In Memoriam Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)

Gone but not forgotten

Two and a half millenia ago sexuality was invented by the horrible Greeks and idealized by Plato. Once idealized, sexuality was as robust as anthrax and as insidious as herpes, and could nest dormant in your cells like trichinella or plasmodium . For most people during much of human history, sexuality merely wallowed in the murk like some enormous, slimy, barbeled catfish, and emerged only occasionally to engulf some hapless human victim. But from time to time sexual / anti-sexual idealists like Augustine and Dante encouraged and strengthened the  monster, and finally in 1830 (with the July Revolution and the opening of Hugo’s play Hernani) the French romantics and liberals brought the undead creature from mud to land. For almost two centuries now it’s been flopping and wallowing among us, going where it will, wreaking havoc and devouring any who dare come its way.

Many have tried to tame or defeat sexuality, but each attempt has only made it stronger and more horrible. Repression, chastity, marriage, idealization, libertinism, liberation, naturalness, “relationships”, psychoanalysis, bisexuality, intersexuality, transgendering, queering – nothing has worked, and sexuality still claims countless new victims each day. This creature has no benign forms and cannot be resisted, and all we can do now is resign ourselves to our sexual fates, whatever those may be, and hope for some post-sexual Beowulf or Parsifal to come along to drive a stake into the beast’s gigantic, loathsome head.

(The part about the 1830 Revolution in France will be explained in a later post. The rest is all common knowledge, though few admit it. Nineteenth century Frenchmen were as fucked up as 19th century Americans, but in a very different manner.)

The Freestanding Sage in the Daodejing

The free-standing sage (i.e., outside the “Therefore the sage” formula) appears six or seven* times in the Daodejing. Two of the Wang Pi text’s chapters which include the free-standing sage (chapters 5 and 19)  are found in the Guodian text without the sage. Chapter 19 is hostile to the sage in any case  and thus not a trustworthy source (exterminate the sage, discard the wise, and the people will benefit a hundredfold), and I will  leave it out of this discussion for that reason.

The Early Layer of the Daodejing

(Transformed from a “page” to a “post”)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT OF THE DAODEJING

In my first two pieces I defined what amounts a late syncretic layer in the DDJ, consisting of the last 15 chapters of the book plus the 13 chapters which include the phrase “Therefore the Sage…” – in all, approximately a third of the DDJ. This late layer was defined by two simple and easily-described operations on the text, rather than by interpretation and a series of ad hoc decisions, and it fits a very plausible story of how the text was put together: the addition of “syncretic Taoist” political writing to an already-existing text produced within a mystical lineage dedicated to meditation and self-cultivation.

The two groups making up the “late” layer, even though defined rather mechanically by two simple cuts, were indeed of a syncretic political type, with a gratifying degree of stylistic and thematic unity. The method didn’t catch everything, and other chapters will end up being assigned to this syncretic layer later, but what we have is is enough to work with.*

I will now define what I think is the contrasting early pre-syncretist layer in the text – 27 chapters, or approximately another third of the text. (26 chapters remain unassigned, to be looked at later.). My definition of this layer was less mechanical and more subjective than the definition of the syncretic layer was, but I think that most will find the result at least plausible. Note that while this selection is based on judgements of themes and style, I worked with the undivided chapters just as they have come down to us, even though there’s plenty of evidence that many of the chapters are composites and not unities.

The “Nei Ye” and the Daodejing

In his book Original Dao (Columbia, 1999) Harold Roth has argued that the “Nei Ye” chapter of the Guanzi is a guide to meditation produced within an organized teacher-student lineage devoted primarily to the arts of “cultivation of life” (meditation, diet, ritual, and physical practices), and that the  Daodejing, a handbook of political wisdom, is the product of a late politicized stage of this same school, or of a branch of the school. Roth’s theory is a beginning toward giving a definite answer to the question “What kind of book is the Daodejing?”, a question which has divided Daodejing interpreters more or less from the beginning.

My answer to this question is very close to Roth’s. However, while Roth (following Graham)  classifies Daoists as Individualists, Primitivists, or Syncretists, I am more inclined to classify the Primitivists as politicized Daoists and as just one kind of Syncretist — for all its utopianism and satirical edge, in the Daodejing Primitivism often seems to be advocated as kind of political device. I also don’t think that it’s terribly important to decide whether the “Nei Ye” is older than the Daodejing; the two texts may have been contemporary, both of them being used in different contexts by the same school, or they may have been used by two opposed schools which had split off from a united earlier school.

