On Thursday, I learned a lot about Foucault. But I also learned a lot about a little function in MS Word called “Show All Non Printing Characters.” What this feature does, once you’ve selected it is show the text you are typing onscreen, but hides it from the draft once you print it. Much to my dismay I accidentally pressed this “show all non printing characters” button and rendered the most important section of my notes (the section on Don Quixote that I was going to present on) completely invisible in the printed copy of my notes that I brought with me to class. Therefore, below is the more detailed discussion of Don Quixote I meant to present on Thursday…
For Foucault, every era has an underlying episteme that ultimately determines the kinds of knowledge that can be produced and circulated at a particular time.
During the 16th century that episteme was one governed by similitude. That is, knowledge was created within the unconscious assumption that signs resembled the things they referred to, and in turn their relationship to one another was legitimized and authorized by the fact that they resembled one another.
All that changed however in the 17th century. Signs were divorced from objects and things. The legitimacy of their relationship to the sign was questioned, and deemed arbitrary. That they had been related by similitude before was taken to be a simple coincidence. Signs did not necessarily have to be a true designation of the things they represented. Suddenly similitude was not a factor to be trusted. Similitude was just a representation, and representations were created by the mind.
Foucault opens his chapter on representation with a discussion of Don Quixote, which he frames as an evidential artifact that registers this major epistemic shift.
Don Quixote finds the titular character consumed by romantic novels about chivalry and high adventure. So enthralled by these novels, he hardly eats or sleeps. Despite their melodramatic flourishes, he believes that the stories in his novels are true. Desiring to experience these adventures first hand, he sets out on an inspired quest. He imagines himself a knight in shining armor and rides off into the sunset on his trusty steed Rocinante. His quest is to prove that his books are true by looking for elements of them in the real world. And along his journey he continues to see that the reality portrayed in his books is exactly like the reality of the real world. He cannot be dissuaded. Anything that occurs that might potentially detract from the authority of his literary delusions, is deemed an effect of magic, which is in itself a trope of romantic literature. Thus even when something occurs in the real world that might otherwise prove to him that his books are fictional, he cannot recognize them as such. Stuck inside the self-serving logic of similitude, Don Quixote cannot see anything beyond similitude. As Foucault explains, Quixote is the hero of the Same.
In the second part of Don Quixote, our hero is recognized in the world as a character from a novel, and is associated with the adventures he experience in the first part of the novel. He becomes a sign, and feels compelled to maintain appearances, to reaffirm the similitude between himself in the world, and himself as the titular character in part one. This becomes increasingly difficult for him as he is tormented and ridiculed by the people in the world around him who laugh at him and poke fun at his delusions. He becomes depressed, descends into madness and denounces chivalric fiction. At the end, he regains his sanity but only before he dies unhappy and alone.
Don Quixote does not belong in the real world. There is no place for him there. As similitude becomes more and more deceptive and resemblances and signs are no longer allies, he is unable to truly recognize this because the episteme of similitude governs his thinking and he cannot think outside of it. He does eventually recognize that signs no longer refer to the things they are supposed to resemble, but by registering this rupture, he himself ruptures and he is a broken man.
Quixote is a madman, who is seemingly punished for not being able to adjust or abide by this new, modern episteme that distrusts the validity of representations, that plays with signs, their similitude and the meanings they designate (or don’t designate).
The madman is mad because he pathologically seizes upon primitive resemblances. He is alienated in analogy. He has a disorder that prevents him from recognizing the difference between the Same and the Other. He cannot perceive the differences, because he has only the capacity to see resemblances. Everything is a sign, all signs resemble one another, and therefore all resemblances are signs. This inevitably cancels everything out however, and in the end, the madman Don Quixote sees nothing and knows nothing.
But Quixote is also a sympathetic character, a sensitive victim. And likewise, Foucault aligns him not only with the madman but the poet as well. There is a great affinity between madness and the imagination for Foucault—something that comes up repeatedly in his work.
The poet still sees resemblances and affinities but can nevertheless distinguish between the same and the different. He still knows how to use language and signs to designate certain things and ideas. The poet experiences language in new ways. He can see the old episteme and the new, and as such is on the frontier of the epistemological rupture, and future.
As an aside, it is interesting how Foucault uses the figure of the madman and his disordered consciousness as a way to illustrate the existence of a particular knowing of knowledge. I cannot help but think of the way Daniel Heller-Roazen used the sensory disorders of Phantom Limb Syndrome and Cotard’s Syndrome as legible expressions of a disorder of the “inner touch” which demonstrated the existence of the particular sense of sensing he is arguing for. Both authors invest pathologies with the burden of proof and situate them as overdeterminations or exaggerations of the phenomena they seek to illuminate (“episteme” and “inner touch”). This suggests the way that monstrous or liminal figures indicate a kind of crisis—and crisis makes manifest previously unacknowledged relations, makes visible what was always invisible.
[Kind of like this posting, which is an attempt to make visible what was invisible in my presentation notes on Thursday].
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