By Gordon Hull
Toward the end of “What is an Author,” Foucault distinguishes between the “founder” and “initiator [instaurateur]” of a discourse. Galileo is the paradigmatic example of the former, and Marx of the latter. This is a puzzling distinction, to say the least. Let’s begin with the terminology: Although “founder [fondateur]” is common enough, as far as I know, Foucault doesn’t use “instaurateur” anywhere else. At least, a computer search of the text of Les Mots et Les Choses, Archéologie du Savoir and the pre-1975 Dits et Écrits didn’t turn up anything. Other things being equal, those seem like the most likely places to find it (if I’m missing uses of the term, I’d love to learn about them!). In particular, Order is a likely bet, because in the French seminar version (the one in D&E – see my initial thoughts here and Stuart Elden’s discussion of the textual history here) of “Author,” Foucault frames the text as partly responding to some leftover business from Order, where he admits that he both refuses to organize texts by authors, but also uses authorial names. The nominal “instauration” occurs a few times in these texts in a way that something more substantial than a blog post would need to investigate, but as far as I can tell, the term of art in “Author” – “instauration discursive,” naming somebody rather than an event – is specific to that lecture. So something is going on here!
It seems to me that it helps to understand this distinction by putting Foucault in conversation with Deleuze. Specifically, it seems to me that the instaurateur is an application of what Deleuze calls difference or repetition outside the order of representation. I’ll make an initial, obviously sketchy, case for that thought over the next few posts, with the caveat that I am not a Deleuze scholar.
Recall that Deleuze and Foucault were well-acquainted with each other’s work, and that they followed each other closely. Deleuze begins the conclusion of Difference and Repetition (DR) with a reference to Foucault’s Order. “Difference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to the requirements of representation,” he writes (262), adding that:
“It seems that it can become thinkable only when tamed - in other words, when subject to the four iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgement and resemblance in perception. As Foucault has shown, the classical world of representation is defined by these four dimensions which co-ordinate and measure it. These are the four roots of the principle of reason: the identity of the concept which is reflected in a ratio cognoscendi; the opposition of the predicate which is developed in a ratio fiendi; the analogy of judgement which is distributed in a ratio essendi; and the resemblance of perception which determines a ratio agendi. Every other difference, every difference which is not rooted in this way, is an unbounded, uncoordinated and inorganic difference: too large or too small, not only to be thought but to exist. Ceasing to be thought, difference is dissipated in non-being” (262)
Deleuze, then, takes into account the analysis Foucault presented in Order, and so the conclusion to DR moves in the same general space as Foucault’s reflections in “Author.” In brief: given an analysis of representation that shows it to be a closed and contingent way of thinking, one that (to be sure) comes freighted with supposedly essential concepts like “man,” what do we do after showing that way of thinking to be contingent or limited?
In an initial presentation of the founder/initiator distinction, Foucault distinguishes two kinds of authors who do more than write a book. The first he calls “transdiscursive,” viz. “the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place.” (113, pagination to the Foucault Reader edition). Examples of such authors include Homer, Aristotle, Church fathers, the first mathematicians, and so forth. These he contrasts with something that started in the 19th Century, viz. authors that “have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts [ont produit quelque chose de plus: la possibilité et la règle de formation d'autres textes]” (114/832 in the two volume D&E). Marx and Freud are the paradigmatic cases, and they “have established an endless [indéfinie] possiblity of discourse” (114/833). Marx and Freud “made possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (115). So too:
“To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not (simply) mean that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the works of Karl Abraham or Melanie Klein; it means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences [différences] – with respect to his own texts, concepts, and hypothesis – that all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself” (114-15/832-3).
This is Deleuzian territory! To see why, consider first the paradigmatic metaphysical system in Deleuze: Platonism. In DR (and this language mirrors the “Plato and the Simulacrum” essay from Logic of Sense), Deleuze says that “The primary distinction which Plato rigorously establishes is the one between the model and the copy” (264), and that he does so in order to execute a police function:
“The second and more profound distinction is the one between the copy itself and the phantasm. It is clear that Plato distinguishes, and even opposes, models and copies only in order to obtain a selective criterion with which to separate copies and simulacra, the former founded upon their relation to the model while the latter are disqualified because they fail both the test of the copy and the requirements of the model” (265).
