James Elias u5333810

ENGL4019
Major Essay, Q5:
Consider the authors self-representation in any text(s) on the course. In
answering this question you might like to focus on one of the following topics:
autopoeisis and other forms of authorial self production; the role of
confessional/memoir/autobiography in writing; the relationship between reader
and writer

Michel Foucaults lecture What is an Author is both a productive critique

and reassessment of the themes introduced in Barthes Death of the
Author, published the previous year and a concise point of penetration
into the function of metonymy in his work as a whole. Specifically,
Foucaults investigation insists that the author is not a person but a
stabilising function within the discourse of literature, constructed as a
means to privilege certain forms of writing; to take a particular attitude
towardtexts: it is to ask of them a certain type of question and to expect
a certain type of answer.1 It is through recognition that the author is in
fact a historical construct - and can therefore be deconstructed that the
cultural significance of discursive textuality can be evaluated.
In this essay I wish to evaluate the authorial construction of two
contemporaneous American poets, Sylvia Plath and Frank OHara. With
regards to Sylvia Plath, I will consider the cultural injunction of confession
exemplified in her writings according to the thesis of Foucaults first
volume of The History of Sexuality. Then, I will consider to what extent the
postmodern poetics of Frank OHara offer a resistance to the
individualising function of authorship in accordance with Foucaults
exploration of classical technologies of the self. First, however, it is
necessary to crystallise Foucaults notion of the author function as
explicated in his lecture What is an Author.
Foucault describes the historical appearance of the author as the
privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge,
literature, philosophy, and the sciences.2 yet Foucault elects not to offer
a sociohistorical analysis of the authors persona,3 seemingly as a
rejection of the model offered in Barthes essay (a movement from the
ethnographic, performative function of writing to the modern, capitalist
subjectification of the author).4 Instead, Foucault wishes to deal solely
with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in
which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance, is outside
and antecedes it.5
1 Michel Foucault, What is an Author? in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(London: Penguin, 1986), 101.
2 ibid., 101.
3 ibid., 101.
4 Roland Barthes, Death of the Author, in Image, Music, Text, (London:
Fontana, 1977), 142-143.
5 Foucault, Author, 101.

With a flourish of irony Foucault invokes the author Samuel Beckett to

provide an epigraph for his lecture: What does it matter who is
speaking, someone said, what does it matter who is speaking.6 Indeed,
what does it matter who is writing: In this indifference appearsa kind of
immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not
designating writing as something completed, but dominating it as a
practice.7
Foucault summarises Barthes notion of writing as practice according to
two major themes. The first is the rejection of writing as purely
subjective expression: Referring only to itself, but without being
restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own
unfolded exteriority.8 Writing is not a series of transcendental works
segregated according to author, its signified content, but a discursive
fluidity, continuously referring to its own process: the very nature of the
signifier.9 Writing does not pin a subject within language, it does not
objectify an author according to categories of subjectivity but dissolves
signified content; it fabricates its own space into which the writing
subject constantly disappears.10 The second theme refers to Barthes
historical model: where once the act of writing was to perpetuate the
immortality of the hero, today writing functions as a sacrifice, a
voluntary effacement of the author, indeed, the mark of the writer is
reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence.11
Foucault acknowledges, however, that None of this is recent; criticism
and philosophy took note of the disappearance or death of the author
some time ago.12 The purpose of his lecture then is to consider further
consequences of their discovery, specifically, the way in which A
certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged
position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and
suppress the real meaning of his disappearance.13 Here Foucault
addresses what he perceives to be the critical shortcomings of Barthes
essay.
First, Foucault addresses Barthes failure to define the curious unity
which we designate as a work.14 Here Foucault uncovers a fallacy in
Barthes argument: if the work designates that which the author has
written, then it inserts the author as antecedent to writing. Secondly,
Foucault questions what criteria constitute an authors writings as work:
6 ibid., 101
7 ibid., 101
8 ibid., 101.
9 ibid., 102.
10 ibid., 102.
11 ibid., 103.
12 ibid., 103.
13 ibid., 103.
14 ibid., 103.

