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Afterword: Waiting for Foucault

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-7247269

1527-1943

Nancy Armstrong,

Foucault, Power, and Ethics

I want to thank Jonathan Arac and John Plotz, past and current presidents of the Society for Novel Studies, and their executive board for choosing my first book as the topic of the SNS’s special session as an affiliated society of the Modern Language Association. It was not that long ago that a few of us met at Duke to draw up plans for a learned society devoted to the study of the novel. Back then, in 2011, I envisioned that the organization we were dreaming up would someday become affiliated with the MLA, but it never occurred to me that someone would make a case for Desire and Domestic Fiction (Armstrong 1987) as the topic of that inaugural session. I am grateful that they did.DDF was—as they say of womanhood itself—both a blessing and a curse. To become its author, I had to arrive at the right place (Wayne State University) at the right time (the year an English translation of Michel Foucault’s [1978] History of Sexuality, Volume 1 appeared) and to fall in with interlocutors who encouraged me to think outside any disciplinary box then recognized. Homer Obed Brown and Leonard Tennenhouse were certainly that for me. As for my early critics and reviewers, they were smart, erudite, and for the most part justifiably pissed off—for I had attacked the basis on which the preceding generation of feminist literary criticism had established a foothold in the field of literary studies. As I came to understand the problem, however, that critique of class sexuality was not nearly critical enough.As a product of the 1980s, DDF was much too quick to identify the form of the domestic novel with the formation of a household that provided the reigning metaphor of a “collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family,” or what, in Hannah Arendt’s (1998: 29) view, “we call ‘society.’” DDF was much too quick to identify the novel, along with the household it formulated, as an apparatus that produced the very subjects who would desire to belong to such a world. By overvaluing the formal consistency of this household and the trajectory of the desire it fostered throughout the history of the British novel, DDF undervalued how regularly and to what effect British novels also pointed out the failures of past households and left domestic wreckage and devastated lives in their wake. Eager to redress this shortcoming, I welcome the present opportunity to offer my own brief retrospective on DDF.▪ ▪ ▪To this end, let me schematically identify three episodes spanning two centuries of novel history, episodes when novels across the board refused to reproduce the household they inherited from past novels. At such moments, novelists turned the household against the novel form and decisively altered both. When strung together, these moments outline a very different history of the British novel than the one I proposed three decades ago. Rather than emphasize the formal continuity of the domestic novel, this later narrative stresses the breaks occurring when, in the very act of formulating a household, novelists abandoned the formal protocols bequeathed to them by earlier novelists. In that this narrative allows us to consider how many and which generic protocols a novel can indeed disregard and still be recognizably a novel, it stands a good chance of explaining why the household has all but vanished from the novels now being written for a global readership.First episode: When John Locke made the mother responsible for cultivating self-government in sons and the qualities required for household management in daughters, he saw to it that his model would reproduce itself in an expanding number of similar households as successive generations reached maturity. Locke clearly meant this move not only to increase the number of men of property but also to channel and restrict the accumulation of wealth. What fell through the gap he had pried open between epistemology and political philosophy was a means of accounting for the radical alterations of daily life that accompanied the disappearance of common land and the diminution of parish responsibilities, as both gave way to private property. To make it possible for literate people at all levels of society to imagine a future for themselves within a household of their own making, the early novel launched an often not so subtle but always decisive assault on Locke’s paradigmatic country manor house. The popularity of eighteenth-century gothic novels is owing in large part to the spectacle of self-destruction that allowed the sexual morality of an emergent middle class to displace the corruptive influence they attribute to the old aristocracy. Reaching its apogee in the novels of Jane Austen, the marriage plot that shaped the sentimental novel dealt Locke a much more devastating blow by loosening the knots of kinship that restricted the English manor house to men and women of rank and inherited wealth. It is difficult to imagine, however, that had Austen been the only one to turn home wrecking into homemaking, literate people at all income levels would have been willing to wager their happiness on belonging to a household that met her standard of respectability.Second episode: The novels of the 1840s rejected the quality of felt experience of living in a parish, shire, or well-connected household and proposed, as an alternative, that a single-family household could better provide the health, education, and affection that