5

Unfortunately, we do not get rid of Heidegger as easily as that; and on closer examination we discover a conceptual or formal embarrassment we failed to acknowledge during the previous discussion. It is that Heidegger has at least two theories of modernity. That, in a pinch, one could resolve by talking about his evolution, his various ‘turns’, the multiple models within his thought, and so forth. I prefer to put it in a different way, namely that in Heidegger there is not one modern break, but rather at least two.

Indeed, alongside the Cartesian break of representation and the emergence of the epistemological ‘world picture’, with its stark opposition between subject and object, there persists an older break, which we may call the Roman or Imperial break. Here we have to do with the loss of the Greek experience of Being as this is reflected in the reification of Greek thinking when it is appropriated by the Roman mentality through translation into Latin (and it should be remembered that for Heidegger Greek and German are comparable in their authenticity – freedom from the contamination of other languages, and etymological closeness to some original experience of Being). Reification (although perhaps as a term the very example of what it designates) is then not an inappropriate or anachronistic word for the translation process, insofar as Heidegger’s first illustration charts the transformation of the presence of beings into what it would not be too fanciful to describe as the ‘reified things’ of the Roman empire (res, ens):

These names are not arbitrary. Something that can no longer be shown here speaks in them, the basic Greek experience of the being of entities in the sense of presence [Anwesenheit]. By these designations, however, the interpretation of the thingness of the thing that henceforth becomes standard is founded, and the Western interpretation of the being of entities is established. The process begins with the appropriation of Greek words by Roman–Latin thought. ‘Hypokeimenon’ becomes subiectum; ‘hypostasis’ becomes substantia; ‘symbebēkos’ becomes accidens. This translation of Greek names into the Latin language is in no way the inconsequential process it is taken to be even today. Beneath the apparently literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different kind of thinking. Roman thought appropriates the Greek words without the corresponding experience, equally original, of what they say, without the Greek word. The groundlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.⁴⁹

It is certain that for Heidegger Roman conceptual reification is the beginning of a ‘metaphysical’ process that is still very much with us (as the survival of the Latin terms on into the European vernacular languages testifies). A certain modernity begins with the Roman appropriation and transformation, itself infused with domination and leading on into the catastrophes of modern Western history.⁵⁰ The very broad periodization of ‘Western metaphysics’ (which is perhaps Derrida’s greatest philosophical debt to a figure who clearly both fascinates and repels him) is laid in place by this particular historical narrative. Is it inconsistent with the Descartes-oriented theory of modernity as representation that we have outlined above? This is very much an interpretive choice: and to be reified about it, one might argue that Heidegger’s Descartes merely adds a reified subject to the reified Roman object world. Still, this makes two breaks rather than one, and allows us to return to theories of modernity generally with some interesting suspicions.

(Nor is any of this simplified by the postwar emergence of yet another possible break, a third one. Heidegger’s conception of technology is certainly far more ideological than either of these two earlier philosophical theories; but it would seem to mark an even more dramatic version of modernity and its emergence, not merely with its pessimistic and well-nigh apocalyptic overtones, but also with its very premise: namely, the complication of the relationship of representation between subject and object in the older theory by way of the addition of a new relay, namely the enigmatic Gestell in which what has been translated as a kind of ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand) enables energy to be stored up for later use.⁵¹ This reusable excess or remainder (of the original act of exchange) is very much like that original surplus from which the earliest forms of political power derive; it may even be comparable to the (far more complex) Marxian analysis of capital itself. Yet as a culture critique and a philosophical concept it does not seem immediately reconcilable with the earlier critique of representation (although it certainly has its family likeness with the latter); nor does Heidegger himself attempt such a reconciliation. In that case, we have three breaks, three moments of the emergence of modernity, three narratives of the process, rather than a single one.)

Heidegger’s multiplication is not an isolated instance; we have therefore some interest in examining this strange periodizing proliferation in another writer (distantly inspired by Heidegger), for whom the act of periodization is now the central preoccupation and the fundamental interpretive gesture: I mean Michel Foucault, and in particular the Foucault of Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), which may certainly be said to offer a history, as well as a theory, of modernity.

