I found Hegel's _Phenomenology of Mind_, the ratty paper copy I passed over at Moe's three days ago and was mulling over Francis's post that summarized the key sections when it occurred to me that maybe a lot of people on this list have not taken their core history of humanities classes. For shame. The poverty of higher education in the United States these days is truly appalling. Judging from some of the responses to Butler's Psyche Life of Power, it seems to me a lot of Econ majors shined their L&S core requirements. Please allow me to make up for this tragic loss.
In order to place and understand Butler (at least in this work), you have to have been exposed to Hegel and understand his position in the history of western philosophy. And it also helps to have some idea of why Hegel became central to almost all subsequent critical and cultural movements in a European history of ideas. Hegel is considered to be the end of the grand metaphysical tradition started first by the Pre-pre-socratics, but more particularly Plato and Aristotle (now you know why I bought the other books). In this tradition, you begin with two basic assumptions. The first is that your goal is to explain everything that is, and second you can do this by a systematic exercise of reason, judgement, and free use of imagination. It should seen immediately that Butler as well as Foucault fit squarely within this over broad description.
What isn't particularly apparent is the relation of Hegel and our latter day luminaries to Romanticism and the subsequent avant gard movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. For some rough idea, we turn to Octavio Paz, _Children of the Mire_, Harvard Uni Press, Cambridge, MA, 1974 (highly recommended as a quick and dirty supplement to a failed education in the arts):
"Our age is distinguished from other epochs and other societies by the image we have made of time. For us time is the substance of history, time unfolds in history. The meaning of the 'modern tradition' emerges more clearly: it is an expression of our historic consciousness. It is criticism of the past, and it is an attempt, repeated several times throughout the last two centuries, to found a tradition on the only principle immune to criticism, because it is the condition and the consequence of criticism: change, history." (9p)
"Modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment, whatever it happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to still another tradition which in turn is a momentary manifestation of modernity. Modernity is never itself; it is always the other. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by otherness. A bizarre tradition and a tradition of the bizarre." (1p)
"What distinguishes our modernity from that of the other ages is not our cult of the new and surprising, important though it is, but the fact that it is a rejection, a criticism of the immediate past, an interruption of continuity. Modern art is not only the offspring of the age of criticism, it is also its own critic. The new is not exactly the modern, unless it carries a double explosive charge: the negation of the past and the affirmation of something different." (4p)
"...modern poetry can be seen as the history of contradictory relationships, fascination and repulsion intertwined, between Romance and Germanic languages, the central tradition of Greco-Latin Classicism and the eccentric tradition of the individual and the bizarre represented by Romanticism; syllabic and accentual verse.
Avant-garde movements in the twentieth century trace the same patterns as in the previous century, but in inverse direction. The 'modernism' of Anglo-American poets is an attempt to return to the central tradition of Europe--the exact opposite of German and English Romanticism--while French Surrealism carries German Romanticism to its furthest extreme. Our own period marks the end of the avant-garde, and thereby of everything which since the eighteenth century has been called _modern art_. What is in question in the second half of our century is not the idea of art itself, but the idea of the modern." (vii, preface)
If we choose 1800 as a point say for the arrival of modernity, then these same currents and themes are found across the intellectual spectrum. In painting there is the contrast of Goya with David. In philosophy then there are Hegel and Kant. Even in mathematics, there are Galois and Gauss. The dialogue or dialectic seems a constant tandem shifting from a classicism and concentration on formal means, to its reaction in a romanticism of expressive means over any formalism. What Hegel represents in this sphere is not only the terminus of the metaphysical tradition, but a revolt against the dawn of modern science as Newton's mechanics reaches its apogee, but also the heavy formalism of Kant's partitioning of knowledge, and subrosa, the apparence of a yawning void--that which was once inhabited by a living breathing subject. While Hegel could hardly be considered any less rational than Kant, he does retain the one core of metaphysics that can not be subsumed by a completely mechanistic system--the concept of being and its most concrete expression as the individual imagination. In Hegel, from his Logic where Being and Nothing are juxtaposed and resolved as Becoming, we have instead in the earlier and more romantic work (Phenomenology of Mind), the concept of Mind which is the obvious metamorphosis of Being, and its more concrete expression as subjectivity, the human spirit, and their resolution as history, particularly cultural history.