sustained a population. To accomplish what proved in fact a brutal transformation of the way most English people lived, novelists replaced what remained of Locke’s country house with an economic unit suited for the wage-earning male. The form of kinship organizing this household could apply at virtually every level of income. Even in exposing the cruelty of this transformation and how many decent people did not manage to live through it, the major novels of the Hungry Forties (Dombey and Son, Mary Barton, and Wuthering Heights, in addition to Jane Eyre) imagined the single-family household as a person’s only access to the resources, services, and information necessary for survival. In the hands of novelists, the formation of a household composed of a heterosexual couple and their offspring persuaded entire readerships to imagine personal experience in terms that ensured the same uneven distribution of goods, services, and information for generations to come.Third episode: By the 1860s, if not before, domestic fiction had produced all the discursive components of the Fordist household of twentieth-century Great Britain and the United States: a family that could be held solely and ethically responsible for the health and morality of its members. After 1945 economists and politicians adopted many of the same narratives that Victorians had used against independent women to send aspiring career women, along with those who worked in factories during the war, back into the home, where the labor of their love would supplement both the fluctuating income from wage labor and the salaries of an expanding professional managerial class. So instrumentalized by postwar economic discourse, the “responsible” or “ethical” family provided the rhetorical machinery for dismantling the welfare state. This was a household whose members felt compelled to mortgage present happiness for purposes of investing in a better future for their children. Novels (as opposed to economic and political theory) must have something to tell us about today’s neoliberalism.Fact 1: For almost three centuries novels made a growing population of readers regard a better household as the only alternative to a bad or broken one. Fact 2: Beginning around the same time that DDF first appeared in print, it was increasingly difficult to find a domestic novel that either aspired to literary status or set about to attract a global readership. What do we make of this sudden vanishing act on the part of domestic fiction? What does it mean that the distinctive form of the British novel has become just another popular subgenre? How do novels now written in English for a global readership ask us to imagine living together, if not in some form of household? Rethinking my argument of thirty years ago in this light not only generated this set of questions for others to pursue but also inflects the following responses to the commentaries that appear with mine in this issue of MLQ.▪ ▪ ▪Arac’s introduction to the sequence of short essays on the legacy of Desire and Domestic Fiction pays homage to a cohort, his and mine, that entered an academy awash with the ideas born of 1968 and the body of Continental philosophy that lent them logical rigor, a place in the history of ideas, and a means of international dissemination. This was not easy company for graduate students and new PhDs, and we served as each other’s first and sharpest critics. It is therefore fitting that Arac identifies a major silence—what Louis Althusser (2014) called a thing of “obviousness”—in my work on the question of its relationship to Marxism. If choosing Freud would require me to translate disruptions of domestic life into private melodramas, then, as Arac intimates, in choosing Marxism as it was articulated at the time, I would have had to turn the vicissitudes of private life into an allegory, reflection, or reaction to political economy. Convinced that the household was and still does something else, I developed my argument to account for this discrepancy between an economic and a novelistic account of social relations.The essay later known in English as “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” offering Althusser’s classic definition of ideology, first appeared in French in the early 1970s. This gave me a means of explaining how economic distinctions were woven into the very fabric of daily life, where they became something like a second nature. Only as long as they remained so would readers continue to believe that those distinctions were simply given, in the way that Althusser claimed the faithful once thought the religious apparatus was. Just as kneeling and praying perpetuated belief in God, I figured, so forming a household and raising children would perpetuate belief in love and family, thereby reproducing the social relations responsible for economic unevenness. More to my purpose as a scholar and critic of the novel, however, was the question of just how that ideology not only limited one’s ability to imagine other futures but also incited desire for a future that actually reproduced the same limitations in one’s progeny. I obviously needed to figure out how the novel manipulated the gap between the discourse of economics and human consciousness. I was waiting for Foucault to provide the piece of the puzzle that, during the question-and-answer period at MLA, Daniel Hack identified as symptomatically missing from the discussion. How can it be, he asked, that a concept so essential to the critical theoretical environment of the late 1980s as “discourse” has all but vanished from our critical vocabulary today? In