Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past PDF

Coda Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past I'm proud of my country's past, but I don't want to live in it. Tony Blair, in comments on a recent effort to update Britain's image...

Coda Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Use of the Past I'm proud of my country's past, but I don't want to live in it. Tony Blair, in comments on a recent effort to update Britain's image Quentin Tarantino's Middle Ages My title derives from some lines in a dark scene deep within Pulp Fiction. They are spoken by Ving Rhames acting the part of Mar- sellus Wallace, the big black boss presiding over the underworld of the movie-that world's heretofore unmoved mover. To this point virtually all we have seen of him is the back of the neck. Due to cir- cumstances definitely beyond his control, Marsellus has been raped by a sadistic white southerner in an S/M dungeon; and after he has been rescued by the very man he has been chasing, Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), he snarls back to "Mr. Rapist," now shot in the crotch and writhing on the floor: I'm gonna call a coupla pipe-hittin' niggers, who'll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. (to Zed)  Hear me talkin' hillbilly boy?! I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna git Medieval on your ass: Get Medieval. The phrase caught on like wildfire: street-smart teen- age boys (the "young male viewers" whom Variety pegged as an obvious primary audience for this movie) could be heard in San Fran- cisco slinging the phrase around the neighborhood; Courtney Love, speaking of her dead husband, Kurt Cobain (reluctant idol of such teenage boys), picked it up to describe how she wanted to treat his remains;2 magazine headlines used it; Saturday Night Live created a skit around it; Film Threat magazine in early 1995 voted Ving Rhanles "Bastard of the Year" for pronouncing the phrase, and noted approv- ingly, "Ving gets bonus points for combining the words ass and medi- eval in the same sentence." 3 Even after this first flush of publicity, the phrase stuck: Altoids in the spring of 1997 launched an ad campaign featuring mint-green billboards reading menacingly, "Get Medieval on Your Breath." 4 The phrase has entered American public culture. Why has it proved so popular? 5 What exactly makes it so useful? To get a clue, I want to look first at what it means in this film: why this word here? Does it perform any function other than to inflict a slight sting on the medievalist, buried in the past but finally getting out to see a movie? The phrase is not repeated in the fast-talking film; the Middle Ages are not mentioned again. But medievalists, especially queer medi- evalists, instead of sinking even lower beneath the pop-culture sur- face, might instead conceive of ourselves as specially equipped to view this movie. With a whole armature of narratives, discourses, and images that look in fact much like Pulp Fiction-sodomitical insults (such as we saw in chapter I), Arthurian romances and the discourse of normative heterosexuality (in chapter 2), Christian expressions of a desire for transcendence (in chapter 3) - we can suggest ways in which what was seen to be Hollywood's latest, from the hot-hot- hot Quentin Tarantino, turned out indeed to be an old, old story- even as the temperature around Tarantino subsequently cooled.6 We can train our long, queer gazes on Pulp Fiction's use of the medieval to understand the film's concomitant construction of the postmod- ern present, and to open up other options for thinking not only the past but the future. In this final chapter I play the movie's idea of the 184 Getting Medieval medieval off another use of the medieval- that of Foucault, whose thematic preoccupations are very similar but whose political inten- tions mark his radicality. Back, then, to the dungeon. There's a lot of violence in Pulp Fic- tion, lots of gore splattered: on my count, five bodies blown away altogether onscreen, an additional three wounded, plus two others busted offscreen or in the prehistory of the narrative-not count- ing the casualties in this scene. Violence happens routinely; it causes practical problems ("Now you got a corpse in a car, minus a head, in a garage. Take me to it," says Harvey Keitel as Mr. Wolf, who fixes messes ). One hit man's qualms (in the film's last scene) cannot alter the whole moral economy: killing, maiming, and terrorizing are what happens, and they continue to happen in the in-folded narra- tive events that diegetically occur after the film's last scene. But in the dark scene with which I began, in the dungeon-basement of the "Mason-Dixon Pawnshop," with its sadomasochism and its southern proprietors, there is what Time magazine, picking up on the film's priorities, called "a fate worse than death": not only rape, but, crucially, sodomitical rape. 7 Butch, having freed himself from the sa- dists' bonds and fleeing the perverts' pawnshop, suddenly hesitates; he decides he cannot leave Marsellus, his mortal enemy, "in a situa- tion like that" (scr. 105), and selects the largest weapon the pawnshop has to offer in order to free his enemy from being sodomized: not the hammer, not the chainsaw, not the Louisville slugger, but a "mag- nificent" Samurai sword (scr. 106). After Butch stealthily returns to the basement and "THRUSTS" it into one of the brothers (scr. 107), Marsellus is freed from the other startled brother, shoots him in the crotch, and makes his medieval plans: as was the provision of a secu- lar law in France in 1270 (discussed above, in chapter I), the punish- ment for sodomy was castration for the first offense, death by fire for repeat offenders-rather like pliers and a blow torch. 8 The sodomitical violence in this scene is different from any other violence in the film, and it calls for a different remedy: it is ritual- ized sexual torture, it is dark and perverse, and it must be met by a personal vengeance that is itself ritualized, torturous, dark, and per- verse. This is the realm of the medieval in Pulp Fiction: it isn't exactly another time, in this movie in which time is peculiarly flattened out both by the manipulations of narrative and by the drenching of Coda 18; everything in postwar cinematic and pop culture references; Marsel- Ius's line about "a pair of pliers and a blow torch" is in fact a direct quotation from the 1973 cult gangster movie Charley Varrick. 