Blog Post 7 (Margaret & Lauren): Foucault's Discourse & Spillers' Consequences

Hortense Spillers argues for a hieroglyphics of the body. Rather than simply discourse surrounding the legibility of words in speech or different types of speech/registers, as both Bakhtin and Foucault point out, Spillers is “reading” the markings of the body as means of understanding the naming and valuation of black people. She suggests the discourse around the marked black body is caught up in “originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” (68). She focuses particularly on African female subjects and black female subjects in America, and does so by arguing for the “ungendering” of the black female slave’s body. She opens her essay with “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman” (65). Spillers is not simply interested in acknowledging that female slaves were also whipped and tortured just like their male counterparts, but to actually suggest that these female bodies, by reading the markings of their flesh, offer a praxis and a theory. To do this, she brings the concern of inheritance up as a site of tension. Unlike the U.S. at large, for black communities and black families, there is no “Father”--emphasizing the matrilineal rather than patrilineal formation, which also significantly absolves any possibility of “ownership” and “property” in this model.

By following this trace of matrilineal subject formation, Spillers puts us in a conversation about ethnicity and this conversation helps to clarify her point about the “ungendering” of the female body. In fact, in order to see this clarification we first must make a distinction between body and flesh, which is the “the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions” and understand that spatiotemporally, “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh’” (67). Situating flesh as a “concentration of ‘ethnicity’” also situates ethnicity in a temporally locked space, so that its meaning is always already tied up in that “before” moment. It is “a signifier that has no movement in the field of signification” (66). If there can be no movement and only a locked constancy, we can also understand “gendering” also gets lost as part of the slave’s subject formation. Because the Middle Passage voyage exists in an oceanic nonspace--no navigational guarantees that the ship and its cargo will arrive to its destination/a destination--the slaves are understood as being nowhere. More importantly then, if the domestic space--rooted and grounded in a physical home that is somewhere, is the space of gendering, then it is not difficult to understand then that slaves as cargo on a ship cannot be gendered for they are constituted, “taken into ‘account’ as quantities” (72). Rather than gendered then, female and male subjects are differentiated based on mass, on how little or much space they take up, thus translating them into a money economy rather than one situated in gender.

If the flesh is being read as cargo/quantities and thus ungendered, we can also understand Spillers' differentiation between slaves by phenotypic color as differentiated speeches/languages/linguistics: “by implication, the most aberrant phenotype [the darkest skin and most unlike the Portuguese captors] embodies the linguistic community most unknown to the Europeans” (70). One can imagine then how Spiller translates this observation into one that reveals how captors destroyed slaves' personhoods through destruction of “the African name, of kin, of linguistic, and ritual connections” (73). Perhaps this gets at Foucault’s understanding of the rules of discourse, which is further described below. In this case, Spillers is talking about the destruction of a true African discourse and the replacement with a European one in which slaves are seen as the “arithmetical” calculations on a ledger rather than as those who bear names. Therefore, to bear the mark of cargo is to not only erase the mark of gender, but also positions slaves as kinless--without family.

One might posit then, if slaves are ungendered and “kinless,” then what do we make of the female slave’s “genetic reproduction of the enslaved” (74)? Spillers seems to struggle with what to call the organization and connections developed between slaves, toggling between family and kin, but nonetheless emphasizing what loaded terms they are. Family as we know it suggests patronymics--inheritance, titles, entitlements, money, etc--between fathers and sons; basically an exchange of property between fathers and sons. What happens when slaves are that property within exchange then? Then whatever offspring that is produced does not belong to a mother and father, but a mode/model of commodity exchange, “an extension of the boundaries of proliferating properties” (75). So the loaded terms of kin and family, Spillers suggests are part of a dominant order that “forces ‘family’ to modify itself when it does not mean family of the ‘master’ or the dominant enclave” (75). Even though the words may be the same, they cannot mean the same thing because of the binary opposition between black and white, between master and slave. Because of this dominant ordering of language, slaves found relation/understanding of relations through dispersal. This dispersal, which represents a lack of presence (physical proximity) implies some of the only possible types of relationships are made across modes of “estrangement” and “disremembering” (76). If those are the only types of relationships possible, than for the woman who gives birth, she cannot be substantiated as a mother for that would signify her possessing parental rights.

