D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault: A Poetics of Historical Vision

Abstract

This paper examines in what way the historical visions of Lawrence and Foucault are similar to each other; how these visions were formed; and what idea of historical process they imply. Both writers derive an optimistic vision from an apparently bleakly pessimistic one. The author explores Lawrence's account of how the extrarational drives become mechanised and instrumentalized by the effects of industrialism, juxtaposing it with Foucault's account of how human bodies are shaped and manipulated by 'bio-power'. The author also connects Lawrence's historical vision of destructive and creative power with Foucault's historical vision of continuity and discontinuity, in the light of their shared view of history as cyclical. Lawrence and Foucault share a historical (and philosophical) vision which rejects the centrality of the conscious human subject, with its prohibition or marginalisation of the unconscious, spontaneous and instinctive. Their vision is also one which repudiates conventional historical chronologies and orderings based on principles of progress, evolution, and the development of the human spirit through time. They 'excavate' to find kinds of knowledge long forgotten, excluded and 'subjugated' in the Western historical tradition, with its emphasis on only continuity and progress. Through their 'archaeological' approach to history, Lawrence and Foucault see it as a cyclical process of destruction and creation, continuity and discontinuity.