'Foucault’s Clay Feet: Ancient Greek Vases in Modern Theories of Sex' by
Caspar Meyer in (2018) 85
History Workshop Journal 143–168 comments
Although Michel Foucault never mentions the objects explicitly, his work on ancient Greek sexuality depends in critical aspects on evidence from sex scenes on ancient Greek pottery. The significance of the images comes to the fore in his argument concerning the radical difference of the gender-blind ethics of desire in Greek antiquity from the gender-based norms of modernity. In the overarching narrative of his multi-volume genealogy of modern sexuality, the alterity of Greece underlines his broader contention about the discursive basis of sexual experience. This article confronts the historiographical biases that led Foucault to disregard the material nature of his sources and explores the implications this silence spelled for his successors. Its argument evolves around the disciplinary instruments which scholars employ to contain three-dimensional objects within the bounds of verbal explanation. Two-dimensional copies, in particular, enable historians to isolate vase images from their contexts of consumption and redeploy them strategically to support unrelated arguments. The discussion first takes a critical look at the archives of vase images that made possible, or responded to, Foucault’s synthesis, and then turns to the possibilities of interpretation which the sex scenes hold out when reunited with their ceramic bodies. Of special interest are the manual operations involved in experiencing the artefacts in convivial settings and the interdependencies of painted and potted forms that mark the objects as intentionally subversive and open-ended. Despite its criticism, this essay is itself Foucauldian in its effort to cultivate critical historiography. Its goal is to perform a ‘genealogy’ of Foucault’s genealogy, with a focus on the objects and practices which sustained the debate on Greek homosexuality as one of scholarship’s foremost contributions to the liberationist projects of the twentieth century.
Meyer argues
Every now and then specialists of ancient Greek vase-painting need reminding how strange the objects they study really are. Figured painting, to modern eyes, almost always presupposes either a flat surface, such as a framed canvas or a page in a book, or repetitive compositions, if the painting is applied as an ornament on an object. Greek vases combine a seemingly infinite variety of images with an equally variable range of pottery shapes, relating to eating, drinking, storage and domestic production. Neither flat nor repetitive, the objects defy modern categorizations of ‘art’ and ‘ornament’. No wonder that ever since their first discovery in the ancient necropoleis of Italy, the contrast between the pictorial sophistication of the decoration and the mundaneness of its medium has generated disagreements about how Greek painted vases should be evaluated. Where early modern antiquarians were primarily interested in the technology and ritual implications of the vessels themselves, eighteenth-century aesthetes saw their figural decoration as fine art that just happened to have been applied to a ceramic shape. A persistent feature in settling these debates was the preference for invoking external evidence, usually from the textual tradition of antiquity. In iconographical study, for instance, which remains one of the dominant modes of approaching the material, texts are adduced to identify mythological subjects in the decoration. In a related manner, archaeologists rely on stylistic seriations of excavated pottery to connect individual deposits and cultural layers in the stratigraphy of sites with historical events mentioned in the sources, most often foundations and destructions of cities.
The interest of such text-based approaches is limited if they are employed, as is often the case, to confirm facts already known from the sources. We already know from Homer that Athena carried an aegis (an animal skin bearing the beheaded Gorgon’s face for protection), and we already know from Herodotus (or have little reason to doubt his claim) that the Persians destroyed Athens’s public monuments when they sacked the city in 480 BC. If text-derived explanations are at best a starting-point for other forms of enquiry, their usefulness breaks down in discussions of subjects that bear little or no direct relationship to surviving texts, which is often the case in Greek vase-painting. The imagery on Greek vases encompasses an extraordinary range of subjects which reveal no easy match with known myth or history, among them many scenes of figures engaging in sexual activities. How can such ‘vernacular’ representations produce reliable descriptions of ancient life, especially if they show acts of a kind only alluded to in the sources?
The relevance of Greek vases to the study of sexuality goes much further than the mere coincidence of subjects. The study of sexuality and Greek vases alike has all too often been conducted in a conceptual vacuum that excludes bodies from the sphere of verbal explanation. In the example of Greek pottery the images of the painted decoration have come to be studied as a visual discourse analogous to the elite discourses familiar from ancient texts, rather than as the embodied practices of those who once used the objects. Studies of sexuality purport to speak about the sexual feelings of individuals, but seek to rationalize those feelings in an analytical domain of structures and relationships which those engaging in sex cannot consciously be aware of.
I venture to say that Michel Foucault, the thinker who did more than any other to define this term’s modern usage, would have agreed that ‘sexuality’ is a profoundly strange concept. Foucault was suspicious of intellectuals who claimed to speak in the name of truth and justice for others. He rejected universal systems of morality, however noble their goals, in favour of examining specific problems and the answers given by those facing them. His commitment to actor-centred historiography is brought out in his distinction between ‘polemics’ and ‘problematizations’: that is, between answers to political issues formulated on the basis of pre-existing theories or doctrines and those that take as their starting-point the challenges through which individuals experience their existence as social beings.1 And yet, when Foucault wrote about sexuality many of his readers were left wondering how far the discourses of sexuality which he identified so masterfully in different historical contexts actually corresponded with individuals’ experiences in the given place and time. When are his (or any other) discussions of sexuality also about sex, and when are they not?
Past commentators have considered the ambiguous scope of his statements about sexuality to be an outcome of the methodological shifts in his oeuvre from what he called ‘archaeologies’ to ‘genealogies’, and back again. Foucauldian discourse analysis, as has often been pointed out, went through different stages, from the more structuralist and text-bound archaeologies of his earlier writings to the later genealogies concerned with the embodiment of discourse in social power.2 While his genealogical approach tried to extend his analytical categories to practices beyond the world of texts and linguistic expression, it received only one comprehensive treatment, in Discipline and Punish (1975), and remained more a repertoire of strategic choices than a coherent theory.3 Furthermore, his late work on ancient sexuality presents a marked return to his archaeological mode of exploring the structures of discourses without much focus on their correlation with power and practice.
This reversal in his method may reflect the unfinished state of his multi-volume history of sexuality, as is often surmised. But in this article, I argue that the flight from the realm of bodies and objects originates far more in the traditional embarrassment about materiality in academic historiography. The embarrassment about ‘things’ in this specific instance manifests itself in the implicit manner in which evidence from Greek painted vases has been subordinated to the demands of verbal explanation.
