(response follows this complicated set-up)
[This bounced because the attached JPEG of Caravaggio was too big. Anyone who wants the image, I'll be happy to forward it.]
>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Subject: Caravaggio vs. David Hockney? (was Re: Butler)
>Catherine Driscoll writes to Chuck Grimes:
>>
>>with an invocation to compare Caravaggio and David Hockney.
>>Chuck, I can't see why this comparison would prove or disprove the claim
>>that Butler and Foucault have had effects on conceptions of sexuality.
>>You want to claim they have had *less* effect than other
>>things/ideas/people I think, but why? And who, exactly -- Hegel?
>
>I didn't reply to Chuck's post because his intent was unclear to me.
>Reading it again, I suppose he is giving us a familiar narrative of decline
>from modern to postmodern. If so, such an exercise has been already done,
>with regard to Van Gogh's and Andy Warhol's shoes, for instance, so I don't
>see any need to reproduce it. (This sort of narrative always reminds me of
>Oswald Spengler's _The Decline of the West_.)
>
>More specifically, Chuck seems to suggest the following (incomplete)
>equations:
>
>Caravaggio = __________ (fill in the blank)
>
>David Hockney = Foucault
>
>I wonder which writer Chuck has in mind as a superior 17th c. antecedent of
>Foucault who can be paired with Caravaggio (1573-1610). Shakespeare? Ihara
>Saikaku (1642-1693) who wrote _Nanshoku Okagami [The Great Mirror of Male
>Love]_? Any philosopher or historian? (In the 18th c., he can turn to
>Jeremy Bentham. See Bentham's essay "Offenses Against One's Self" (1785),
>the first known argument for sodomy law reform in England, according to
>Louis Crompton. Available at
>http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/events/sw25/bentham/.) In any case,
>isn't it silly to make this sort of comparison?
>
>BTW, what of Foucault's own taste? I imagine Foucault would have preferred
>a Caravaggio to a Hockney as a cover picture of one of his books. For
>instance, "Flagellazione." (Take a look at the JPEG attachment.)
>
>An aside to Chuck: Read, for instance, Richard Dyer on homophobia in Film
>Noir.
>
>Yoshie
---------------------
Catherine and Yoshie,
This was a complex thread and my post was not really intended as an argument in the form of a rational comparison--more like an expressive comparison. The basic idea was to look at two different responses to sexuality and homosexuality in different periods through different works. I am almost certain Foucault would prefer Caravaggio to Hockney. I haven't read enough of Foucault to know, but I would be surprised if Foucault didn't spend some time thinking about Caravaggio.
C was a very fascinating character as well as one of the giants. He was most likely the lover of his patron in Rome (forgot his name at the moment--Duke Barbari something) who was a cardinal and later became Pope (I think). At the height of his career in Rome, Caravaggio got in an argument with somebody over gambling on a tennis match he had lost and killed his opponent--probably a sexual rival at that. He was arrested and jailed, but the Duke Barbari(?) got him released so he could leave Rome until things cooled off. C when to Naples and worked for awhile until his sexual exploits and violence got him in trouble in Naples, so he left and migrated further south to Salerno(?). Once again more altercations had him off to Malta. In Malta, he must have really been a bad boy, I suspect screwing the Duke of Malta's young son (see portrait of the boy and his father). So he fled Malta and went back to Sicily. Ah, but he wouldn't stop snuffing around that young stuff and the local bishop kicked him out for some undisclosed naughtiness--not too difficult to figure out what. Meanwhile the Duke of Malta dispatched agents to bring Caravaggio back to Malta (probably planning to castrate and impale him--antique style). Somewhere north of Naples, a few months later Caravaggio was found murdered on the beach.
So, with that rough background, when you look at his painting you can see the complex interrogations he conducted between sensuality and spirituality in masterpieces of formal execution that always implied an undercurrent wickedness of mood and sensibility, and an equally beautiful and strange dialogue between romantic love and violent brutality. In other words, film noir.
I wouldn't compare Foucault to Shakespeare, but I do think that Caravaggio and Shakespeare must share something on some meta-aesthetic level of adventure, masculinity, feminity, gender ambiguity and transgression, crime, power, and master craft. They both belong to the big scale of accomplishments and performances.
The only reason for my suggesting a comparison is to gage what we consider adventurous, progressive, and an accomplished performance in art, life and transgression by some other scales. It isn't a matter of the decline of the West, but the contraction of expression.
Yoshie wondered vaguely about the suppression of histories of transgression. Most people who look at Caravaggio or go to Shakespeare never see what we are talking about here--it has indeed been suppressed, and quite successfully--squeezed flat so to speak. On the other hand, we have been diminished and the fact that writers like Foucault or Butler struggle within extremely confined little boxes of analysis is a fairly accurate reflection of that diminishment. It isn't a matter of declines or hierarchies, but constriction and reduction of the means of expression. After all neither are painting giant masterpieces or writing sweeping plays on accension to power, and falls into revenge, love, and murder, are they? There is not the money, the public, nor the cultural context to do so. (Although considering Monica, Bill, Ken, and Trent, you have to wonder why the hell not!) That isn't to deride Foucault or Butler, so much as the whole historical configuration we live under, brought to us by pig capitalism and the moral nazis taking most of the credit--right?
But there were other things woven along on those threads on Butler that had to do with reading Psychic Lives and thinking about Hegel, and yet another era--Romanticism, Napoleon, and the German enlightenment. So Butler isn't Hegel, so what? Well, so nothing, except that Butler seems to have skipped some important items to mention about her use of Bondsman and Unhappy Conscious--that was all. Butler is constricted, and has reduced her means of expression, just like her prose style, into tight little circles. As I was reading her, I wanted to scream, Come on Judy, open up a little. Take a few broad strokes, stretch out a little, exercise the flamboyant, the expressive, and a more broadly conceived spectrum of registers. Risk being a fool, a slut, a poet and a philosopher all at the same time--make me admire you and worry that you will fail or fall in love with you if you succeed--you know take, the fucking chances. And the same goes (of course posthumously) for Foucault. Too fucking tight ass. Somehow just as constricted, oppressive, reduced, and barren as the times themselves.
Chuck Grimes