truth, as he suggests, I could not have understood the political impact of the novel form without it.Robert Hurley’s translation of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 appeared just as I had begun to transform a dissertation that evolved during the 1970s much as literary theory did. This was an incredibly messy process, requiring me to turn my entire way of thinking about novels inside out. Rather than emerge in the gap between epistemology (the discourse of personal consciousness) and political economy (the discourse of capitalism) as it reproduced the daily life of respectable English people, the novel provided the means of rendering that world intelligible as two separate domains, producing a gap that only madness or imagination could repair. Foucault could have benefited from a concept of the novel form—not of any particular novel, or even of the sum of novels produced at key moments, but of a print vernacular that articulated medical discourse, pornographic discourse, religious discourse, treatises on taste, good behavior, and child rearing, you name it—as a world whose perils and enticements one could experience vicariously, a world that appeared to run for the most part on its own. Confined neither to the literary text nor to the book as commodity, this formal apparatus demonstrated an inbuilt capacity to expand comparable to that of capitalism. That much I had figured out, but I could not have imagined the lines of inquiry that Ian Duncan and Deidre Lynch call to our attention here.Duncan does us the enormous service of setting the British domestic novel in conversation with two European novels of the Romantic period, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807). Aside from showing that the bildungsroman is not the story of individual development that we generally assume it to be, he uses the domestic fiction exemplified by Austen to triangulate the disagreement between the French and the German novels. As each novel restages in miniature the argument it wages with the other, together they stage in miniature what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) describes as the “dialogic style” of the novel. Their respective styles of argument differentiate national styles that later distinguished national traditions of the novel. If Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister incorporates what Duncan calls “traits conventionally associated with women: unformed, susceptible, varium et mutabile, aesthetically attuned to environment and climate, drifting with events rather than driving them,” Staël appropriates those same traits in order to invest her female protagonist with a capacity for self-cultivation. Had Staël not sacrificed that potential to a love story, Duncan seems to say, Corinne might have realized Schiller’s “aesthetic state” in Italy. Why does this novelist deliberately cede to English domestic fiction the power to turn away from grand ideas of art and science in order to focus on the petits faits of private life? If we think of hegemony as Raymond Williams (1977: 128–35) does—as what happens when a cultural formation gives expression to “a structure of feeling” that lurks in past literary forms just beyond the limits of legibility—then what Staël says about the English novel might be taken as a premonition of its hegemony. To clarify that statement, I turn now to Lynch’s argument and, with one key adjustment, second it.I want to distinguish what David Hume (1964: 460) called “the fiction of the original contract” from the contract law designed for regulating economic exchange as well as from the quasi-religious contract that handed over women’s property to their husbands upon marriage. As a fiction, the contract provided a way of making both economic exchange and the power differential of heterosexual marriage seem natural and necessary, if not always desirable or right. According to Althusser’s (1972) reading of Rousseau, the fiction of the contract was and still is a powerful delivery system for ideology. In the economic and political domains, as in the personal and social domains, this fiction presupposed gender (culturally specific forms of masculinity and femininity), and because the novel builds its world on that foundation, it also splits modern societies into two basic biopolitical groups (men and women). Yes, as Lynch reminds us, it was the eighteenth century that seized on writing “as a technology of world making.” While it is true enough that contract law and marriage rites are also preserved through writing, their increasing power as legal instruments during the eighteenth century is owing to the fiction of the contract—namely, the rhetorical operations that made a certain way of conducting social relationships appear natural and necessary, if not always desirable and right. I used Althusser’s reading of the social contract to distinguish the operations of contractual rhetoric (as fiction) from its logic (as law). It is in the former sense, as fiction, that the contract appropriated the uncommon traits of taste and decorum for common women and, on that basis, distinguished an emergent ruling class. The rhetoric of the contract, in other words, constituted the very parties to the legal agreement that the logic of that contract required as the precondition for its enactment. This sleight of hand enabled contract law to institutionalize the class hierarchy that novels made to seem simply the way things ought to be.Without this distinction, we would be hard put to explain why Eliza Haywood and so many other pre-nineteenth-century novelists chose to write in the