ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, the notion of “the classical body” has remained essentially uncontested, some 40 years after three writers from different historical contexts (Stalinist Russia, pre-Nazi Germany and post-war France) had their seminal work on the topic translated into English: Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1968); Elias’s The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1969); and Foucault’s The History of Madness (1961), Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978). The differences among these theorists extend to critical approaches (Marxism in Bakhtin’s case, psychoanalysis and German sociology in Elias’s, as compared to Foucault’s critical relation to both Marxism and psychoanalysis). Bakhtin’s paean to the ambivalent grotesque realism of the carnival, which subverts dominant hierarchies and beliefs, and affirms the devalued and denied, finds its crowning expression in Rabelais, only to be recuperated by the absolutist state and reduced to a low literary genre with monologic meaning. In the process, marketplace frankness about the “lower bodily” organs of ingestion, excretion and reproduction, upheld as openings to the world, was suppressed by civilized manners; and the emerging classical body was bounded, closed off, privatized and homogenized with the rise of high, serious official culture and the bourgeoisie. Like Bakhtin, Elias marshaled a host of examples to show how body functions—eating, spitting, ejecting mucus, farting, secreting urine—which had been acceptable to elites, came to be viewed as beastly with the advent of court society, associated with shame and guilt and repressed; thus the self was molded into producing socially desirable behavior that displayed self-control, decorum and dignity. This disciplining of the subject, which marks the early and middle Foucault, devolves from the exclusion of marginal bodies as “mad,” with the founding of the Hôpital Général in 1656. And with unreason (déraison) banned, Foucault’s “classical age” incorporated the structure of the prison into its social institutions, controlled subjects “panoptically,” incited confession about sexuality and the body, valorized decorum and marked the rule of monogamous conjugality. And yet, at the end of History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault evoked a utopian vision for the future, “the possibility that one day” there will “perhaps” be “a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (159), not unlike the final paragraph of The History of Manners, where Elias imagines a time when “the tensions between and within states have been mastered,” and “self control … can be confined to those restraints which are necessary in order that men can live with each other and with themselves with a high chance of enjoyment and a low chance of fear” (524). Rather than look forward, Bakhtin looked nostalgically back to a populist utopian, prelapsarian moment of unconstraint, bodily freedom and joyful laughter.