What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference,
the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: Is it a work?
Why not?15 In refusing to provide a theory of the work, Barthes is guilty of
privileging certain writing as more significant than others. Finally, Foucault
questions Barthes notion of ecriture (writing as detached from all
agency, all activity) as a supersession of ecrire (writing as the action of
an agent).16 While Barthes thesis attempts to efface the empirical
characteristics of the author, this unity is transposed into a
transcendental anonymity.17 Specifically, acknowledging this primal
status of a text resists the neutrality of discourse and affirms a
transcendental agency subject to both the religious principle of the
hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of
implicit signification, silent determinations, and obscured contents.18
As such, Foucault declares the importance of locating the space left
empty by the authors disappearance.19 This space constitutes the
author function. In describing this concept, Foucault appeals to the
function of the authors name. As a proper name, it denotes subjectivity, a
continuity of identity, yet It has other than indicative functions: more
than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointing at someone, it is the
equivalent of a description.20 When one refers to Aristotle, the name
denotes not an empirical reality but a series of of definite descriptions
such as the author of the analytics, the founder of ontology, and so
forth.21 To invoke an author, thus, is to produce an authority over a text:
it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a
classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a
certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast
them to others. In addition, it creates a relationship among the texts. 22

The author function serves to fragment and objectify the fluidity of writing
into discrete elements, which then serve to legitimise certain forms of
knowledge or experience. Discourse thus constitutes a form of language
that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture,
must receive a certain status.23 The authors name does not pass from
the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced

15 ibid., 103.
16 Adrian Wilson, Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis,
The Modern Language Review Vol. 99, No. 2 (2004): 340.
17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978), 104.
18 ibid., 104.
19 ibid., 105.
20 ibid., 105.
21 ibid., 105-106.
22 ibid., 107.
23 ibid., 107.

it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges
of the text, revealing, or at least characterising, its mode of being.24
The author does not precede the text nor does the text precede the
author. Rather, the author is produced as an interpretative authority at the
moment of a texts reception. Thus, the authors name does not refer to a
historical individual but to a delimiting homogeneity of textuality produced
at the moment of a texts reception and according to the cultural
particularities of that reception. Thus, the author is a multiplicity of
interpretative potentialities formative of such a homogeneity. It is
according to this rubric that Foucaults writings explored the repressive
function of individualisation within various western discourses. In his
examination of modern sexuality, Foucault considers the discourse of
confession as a textuality of transgression in which the subject is
individualised according to their relationship to sexual normativity.
Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality that Since the Middle Ages at
least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the
main rituals we rely on for the production of truth.25 So much so that the
practice has far exceeded its original religious function, indeed, we have
become a singularly confessing society.26 Where once the confession was
essentially a catalogue of religious transgressions, today:
The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a partin the
most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one
confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's
illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision,
whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to
one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves; one
admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to
tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. 27

Confession today constitutes so many social obligations intrinsic to

contemporary culture and practices of individualisation that its original
religious function is for the most part obscured. Ironically:
It seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only
to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in
place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be
articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. 28

As such Foucault condemns naive assumptions of sexual freedom in

modern discourses as an internal ruse. Indeed, one must have an
inverted image of power to credit the cultural injunction of confession
24 ibid., 107.
25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978), 58.
26 ibid., 58.
27 ibid., 59.
28 ibid., 60.

with a liberating and not a repressive function. To disclose compulsively

what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has
forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking is
an immense labour to which the West has submitted generations in order
to producemens subjectionin both senses of the word.29
While sex is indeed the privileged subject of confession, the practice is in
essence the formation of individuality through the articulation of any
culturally recognised transgression. That which is supposedly hidden
within the subject is coerced through confession, yet, on the contrary,
transgressive discourses are in fact produced through confession:
Suppose the obligation to conceal was but another aspect of the duty to
admit to itWhat if sex in our society, on a scale of several centuries, was
something that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession? 30