It will be remembered that Foucault’s monumental archaeology is organized around four historical moments. The first is a kind of pre-modern moment, in which elements of the medieval are combined with the more superstitious features of the Renaissance to convey a timeless mythical world in which reality is a book or text that its interpreters read. It is a text organized around microscopic and macroscopic resemblances (conventia, aemulatio, analogy and sympathy),⁵² in which the predominance of grotesque catalogues and encyclopedias, bestiaries, fantastic histories, is not to be thought of as error or superstition in any modern sense, but only reflects a radically different kind of interest, focus and attention: an interest in ‘everything that has been seen or heard, everything that has been narrated, either by nature or by men, by language of the world, by tradition or by the poets’.⁵³ These luminous pages form a kind of anteroom to the history proper, which begins at once as we shall see with modernity: in this world of figures and resemblances, of echoes and signatures, there is as yet no ‘real’ history (in the modern sense), and therefore questions about causality, beginnings and scope have no purchase here. To denounce the rest of the narrative as Eurocentric is to overlook this mythic, well-nigh African universe that precedes it; to ask how classical Greece fits in here, or China, or India, is to ask false questions.

We are entitled to raise such questions as soon as Western modernity begins: about what we are calling the second period or moment, for example – that moment of what Foucault calls ‘representation’ (not at all in Heidegger’s sense), and what he also calls the ‘classical period’ (following a French usage that may seem parochial to the other national traditions), namely the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are then even explicitly authorized to raise the historical question about our third period, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, insofar as this period is itself the very moment of the invention of modern history as such, the moment of historicism, vitalism and humanism, and of the construction of the so-called human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). As for what I am calling the fourth period, this is a shadowy and prophetic realm, a realm of language and death, which lives in the interstices of our own modernity as its negation and denial: a realm nourished by structuralism but in no way premonitory of postmodernism, since virtually by definition it cannot itself be realized as a separate historical period, yet one whose Utopian promise, very much like Heidegger’s, lies in the disappearance from it of anthropomorphism and humanism, of Heideggerian ‘representation’, such that, famously, ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.⁵⁴

Neither the first or the fourth of these moments, therefore, can technically be called a historical period. For that very reason they are most instructive about the way in which periodization necessarily constructs a frame around itself, and builds on the basis of a subtle interplay between two forms of negation, the contrary and the contradictory, between differentiation and outright opposition, between the locally distinguished and the absolute negation, antagonistic and non-antagonistic, the non- and the anti-. In this sense, the first, Renaissance world would seem to constitute a universe of the non-modern, while the last moment, the underside of humanism, can be taken to be its radical negation or the pre-eminently anti-modern (which unlike the postmodern somehow remains modern in its very denial and resistance, its aesthetic indeed coming to seem the very quintessence of modernism, rather than a break from it). At any rate we may register some first production of non- and anti-modern spaces which is part and parcel of the very positing or affirmation of modernity as such.

Our basic concern here, however, has to do with the positing of two moments of the modern as such: namely our second and third moments, which alone can properly be described as historical periods. And here, even though the periodization is the traditional French one, it seems to me the other national traditions have their own rough equivalents (substitute Luther for Descartes in the German tradition, or Bacon in the English one), and that the double standard of the two moments or versions of modernity – the scientific one of the seventeenth century, the industrial one of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is a doxa so widely held as to be largely commonsensical and unchallenged. But that lack of ideological vigilance simply reflects a slippage back into empirical history: what could be more normal, after all, than a historiography that puts Galileo before the steam engine, that enumerates merchant capital and commerce first and industrial capitalism only after that, that sees the various moments, in other words, as so many stages or progressions within the same process? The merit of Foucault (and his interest for us here) is then evidently to assign these moments to radically different historical systems, and to turn that very succession or progression into a historiographic and even a philosophical problem.

