Leave off looking to men to find what you are not”; Modernity, Crisis and the ‘ethics of the

self’ in
the work of Mina Loy and Michel Foucault

Labelled by even favourable critics as ‘androcentric’,1 Michel Foucault’s work may seem an unlikely
counterpart to the poetry of Mina Loy, author of The Feminist Manifesto. Foucault’s assessment of
sexuality as the ‘displaced religiosity’ to which the modern subject had ‘subordinated its soul’2
struggles to find referent in Loy schema for self-knowledge: ‘I know nothing about anything but life!-
and that is generally reducible to sex.’ 3 Such conflicts in thought are not limited to this difference of
orientation; Loy’s connection with the Futurist religion of speed contests the glacial pace with which
technologies of power construct ‘docile bodies’4, nor does the birth of this disciplined modern
subject chime with Loy’s limitless being of ‘infinite maternity’. However, Loy’s self-fashioning, her
lifelong negotiation with the politics of the avant-garde, her destruction of the boundary between
the everyday and the aesthetic, her lyrics of contested subjectivity and excluded, marginal figures on
the limits of the human can all be read productively in dialogue with the late Foucauldian ‘aesthetics
of existence’ and the early Foucaldian poetics characterised by ‘the being of language’. Loy’s lyric
voice, unable to articulate the condition of its own presence, resists what Kristeva calls ‘a reality
posed in advance and forever detached from the pulsional process’. As Loy’s biographer Carolyn
Burke attests, ‘in order to pursue her epistemological concerns [Loy] risks imperfection’. Products
and producers of their historical moments, Loy and Foucault take the ontological and
epistemological crises of modernity as the very ground on which to form an ‘ethics of the self’. The
ethical question of modernity becomes an artistic one. Against the normative injunction of a pre-
discursive ‘I’, a new configuration of the political can be elaborated, no longer understood as the set
of practices derived from the alleged interests of a ready-made subject.5 Loy’s inchoate lyrics of
incompletion and alienation are ways, rather than works, of a subject-in-process.

Tracing the position of the artist from the corner to the centre of the canvas, Foucault’s essay on
Holderlin establishes the idee fixe of modern art to be the historical quality of the subject-as-such

The self-portrait was no longer a furtive participation by the artist in the corner of the painting, in
the scene he was representing. It became, at the very center of the painting, the work of the work
where the beginning joins the end, in the absolute heroic transformation of the very one who
allowed heroes to appear and to continue to exist. […] The artist thus established a relation of the
self to the self.

The ‘ego athirst for the non-ego’, a ‘prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes’, this newly
established relation of the self to the self is indicative of the condition first theorised in Baudelaire’s
The Painter of Modern Life. Benjamin, in an unlikely concordance with Foucault, attests to this new
heroism of heroism, the artistic response to modernity: ‘flaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were
so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes’. It is precisely this

1
Margaret A. McClaren, Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity (New York: State University of New
York Press, 2002), p.82.
2
Michel Foucault, The History Of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p.124.
3
Linda A. Kinnahan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina
Loy, Denise Levertov and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 50.
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (
5
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2007), p.154
sense of subjective limbo, neither here nor there,’to be away from home and yet to feel at home
anywhere, to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen’ that Loy
established as her artistic calling: 'I assure you I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay
very unknown . . . to maintain my incognito, the hazard I chose was—poet’. Only through a
autopoiesis can the modern subject articulate the difficulty of articulation, give form to the
formlessness of modern subjectivity: Baudelaire, is not man who goes off to discover himself, his
secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does
not 'liberate man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself

In his work on the composer Pierre Boulez, Foucault draws attention to the historically
embedded quality of the artistic subject, ‘his object, in this attention to history, was to make it
so that nothing remains fixed, neither the present nor the past’. Before elaborating the mode
through which the Loy’s poetry anticipates the Foucauldian revolt against all that is
normative, it is important to establish the specific historical circumstances of ‘this deep crisis
in art that constitutes the outstanding characteristic of modernity’.

Franco Moretti identifies a tendency for courte durée historiography in analyses of the crisis
peculiar to Modernism:

Desirous of moving from Crisis to Crisis- literary criticism almost always resorts to one single
and specific event: the war. There in the summer of 1914, the break came. There lie the
roots of the crisis and of the literature of crisis.

Against crisis as event or even epochal response to event, Modernism can be located as the
culmination of a conceptual crises, or rather, multiple crises in the process of
conceptualization itself. Moretti identifies the economic crises of the 1870s, the ruination of
‘the self-regulating market’ and the concomitant loss of ‘the capitalist real’, as the which
dovetails with the Marxist conception of modernity.

Calinescu’s modernity stems from God’s ‘unthinkable, yet banal demise’ indivisible from the
desacrilizing effects of capitalist modes of production. With Descartes cogito, and Kant’s
elaboration of sapere aude, the function of rendering human experience intelligble had been
transferred from God to that very subject of experience, drawing the boundaries of what can
be known. Nietzsche was not the first thinker to discuss the death of God, but the significant
change that he inaugurated, in Foucault’s understanding of the cultural crisis peculiar to
modernity, was to leave the space evacuated by God without a transcendental placeholder:
but we must be careful, because the notion of the death of God doesnot have the
samemeaning in Hegel, Feuerbach and Nietzsche. For Hegel, Reason takes the
place of God, and it is the human spirit that develops little by little; for
Feuerbach, God is the illusion that alienates Man, but once rid of this illusion, it is
Man who comes to realise his liberty. Finally, for Nietzsche,
the death of God signifies the end of metaphysics, but God is not replaced by man,
and the space remains empty.

Rather than a doctrine, a body of knowledge or an end to philosophy tout court, Foucault’s
conception of an ethics of the self is as a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’. ‘the end of the
philosopher as the sovereign and primary form of philosophical language’ The death of God
necessarily however entailed the death of the figure who had taken on his role as the
Absolute. The space that remained empty is staged by the ‘subject’ of Loy’s comically
Zarathustran ‘Apology for genius’. Ostracized as we are with God /The watchers of the
civilized wastes / Reverse their signals on our track. The speaking subject is not replaced
God, neither is God absent, absent presence that characterises the modern imaginary. The
ethical crisis begets an artistic response, the ‘hero’ is no hero, it is an
 “Flaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to
him. For the modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes”.

it is from this abyss that the modern subject creates itself, and more importantly, creates its
own values ‘Our purpose is the instatement of Actual Values to destroy
the power - inimical to man - of those things he does not understand.