9 The medieval, rather, is the space of the rejects-really, the abjects-of this world. Despite the New York Times's liberal claim that the film is "completely and amicably integrated," we can see what must be eliminated: sodomy, sadomasochism, southerners. to Even the status of black men is degraded by this scene, despite the fact that it is a black man who speaks these lines and who clearly participates in the process of abjecting those country perverts. At the end of this se- quence we're left with the vision of the triumphant Butch, roaring away on the Harley owned by the homo whose medieval torture is being planned - white hypermasculine Butch, drawing on the sexu- ally powerful look of a macho gay man but whose ass, we know for sure now, is straight, male, modern. We might well have wondered about Butch's butthole. The film plants the doubt itself. In a scene at least one critic found gratuitous, the dream that chronologically begins his story, Butch recalls that as a young boy he was visited by a Vietnam War buddy of his father's.ll Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, tells the young Butch the story of the gold watch that he is now delivering from Butch's dead father, who didn't make it out of "that Hanoi pit of hell" (67). I am always interested in what seems gratuitous in a narrative, since these are the things that, for some reason, the author simply cannot leave out. What we get here is not just a "gross-out... anecdote" (Janet Maslin) or a lousy "joke" (Anthony Lane); the anatomy, as it were, of male bonding-the relationship of homosocial and homo- sexual male relations in this movie about gangsters-is opened to view. In a deadpan monologue, Captain Koons tells the little Butch that the watch he is being given was his "great granddaddy's war watch" from the First World War, handed down to his "granddad for good luck" in World War Two, in turn handed down to his infant father, who grew up to be "shot down over Hanoi" with the watch on his wrist: "Now he knew if the gooks ever saw the watch it'd be confis- cated. The way your Daddy looked at it, that watch was your birth- right. And he'd be damned if any slopeheads were gonna put their greasy yella hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one 186 Getting Medieval place he knew he could hide somethin'. His ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you." (68) The captain puts a "hunk" up his ass, the same "hunk" that has been up his buddy's ass; the suggestions of sodomy are obvious. They are only sugges- tions, of course: the hunk is "uncomfortable," not pleasurable; there is no necessary anal contact between the giver and the receiver of the watch; and the detail about death from dysentery works hard to make the whole monologue laughably disgusting. Sodomy is only hinted at here, both suggested and at the same time deflected into a sophomoric bathroom joke!2 But what is explicitly confirmed in this initial scene is the centrality of the anus in male bonding, or, more precisely, in the maintenance of patriarchy: the interanal storage and bequeathal of the watch by father to son ("little man") is the monologue's focus. What is not clear is the limit of the uses of the anus between and among men. This is an issue obsessively raised in Tarantino's films (including the True Romance screenplay, Reservoir Dogs, and his bit part in Sleep with Me) but never patiently worked out. 13 In ways more superficial and conservative than in the deeper and more pointed-yet still un- resolved - Reservoir Dogs, the whole Butch episode undertakes to limit the uses of the anus. 14 We might call this episode's project "anus- surveillance," following John J. Winkler's studies of classical Athens: sodomy, implicitly suggested and denied in the opening monologue as a possibility in male bonding, is then explicitly represented, in the pawnshop basement, as nonconsensual and violent-rape-so that it cannot be seen as in any way acceptable. Is In this racist straight white male imaginary, sodomy puts one in the passive and feminine, which is equal to the black, position here. Sodomy is combined with sadomasochism, which figures sexual torture as an unmistakable per- version and thus safely distances the everyday torture hit men per- form from any perverse desire. I6 Butch can ride off on that chopper with his French girlfriend (who insists that he give her "oral plea- sure" before she does him ) - he can even "hum[p] a hot hog," as the script puts it (109, probably referring particularly to Deliverance), he can look like a Castro fag, and because of these representational Coda r87 strategies the audience can still rest assured that his straight mascu- linity is unthreatened!7 Earlier in the movie, the marriage of queer "love birds" -the Three Stooges-is broadcast on a TV that Lance the drug dealer is watching ("Hold hands, you love birds," we hear); but that queer parody is comfortingly replaced by the real thing now: as the final stage directions for this episode read, "the two lovebirds [Butch and Fabian [sic] PEEL AWAY" (scr. III) on the chopper. This anal surveillance project makes sense, too, of the fact that John Travolta, as Vincent Vega, spends so much time on the toilet in this movie. He misses out on crucial action twice when he goes to "take a shit" (and once when he "take[s] a piss"). This is part of the film's anal project: it is trying to reassure the (putatively straight) audience by this reminder that anuses are used for shitting. But that fact might not turn out to be so reassuring, after all. I8 Vince's time in the toilet has been not only useful but pleasurable - he dallies in a leisurely read of an action novel at Butch's apartment-and thus its distinction from another pleasurable use of the anus has become blurred. Shitting is problematic in this movie, as Sharon Willis has shown; just as little Butch's father is said to have died of it, Vince himself must be eliminated. He is blown apart by Butch, the film's representation of the triumph of homo jhetero distinction. Homosexual sex is a constant possibility between men, Tarantino's movies affirm. In major and minor moments throughout Pulp Fic- tion the possibility of homosex is raised in an attempt to manage it - to distance and foreclose it. The attempt to construct straight white maleness and armor its body is thorough: men's bodies, black and white, must remain on guard against the possibilities of plea- surable opening. I9 But by the end of the film, one black man has been "fuck[ed]... like a bitch" (as Jules puts it, referring to another situation ); the "armour" of Vince's and Jules's black suits, as Tarantino said in an interview, has been completely stripped off and turned into "the exact antithesis - volleyball wear" ;20 and Vince is a lost cause in the project of constructing masculinity. As it turns out, neither Vince nor Jules can finally survive in this world in which any play with open and shut, clear-cut, and stable distinctions proceeds according to an all-too-predictable straight white male agenda. The medieval signals all the abjected Others of this world of Pulp Fiction. But as with all such abjection, the medieval inheres in the 188 Getting Medieval (post)modern, perversion inheres in the straight, hicks in the urban, black in white. The very postmodern Pulp Fiction's concern to police the borders of male homosociality is continuous with various medi- eval attempts (as we've seen throughout this book) at drawing the line. Marsellus's "pipe-hittin' " city "niggers" will end up acting like the white hillbilly sadist they torture; similarly, Butch "THRUSTS" (scr. 107) his giant, uh, sword into the other homo. And shortly after he has rescued Marsellus, Butch's question sounds like a proposition: "[W]hat now, between me and you?" (108). If the medieval repre- sents things that cannot be eradicated, despite