As such, Foucault understands sexuality as virtually the collective content

produced through confession. Such discourses, however, posit a
transcendental origin as a means to qualify cultural order. The
subjectifying function of confession is the particular ritual of discourse in
which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement.31 Yet it is
also:
a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess
without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply
the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes
and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge 32

Through this judgement, the confessor (reader) produces an author

(confessant) through reference to the confession as text. Indeed,
confession is: a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles
and resistances it has to surmount in order to be formulated; the
confessant is subjectivised a priori according to the particularities of the
text. As such confession does not signify an event or action but, a priori,
an abstract agency as one who naturally produces such events:
This shift from actions to thought marks what we may call the
rhetoricalisation of confession: it is now a distinctively rhetorical form
because it functions tropologically. It is no longer a simple listing of
misdeeds; rather, it involves the rhetorical insertion of an origin that can
anticipate and explain misdeeds. 33

M. L. Rosenthal coined the term confessional poetry in his review of

Robert Lowells Life Studies, designating a style of writing that
29 ibid., 60.
30 ibid., 61.
31 ibid., 61.
32 ibid., 61.
33 Dave Tell, Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucaults Critique of
Confession, Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010): 106.

emphasised a unity between author and empirical writer. Not only

critically problematic, the term was rejected for the most part by the poets
categorised as such as reductive and limiting. Ted Hughes, attempting to
distinguish Plaths poetry from the category of the Confessional, admits
that she shares with them the central experience of a shattering of the
self, and the labour of fitting it together or of finding a new one.34 Hughes
identifies a theme ubiquitous within Plaths writing: the cultural injunction
to formulate an individuality.
In Plaths only novel, The Bell Jar, the autobiographical protagonist Esther
Greenwood, in a trance-like moment, describes how she saw her:
saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future
beckoned and winkedI saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree,
starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the
figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing
one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs
began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the
ground at my feet.35

Herein is expressed a focal theme in Plaths novel: the loss of self

symbolised by the motif of the bell jar and the anxieties such a loss
produces. These anxieties constitute a destabilisation of the subject; an
inability for the subject to delineate a continuity according to
individualising discourses. Indeed, this destabilisation is Esthers
psychosis, her inability to maintain a stable self able to resist renewed
attacks of madness.36 She reflects:
But I wasnt sure. I wasnt sure at all. How did I know that someday at
college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere the bell jar, with its stifling
distortions, wouldnt descend again?37

Much of Plaths poetry can be interpreted according to such anxieties. In

Tulips, the narrator contemplates their experience in a ward:
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetists and my body to the surgeons. 38

The narrator describes an inability to maintain continuity; all signifiers of

identity are effaced. Yet there is no anxiety here; she has transgressed an

34 Rita Horvth, Never Asking Why Build Only Asking Which Tools:

Confessional Poetry and the Construction of the Self (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad,
2005), 55.
35 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber), 73.
36 Horvth, Construction of the Self, 55.
37 Plath, he Bell Jar, 94
38 Sylvia Plath, Ariel (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 12.

ideal, has become a passive signified within a medical or psychological

institution. Former obligations of self formulation are made redundant:
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring
me sleep.39

Appealing to the social discourses, the narrator is individualised as an

object of knowledge: Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.40
Elsewhere, identity is formulated through more explicit reference to taboo.
Plaths Daddy refers to the most primal trauma: that of familial
relations. Interestingly, however, the narrator duplicates this trauma - and
thus the author as function - by formulating an identity between father
and husband:
And I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And the love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.41

Specifically: The speaker of Daddy views her catastrophic relationship

with her husband as a compulsive repetition of the original trauma
associated with the father.42 The narrator is objectified according to the
psychological typologies of both matrimony and patriarchy, and thus, is
individualised simultaneously as both repressed daughter and repressed
husband and stabilised at the intersection of these separate discourses.
Furthermore, to abreact the most primal trauma of paternal hostility by
producing identical particularities in a lover: The vampire who said he
was you/And drank my blood for a year/Seven years, if you want to
know,43 is to consolidate an objectified psyche by [replicating] the
obstacles and resistances it ha[d] to surmount in order to be
formulated.44 The murder of both: If Ive killed one man, Ive killed two
, may appear to signify psychological palliation. However, the
individualising function of the trauma is preserved through the continuity
of experience that is constitutive of the subject. Indeed, the final line
suggests little resolution: Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through.45

39 ibid., 12.
40 ibid., 13.
41 ibid., 50.
42 Horvth, Construction of the Self, 56.
43 Plath, Ariel, 50.
44 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 62.
45 Plath, Ariel, 50.

