Mouth Mantra

This matter of the construction of the object, however, also clarifies the usefulness, to literary history proper, of artistic histories from other domains, from the visual arts, for example, or from music. For they are distant enough from the verbal artifacts with which we work to be preeminently suggestive of new possibilities of construing our own objects: histories of color, of perspective, of musical instruments—all these topics, with their peculiar conjunctures and reversals, help us break out of the old problems of irony or point of view, of style indirect libre or thematic imagery, and propose new stories to be told, new kinds of histories to be constructed. Such breakthroughs might be comparable to what Foucault was able to achieve with that tired old genre, the “history of ideas,” with which he was so embarrassed to be identified. For his strange constructs were themselves like the bricolage of a sculptor’s studio: it was not so much that he gave us a clearer view of historical reality as that he showed us how the historian could be engaged in all kinds of new operations, not merely discovering and incorporating new kinds of documents, but also incorporating new materials and forgotten objects, like the panopticon or the ship of fools, and organizing new stories and narratives around them. (Indeed, it seems to me quite misguided to think that Foucault had new ideas about power or sovereignty or whatever; better to think of him as a kind of inventor rather than a kind of thinker.) At any rate, it seems possible minimally to characterize these new intellectual constructions as conceptualities in which one or several material objects are embedded.