efforts to construct something free of them - represents, that is, the impurity of these apparently pure concepts (straightness, whiteness, identity) - then "getting medieval" redoubles that impurity by making the medi- eval (the abject) itself a role or game. Getting medieval-playing in an abjected space, adopting an abjected role - doubly gets at the impossibility of absolute straightness, whiteness, modernity, of the purely dominant, of essentially being anything. And this condition of inessentiality, the basic condition of the impossibility of essential being, becomes an explicit fear at the film's end. It is an impossi- bility so thorough in this postmodern cinematic world of simulation and citation that it takes a putative miracle from God to suggest-to Jules, the hit man with qualms - any chance of being (as he puts it) "just... Jules... no more, no less" (147). Being, not just acting. Jules worries, at last, about his own rituals of performance as he struggles to extract himself from a world in which he and Vince"get into character" (17) in order to stage a killing: he has been accus- tomed to quote a biblical text just before he blows his victims away, but what role is it, exactly, he wonders, that he has been playing in the Ezekiel verses he quotes? (157-58). That he could worry about the potential interchangeability of roles in themselves means that he must already be through with this acting and this whole world. As the character-black-in whom authenticity has been located in the film, he prefers, as he states at the end, to wander the earth "Until God puts me where he wants me to be" (147, emphasis added). Jules is the only one trying to opt out at this point, and the figure of Jimmie (formerly in the life and still plagued by his hit-man pal) suggests that any break Jules tries to make isn't going to be clean. Further- more, in the racist "new world order" of this film, as bell hooks Coda 189 notes, the "resident black male preacher/philosopher death-dealing mammified intellectual," thus enlightened, doesn't have anywhere to go: Vince makes it clear that Jules will be a bum if he quits. 21 Jules's is not the only response to the impossibility of true identity, of course, to simulation and roles, in this movie whose deepest (and most expensive) visual delight is the simulation of a simulated fifties diner in nineties L.A. The film revels in role-playing so deeply that its own actors refer to their earlier roles: John Travolta's dancing the twist and Christopher Walken's pow monologue are the most obvi- ous examples. But it is crucial to remember that shaping all this rev- eling is the film's desire to limit what, exactly, can be performed and by whom - which roles or positions can be taken up as empower- ing and which ones cannot be. This is an agenda that has used Jules to articulate its own desire for authenticity, for the solid ground of being. Dennis Cooper has remarked on Tarantino's "fascination with the amoral," a fascination that is itself "moralistic." 22 But couldn't Pulp Fiction, then, for all the obviousness of its ass- hole narrative, for all its joy in cross-race male homosociality, be pointing out and critiquing homophobia? Couldn't it be critiquing the way homophobia dissolves even racial boundaries in its corrosive patriarchal politics? Butch cannot leave the black man "in a situation like that"; sodomy is the worst thing, bar no explosive violence, in the world of this movie. Isn't Tarantino showing how absurd an attitude this is? Maybe, at times; there is certainly a send-up of Deliverance in this scene.23 But with bell hooks, who has posed these questions as well, I contend that it doesn't finally matter if you read it that way or not, if you catch the parody or if you don't: "Yeah, like it's really funny when Butch the hypermasculine phallic white boy - who has no name that means anything, who has no culture to be proud of, who comes straight out of childhood clinging to the anal-retentive timepiece of patriarchal imperialism - is exposed. Yet exposure does nothing to intervene on this evil, it merely graphically highlights it." 24 Jules, she points out further, is not shown "grieving or seek- ing revenge" for Vince when he is killed: so much for enduring male bonding. And if it is a twist on the usual scenario that this black man is not eliminated, no place to which he tries to exit will have changed: as sharon Willis remarks more mildly, "we need to entertain the pos- 190 Getting Medieval sibility that Pulp Fiction might resecure racialized representations for a racist imaginary, even as it tries to work them loose from it." 25 "[S]ubversive possibility" may "titillate" in a narrative sequence such as "The Gold Watch," but then "everything," as hooks observes, "kinda comes right back to normal." 26 Band-Aids will still be made in the color "flesh," like the one that sticks, gleaming, to Marsellus's black neck; and the black woman will still be a just-barely-visible phantasm.27 White Butch and Fabian have a place to go (Bora Bora, Tahiti, Mexico? ) and a big bike, courtesy of a dead homosexual, to take them there. And Jules, not mourning for Vince, will wander, will have adventures, and thus will continue to represent authen- ticity for a sped-up dominant culture - the culture in and of this film, including the hordes of its appreciative viewers-that revels in but ultimately fears really getting medieval. Michel Foucault's Middle Ages The medieval; sodomy and sadomasochism in male-male relations; the desire for transcendent, essential identity: the dense cluster of themes I have been tracing is not itself unique, however startling and showy Quentin Tarantino's saturated-color, no-grain handling of it. These preoccupations are deeply intertwined in Western culture, in popular fantasy outlets as well as in more analytical and political spheres-such as in Foucault's landmark History of Sexuality, vol- ume I. The coincidence of movie and book, I contend, is not hap- hazard; I want to get at not only the similarities but also the very significant differences between them. In the rest of this coda I shall look closely at volume I of Foucault's History and support that look with glances at various others of Foucault's works. Generalizations about Foucault's practice of the history of sexuality in volume I have to be tempered by consideration of volumes 2 and 3, but I focus on volume I here because it has had the most impact on lesbian and gay studies to date?8 Foucault's claims about the medieval shifted across the years of reformulating his History ofSexuality; and yet, as I shall argue, the pervasive political and ethical dispositions that inform these claims in volume I persist through his late thought. His use Coda 191 of the medieval- contradictory, nostalgic, and above all tactical- finds possibilities for creativity where Pulp Fiction has found shit. I am walking something of a tightrope through the course of my analysis here, as I both celebrate Foucault's usefulness and critique aspects of his work. Foucault is not unassailable, a high-culture club with which I shall beat pop-culture fictions to a pulp; recalling to us the