very form to whose rhetoric they objected. Staël moves us toward an answer as she bursts the balloon of her heroine’s political ambitions and sacrifices Corinne’s intellectual potential to a love story. To write a novel, Staël has to change her utopian tune and produce a marriage plot that fails to arrive at a happy ending. In this way, Corinne undermines the hegemonic form it must acknowledge in order to do so. Austen makes the same point by staging successful plots that realize domestic happiness against a backdrop of repeated (and often more interesting) domestic failures. Seduced or betrayed women make their appearance in each of her novels and in some cases, like Maria Bertram and Mrs. Norris, end up keeping house together. In virtually every case, moreover, the happy marriages that do occur would seem to bear out the claim that eighteenth-century novels had already established the very principle that Sharon Marcus (2007) attributes to the nineteenth-century novel, namely, that successful marriages are predicated on the quality of friendship that women enjoy with other women.But try to carry this principle into the novels written in the United States during the early Republic (1789–1826) and you hit a wall. Although Eliza Wharton, the heroine of Hannah Webster Foster’s novel The Coquette, is seduced and dies alone, the letters that tell her story provide a cautionary tale that assembles a sympathetic community of readers made wary of seductive men. Nor is Foster’s the only tarnished American heroine to found a community. In view of the license that Locke gave colonial women to do so, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s affirmation of Hester Prynne’s domestic refuge for social exiles, it should not surprise us that this happens more often than not in early US novels. In referencing the contrary domestic story that shapes Haywood’s British Recluse, then, Lynch reminds us that the American novels of the period also staged an argument with the dominant model of English domestic fiction, albeit in a different way from Staël. Together with Duncan’s, Lynch’s argument consequently gestures beyond the hegemony of the bourgeois ideal of woman in a Europe about to undergo industrialization and toward the hegemony of Anglophone fiction within the global book market of today. In combination, the two responses dramatize the rather basic truth that insofar as national styles defined themselves as they took up positions within a differential system, the novel has always been international. To determine what novels do to this system of national differences when they no longer find it necessary to reproduce a household of any recognizable form, one would do well to begin where Duncan and Lynch leave off.▪ ▪ ▪Because they venture onto that murky terrain we call the “personal,” I have saved the essays by Jesse Rosenthal and Rachel Ablow for last. The “personal” is implicitly antithetical to the “impersonal,” and there the clarity of its signification ends. “Getting personal” can verge on presumption, if not insult, depending on whether one tries to establish personal authenticity or claims to reveal how someone else truly thinks and feels. Either usage of the term sets the “personal” outside and prior to the social and certainly outside the political. If there was one thing about which I wanted to convince the readers of DDF, it was that exactly the reverse was true. Discourse—being by definition social—produces the “personal” as it privatizes certain practices having to do with sexual pleasure and the biological functions of the body. On the assumption that what we say and write can be as revealing as what we do in the bed and bathroom, at least as many privatizing procedures are aimed at speech and writing, when to speak or write and in what terms. What happens to the “sort of secret” that, as Rosenthal notes, seems to “pop up in our critical discourse” if we see such secrets as direct reversals of the logic that personalized that area of discourse in the first place?For an explanation of what it is that we cannot reveal save as a “slip” or violation of literary-critical protocols, I would turn away from psychoanalysis to Jacques Rancière’s (2011) concept of modern literature as the formulation of “rules of appropriateness” designed to distinguish literary writing from other forms of vernacular writing—especially from what he calls “democratic writing” and describes as a writing style that could be virtually anyone’s addressed to virtually anyone else. This institutional event occurred somewhat later in the nineteenth century than “the institution of the novel” that Brown (1997) identifies with the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists in 1825. From its inception, indeed, the novel has raised questions about what effect it would have on the (personal) lives of those who read it, especially the many women who seemed willing to put their virtue at risk by reading fiction by the likes of Haywood. By Scott’s moment in history, the novel was already a critical institution that carried on elaborate arguments as to which areas of domestic life should be put in writing and which should be relegated to other forms of discourse (e.g., medicine, pornography, sermons) or preferably to silence. The impulse to use only certain novels for a national literary tradition was a nineteenth-century one, but one that reiterated the much earlier concern that novels had a role in shaping the person of the reader; world making was not managing people so much as making people who could be managed.Before we are very far into the nineteenth