In this sense power, in which we are, sees the crumbling of its fundamental consensus rise from its own inner being. What I want to point out most, within the limitations of this essay, is the homology between these continuous processes of breakdown described (in a fairly allusive form) by Foucault and the function Barthes assigns to literature inside the system of linguistic power. Which would lead us perhaps also to make some reflections on a certain aestheticism in Foucault’s view, just as he (compare the 1977 interview in the appendix of the volume just mentioned) declares himself opposed to the end of the writer’s activity and to the theorization of writing as eversive activity. Or to wonder if Barthes (when he says that it is a possibility open also to the scientist or to the historian) is not making literature an allegory of the relationships of resistance and criticism of power in the wider context of social life.
What seems clear is that this technique of opposition to power, always from within and widespread, has nothing to do with the techniques of opposition to force, which are always external, and specific. Oppositions to force always obtain an immediate reply, like the clash of two billiard balls; those against power always obtain indirect replies. We will venture an allegory, something like a good old American film of the ’30’s. In Chinatown a gang sets up a laundry racket. Acts of force. They come in, ask for money, and if the laundry doesn’t fork over, they smash the place up. The proprietor of the laundry can oppose force with force: He punches a gangster in the face. The result is immediate. The gangster has to exercise greater force the next day. This game of forces can lead to some changes in the restriction of the neighborhood life: iron bars on the laundry doors, alarm systems.
But gradually the inhabitants of Chinatown adjust to the atmosphere: The restaurants close earlier, the inhabitants stay home after dark, other storeowners agree that it’s more reasonable to pay up than be harassed. . . . A relationship of legitimization of the gangsters’ power has been established, and everyone collaborates, including those who would prefer a different system. Now the gangsters’ power is beginning to be based on symbolic relationships of obedience, in which the obedient are as responsible as the obeyed. In a way, each finds something in it to his own advantage.
The first breakdown of the consensus could come from a group of young people who decide to organize a celebration every evening with firecrackers and paper dragons. As an act of force it could perhaps hinder the passage or the flight of the gangsters, but as far as that goes the action is minimal. As an aspect of resistance to power, the celebration introduces an element of self-confidence, which acts to disrupt the consensus dictated by fear. Its results cannot be immediate; and, furthermore, there can be no result unless other marginal attitudes correspond to the celebration, other ways of declaring, “Count me out.” In our film it could be the courageous act of a local reporter. But the disrupting process could also abort. The tactics would have to be immediately denied, if the racket system were capable of absorbing them into the local folklore. . . . We will stop the allegory here before, being a movie, it obliges us to find a happy ending.
I don’t know whether this festivity with the paper dragon is an allegory of literature according to Barthes or whether Barthes’s literature and this festivity are allegories of the Foucaultian crises of the systems of power. Also because at this point a new suspicion arises: To what degree does Barthes’s given language obey mechanisms homologous to the systems of power described by Foucault?
Let us posit then a given language as a system of rules: not only grammatical ones, but also those that today are called pragmatic. For example, the conversational rule that a question must be answered in a pertinent way, and whoever breaks this rule is judged, depending on the situation, rude, silly, provoking; or else it is assumed he is hinting at something else he doesn’t want to say. Literature that cheats with the given language is presented as an activity that breaks down the rules and imposes others: temporary, valid in just one instance and for one current; and especially, valid in the context of the literary laboratory. This means that Ionesco cheats with the given language, making his characters speak the way they do in The Bald Soprano, for example. But if in a social relationship everyone spoke like the bald prima donna, society would break down. Mind you, there would not be a linguistic revolution, because revolution involves an upset of power relationships; a universe that talks like Ionesco wouldn’t upset anything, it would establish a kind of nth degree (the opposite of zero, an indefinite number) of behavior. It would no longer be possible even to buy bread from the baker.
How does the given language defend itself against this risk?
Barthes tells us, reconstructing a power situation faced by its own violation, absorbing it (the anacoluthon of the artist becomes common norm). As for society, it defends the given language by reciting the literature, which questions the given language’s position, in certain set places. Thus it happens that there is never any revolution in a language: Either it is a pretense of revolution, on the stage, where all is licit, and then you go home speaking in a normal way; or else it is an infinitesimal movement of continuous reform. Aestheticism consists of believing that life is art and art, life, confusing the areas. Deceiving oneself.
The given language, therefore, is not a scenario of power, in Foucault’s sense. Very well. But why do we seem to have found such strong homologies between linguistic devices and devices of power—and to have noted that the knowledge on which power is nourished is produced through linguistic means?
Here another suspicion arises. Perhaps it isn’t that the given language is different from power because power is a place of revolution, something denied to language. It is that power is homologous to the given language because, as the former is described to us by Foucault, it can never be a place of revolution. That is, in power there is never any distance between reform and revolution, since revolution is the moment when a slow process of gradual adjustments suddenly undergoes what René Thom would call a catastrophe, a sudden turn; but in the sense in which a collecting of seismic movements suddenly produces an upheaval of the earth. A final breaking point of something already formed in advance, step by step. Revolutions then would be the catastrophes of the slow movements of reform, quite independent of the will of the subjects, casual effect of a final compounding of forces that obeys a strategy of symbolic adjustments ripening over a long time.
Which is tantamount to saying that it isn’t clear if Foucault’s view of power (which Barthes, with genius, exemplifies in the given language) is a neorevolutionary view or a neoreformist one. Except that Foucault’s merit would lie in having abolished the difference between the two concepts, forcing us to rethink, along with the notion of power, also that of political initiative. I can already see the hunters of fashions charging me with having categorized Foucault as a typical reactionary thinker. Nonsense. The fact is that in this knot of problems new notions of power take shape, and of force, of violent upheaval and of progressive adjustment through slow, marginal shifts, in a centerless universe where all is margin and there is no longer any “heart” of anything. A fine plexus of ideas for a reflection that arises under the sign of a “leçon.” We’ll leave it suspended. These are problems, as Foucault would say, that the single subject does not resolve. Unless he confines himself to literary fiction.
In Praise of St. Thomas
The worst thing that happened to Thomas Aquinas in the course of his career was not his death, on March 7, 1274, in Fossanova, when he was barely forty-nine, and, fat as he was, the monks were unable to carry his body down the stairs. Nor was it what happened three years after his death, when the Archbishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, published a list of heretical propositions (two hundred and nineteen of them) that included the majority of the theses of the followers of Averroes, some observations on terrestrial love advanced a hundred years earlier by André le Chapelain, and twenty propositions clearly attributable to him, Thomas, the angelic doctor himself, son of the lordly family of Aquino.
For history soon dealt with this repressive act and in Thomas’s favor, he received justice, even after his death, winning his battle while Etienne Tempier ended up, with Guillaume de Saint-Amour, Tommaso’s other enemy, in the unfortunately eternal ranks of the great reactionaries. No, the disaster that ruined the life of Tommaso d’Aquino befell him in 1323, two years after the death of Dante and was perhaps also, to some degree, attributable to the poet: in other words, when John XXII decided to turn Tommaso into Saint Thomas
