Like a Face Drawn in Sand: Anti-Humanism in D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault

Detail from the front cover of Foucault Now, 

ed. James D. Faubion, (Polity Press, 2014)

I.

According to Andrew Keese, a faculty member of the English Dept. at Texas Tech University: "Lawrence worried about anything which might force humans to be something other than they were actually born to be." [1]

But this is laughably mistaken in its natal essentialism. For Lawrence, the self was a product of external forces: "I am myself, and I remain myself only by the grace of the powers that enter me, from the unseen, and make me forever newly myself." [2]

He vehemently rejected the idea of an individual as a fixed entity with a predetermined fate and, like Foucault, Lawrence was happy to welcome the incoming tide that would mark the death of man. Not because he was anti-human, but because he was anti-humanist and keen to challenge all forms of anthropocentric thinking, including the conceited idea that man is the necessary end or highpoint of evolution.


II.

For readers unfamiliar with Foucault's notorious (but very beautiful) concluding paragraphs from The Order of Things, here they are in full: 

"One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words - in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same –-only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

      If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility –-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." [3]

Foucault's argument is actually very straightforward: he is using the term man to refer to a cultural and historical formation - not a biological organism or zoological species. In other words, man is a specific (but contingent) mode of being that has arisen at a particular time due to circumstances that will sooner or later change.

Understanding man in this way allows us to also think about the play of forces (social, economic, technological, etc.) peculiar to each epoch and how these interact with each other and with the forces within the human animal to produce new forms and ways of being. Unlike Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, Foucault is not fantasising about a world without humans, but thinking rather of a future in which the convenient fiction of humanity as presently conceived is no longer tenable.

Further, Foucault is interested in the extent to which man as a conceptual category can be understood as a bourgeois compromise (or as a bridge between ape and Übermensch, as Nietzsche would say) and to what degree man is merely something that obstructs and inhibits vital forces and flows.       

To be honest, the idea is so simple and - I would have thought - uncontroversial, that I cannot see why some people (including those who should know better) have problems understanding or accepting it ... 

Notes

[1] Andrew Keese, 'Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley's Lover and Pansies', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 127-135. The line quoted is on p. 134. 

I'm afraid that Keese misunderstands both Lawrence and Michel Foucault in this essay; particularly on the subject of power, which neither saw as corrupting (that would be Lord Acton), nor as something merely repressive. Nor is it correct to say that, like Lawrence, Foucault regards humans as being "out of balance between their instinctual and mental selves" [129]. That's more a Freudian schema than Foucauldian and, as far as I recall, Foucault doesn't uphold the Cartesian mind-body division in his corporeal ontology.     

[2] D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 344.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (Routledge, 1989), pp. 421-22.