century, that potentially unmanageable interiority had become a fact of nature, and a new class of people had based their right to govern others on their demonstrable ability to govern themselves and, by extension, members of their households. This was not an ideology that George Eliot could abide any better than Gustave Flaubert, and, like him, she positioned herself at an aesthetic distance from the world she claimed to represent. But only with the emergence of formalism (1916) did criticism establish a clear set of rules for reading novels as literature. This is a rather long-winded way of asking whether we do in fact reveal personal information when we confess to reading habits that do not observe those rules. By so doing, I believe, we actually personalize the kind of information we are required to rule out if we want to read novels as works of literature. Like any disciplinary apparatus, literary criticism incentivizes the development of a specialized voice so that it seems gratifying to renounce the cruder power of vernacular writing as incompatible with the erudition, technical vocabulary, and prose style that constitute an academic voice. As it renounces writing that might be by anyone and addresses virtually anyone else, the institutionalizing process paradoxically reclassifies as personal the vicarious experience of novel reading long ascribed to untrained, popular, or common readers. By putting us in this political double bind, literary criticism at once prompts us to confess to novel reading’s common pleasures and makes us feel ashamed when we do.This brings me to Ablow’s essay and the question of the critic’s voice. The voice that people “hear” in DDF is not my voice but that of symptomatic reading, which is to say, the voice of critique. Although this voice originates in Marx, as Arac observes, DDF indirectly acknowledges that source by citing Lukács, Althusser, and Jameson instead. To think of the household, along with novel reading, as a major means of social reproduction, however, I had to think within and through Foucault. His voice made it possible for me to identify the sexual constraints of a distinctively modern bourgeois ethos not as a “repressive” apparatus but as a set of technologies that continues to expand a whole field of forbidden pleasures. To police the gender line and silence transgressions of it, Foucault observes, the discourse of sexuality has to be extremely noisy. It latches on to any wayward practice it encounters and, by giving that practice an origin at the very core of the individual, makes that deviation compelling as the secret of personal identity in which the new ruling class invested so much libidinal interest.Foucault did not have much to say about either women or novels. By turning his method of critique on an area of literary studies that considered itself stalwartly British, Marxist, and feminist, however, I could explain the political stakes of transforming a culture disrupted by economic change into a dangerously exciting and seductive world in which an unwary protagonist was more likely to perish than not. One might be tempted to say that I had found my voice once it had been inflected by Foucault and then Jane Eyre, but that would be premature. To the contrary, until other critics borrowed and adapted for their own counterarguments the voice I had fashioned for DDF, that voice paradoxically did not belong to me. What better testimony to the fact that that voice is anyone’s to take and use in a distinctive way than Ablow’s opening declaration, “Desire and Domestic Fiction took Jane Eyre away from me. That was disappointing.” Insofar as that sentence echoes not only Foucault but the opening line of Jane Eyre as well (“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”), it activates the voice of DDF. Rather than a triumphal feminist narrative, as Ablow points out, this way of “giving voice” yields practical knowledge of its own limitations and how to exceed them—along with the cost of doing so.To conclude, then, I want to link the lack of subtlety that Amanda Anderson correctly identifies in my work both to Rosenthal’s ambivalence toward the institutional limits of novel criticism and to the pleasure Ablow obviously took in borrowing the aggressive voice of critique in a declarative statement no less political than my own.1 To be trained as a literary scholar and critic, one has to think within the literary institution and subject his or her thinking to the formal rules allowing one to practice some variety of close reading. Ideally, one becomes so enamored of the mastery that enables a literary reading that it seems counterintuitive to read any other way. It consequently takes a certain kind of nerve to ask yourself how, by observing the rules of the game, you are surely collaborating with the text to render something unspeakable, something that cannot be thought with the technical protocols of our discipline. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault (1984) uses the aging Kant to argue that a practical awareness of the historical limits of critical thinking is not only predicated on our submission to these rules but also prerequisite to our thinking beyond them. It is essential, Foucault concludes in the last two paragraphs of this essay, that any history or theory of the human subject—what he calls “the critical ontology of ourselves”—“has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” “This philosophical attitude,” he concludes (as do I), “has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries.” This attitude amounts to nothing without such appropriations.