racial agenda linked to sexuality in Pulp Fiction, for example, Fou- cault in volume I uses various, mostly eastern civilizations - "China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies" (57 )-as uni- form, idealized, and unproblematically eroticized societies of the ars erotica in order to develop and analyze the concept of the Western scientia sexualis - a use so troublingly imperialist that he disavowed it later.29 What I do want to suggest, though, is that Pulp Fiction takes an easy way out of the labyrinth of cultural problems it maps; it is easy at least in part because of its long history - a history that in- cludes such essentializing and abjecting strategies as we have seen in this book but which is not inevitable, as Foucault helps us recognize. My aim is to understand how the all-too-familiar dynamics of a work like Pulp Fiction can be exploded and how - instead of the abjection of the past and the inessential, and the longing for pure truth - a postidentitarian and postmedieval ethos and history can be forged. I shall begin my discussion of Foucault's use of the medieval with one of his famous claims in volume I of The History ofSexuality, the notorious historical distinction between the sodomite and the homo- sexual. ''As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes," he writes, "sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them." But in the late nine- teenth century, Foucault maintains, there occurred "an incorporation ofperversions and a new specification ofindividuals" (4 2 -43 [58-59], emphasis original); and therefore follows the distinction that Fou- cault, as David M. Halperin has recently explained, posited in the service of his larger claims about modernity: "The sodomite had been a temporary aberration [un relaps]; the homosexual was now a species" (43 ).30 Thus the paradOXical but thoroughly Foucauldian proclamation in Halperin's earlier, influential essay, "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality": "[A]lthough there have been, in many dif- ferent times and places... persons who sought sexual contact with other persons of the same sex as themselves, it is only within the last 192 Getting Medieval hundred years or so that such persons... have been homosexuals." 31 (We might note that this shift finds its counterpart in a shift, at around the same time, that Foucault hypothesizes in Discipline and Punish, from the offender to the delinquent: "The delinquent [Ie delinquant] is to be distinguished from the offender [l'infracteur] by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him.") 32 The historical argument about the sodomite in particular has been pursued by Alan Bray and, following him, Jonathan Gold- berg, as I have mentioned in chapter I, who contend that European Renaissance society, intensely homosocially bonded, is built not only on male social bonds but also on sexual acts unrecognized or unac- knowledged as sodomy. Goldberg, in his intricate investigation of the opposition of "acts" to "identities," comments that: [A]lthough sodomy is, as a sexual act, anything that threatens alli- ance - any sexual act, that is, that does not promote the aim of married procreative sex... and while sodomy involves therefore acts that men might perform with men, women with women (a possibility rarely envi- sioned), men and women with each other, and anyone with a goat, a pig, or a horse, these acts - or accusations of their performance - emerge into visibility only when those who are said to have done them also can be called traitors, heretics, or the like, at the very least, disturbers of the social order that alliance - marriage arrangements - maintained.33 Thus, according to this strand of Foucauldian argumentation, men could engage in sexual relations with one another and not only did they not identify themselves as homosexuals, but the acts them- selves, part of and continuous with the male-dominated structure of culture, were not even visible as sodomy unless performed in "par- ticularly stigmatizing contexts." 34 My argument in this book has demonstrated the pervasive relation of the discourses ofLollardy and sodomy, thus confirming Goldberg's viewpoint. 35 The homosexual, in contrast, is a sexual identity deployed in the process of the sub- jectivation of modern individuals (the making of subjects, and their domination); in a crucial argument about the nature and operations of modern power, Foucault opposes what he calls the "repressive hy- pothesis" to his contention that modern power works not merely to repress - to block or negate - but to produce sex, to multiply and im- plant all forms of it. Modern power constitutes "sex" as the truth- Coda 193 which we tell ourselves is taboo - of each individual. Thus sexual, and in particular homosexual, identity (though Foucault does not use this word here). We can see the applicability ofFoucault's analysis ofmodern homo- sexual identity as we consider Pulp Fiction once again. Though the film shows a world of male bonding (in this respect picking up from Reservoir Dogs, in which there are no major female characters, as well as from True Romance and Natural Born Killers, in which the female characters are not terribly nuanced) /6 sexual relations between men cannot be acknowledged as an inevitable part of the structure of that society. Thus Mr. Wolf, having detailed and begun to implement a plan to clean up a particularly bloody mess, warns everybody not to congratulate each other too soon: "[L Jet's not start suckin' each other's dicks quite yet" (134), he sneers, the scorn in his statement making it clear that only homos would stop to enjoy this point, taking pleasure when it should not be taken. Homosexual relations are on the horizon of male bonding, but must be kept there. A divide must be erected and anxiously maintained; on the one side are homosexuals, those whose same-sex desires are at the center of their identities; on the other are straight men, whose absence of homosexual desire and aggressive gender style define their identities. The fact that Marsellus has participated in even forced homosexual sex acts must be hidden forever: "[DJon't tell nobody about this" (108), he orders Butch, lest he be thought a fairy. Foucault's contrast between the sodomite and the homosexual has had a big impact on scholarly work on sexuality. It has been taken as a dictum, and scholars of early and late periods have taken up and run with it, analyzing what, exactly, sexual identity is, how it is con- stituted and manifested, whether or not one can indeed talk about sexuality as a constructed core of identity in premodern times. When the assertion about the sodomite has been taken to imply something about the entire premodern Western sexual landscape, the dictum has been used to authorize reductive and ignorant views of sex in the Middle Ages. In fact, as we have seen in this book, any stark his- torical opposition between the categories of premodern subjects of sodomitical acts, on the one hand, and modern people who are iden- tified on the basis of sexual preference, on the other, is wrong: that is, it is clear from a number of different kinds of premodern