This is the moment to say something more about the Foucauldian break, so central to his whole philosophical ideology, with its insistence on the message of discontinuity and its attacks on the continuities of humanist historiography (whether in the ‘history of ideas’ or in the ‘stages’ of the Stalinist dialectical materialism or evolutionism, which Foucault so often confused with Marxism tout court). These breaks – which Foucault inherited from Althusser’s inheritance of Bachelard’s famous ‘coupure épistémologique’ – are the very content of Foucault’s vision of history (to use another reprehensibly humanist expression) and up to the very end (and the seemingly more humanist and mellow reflections on the self), each break officially posited seems to bring a flurry of new ones in its wake, as though in fear of eventual totalizations. For along with the breaks comes the insistence on the merely partial and incomplete, never-to-be-completed or totalized object of study: here for example Foucault wishes to stress the seemingly random and arbitrarily selected nature of his ostensible objects of study, namely language, life and labour (or in the older system, signs, natural history and riches), or, from some contemporary disciplinary standpoint, linguistics, biology and economics. (This insistence on partial sets then conveniently serves to distract us from the cunning formal symmetries and effects Foucault will derive from this selection.)

But what also needs to be stressed is that along with the ostentatiously anti-totalizing gesture, Foucault here proceeds in a profoundly dialectical manner. For one way in which the dialectic can be defined is as a conceptual coordination of incommensurabilities. Our first-level processes of abstraction, in other words, produce universals under which are ranged phenomena that exhibit similar or even identical dynamics and laws: such are the abstractions of traditional logic, and traditionally the relationship between universals and particulars, genus and species, concepts and exemplars, have been thought of in this way as a collecting and a grouping of identities. With Hegel, however, the problem arises of the coordination of analogous phenomena that have wholly different internal dynamics and laws. The fundamental conceptual shock here comes from the discovery of the mode of production in the eighteenth century by the Scottish Enlightenment;⁵⁵ here we have an abstraction or a universal – the mode of production, as the organization and reproduction of any social formation whatsoever – each of the embodiments of which has its own unique inner dynamics and structure which are incomparable with any other, the inner laws of tribal society or feudalism, for example, operating in a wholly different way than those of capitalism. Meanwhile, as the structural elements or constituents of each mode of production are determined by their function, we cannot abstract them from either and assume simple equivalences between them from one mode to another: to grasp each element, such as this or that technology, or gold and currency, or property laws, we must first refer back to the totality of which they are functioning parts. The dialectic is thus proposed as a kind of new language strategy, in which both identity and difference are given their due in advance and systematically played off against each other (in ways that for non- or pre-dialectical thought will seem to break the law of non-contradiction). Thus even the term ‘mode of production’ is an abuse since the phenomena ranged under it are virtually by definition utterly unlike and indeed incommensurable. But the dialectic comes into being as an attempt to hold these contradictory features of structural analogy and the radical internal differences in dynamic and in historical causality together within the framework of a single thought or language.

But this is precisely what Foucault finds himself very self-consciously doing; and indeed his moments or epistemes – which are alleged to describe only the historical systems of what counts as knowledge – function very much like modes of production in the older sense. This means that the classical and the humanist moments – the moment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representation and that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century vitalism and evolutionism – not only have radically different, indeed, incomparable inner structures, but also obey utterly different laws of causality. In our present context this means that the breaks between them, the transitions and the reconstructions, the passage on to new systems, will also not be comparable: but to pose a different type of historical causality for each such break is to demand a kind of thinking that only the dialectic can offer.

Yet as has been observed in passing, we must also acknowledge that Foucault cheats a bit in order to bring his tour de force off; and indeed his three levels or zones of reality – he calls them ‘systems of elements’, ‘codes of a culture’, or forms of ‘order’⁵⁶ – constitute the guiding thread or identity on which the radical historical changes can be rung and against which the mutations from one moment to another can be registered. Thus, in that first ‘modernity’ which is Foucault’s second or classical moment, we are asked to isolate three sectors or forms of knowledge which are those designated by the terms ‘riches’, ‘natural history’, and ‘signs’. These three sectors of reality are then demonstrated to be homologous, in the way in which each is organized around a static tableau, as most strikingly in the tables of the various zoological species. Time and history here take the form of a meditation on origins, as witnessed by the centrality of etymologies; and the crucial act of knowledge is found in the linguistic proposition, which affirms the relationship between noun or name (the same word covers both in French) and thing.

