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Blake, Foucault, and the Classical Episteme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Daniel Stempel
Daniel Stempel*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu
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Abstract

The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 3 , May 1981, pp. 388 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 191. Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical page citations for Foucault refer to this text. References to Foucault's The Order of Things, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1970), are designated by OT in the text.

Note 2 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 4th ed., p. 523. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Blake's work are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text; abbreviations for individual works are J for Jerusalem; M, Milton; FZ, The Four Zoas; MHH, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and EG, The Everlasting Gospel. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (London: Oxford, 1971), has been used for one reference, noted in the text.

Note 3 Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 277–78. The rationale of Blake's system of numbering is the same as Swedenborg's: “To number in the spiritual sense signifies to know the quality, because number in the Word does not signify number, but the quality of a thing…. For the Lord's heaven consists of numberless societies, and the societies are distinguished according to the varieties of affections in general, and so all in each society in particular. The Lord alone knows the quality of the affection of each, and arranges all into order according to it. The knowledge of this quality is understood by the angels by numbering …” (The Apocalypse Revealed [New York: Riverside, 1907], i, 364). The “hidden meaning” of numbers is, significantly, the distribution of qualities in a nonnumerical order.

Note 4 “… the immediate apperception of our existence and of our thoughts furnishes us the first truths a posteriori, or of fact, i.e. the first experiences, as the identical propositions contain the first truths a priori, or of reason, i.e. the first lights (les premières lumières). Both are incapable of proof, and may be called immediate; the former, because they are immediate between the understanding and its object; the latter because they are intermediate between the subject and the predicate” (Leibniz, New Essays concerning Human Understanding, trans. A. G. Langley [Chicago: Open Court, 1916], p. 499).

Note 5 See “heart,” The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick (New York: Abingdon, 1962), ii, 549. The article notes that the word appears eight times as lvh. Blake was evidently aware that the “ah” ending is feminine in Hebrew. At the top of the plate of the Laocoön he engraved, “He repented that he had made Adam (of the Female, the Adamah).”

Note 6 Jones, The Origin of Language and Nations (1764; rpt. Menston: Scolar, 1972); Hieroglyfic (1768; rpt. Menston: Scolar, 1972); and The Circles of Gorner (1771; rpt. Menston: Scolar, 1970). Cleland limited his claim to the European languages in The Way to Things by Words (1766; rpt. Menston: Scolar, 1968).

Note 7 De Luca, “Proper Names in the Structural Design of Blake's Myth-Making,” Blake Studies, 8 (1978), 5–22.

Note 8 Cleland, p. 23. Jones gives as the source of “matter” “ma-tîr, the great earth” (Origin of Language, under “matter”).

Note 9 Arnauld, The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic, trans. J. Dickoff and P. James (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 108.

Note 10 'Letter to Leibniz, 28 Sept. 1686, in G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology, trans. G. R. Montgomery (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1945), pp. 142–43.

Note 11 Remarks on Arnauld's letter, May 1686, in Leibniz, Correspondence, pp. 110–11.

Note 12 Leibniz, “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans, and ed. Leroy E. Loemker, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1969), p. 293.

Note 13 For a brilliant discussion of this point, see Hidé Ishiguro, Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 130–33.

Note 14 Leibniz, “On the Method of Distinguishing Real from Imaginary Phenomena,” Philosophical Papers, p. 363. McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 128.

Note 15 The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, trans, and ed. Gerald Gillespie (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971). “His whole genius was concentrated on the completion of a tragedy in which the great spirits of mankind (whose body and mere outward shell, as it were, it constituted), love, hate, time, and eternity appeared as lofty arcane figures, and through which, instead of the chorus, there ran a tragic clown, a grotesque and fearful mask. With an iron fist this tragedian held the beautiful countenance of life unflinchingly before his great concave mirror, in which it was distorted into wild features as though it manifested its abysses in the furrows and ugly wrinkles that dropped into the beautiful cheeks; thus he drew its sketch” (p. 127). “It is indeed terribly lonely in the ego, when I clasp you tight, you masks, and I try to look at myself—everything echoing sound without the disappeared note—nowhere substance, and yet I see—that must be the Nothing that I see!—Away, away from the I—only dance on, you masks!” (p. 169).

Note 16 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern, The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 222 (No. 278).

Note 17 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1967), p. 67 (No. 9).

Note 18 Novalis, Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), i, 110.

Note 19 Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), p. 508.

Note 20 White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 254.

Note 21 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon. 1955), pp. 35–36.

Note 22 Writing on the rise of historicism, Cassirer stresses this point: “There is no break in continuity, therefore, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, between the Enlightenment and romanticism, but only a progressive advance leading from Leibniz and Shaftesbury to Herder, and then from Herder to Ranke” (The Problem of Knowledge, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950], p. 224). According to Cassirer, Herder's work on the origin of language and on national literatures also mediates between the Enlightenment and romanticism. See Cassirer's Language, Vol. i of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), p. 153, and The Myth of the State (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1955), p. 231. On Herder's transformation of the monad, see Cassirer's Freiheit und Form (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), pp. 194–96.

Note 23 Descartes neither invented nor used rectangular coordinates. It was Leibniz who, in the 1690s, brought into mathematical usage the terms used today: coordinates, abscissa, ordinate.