sources 194 Getting Medieval (some of which we have seen in chapter I, for example) that men who engaged in acts of male-male sex were thought to be visibly marked, known at least to others if not to themselves, grouped with others of the same kind, and defined by sexual desire. In the same chapter we have also seen that female-female sex is codified by "ancient civil and canonical codes" as sodomy, but females who have sex with other females are not (at least in the Twelve Conclusions) identified visibly in themselves, as a group, or by a specific desire; in other words, we see that a description of "the sodomite" that works for men does not work for women. More on that gender dissymmetry, invisible to Foucault's analy- sis, in a moment. For now, we must allow that it may be, indeed, a distortion of the kinds of claims Foucault makes in this introduc- tory volume 1 to try to fasten onto an absolute and precise historical opposition between sexual acts and sexual identities. He specifically refers in this passage to the juridical subject of ancient civil orcanoni- cal codes, thus implying that one particular discursive formation is what he is talking about at this moment; as Halperin has pointed out, Foucault is talking about a particular premodern "discursive style" of "disqualifying" male-male sex, against which he plays the mod- ern "discursive style" of doing so (via the construction of a modern homosexual identity). Foucault does not state here that premodern people could not have made "connections" between "specific sexual acts and the particular ethos, or sexual style, or sexual subjectivity, of those who performed them," Halperin explains; he more simply, heuristically, suggests here that premodern ways of "regulating and delegitimating" male-male sex differ from modern ways.37 In a later piece, a 1982 interview in Salmagundi in which homosexuality is discussed and references to the Middle Ages are pursued, Foucault blurs any starkly drawn opposition between sexual acts and sexual identities. 38 Certainly by that time, as Halperin contends, and wit- nessed most fully in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality, Foucault had shifted away from contrasting sodomy and homosexu- ality, sexual practices and categories of individuals, and toward what Halperin has summarized as "defining different historical forms of sexual experience-different ways of being, different sets of rela- tions to others and to oneself, different articulations of pleasure and meaning, different forms of consciousness." 39 Coda 195  But a sharp contrast between acts and identities is drawn, and that opposition, however heuristic, is deployed for certain effects in the particular paragraph in volume I, in the whole volume, and in the later work. 40 However Foucault might have changed his mind about the history of sexuality, a contrast between acts and identities pro- vides something of a structuring principle for Foucault's thinking about history - and about the future. Foucault in volume I evinces a particular desire for a premodern realm of (as he sees it) clearly apprehensible sexual acts as opposed to the hypocritical and surrep- titious world of modern sexual identities. I want to look more closely at volume I to see, first, what kind of history this is. We can then dis- cern carefully what the medieval is for Foucault, and understand the kind of liberatory potential that is offered by a realm of acts without essential identities - in contrast to the fear of such a realm and the desire for true being in Pulp Fiction. In looking at Foucault's deployment of the Middle Ages, we must keep in mind - if it has been forgotten over the course of this book- that he refuses to write "history" as it has been traditionally formu- lated. In brief discussions of Foucault's treatment of the Middle Ages, what Pierre Payer has not acknowledged, and what Anne Clark Bart- lett has, is Foucault's crucial and thorough assertions of his projects' difference from "history." From Madness and Civilization (1961) through The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1969), and "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971), to The History of Sexuality (1976-84), he resists the search for determinative origins and "the discourse of the continuous." 41 Yet what makes this antihis- torical perspective difficult to keep in mind is the fact that Foucault has also chosen to retain some markers placed by very conventional history, such as "medieval," "modern," and "the rise of the bour- geoisie" (not to mention eras defined by centuries); he retains as well some concepts that derive from totalizing historical analyses ("capi- tal," for one), and some dates that are often taken by conventional historians as watersheds or as moments of origin (1215, for example, the date of the Fourth Lateran Council). That he employs these con- ventionally accepted historical concepts in his discussion of the re- pressive hypothesis - that is, that he critiques, via conventional his- torical markers, a conventional historical story that we moderns tell ourselves, a story that he says is not the whole truth (II) - makes his 196 Getting Medieval investment in "history" difficult to ascertain. But, as he put it in an interview about volume I: "I am well aware that I have never writ- ten anything but fictions.... One 'fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one 'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth." 42 The History ofSexuality, volume I, offers a vision of a future poli- tics based on a politically "fictioned" "true" past. And as opposed to the final desire in Pulp Fiction, at the base of Foucault's "fictioned" politics is the inessential identity of its author. Foucault suggests in another introduction-this one to The Archaeology ofKnowledge- that his writing is a kind of performance, whose gaps and lapses seek the dissolution of his own identity. This introduction clarifies Fou- cault's relation to historical markers: he uses them strategically to clear a space ("this blank space from which I speak") for his own project. 