The Disquieting Muses appeals to the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty to

provide an ideal of femininity and passivity unattainable by the narrator
yet expected by the narrators mother. The narrator, in Freudian fashion,
ascribes these shortcomings to the very figure who constitutes them as
such:
Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead46

In the classic fairy tale, an uninvited fairy curses the christened child to an
endless sleep. Within Plaths narrative, however, the curse takes the form
of the the disquieting muses: personifications of the mothers
expectations of a young woman; the repressive aspects of maternity as
severed from the affectionate figure who fed/My brother and me cookies
and Ovaltine/And helped the two of us to choir.47 The disquieting muses
demand the narrator fulfils certain cultural ideals or else face maternal
disappointment:
When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried48

This division of the mother as both figure of hostility and of familiarity

represents the young narrators inability to delineate a continuity between
the vacillating characteristics she perceives in her mother, to posit a
subjective origin as antecedent to the textual events of their interaction.
The disquieting muses constitute a means of reinvesting meaning on the
perceived contingencies of her mothers behaviour and thus to preserve a
pure image of her mother. The last two stanzas, however, suggest that
while once the muses were a coping mechanism, their presence has
outlasted their relevance. They are now travelling companions, Day
now, night now, at head, side, feet,/They stand their vigil in gowns of
stone.49 They are the spectres of mature depression.
Indeed, the family could be considered the primal normalising discourse
until patriarchal authority becomes transposed across a wealth of social
discursive practices. The last three lines provide a penetrating insight into
the discursive function. this is the kingdom you bore me to,/Mother,
46 Sylvia Plath, The Disquieting Muses, in Sylvia Plath Poetry E-Reading,
https://wattlecourses.anu.edu.au/mod/folder/view.php?id=946525.
47 ibid.
48 ibid.
49 ibid.

mother is an acknowledgement of the artificiality of normativity, the

inevitability of transgression. Finally: But no frown of mine/Will betray the
company I keep,50 relative to the content of the poem itself, constitutes
an admission of the aporetic function of confession as the cultural
injunction to divulge in specific modes that which must remain hidden.
Three years after this initial reflection of the socio-political function of
confession in The History of Sexuality, Foucault sought to amend his thesis
in his lecture Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political
Reason.51 The latter text argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics and
Epicureans had all developed similar institutions of confession that
proceeded the Christian practice, but ones that were not necessarily
complicit with practices of domination.52 Similar lectures in Berkeley and
Dartmouth in 1980 expanded this new emphasis, considering specifically
Senecas De Ira as a stoic confession, which, unlike the repressive
function of Christian confession, would allow the subject to live
differently, better, more happily than other people.53
By his second reading of De ira in 1982 Foucault insisted that the Stoic
confessional practices, while very close to what is found in
Christianity, seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should
call confession in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word.54
Foucault proposed in The Care of the Self that the De ira - the most
detailed description of such practices of the self seemed at first
glance like a Christian confession but in fact The purpose of the
examination is not [ ] to discover ones own guilt, down to its most trifling
forms.55 The profound difference between the Christian discourse of
confession and the classical discourses of the self would come to be the
focal point of the later years of Foucaults writings.56
The distinction between the discursive practices of Christian confession
and the techniques of the self is reducible to the political function of
rhetoric. Specifically, the potentiality of classical technologies of the self
rest on their resistance to rhetoric; they are nonrhetorical.57 This
distinction demonstrates the capacity of rhetoric in Foucaults philosophy
vis--vis Nietzsches critique of metonymy.58
Specifically, Foucault considers Nietzsches On Truth and Lying in a
Nonmoral Sense, another series of lectures that Tim Murphy has marked
50 ibid.
51 Dave Tell, Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucaults Critique of
Confession, Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 2 (2010): 95.
52 ibid., 95.
53 ibid., 95.
54 ibid., 96.
55 ibid., 96.
56 ibid., 96.
57 ibid., 96.
58 ibid., 96.

