Michaux, Displacement, and Postmodernism

Michaux, Displacement, and Postmodernism Laurie Edson Being is the recurrence of difference. . . —Michel Foucault1 J UST A FEW MONTHS after Michaux’s death in October 1984, Gallimard brought out the last in a long series of books by Michaux. This book, entitled Déplacements, Dégagements, is, like many before it, a collection of shorter pieces gathered together—pieces with no real unifying theme, no stylistic continuity, no structural coherence among the parts forming the whole. And yet, with its juxtaposition of different genres and fragmented discourses, Déplacements, Dégagements is quintessential Michaux in its very form: the refusal of unified or unify­ ing discourse. The various sections of Déplacements, Dégagements treat themes already familiar to Michaux’s readers: mysterious beings emerging from the void, a travel adventure, a meditation on music, poems about tem­ poral and spatial movement, an essay dealing with the development of children’s drawings, two pieces about experimentation with drugs, and poems ostensibly generated from four different body positions during meditation. Most of these subjects and techniques involve more tradi­ tional sorts of displacement: the person under the influence of mescaline experiences mental displacement, the traveler undergoes physical dis­ placement, the person meditating experiences spiritual displacement, and all forms of displacement serve to disrupt habitual modes of perception. Most of Michaux’s works situate the self in an unknown context with the purpose of disorienting, disturbing, and disrupting the very sense of self that would inevitably (and falsely) begin to emerge in the absence of such disruption. Accepting fragmentation and disunity as the true state of things, if one can speak of such a thing as the “ true” state of things with­ out falling into an essentialism, Michaux continually dislodges his sub­ ject by inserting him into far-off lands with different customs and con1 . Michel Foucault, “ Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Prac­ tice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 187 (hereafter cited as Language). Vol. X X V I, No. 3 5 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r ventions (as in the texts of Ecuador, Un Barbare en Asie, Ailleurs) or by plunging him into mindscapes of hallucinations, dreams, nightmares, or absurd universes. All of these constitute a thematics of displacement and are readily identifiable in Michaux’s work. What interests me here, however, is not so much displacement as a theme, but displacement as an authorial and a textual strategy. What I will call Michaux’s strategies of displacement seem to me to serve an important function beyond displacement for its own sake. Instead, dis­ placement appears as the necessary first step in an epistemological inquiry whose praxis precludes closure of any sort. Such closure to be avoided, for Michaux, would include frozen modes of thought, ready­ made assumptions, absolute, unchanging value systems, dominant ideologies, or clichéd language: “je me dégage de ce que j ’ai haï le plus, le statique, le figé, le quotidien, le ‘prévu’, le fatal, le satisfait” (ER, 43).2 It is precisely to avoid closure, then, that the inquiring subject re­ positions itself continually, creating new contexts in which to consider its relation to the world. Behind such re-positioning lies a belief that new contexts will open up new perspectives, will generate new vision, indeed, re-vision, and will ultimately lead to new consciousness, new subjec­ tivity, and new knowledge. Since Michaux himself was a celebrated painter who also wrote about art and artists, an analogy from painting seems appropriate. Looking back to the establishment of single-point perspective in the history of painting, we can now understand that it had the effect of creating the illusion of the unity and stability of the viewing subject. Single-point per­ spective established the viewer at the center as the God for whose gaze everything was presented in an orderly way. With single-point perspec­ tive, the viewer could appropriate and consume everything under his gaze without difficulty.3 Perspective, then, was relatively unproblematic. With Cubism, however, when single-point perspective was abolished in favor of simultaneous, multiple perspectives, not only did the act of viewing become more complex and hence an object of study in its own 2...