43 How, exactly, he uses the conventionally delineated Middle Ages in his project of disaggregating identity is the issue to which I now turn. In volume I Foucault posits (by using conventional markers) two major historical "ruptures," shifts in the history of sexuality mapped, as he puts it, as the history of "mechanisms of repression": one in the seventeenth century, one in the twentieth: "The first... was characterized by the advent of the great prohibitions, the exclusive promotion of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency, the obligatory concealment of the body, the reduction to silence and mandatory reticences [pudeurs imperatives] of language. The sec- ond... was really less a rupture than an inflexion of the curve: this was the moment when the mechanisms of repression were seen as beginning to loosen their grip [se desserrer]" (115 ). "The chro- nology of the techniques [of repression] themselves," he notes with a characteristically broad stroke," "goes back a long way [remonte loin]." Making this dating more precise, he goes on: "Their point of formation must be sought in the penitential practices of medieval Christianity, or rather in the dual series" of changes imposed by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and then by devotional practices of the sixteenth century (115-16 ). We might ask, for starters, what gain Foucault makes in adhering to a paradigm of ruptures and peri- ods, particularly since the points of rupture seem so constantly re- vised, so labyrinthine (note the"or rather" in this passage, and such Coda 197  revisions throughout the book). This is the whole (ruptured) style of his Nietzschean model of effective history.44 But it might also be read as itself having a specific rhetorical effect: perhaps it affords him what early in volume 1 he calls "the speaker's benefit [Ie bene- fice du locuteur]" (6 ): the verbal act of speaking of a time before "the great prohibitions" puts the speaker prophetically outside of or beyond them, and thus "anticipates the coming freedom [la liberte future]" (6 ). Foucault's analysis of the discourse of liberation (the ruse of the repressive hypothesis) can be applied to his own use of the Middle Ages in "a discourse that combines the fervor of knowl- edge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights [IeJardin espere des delices]" (7 ). I shall pick up on such longed-for past delights in a moment. But notice first what role the medieval period plays in this pas- sage about the two major historical ruptures: it is the time period in which techniques of modern subjectivation took form. Specifically, the medieval is the time in which, after 1215, the obligation of annual confession began the process of putting of sex into discourse (a pro- cess completed by the seventeenth century [20 (29)]). The Middle Ages here are the time of the seeds of modern "men's subjection [1'assuJettissement des hommes]: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word" (60 ); "Since the Middle Ages at least," Fou- cault contends (58 ), confession has been a mainstay of such sub- jection; the Christian pastoral made sex an "enigma," creating "mod- ern societies" who speak and exploit sex as "the secret" (35 [48-49]). Further, Foucault claims that modern power's suppression of its own actual multiplicity originated in the Middle Ages (86 [114-15]). Even if these "beginnings" of modern sexual subjectivity were "surrepti- tious," they were "long ago... already making" themselves "felt at the time of the Christian pastoral of the flesh" (156 ) - already long in evidence before the sixteenth century. Thus there is a powerful and continuous use of the Ages in volume 1 as the site of the beginnings of modern sexual subject for- mation. We have seen in relation to John/Eleanor Rykener in chap- ter 2 at least one potential context in which this analysis of putting sex into discourse is right on target. I am not going to evaluate fur- ther Foucault's particular claims about the institution of confession here; my intent is only to present his general claims about periodiza- 198 Getting Medieval tion. 45 And what I find in general counterpoint to this pervasive use of the Middle Ages is another use, wherein the Middle Ages form the firm border between us moderns and a very different age with its own systems of codes governing sexual practices: codes that center sexual practices on matrimonial relations, that still determine "nature" as "a kind of law," and that do not differentiate the concept of the "un- natural" into a specific field of sexuality (37-39 [51-54]). It was a time, this theme goes, of a "markedly unitary" discourse ("un dis- cours asse'{fortement unitaire") around "the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance," a uniformity that was "broken apart" ("decom- posee") more recently (33 ). At this point I hear something like a note of nostalgia tuning Foucault's historical song. Such nostalgia is even more audible in the claim that "[l]ittle by little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled" (18 ). Foucault argues that increasing discretion of early modern confessors was advised so that less detail would be articulated: no longer was there, as he puts it, a complete"description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure - an entire painstaking review of the sexual act in its very unfolding" (19 ). In his style that mimes the rhythms of the medieval confession itself, Foucault seems here to assert that medieval language was able to record so precisely as itself to mime "the sexual act in its very unfolding [dans son operation meme]" (27). It is difficult to pin down the historical value or even the place in his own argument of Foucault's idealizing assertion here. 46 This de- scription in volume I, which Foucault offers as an accurate account of modern power (the beginning of the proliferative modern pro- cess of putting sex into discourse) sounds much like the mocking description of the repressive hypothesis that opens the volume: "it would seem [dit on]," he writes in the opening, that the beginning of the seventeenth century was still "a time of direct gestures, shame- less discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies 'made a display of themselves.' "47 Is this time of direct gestures, easy contact between body parts, and naked descriptions of nakedness a rhetorical effect or Coda 199 genealogical-historical fact? (More generally, and hearkening back to my earlier observation about the repressive hypothesis: is this re- pressive hypothesis a story Foucault must tell to produce a certain modernity, or one he believes we moderns really believe?) Following his comments on politics, fictioning, and history, I think both propo- sitions are true: the Middle Ages plays a role in the history of sexu- ality formulated around the mechanisms of repression-the period works for his effective history, he deploys it for certain effects - and he believes, or at least desires, that it really was like that. Now it may well be that these two perspectives on the Middle Ages-seen as a period that produces our modernity, and as a period quite separate and different from our own-are conceptually coher- ent, part of a whole genealogical approach to the modern subject. The demonstration of modern contingency traces the forces that produce us and at the same time suggests that we can be different in the future because we were not always like this. But I do not want to harmonize these two strains completely and thus elide not only the obviously tactical use of the Middle Ages in volume 1 but also - crucially - the desire that emerges from this contradictory history. Central to dis- cerning the value of this double position is in fact that nostalgic tone; various critics have noted an idealization and have assigned vary- ing importance to it. Medievalists have always taken exception to a Middle Ages that functions "as a lost and golden age," as Bartlett puts it; yet I don't want to discard utopianism altogether. 