as the beginning of Nietzsches life-long concern with metonymy.59 For

Nietzsche, metonymy consists of mistaking a part for a whole; of
substituting arbitrary and particular phenomenon for abstract causes.
Metonymy functions to advance abstract concepts, which owe their origin
only to our experiences, as a priori; the intrinsic essence of things: we
attribute to the appearances as their cause that which is only an effect.60
Nietzsche offers a concise definition in Philosophy and Truth: Abstractions
are metonymies, i.e., substitutions of cause and effect. But every concept
is a metonymy and knowing takes place in concepts.61
Enquiry into this fallacy is a central tenet to much of Foucaults thought:
a metonymically constructed knowledge of the self separates the knower
from his body: it has turned man into mere abstractis.62 Thus,
Foucaults works on criminality, sexuality, and insanity are all critiques of
discourses that insist a priori an identity that proceeds appearance or
event:
the phenomenal world can be populated with a host of agents
and agencies that are presumed to exist behind it [by
metonymy]. Once the world of phenomena is separated into two
order of beingthe primitive conscious is endowed, by purely
linguistic means alone, with the conceptual categories (agents,
causes, spirits, essences) necessary for the theology, science,
and philosophy of civilized reflection.63

All such abstractions are essentially reducible to the author function. This
sovereign creative subject is invoked in order to metonymically classify
a series of discursive contingencies as derivative of a single transcendent
origin. To acknowledge the author is to efface the materiality of discourse
and subsume its particularities under a false unity. In short, the author is
invoked to qualify the contingency of the event.
But this does not mean the author function cannot be resisted. Nietzsche
invoked the notion of the free intellect as a remedy to the Immense
framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings; a
means to reclaim the mass of images which originally streamed from the
primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid; to recover the
surface of things.64 Similarly, Foucaults works all engage with the raw
material of history, a methodology that opposes itself to the search for
origins as this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that
precede the external world of accident and succession.65 Foucaults
archaeological and genealogical works all sought to substitute the
analysis of rarity for the search of totalities, the description of relations of
59 ibid., 99.
60 ibid., 99.
61 ibid., 99.
62 ibid., 100.
63 ibid., 100.
64 ibid., 100.
65 ibid., 101.

exteriority for the theme of the transcendental foundation, the analysis of

accumulations for the quest of the origin.66 To acknowledge the
artificiality of the author is To reveal in all its purity the space in which
discursive events are deployed [ ]to leave oneself free to describe the
interplay of relations within and outside it.67
Foucault in his late works recognised classical practices that were similar
to confession yet circumvented the inherent power relations complicit in
the Christian tradition; technologies of the self that involved the act of
telling all (frankness, open-heartedness, plain speaking, speaking openly,
speaking freely) yet resisted the totalising abstractions of transgression. 68
Foucault referred to these technologies as parrhesia, and, in his discussion
of Socrates attempted to delineate the difference from confession:
Because we are inclined to read such [parrhesiastic] texts through the
glasses of our Christian culture, however, we might interpret this
description of the Socratic game as a practice where the one who is being
led by Socrates discourse must give an autobiographical account of his
life, or a confession of his faults. But such an interpretation would miss the
real meaning of the text.69