It should now be more obvious why Hegel is important to the histories of modernism and avant gards. In terms of cultural and arts histories, he appears again and again in the tracts of movements centered on revolts of subjectivity, which is almost always considered as a form of romanticism, the revolt of being. This current in Hegel, as a man, must have been how he and Goethe became friendly acquaintances. They shared a complete hatred of Newton and the entire scientific and mechanistic vision of the world. They obviously fell on the romantic side of the divide. Although they had not yet met, Goethe published the first part of _Faust_ in 1808, the year after Phenomenology was finally published. Among other correspondences in the arts, I should mention Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 (1804), in which you can literally listen to something like all of the above played out in musical analogue. What can I say? The themes of the individual, the nation, rationalism, and the expressive power of art, set to the grand scale of a free public sphere were in the air. Together they compose the cultural conceptualization of the modern western world.
Wrapped or intertwined in this division are also conflicting conceptions and contradictory visions of the State. On the formal level or in the formal, mechanical, and empirical wing, the State is embodied in law and ruled by reasoned judgment, possibly corrupted by money or power, but these too are rational and mechanistically understood. On the other hand are all the cultural expressions of State as historical destiny, as collective identity, as a cultural dynamic, and hence a romantic or expressive form. In this lexicon, the State is corrupted by the influence of other national traditions, languages, cultures, races and mysterious forces--manifestations of being and spirit. Money and law appear to be much less important in their ability to corrupt and dissolve.
It is this romantic vision of State as Hegel portrays it later in _The Phenomenology of Right_ that gives to his philosophy the potential of a reactionary, conservative, and authoritarian cast. It seems to be that romanticism because of the primary place given to the metaphysics of being, particularly individual being as revolt, will always hold out the threat of an authoritarian resolution to conflicting impulses across an intellectual spectrum. Beethoven's disillusionment with Napoleon's promised liberation, and indeed the French disillusionment with the same promise tell a similar story.
Consider this historically interesting coincidence. Hegel finished the Preface to Phenomenology of Mind, and therefore the work on October 13, 1806, in Jena, the day before Napoleon opened the battle of Jena. The revolution was literally at Hegel's door. He later said to Goethe, he thought at the time it was the close to the Middle Ages. This comment might strike us as odd, but we in the US forget that the French Revolution and its subsequent transformation into the first modern military state under Napoleon was primarily aimed at destroying the foundations of feudalism, represented in the traditional Estates General as the monarchy, the clergy, and the aristocracy (see Intro, Geoge Lichtheim in _The Phenomenology of Mind_, Baillie, JB, trans, Harper Row, NY, 1967). At the time, the destruction was conceived as a constructive and founding triumph of lost classical ideals of democracy, rationalism, and individual freedom.
Since I am listening to Beethoven's 3rd at the moment, it just occurred to me that few people I can remember have ever asked for whom was the funeral march composed? I would venture, Ludwig was tossing the Ancien Regime a requiem.
So, with this sketch as background, then the recent eclipse of a politics of identity, the constant arrival of a yet another new nationalism, a new ethnic identity, or the constant redefinitions of existing national identities, including their supposed dissolutions, and certainly the extremes of religious fundamentalism that seemed to have sprouted like rank weeds everywhere, should come into a clearer historical perspective. It is not that we are re-living history, yet we are reproducing and resuscitating its broad cultural themes and variations. I wouldn't go as far as Paz did more than twenty years ago, and claim we have completed the cycle and have returned at last to the very opening movements of a modern age, hence the term postmodern.
But, it is in this way that we can see both Foucault and Butler as within a romantic, quasi-criminal and yet traditional reaction to the vast moral absolutes of a thoroughly rationalized and mechanized State. In fact, I noticed that Butler has yet to mention romantic love, which I think is both ironic and telling. It is possible to think of homosexual love as the last refuge of a thoroughly oppressed and therefore criminalized romantic impulse that has become openly expressive and expressionistic in its revolt, and thereby liberated from its interiority yet it remains within its own comprehension of similarity.