48 The utopian, the elegiac, what I have been calling the nostalgic, functions as part of a serious ethical and aesthetic vision of the present and the future: a view of political reality informs Foucault's historical pronouncement about the sodomite and the homosexual, and, in turn, the historical pronouncement allows Foucault to fiction a future politics. Foucault has insisted that he does not study historically distant periods in order to find an alternative to the present: "I am not look- ing for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people." Indeed, he maintains, "[T]here is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period... it is not anything to get back to" ;49 and yet genealogical analysis, he suggests, can be useful in showing us that, and perhaps how, such a "fictitious unity" as modern sexuality (vol. 1, 154 ) can be broken apart and reconfigured. Foucault uses 200 Getting Medieval the opposition of acts to identity, surface to depth, premodernity to modernity, in order to show that future sexuality does not have to be dominated by current notions of identity. The potential for acts (not entailed with identity) to shatter the modern liberal subject is great; insofar as such a category of acts is associated with the premodern in his historiography, Foucault expresses a desire for the premodern. What I find in Foucault's work, carried through the late interviews, is not only an analytical focus on the body as imprintable surface 50 but a desire-which is mistakenly reduced to mere nostalgia-for a realm of clearly apprehensible acts and legible surfaces. In Discipline and Punish the premodern offender's acts were clearly motivated by "a free, conscious will," Foucault writes, while the delinquent's in- ternal "instincts, drives, tendencies, character" muddy the surface. 51 In the Middle Ages invoked in the 1980 Introduction to Herculine Barbin, the hermaphroditic body is clearly legible, not clouded over by the necessity of interpretation. 52 At the beginning of The His- tory of Sexuality, vol. I, the scene opens on "this bright day [ce plein jour]" (3 ) of bodies displayed and accessible, on the surface and without mediation. And at the end of volume I, Foucault calls for a resistance to coercive modern "sexuality" and its "fictitious unity" in order "to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges" (157 ) - calls, as Leo Bersani puts it, for a "reinventing of the body as a surface of multiple sources of pleasure." 53 There is an emphasis on the visible and apparent, on the apprehensible in its immediacy; it even sounds "prediscursive," as Judith Butler points out, despite Foucault's "official" line that (as she puts it) "there is no 'sex' in itself" -and certainly no body- "which is not produced by complex interactions of discourse and power." 54 This pre- or extradiscursive reinvention project has as its basis "de- sexualization," as Foucault put it in an interview at about the time of volume I'S publication: a reinvention "with the body, with its ele- ments, its surfaces, its volumes, its depths, [of] a nondisciplinary eroticism: that of a body in a volatile and diffuse state given to chance encounters and incalculable pleasures" not centered on geni- talia. 55 Foucault suggests in a 1978 interview, "Le Gai savoir," that in anonymous sexual encounters there is "an exceptional possibility of desubjectivization, of desubjection, perhaps not the most radical but in any case sufficiently intense to be worth taking note of.... Coda 201 It's not the affirmation of identity that's important, it's the affirma- tion of non-identity": the act, the surface, and the loss of identity are linked. 56 The body is turned inside out; its depths become surfaces; this body is "diffuse," "exploding," and without the old hierarchical conceptualizations of internal drives and impulses. 57 In the later volumes of The History of Sexuality as well as in late discussions in the gay press, Foucault's emphasis on becoming rather than on being, performance rather than ontology, is marked; in study- ing the "arts of existence" in volume 2, for example, Foucault clarifies that he means "those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre" (2: 10-11 ). And in a 1981 interview, he insists, "[W]e have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be ob- stinate in recognizing that we are." 58 Finally, recalling to us the very different treatments we have seen in the other visions of the medi- eval, Foucault happily links such an acts-centered disposition against depth to sadomasochism in a 1982 interview: "I think that S/M... [is] the real creation ofnew possibilities of pleasure.... The idea that s/ M is related to a deep violence, that s/ M practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid." And in the same interview, he links S/M to the "strategic game" of medieval" 'courtly love.' "59 But the valorization of surfaces and thus clearly apprehensible acts needs to be considered carefully. of course cannot be imag- ined to be immediately self-apparent. Foucault, genealogist, certainly is not suggesting that they are. Earlier, in Discipline and Punish, he suggests that the modern penal state itself problematizes the notion of a proven and punishable act (19 ). At specific moments in volume I, too (elaborated in volume 2 [e.g., 92 (106-7)]), Foucault makes perfectly clear the compleXities of judging acts, especially in the Christian tradition. In his discussion of the expansion ofthe scope of confession in volume I, for example, he notes that an "evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most im- portant moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings- so difficult to perceive and formulate-of desire" (19-20 ). I as- sume that the biblical precedent for this shift is Matthew 5.28, Christ's warning in his Sermon on the Mount: "But I say unto you, That who- soever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery 202 Getting Medieval with her already in his heart" (King James Version); the act, that is, has already taken place even before the act has occurred. This is a de- construction of the act pursued with moral vigor by patristic writers such as Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome.60 What we see in the act, in its "concrete realization" (2: 63 ), on the surface, does not nec- essarily indicate-and certainly does not exhaust-its meaning or function in social context. We only have to recall the intense anti- Lollard polemics on the Eucharist to appreciate that in the Middle Ages (as in any other time) what you see is not necessarily what you get: remember Roger Dymmok's argument that inner change is not always accompanied by outer change. And Foucault, ever suspicious of the ways modern power can infuse and saturate the body from the interior, would not presume that a visible surface at any time is a re- liable indicator of meaning or function; indeed, who would? To be historiographical tools, then, and not mere heuristic devices, the "category of forbidden acts" and the concomitant "juridical sub- ject ofthem" must be supplemented in order to accommodate (among other things) differences in social context and empowerment among such subjects. The mechanisms of the premodern codes' prohibi- tive functioning-exactly how these civil and canon laws worked to regulate specific