Foucault viewed such technologies as an urgent, fundamental, and

politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or
final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship
one has to oneself.70 It is a task that consists in disentangling the
metonymical operation of knowledge, of resisting universals and origins
and privileging instead surfaces, contingency, the raw material of
history.71
The principles of Stoic examination involved introducing discontinuity
into continuous movements. Marcus Aurelius taught his students to
practice such discontinuity by resisting the aesthetic value of melody and
instead listening to musical notes as particular, discontinuous events. 72
Such a principle could then be applied to the self:
to our own life. And in applying it to ourselves we realize that what we
think to be our identity, or that in which we think we should place it or
seek it, does not itself guarantee our continuity. As a body, even as
pneuma, we are always something discontinuous in comparison with our
being. Our identity is not here.73

66 ibid., 101.
67 ibid., 101.
68 ibid., 109.
69 ibid., 109.
70 ibid., 109.
71 ibid., 110.
72 ibid., 111.
73 ibid., 111.

Rejecting the artificial unity produced through confession, the Stoics

considered the self as a disparate collection of somatic sensations,
exposing identity as an empty synthesis.74 In resisting continuity they
were able to formulate what Foucault called an aesthetics of existence,
a reorganisation of the relationship between life and body by means of a
group of controlled decisions.75 It allowed the two to become virtually
identical; the self would resist alienation from its physicality through
delimiting identities. Instead of inserting a priori a sexual identity in order
to legitimise a sexual act, Marcus Aurelius considered copulation as simply
nerves rubbed against each other. It is a spasm followed by a bit of
secretion, nothing more.76
Indeed, the text always exists in the space between two bodies, Lucky
Pierre style,77 writes Frank OHara in his facetious Personism: A
Manifesto, a parody of the pretentiousness of vanguardist polemics.
Personism, OHara writes, is: a movement which I recently founded and
which nobody knows about, it:
has nothing to do with philosophy, its all art. It does not have to do with
personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its
minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet
himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying loves life
giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poets feelings towards the poem while
preventing love from distancing him into feeling about the person. 78

OHara resists Foucaults author function by refusing to demarcate an

aesthetic homogeneity from language as purely quotidian function, he:
avoids abstraction in a way that is akin to a deconstructive lens
through which the poet views and interprets experience, where the events
of his life become the action and the subject of the poems, as well as the
art of the poetry. In other words, the notion of beauty is in the very
experience of experiencing79

OHara employs language as neutral, a play of signification that unfolds

like a game (jeu) [and] invariably goes beyond its own rules and
transgresses its own limits.80 It is concerned with purely circumstantial
phenomena and refuses to signify any authoritative origin, to pin a
subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into
74 ibid., 111.
75 ibid., 111.
76 ibid., 111-112.
77 Frank OHara, Personism: A Manifesto, in Postmodern American Poetry: A

Norton Anthology, second edition, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2013), 877.
78 ibid., 876.
79 Mark Tursi, Interrogating Culture: Critical Hermeneutics in the Poetry of Frank
OHara, The Nieve Roja Review, no. 4 (Winter 1988-9), accessed November 8,
2016, http://nieveroja.colostate.edu/issue4/ohara.htm.
80 Foucault, Author 102.

which the writing subject constantly disappears.81 In A Step away from

Them OHara plays with empirical potentialities of a New York lunch hour,
yet refuses to reduce them to any didactic universalism:
On
To Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in the doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.82

Such eventualities resist questions of truth and thus the need to posit an
authority. They carry no empirical weight; they signify nothing more than
the poets relationship to the moment. OHara referred to such poetry as
his I do this, I do that poems, an aesthetic that recalls the Stoic tradition
of the first and second centuries, a point at which:
introspection becomes more and more detailed. A relation developed
between writing and vigilance. Attention was paid to the nuances of life,
mood, and reading, and the experience of oneself was intensified and
widened by virtue of this act of writing.83

Indeed, compare this stanza of A Step away from Them to a letter from
Aurelius to Fronto, dated 144-45 A.D.:
We are well. I slept somewhat late owing to my slight cold, which seems
now to have subsided. So from five A.M. till 9, I spent the time partly in
reading some of Catos Agriculture, partly in writing not quite such
wretched stuff, by heavens, as yesterday. Then, after paying my respects
to my father, I relieved my throat, I will not say by gargling 84

