The Banana Peel Project

Looking over Foucault’s ingenious structural history of medical practice, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation 1973) I was struck by how well Foucault’s early work draws together communication, critical theory, and the anthropology of medicine.  The study of communication–language, symbols, discourses–is at the heart of any serious attempt to understand–to set apart, to juxtapose, to grasp–what we humans call “knowledge,” whether that knowledge resides in our hands, in our heads, in our tools, or in some space whose edges they define.  Here’s what Foucault has to say about it in the preface to Naissance de la Clinique:

Commentary questions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; it tries to uncover that deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth; in other words, in stating what has been said, one has to re-state what has never been said…[T]o comment is to admit by definition an excess of the signified over the signifier; a necessary, unformulated remainder of thought that language has left in the shade–a remainder that is the very essence of that thought, driven outside its secret–but to comment also presupposes that this unspoken element slumbers within speech (parole), and that, by a super-abundance proper to the signifier, one may, in questioning it, give voice to a content that was not explicitly signified.

So commentary is criticism.  Commentary reveals an unarticulated thought or intention, exposing it in its capacity as an unarticulated thought or intention.  How else can one say this?  To comment is to assume a critical orientation towards a subject (which, as Foucault makes clear, is just as likely to be an object).

In his early work, Foucault explicitly sought to reveal the underlying structures, forms, systems, and nosologies that allowed human knowledge (that is, knowledge claimed by people as well as about people) to make sense.  While he appeared to lose patience with the systematic archaeological methods promoted here in his later work, it’s pretty clear that he never stopped insisting on the materiality of the discourses about which he wrote.  Sexual discourses were not about language or what was said, for example–they existed only in and for those fleshy, breathing bodies about which they spoke.  Medical knowledge was (and is) about the techniques–technologies, tools, practices, hands–used to gaze upon and in so doing to produce (”if we are to believe first appearances”) diseased bodies.  Foucault knew that discourses–languages, symbols, communication–can only occur within spaces.

We must reexamine the original distribution of the visible and invisible insofar as it is linked with the division between what is stated and what remains unsaid: thus the articulation of medical language and its object will appear as a single figure.  But if one poses no retrospective question, there can be no priority; only the spoken structure of the perceived–that full space in the hollow of which language assumes volume and size–may be brought up into the indifferent light of day.

Foucault thus spoke of “supports,” material things that bang and clank and feel like other things, because they were an inseparable piece of the historical question, the commentary that also criticizes because it is commentary.  Knowledge reveals itself only when language and “stuff” are seen to be one and the same.  “We must place ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological, where the loquacious gaze with which the doctor observes the poisonous heart of things is born and communes with itself.”

The study of the anthropology of disease (just as the study of the sociology or anthropology of any experience) is therefore inherently a critical enterprise; and criticism, being always already present in any bit of polemical commentary, is always first and foremost and always an exercise in communication.