communities-need further analysis; such mecha- nisms matter because (for one reason) these codes clearly had dif- ferent relations to male and to female perpetrators of sodomy. In the case of the 1270 legislation of Orleans that I cited above, for ex- ample, female sodomites were mentioned but not really envisioned at all (their punishment makes little practical sense, as I pointed out in chapter I), whereas males definitely were; the law therefore has a different evidentiary status in relation to male sodomites from the one it has to female sodomites. More generally, any historical ob- servation that depends on an understanding of legal codes or even more broadly, some category of "acts," must register the fact that historically women's acts are not recorded and not codified as fully as men's because women don't act in public spheres as do men, and thus women tend to be regulated differently. The Twelve Conclusions ofthe Lollards makes this point, as we have seen. I argued in chapter 1 that the Eleventh Conclusion makes a very different kind of accusation about women than the Third Conclusion makes about men; a con- cept of gender, the secondariness and perversion of femininity itself, Coda 203 informs the indictments of female sexual behaviors in the Eleventh Conclusion. Acts are not separable from gender categories; acts have values and effects that differ as they are practiced by different people and in different contexts. As feminist scholars have continually in- sisted we ask, "Who can act, when, and under what circumstances?" But as a mere heuristic device, the Foucauldian distinction between identity and act proved immensely fruitful in queer political organiz- ing in the United States. The importance of volume 1for queer activist practice in the late 1980s and early 1990S was immense: Halperin ob- serves in Saint Foucault, on the basis of an "unsystematic" 1990 sur- vey of people active in ACT UP/New York in the late eighties, that "the single most important intellectual source of political inspiration for contemporary AIDS activists-at least for the more theoretically- minded or better-outfitted among them" was volume 1 of the His- tory ofSexuality.61 Just as an analytical model of sex acts challenges models of identity, so does a model of political acts: current queer re- sistance to identity politics is informed by an acts-centered model of coalition politics (such as I outlined in chapter 3) that picks up on Fou- cault's preference for acts. Such an acts-centered model is politically efficacious in particular circumstances, countering the persecution of already marginalized identity-based groups-efficacious when, for example, the concept of "high-risk acts" in AIDS activist discourse counters the phobic, racist, and misogynist concept of "high-risk groups." But queer politics can constantly benefit from feminist tute- lage, as the connotations of the term"queer" themselves suggest (still young, white, and male): who gets to act-and who gets to act up? 62 The very concept of self-identical and thus self-apparent acts ap- prehensible via the surface, then, needs to be nuanced in scholarly and in activist practice. Identities may be constituted by acts - the theory of nonessentialized, performative identity so fully enunciated in Gen- der Trouhle has conceptual roots in Foucault's genealogy of modern sexual identity in volume I, and volume 1 in turn continues to per- form the dissolution of essential identity that we saw in the preface to The Archaeology ofKnowledge - but acts are not themselves fully self-identical or self-apparent. From a conventional historicist point of view, Foucault's locating self-apparent acts in the Middle Ages in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality seems both essentializing and nostalgic. Essentializing it is not, as I have suggested. Furthermore, 204 Getting Medieval nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Foucault, tactical, forward-looking and resistant, is fictioning history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, in order that he can fiction a politics not yet in existence. Sexual identity now is constructed as truth, so that only in resistance to modern sexual subjectivation is there any possibility of reinvention or "explosion" of the body into surface. In contrast to the medieval in Pulp Fiction, then, that space of ab- jection and otherness-the space where sodomy, sadomasochism, southernness, and blackness get dumped in the creation of a unified straight white masculinity-the Middle Ages Foucault most deeply desires is a time whose lack of unified sexuality is preferable to the present with its "fictitious unity" of normative heterosexuality, a time whose sexual disaggregation is not to be feared but can for the future offer a creative, even liberatory, potential. "There is a creation of anarchy within the body," Foucault comments in a 1975 interview suggesting such disaggregation, "where its hierarchies, its localiza- tions and designations, its organicity, if you will, are in the process of disintegrating.... This is something 'unnameable,' 'useless,' out- side of all the programs of desire. It is the body made totally plastic by pleasure: something that opens itself, that tightens, that throbs, that beats, that gapes." 63 Here is that prediscursive body gaping wide open. So when Hayden White analyzes, and goes on to condemn, Fou- cault's historiography as "all surface," I can agree with the terms of the analysis but value them entirely differently.64 "Of course," states Ed Cohen on this late material, "Foucault does not characterize these new possibilities of pleasure as inherently 'political' or 'resis- tant' "; thus his qualification, for example, of the radicality of anony- mous sexual encounters (quoted above).65 But he does place them at the center of any future deliberations of a "homosexual movement" about the organization of a given society. The ethos of this disaggregative project underwrites a coalition politics such as I delineated in relation to queer medieval studies, funding for the humanities, and academic freedom in chapter 3. This view of the fragmented self enables contingent relations with the past, such as we have seen Foucault making in the archive in chap- ter 2-and, in my introduction, as we have seen Michael Camille and Roland Barthes make, too - and those relations, I have been argu- Coda 205 ing throughout this book, can be the material not only of selves but of communities. And we can insist that such a project of disaggre- gation be specifically informed and guided by feminist analyses and goals of transforming the "social relations within which sexuality is organized and articulated." 66 Getting medieval: not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath, as Marsellus Wallace threat- ens in Pulp Fiction; and not turning from an impure identity to some solidity guaranteed by God, as Jules is made hopefully to do; but using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future. What could be better, after all, as the Altoids ad- vertising executives obviously knew, than getting medieval on - or with - your very breath? 206 Getting Medieval