Spillers somewhat seamlessly follows this trajectory of the slave female’s structural formation, positing that if motherhood and gender are not entirely possible under the current of slavery, then how do we understand sexuality, and specifically, female sexuality? She uses a novel, which I just read for my Black Feminism class, called Corrigedora, to discuss the topic/possibility of pleasure under conditions of slavery. That’s the distinction. In Corrigedora, as readers we come to understand that sexuality, like gender, is not possible for those signified as property; however, Jones’ narrative posits the difficult possibility that even in these scenes of brutality, moments/scenes of pleasure were happening, a pleasure not based in sexual subjectivity, but in feeling. In this regard, Spillers points out that such a question is not one that “we can politely ask” (76). Spillers argues that “the customary lexis of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are thrown into unrelieved crisis” (76). As such, I’m not sure that Corregidora and Spillers are in agreement other than making legible that difficult question that remains in the gaps and silences of the historic record and the language economy used for enslaved peoples.

With these “gaps and silences,” it may be useful now to look at what Foucault says concerning coherence in The Archaeology of Knowledge. This work can also help us here think more about methodology. Foucault describes all of the “negative work” that we must do before we can talk about discourse: “We must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity” (21). These notions include thinking about history in terms of traditions, influence, unity, and coherence, which Foucault wants to suspend (not completely do away with, but to think about in terms of their formations). This questioning of unity addresses the apparent unity of a book or author and then the coherence of discourse. Rather than think of discourse as “major types,” Foucault’s posits discourse as “reflexive categories” with “complex relations” (22). Furthermore, rather than positing discourse as progressing by saying what was previously unsaid or somehow buried, Foucault suggests that “we must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption” (25). Perhaps this methodology relates to Spillers, specifically in the way that a signifier, in her analysis, may have “no movement in the field of signification” (66). It seems as an eruption stuck in a certain place and time. For Foucault, the specificity of what is said (and said “nowhere else”) can help “create cracks” in what has been formulated as coherent (28).

Foucault seems interested in looking past certain discourses (that have been proposed as somehow coherent) to “describe the interplay of relations within it and outside it” (29). Here, he’s after the “statement” (and what unifies these). How might we analyze the “interplay of rules” at hand? This analysis, “instead of reconstituting chains of inference...would describe systems of dispersion” (37). Foucault acknowledges that this analysis, one that looks at systems of dispersion, involves risks. It moves beyond the familiar, which always involves the danger of there being nothing there. In the next chapter, Foucault moves to “real content” in order to illustrate this analysis. Thinking about his work on madness and confinement, for instance, Foucault shows how clinical discourse, law, and religious discourse together to form and order objects: “These are the relations that, operating in psychiatric discourse, have made possible the formation of a whole group of various objects” (44). What’s important here is the way in which discourses themselves form and create: Discourses “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (49)  We might think back to Spillers here and the discourse around the marked body. She complicates the idea of discourses forming by addressing discourses of destruction and how that destruction (of names and rituals, as mentioned) precedes a replacement.

For Foucault, discourse is made up of multiple surfaces or “sites” interacting. He turns again to medicine in the nineteenth century, which “became the major authority in society that delimited, designated, named, and established madness as an object” (42). For clinical discourse, a number of “sites” come together in order to make up its sovereignty: who is speaking (the doctor),  the materials (including the body), and a number of atmospheres: “It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed” (55). Yet, what establishes this “system”? What, in other words, are the rules? Foucault suggests that it is the “specificity of a discursive practice” (55). This is certainly no straightforward answer, as it requires a thorough analysis of what a “statement” is (and is not). A “statement” for Foucault is not what we might usually associate with “statement”: it is not a sentence and it cannot be judged by grammar (a graph could be a statement (82)). A statement, moreover, has “a specific relation that concerns itself” (89), which makes it a “function” (87). What, then, is the “function” of a statement? From what I can tell, the function of a statement is connected to Foucault’s initial positing of the “interplay of rules.” A statement is a “function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space” (87). A statement appears to actually be a representation of the rules that make up discursive formations. Foucault’s statement that discourse is a “fragment of history” (117), where articulations are subject to their time and space, may further connect to Spillers and her methodology, especially in her discussion of “family.” Foucault continues to only situate us in the realm of discourse while Spillers takes us right to the consequences, right to the markings on the flesh.