About this extraordinary account, we have now to ask, first, how such a system comes into being: or in other words, how is this first break, between the pre-modern and this modern (the moment of Galileo and Descartes, of the Port-Royal Grammar, of Newton, indeed of the Encyclopédie), to be conceptualized (or narrated)? A disquisition on Don Quixote is offered in place of an answer to this question, which however clearly turns on the ‘sundering of similitude from the sign’.⁵⁷

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a frequent habit,’ says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognized to be true of only one of them.’ The age of resemblance is drawing to a close. It is leaving nothing behind it but games.⁵⁸

We may therefore imagine this transition as one in which the weakening of the omnipresent power of resemblance releases hitherto bound elements – such as the ‘sign’ – around which in time a whole new system will form. The other breaks or transitions in Foucault are more generously characterized: yet this one nonetheless allows us to make a preliminary observation about the transitional process in general in Les Mots et les choses. I am tempted to say that in Foucault such breaks or transitions are neither conceptualized nor are they represented: a general scheme is laid in place, namely that the old system breaks up, and among its ruins (as in Piranesi’s eighteenth-century views of classical Rome) a new system forms which has nothing to do with its predecessor. The latter does not figure in the former’s genealogy, nor is it in any way the agent of its destruction. Indeed, causality seems to be absent from these purely structural descriptions, and this is why I have concluded that they are not conceptualized, and that Foucault does not offer us a theory of change or transition exactly. Rather, it seems to me that he gives us the elements with which to form our own representations of the processes (something I have largely done above, under the cautionary verb ‘to imagine’). He does not himself offer full representations, rather his characteristic multiplicity of figures nudges us in this direction, while withholding any definitive figure of his own devising. It is a procedure that certainly causes us to wonder whether there is something fundamentally unrepresentable about such moments of radical structural change, of the break or the transition, in the first place.

Two other brief observations are worth making about this first or classical moment of modernity. Its episteme, which in other areas (such as physics and astronomy) certainly counts as what we would today recognize as knowledge, can at the very least, even in the three today-outmoded areas in question (value, animal species and grammar), and in particular by contrast with the situation that precedes it, be said to constitute a framework in which – ‘for the first time’ – meaning as such emerges.

The other point to be made is that consciousness has no place in the classical system (it should be noted that Foucault here reduces Descartes to a footnote, just as he does with that ‘minor Ricardian’ Marx in the next historical system): it is a tabulation within which elements of the human are distributed here and there, but which does not – unlike our next historical moment – make ‘man’ the measure of all things (here Foucault sharply diverges from Heidegger’s account, which we have outlined above).

But this systemic absence is precisely what lends Foucault’s narrative its polemic force: for the account of the third moment – that of the invention of History, that of evolutionism in biology, of Marxism in economics, and of the great linguistic tradition of Bopp and Grimm – is something like an anti-humanist pamphlet, despite the fullness of scholarly detail. But here the nature of the transition (or the break between the classical and the historicist moment) is much more fully developed; and Foucault’s figuration is far more pronounced. I will summarize it briefly: the catastrophe that strikes the system of representation is the weakening and disappearance of homology, or in other words, of the structural parallelism that held the three levels together. We may note that there is a sense in which this disappearance is merely an intensification of what happened in the first transition: there it was resemblance that was weakened (and then logically absorbed into various local operations); now it is that form of structural resemblance called homology whose binding power is loosened and discredited. In this sense it is as though the movement of the historical narrative can also serve as a defence of Foucault’s valorization of the break, the discontinuity of radical Difference (and perhaps even of the dissolving power of Thanatos) as opposed to Identity, resemblance, sameness, continuity and the like.