Primitivism in the Daodejing

A.C. Graham has distinguished between Individualists, Primitivists, and Syncretists among the early Daoists, with the first group dedicated to self-cultivation and meditation, the second advocating a kind of peasant anarchism, and the third adapting Daoist principles for the ruler’s use. In his book Original Dao Harold Roth has argued that the “Nei Ye” chapter in the Guanzi and parts of the Daodejing represent the Individualist contemplative strain of Daoism, whereas other parts of the Daodejing are Primitivist or Syncretist. I generally agree with Roth, and have defined an Individualist “early layer” within the text of the Daodejing which has many points in common with Roth’s “Nei Ye”.

While I see a sharp distinction between the early “individualist” layer of the Daodejing and the  later “syncretic layer” (the core of which is Chapters 67-81),  the distinction between syncretism and primitivism in Lao Tzu does not seem to be a terribly important one in this text, since many of the Daodejing’s primitivist chapters clearly view primitivism as a device of the ruler.

The Structure of the Text of the Daodejing I

 

(It’s generally agreed that the Daodejing is a composite text which includes the work of many anonymous  authors, and it is also widely thought that “Huang-Lao” writings on political methods overlays earlier, more contemplative writings. It’s more complicated than that, but it turns out that one group of Huang-Lao additions is easy to spot).

I

The Guodian manuscript of the Daodejing does not include Chapters 67-81 of the traditional text. It is my hypothesis that this block of text was not available when the Guodian text was copied out (probably because it had not yet been written)  and that Chapters 67-81 represent the final addition to the composite Daodejing text. An examination of these passages finds a well-defined argument written in a consistent style, and this block can be differentiated from much of the rest of the 81-chapter text both by the absence of many themes, phrases, and styles found in the first 66 chapters, and by the disproportionate presence of other themes.

The Daodejing has long been thought to be an anthology. The text is notably discontinuous, and it frequently repeats or echoes itself in widely separated passages. A few chapters seem like hodgepodges with no train of thought, and the point of some other chapters cannot be found without great effort. However, the old theory that the text has been damaged, or that it was carelessly edited, is no longer held, and it is now generally agreed that the text we have was put together over a long period by a series of authors and editors, and that it was intentionally passed down to us in approximately its present form by an anonymous Daoist sage (or council of anonymous sages) working within an organized community. (The fact that almost all of the Guodian materials are included of the present text argues that a school already existed at that time to authorize texts,  even though the 81-chapter version of the Daodejing had not yet been produced and even though the passages are not organized into any apparent  sequence.)

Stacking wheat and things of that kind

In chapters  XIII-XV of Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie (Nebraska, 1961) the stacking of wheat is explained in enough detail for the book to be usable as an instruction manual, and he also describes the various technical changes wheat harvesting went through during his lifetime.  (From when I was about six I just barely remember the kind of crew-operated threshing machine that left a big pile of chaff; it had replaced hand stacking and would soon be replaced by the combine). Stacking wheat was a difficult and critical job, and good stackers were in high demand during the harvest season, though not really afterwards, since they were just farmworkers after all.

Things were about the same in France:

My father would contract to cut certain fields of rye or oats, the only grains grown in our area at that time. When the grain was brought in, my father was much in demand for that particular job, setting the sheaves up in rounded stacks  called groac’hel. He was a past master in the art of constructing such stacks. Stacks had to be very well built; because the winnowing was done entirely by flail, it took a long time, and if during that time it should rain heavily on poorly constructed stacks,  the water would get inside and everything would be ruined, grain and straw.

Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, Jean-Marie DeGuignet, Seven Stories Press, 2004

Stacks were stacked out in the field, though, not in Chicago. I don’t know where Sandburg got this from:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders….

In the high and far-off times they even stacked things in New England. Maybe they still do sometimes, at re-enactments and the like:

“But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay”

“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”

Arthur Rimbaud left the difficult job to his mom:

Delahaye was slightly awed when he called at the farm… He found his friend at harvest-time, rhythmically heaving the sheaves of wheat overhead to his mother, who formed the haystack.

Rimbaud, Graham Robb, Picador, 2000, p. 301.

During his time in the U.S. the great Norwegian author and quisling Knut Hamsun worked the wheat harvest on a plantation-style bonanza farm in North Dakota and warned against the 15-hour days there. Whether he actually stacked wheat is unknown.

(Part II)