And so forth. in Aurelius letter these details details become important

because they are you what you thought, what you felt.85 Yet his letter
ends with an astonishingly frank and explicit admission of love, something
conspicuously absent in OHaras writing: Farewell, my Fronto, wherever
you are, most honey-sweet, my love, my delight. How is it between you
and me? I love you and you are away.86 Alexander Nehamas, writing on
81 ibid., 102.
82 Frank OHara, A Step away from Them, in Postmodern American Poetry: A

Norton Anthology, second edition, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2013), 109.
83 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, in Technologies of the Self: A
Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H.
Hutton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988), 28.
84 ibid., 28.
85 ibid., 29.
86 ibid., 29.

Foucault, proposed that such technologies of the self were: particularly

useful to excluded, oppressed groups that have not been able to speak in
their own voice so far he, in particular, was primarily (though by no
means exclusively) concerned with homosexuals.87
Yet it is clear why such an open expression of homosexual love is
impossible in OHaras writings: Foucault demonstrates in The History of
Sexuality that any mention of a sexual act constitutes confession and thus
posits a transgressive sexuality as antecedent to that confession. For
OHara to admit any homosexual affection or contact would objectify him
as a particular identity and delimit his writings accordingly. This is the
oppressive function of Foucaults discourses. Yet Frank OHaras poetics
circumvent such trappings. In Personal Poem, a casual reader might
not understand that he is reading a love poem that waiting at the end of
this laundry list is a lovers ear:88
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so 89

OHara writes in his manifesto that Personism: was founded by me after

lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love
with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and
wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realising that if I
wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.90 This
relationship with his lover is not codified within the text, it is anterior to
the text; it is not a relationship of discursive identities but of bodies. The
poem is simply a catalogue of introspections, at last between two
persons instead of two pages.91
And so, in the Stoic tradition, OHara offers up his self to his lover,
recounting his experiences as pillow talk, lovers gossip at the end of the
day.92 Practicing an aesthetics of existence analogous to antique
technologies of the self, OHara is free to describe [his] body after the
manner of [his] choosing.93 Undoing the synthetic processes of
metonymy consists in acknowledging the irreducibility of such events, of
preventing contingencies to gain abstract currency and dominating
origins. The techniques of the self are nonrhetorical, they offer the first
87 Tell, Rhetoric and Power, 109.
88 Caleb Crain, Frank OHaras Fired Self, American Literary History, Vol. 9,

No. 2 (1997), 302.

89 Frank OHara, Personal Poem, in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton
Anthology, second edition, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2013), 108.
90 OHara, Personism, 876.
91 Ibid., 876.
92Crain, Fired Self, 302.
93 Tell, Rhetoric and Power, 111.

and final point of resistance94 to political oppression and constitute

Foucaults much celebrated aesthetics of existence.95 In OHaras
Personism, he echoes this optimistic recalcitrance, albeit facetiously: I
confess that [personism] may be the death of literature as we know it.96
In Foucaults 1974-75 course, he argues that confession is a technique of
power[ ] literally interchangeable with Jeremy Benthams panopticon,97
that confession is today not a burden enforced but an opportunity to
subjectivise oneself to overdetermined categorical frameworks and
absolve oneself from the terrifying meaninglessness of agency. Yet it is the
marginalised that suffer from such categories. In Personism, OHara
writes that the transgressive has to take their chances and try to avoid
being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.98
Sylvia Plaths pain is ubiquitous throughout her poetry, and it seems
perfectly logical that the literary identity she produced anticipated in so
many ways her personal tragedies.
As a space that would express the functions of the technologies of the
self, Foucault offered the bathhouse, where you meet men [ ] who are to
you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and
productions of pleasure are possible. Where you came from and where
you will go are irrelevant, you are not a sexuality, an identity, a continuity,
but a body and a moment. For indeed, in the steam of the bathhouse,
What does it matter who is speaking?99

94 ibid., 113.
95 ibid., 113.
96 OHara, Personism, 877.
97 Tell, Rhetoric and Power, 104.
98 OHara, Personism, 875.
99 Foucault, Author, 101

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