Simultaneously with this dissolution – but one cannot say whether it is exactly to be grasped as an effect of the latter – there takes place an autonomization of the three areas. Each begins to develop into a system in its own right, and the three slowly begin to move away from each other: it is a well-nigh geological process, and conveyed by the image of tectonics: layers of older continents shift and move apart, resulting in new land masses and the overlap of unstable plates, themselves doomed to further lawful and yet incomprehensible and unpredictable slippage. Meanwhile the distance between these three land masses will play a significant role in the new nineteenth-century developments.

Yet there is something of a sleight of hand in Foucault’s rhetoric of difference and autonomization here: for it is clear enough, and on his own account, that the three new areas of linguistics, economics and biology have much in common with each other; and that that ‘much’ (which remains the homology between them) can be summed up in the word ‘historicism’, in particular as it is crystallized in various evolutionary theories (whether of economic crisis and development, sound change in linguistic history, or Darwinism itself). Oddly, however, Foucault does not take historicism on directly (to assign it to a specific historical system is already to deprive it of its truth claim), but rather focuses on its other face which is that of humanism and the emergence of a concept of ‘man’ or of human nature.

But this is precisely not a form of knowledge: it emerges in the interstices between the three positive forms of knowledge under investigation here. Human nature (and the various Geisteswissenschaften and humanist ideologies that accompany it) is something like the gap between them and the attempt to fill that gap as well and to construct a complete metaphysical system. We can say this another way by underscoring a shift in the very nature of knowledge itself, when it comes to the three positive domains of economics, biology and linguistics. For if knowledge in the classical period always in one way or another sought to answer the question why? and to search for origins, that question has disappeared from this third historical moment in which only empirical facts and arbitrary and contingent laws remain. Such positivities are therefore also mysteries: life, labour and language; and they are non-human mysteries at that, to which alone such strange new anti-humanist ‘methods’ or disciplines like (structural) anthropology or ethnology and psychoanalysis correspond (significantly, Foucault finds no correspondingly ‘economic’ approach to the underside of the positivities).

What this whole account registers and stresses is a fundamental gap or split, in this second moment of the modern, between the empirical and the transcendental; a gap whose theorization puts us on the track of Foucault’s ambition for this dense and unclassifiable book, neither history or philosophy exactly, but also pamphlet and aesthetic at the same time. The shadowy yet central and even preponderant role played by Kant here, particularly in the appropriate historical moment (the transition from representation to history) suggests that the writer imagines a similar historical position for himself in some late modern great transformation. I am thus tempted to say that, if the classical period was the moment in which meaning appeared, this new historicist or humanist period is that in which the limits of meaning now begin to emerge; in which the boundaries of what is humanly thinkable and indeed of knowledge itself become as obsessive and as problematic as the content of that knowledge. Foucault’s operation, then, like Kant’s, lies in tracing those boundaries and in mapping out what can count as thinking and what cannot. But like Kant’s, Foucault’s achievement overshoots the mark, and far from this very modest and reasonable programme, with its careful limits and precautions and its sober catalogue of positivities, the marking of the limit exacerbates the will to transgress it and to pass over into what is forbidden.

It is that zone of non-knowledge which we have characterized above as something like a fourth historical moment, even though in another sense it coexists with our own daytime world of historicism and the human sciences as their photographic negative. We therefore here confront yet a third type of ‘transition’, if it can still be called that, a third kind of representational (or even dialectical) problem. For although this fourth moment is occasionally evoked in the prophetic mode – the famous ‘effacement of man from the sand’, the fleeting 1960s hope and glimpse of some new proto-structuralist transformation of thought and life which one finds briefly echoed in Lévi-Strauss and Derrida as well⁵⁹ – most often its promise is sought (and found) in the nooks and crannies of our own system: in the rediscovery of the great madmen, for example, of Hölderlin and Artaud; and the aesthetic foregrounding of a language beyond bourgeois consciousness, a language with the density of an existent, a language that wishes not to mean but to persist on the very limits of meaning, or beyond them. One here recognizes the affinities with the aesthetic of Maurice Blanchot (to which we will return in Part II), rather than with Heidegger (despite the solemnity of these evocations) – for that luminous and light-filled clearing promised by Heideggerian ontology and poetics has here become as dark and ominous as a black hole. To be sure, as in Heidegger, what is here prophetically demanded, as desperate need and Utopian vision alike, is the overcoming of humanism. It remains, however, to enquire whether this is the same as what at the high point of World War II the Japanese fatefully called ‘the overcoming of modernity’.⁶⁰