To review, Deleuze is making a case against both Platonism as a method and a traditional reading of Platonism. On the traditional reading – this is the one we tell our students in intro classes – Plato is interested in questions like “what makes something virtuous?” The answer eventually comes back that we first need to know what virtue in an abstract sense is, and that we will then know if a given act is virtuous or not based on its resemblance to (or participation in; the details don’t matter in this context) that more abstract understanding of virtue. On the standard intro-class version, Plato is doing this as an epistemological endeavor. Deleuze’s intervention is to suggest that the point is not epistemological, or rather that the epistemological point is in the service of what he calls a “moral” argument. The moral argument is that the real point is to distinguish between good and bad copies of the model, in order to get rid of the bad ones. To take an example from the Republic, the reason we need to understand the concept of justice is in order to dismiss a claim like Thrasymachus’ that “the just is the interest or advantage of the stronger” (338c2-3; Cary Nederman has a great paper that complicates this standard reading of Thrasymcahus). Of course, this is not what we tell our intro students, and Deleuze points out that “the world of representation will more or less forget its moral origin and presuppositions” (265).
Deleuze emphasizes that “this Platonic wish to exorcize simulacra is what entails the subjection of difference” and that the model requires “a positing of identity as the essence of the Same, and the copy by an affection of internal resemblance, the quality of the Similar” (265) such that the copy “has an internal relation to being and the true which is analogous to that of the model” (265). In other words, good copies are correctly analogous to the model, and bad copies fail this test. Such bad copies – simulacra – that do not imitate the model – are ruled out on moral grounds. As he puts it, “as for the rebellious images which lack resemblance [simulacra], these are eliminated, rejected and denounced as ungrounded, false claimants” (272).
Let’s begin with the way Deleuze characterizes “founding” (the English uses “grounding,” which is fine, but I want to keep the terminological proximity to Foucault) something. He begins a section by nothing that “to ground [fonder] is to determine” and that “grounding is the operation of the logos, or of sufficient reason” [“Le fondement est l'opération du logos ou de la raison suffisante]” (272/349 in the French). He then goes on to distinguish three senses of founding. The first replicates the discussion of Platonism above, and concludes with the passage about rebellious images. The second solves a different problem, that “what must be grounded is the claim of representation to conquer the infinite” such that “to ground no longer means to inaugurate and render possible representation, but to render representation infinite” (273). The third sense, which “unites” the first two, is complex:
“To ground, in this third sense, is to represent the present - in other words, to make the present arrive and pass within representation (finite or infinite). The ground then appears as an immemorial Memory or pure past, a past which itself was never present / but which causes the present to pass, and in relation to which all the presents coexist in a circle” (273-4).
Deleuze cites the moment as occurring in Plato, Hegel and Leibniz. It’s something like totality in Hegel, or the entire movement of Geist. The take-home point is that “to ground is always to ground representation [Fonder, c'est toujours fonder la représentation]” (274/351). Founding, in this sense, is what we need to try to think beyond. Deleuze accordingly suggests that there is an essential ambiguity to the foundation, that it “vacillate[s] between a fall into the grounded and an engulfment in a groundlessness [entre sa chute dans le fondé et son engloutissement dans un sans fond]” (274/351); he adds that this is “the most general characteristic of the ground,” that it is circular in that “representation must prove what proves it” (274). As a result, “the world of the ground is undermined by what it tries to exclude, by the simulacrum which draws it in only to fragment it” (274). As he summarizes:
“Sufficient reason or the ground is strangely bent: on the one hand, it leans towards what it grounds, towards the forms of representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges into a groundlessness beyond the ground which resists all forms and cannot be represented” (275).
Because it cannot represent what is outside of itself, representation presents that outside, that which is without foundation in this sense, as a “completely undifferentiated abyss [le sans fond comme un abîme tout à fait indifférencié]” (276/354), when in fact groundlessness “swarms” with differences.
In other words, to translate back into Foucault: if the author is our organizing principle, then it excludes from thought anything that does not accord with its organizing principle. In a 1968 essay (“Réponse à une question,” translation options here) Foucault speaks of discontinuities and the gaps between discursive elements. Rather than replacing a principle of “continuity” with one of “discontinuity”:
“On the contrary, I strive to show that the discontinuity between events is not a monotonous and unthinkable void that one needs to hurry to fill (two perfectly symmetrical solutions) by the dreary plenitude of cause or by the Cartesian Diver [ludion] of spirit; but that it is a game of specific transformations [which are] different from one another … and tied together according to schemas of dependance. History is the descriptive analysis and theory of these transformations” (D&E 708).
The image about spirit is precise and fascinating. A Cartesian Diver is a toy that can be made to rise and sink within a container based on varying the (air) pressure within it by pressing on a flexible membrane on top. As Foucault emphasizes slightly earlier, “discourse is not the place of of a pure irruption of subjectivity; it is a place of differentiated functionings and positions for subjects” (708). Discourse is not about the emergence of something inside which is then, Plato-like, articulated as the unfolding of an eidos, the author-principle. But we need to understand how we go to the point of thinking that it is.
I’ll have more next time…
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