It is a question that returns us to the issue of the two breaks, in Foucault and Heidegger alike, and in the mystery of the two modernities. Foucault’s scheme, indeed, makes clear what was obscured by Heidegger’s insistence that the whole development of Western metaphysics up to our own time (and to himself) was already implicit in Descartes’s inaugural gesture. In Foucault, it is as if this historical narrative of Heidegger’s were split into two moments: the first one offers the modernity of simple representation, so to speak, the first modern or ‘scientific’ translation of the world into mathematical tables and signs. It is only in the second moment that the subject appears (or what we used to call self-consciousness): in good Lacanian and even Kantian spirit, it is inauthentic when claiming existence as a positivity – humanism, human nature, individuality, and so forth – and authentic only when registered as an impossible absence – either in the logic of the ‘fourth moment’ as a late aesthetic phenomenon, or as far back as the seventeenth century in the empty subject-positions of Velasquez’s Las Meniñas. But the aesthetic – in both Foucault and Heidegger – seems to have more in common with modernism as such (or with that somewhat different thing, the aesthetic of modernism) than it does with anything postmodern that might conceivably lay claim to some more fundamental and decisive break with modernity as such. The trouble lies in the way in which a genuine repudiation of modernity’s solemnities – for these modern philosophers a very solemn gesture indeed – seems on the contrary to demand the very opposite of solemnity, if not to say frivolity, trivialization, flippancy, camp, decoration, and the like: but that is a question better raised in our aesthetic enquiry into the matter in Part II.

Here, we need only to make two remarks in conclusion. The first is that at least one feature of Foucault’s analysis of the modern will be retained and far more richly developed in another theoretical tradition. This is the idea that at least the second modernity is characterized by a logic of separation (most notably when the three realms of life, labour and language begin to move away from each other geologically and to become relatively autonomous). In a later section we will see that the interpretation of a break or gap in terms of separation is a promising starting point for a rather different theory of the modern.

As for the two breaks and yet some third one they seem to promise (in the uncertainty as to whether some fourth historical period will really be forthcoming), their proliferation has a crucial lesson for us in the peculiar inner dynamics of that narrative category called modernity itself. It is as though the intensification of our attention to modernity turned upon itself, and began to distinguish the detail of what was somehow less modern in modernity from what was more so, thereby generating a kind of pre-modern moment within modernity as such. The pre-bourgeois (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) moderns are thus already modern and yet at one and the same time not yet so: the thinkers of the classical period are no longer part of some traditional world, and yet they are not fully admissible to what we recognize as the broad daylight of full modernity as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lived and experienced it. Even when we turn to that more modern modernity, however, it can also begin to strike us as strangely antiquated and old-fashioned (and ever more stylistically obsolete the nearer it comes to us in time). It will be said that as the thinking of modernity folds back into the attempt to think temporality as such, it comes to encounter all the latter’s antinomies and conceptual contradictions.

But this is to wash away all the unique structural peculiarities of the idea of the modern itself; and in particular to overlook the idiosyncratic rhythm of its thinking, which does not begin with the earliest facts and data like an archaeologist, but rather frames a global notion of the modern in the here-and-now, which is transferred wholesale to the past before the kinds of chronological doubts and discriminations embodied in the proliferation of breaks can begin to appear.

We can put this another way by suggesting that it is just this multiplicity of breaks that corresponds to what Hegel notoriously called ‘the negation of the negation’, but it is a negation which does not, as Engels and Stalin thought, govern the future, but rather the past, which it ceaselessly differentiates into ever further others of the other. It is a process that holds fully as much for breaks as for the periods themselves, which in any case as we have shown turn back and forth into one another by virtue of the same rhythm.