Wednesday Investigation 02: Charles Fourier and the "political theory of crime"
This note is from 1998, when I was reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Late in the book (p. 289), Foucault offhandedly mentions a group called the "Fourierists."
Foucault argues that the Fourierists "were perhaps the first" to understand that some crime could have "a positive value," that crime could constitute "a political instrument that could prove [...] precious for the liberation of our society." (Foucault supplies quotes taken from issues of a Fourierist social sciences journal, La Phalange, the earliest of which date as far back as 1837, predating Thoreau's Civil Disobedience by about a decade.) Pretty interesting, although Foucault doesn't bother to clue us in as to who the Fourierists are, so I wrote "hmm" in the margin of my copy of Discipline and Punish and... made a note with the "investigate" tag.
I figured out who the Fourierists were six years later, in 2004, when reading Guy Davenport's terrific collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. In an essay on Walt Whitman ("Walt Whitman an American"), Davenport provides a brief primer on Charles Fourier, and the utopian communities he designed.
Fourier, Davenport explains, believed that our human duty was to maintain the "Sacred Flame." Davenport, elaborating lovingly on this concept, informs us that the "Sacred Flame" includes "both our kinship to God and those livelinesses of spirit man himself had invented--the dance, poetry, music, mathematics, communal genius like French cuisine, Cretan stubbornness, Scotch scepticism, Dutch housekeeping[.]" I love these phrasings--"livelinesses of spirit," "communal genius"--and the particular examples of communal genius that Davenport provides (they do not appear to have originated in Fourier's writings) help to draw out the concept more clearly than some other attempts I've seen from writers who attempt to write in a Fourierist mode. (I'm thinking here specifically of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which deploys a diluted version of Fourierism with its notion of "the keepers of the fire.") Furthermore, the idea that helping preserve the best aspects of humankind is an important and dignified endeavor resonates with me, especially that I'm a middle-aged educator who just spent the last semester trying to teach students about things like Surrealist games and sixteenth-century haiku while a pandemic was bearing down on us.
Fourier intended for people to live and work together in a large communal building, or "phalanstery," to be located within a rural environment. Here's the cover page of an issue of La Phalange, featuring an image of a phalanstery:
And here's Davenport again, detailing Fourier's vision: "All work is done by everybody, an hour at a time. The days are rhythmic and contain a little of everything good. All sexual predilections are arranged for and honored in their diversity. Ceremonial honors are given to those whose passionate nature encompasses the widest range... the dominant note of the community is play."
Davenport sums Fourier's thinking up this way: "He is the only philosopher interested in happiness as the supreme human achievement."
OK, sounds great! It's no wonder that Fourier's ideas have been embraced by liberationist writers ever since. Wikipedia identifies André Breton, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and David Harvey as a few of the writers who have all praised Fourier's thinking or dedicated works to him.
Fourier has popped up in some other books I've read over the years, too. In their account of prehistoric sexuality, Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá argue that early human civilization practiced a form of group sexual partnerships among all genders, which they describe using the term omnigamy, a Fourier coinage. (He's also credited with coining the term feminism.)
I'm pretty up on my feminism, but omnigamy warranted a bit more investigation, I thought. The term comes from Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux (The New Amorous World), a work written in 1816 although not published in France until 1967, which gives you some idea of the provocative quality of the content. (It remains untranslated into English.) Cultural critic McKenzie Wark has referred to it as a "little known queer theory classic," and a "a unique kind of philosophy of the orgy." Wark elaborates, writing that "what is truly remarkable about Fourier" is his "ability to imagine a relational pornography, where all social contacts are pleasurable and engage as many of the passions as possible. It is a heretical reversal of perspective of liberalism."
Very cool, although by this point in the newsletter you could be forgiven for wondering exactly how well Fourierist ideas survive upon contact with reality. Fourier apparently never was able to finance a phalanstery of his own, which might be part of what led Benjamin to temper his appreciation, writing: "Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier's fantasy materialized."
Benjamin has a point, though he also makes it sound a bit like no one ever had a go at it, which is misleading: some estimates suggest that by the "summery middle of the nineteenth century" there were hundreds of communes founded on Fourierist principles. Over thirty were founded in the US in a two-year period alone following the publication of Albert Brisbane's Fourierist book, Social Destiny of Man, in 1840.
If you want a sense of what living in one of these communes might have been like, you could do worse than to check out Susan Sontag's final novel, In America (2001), which I read last year around this time. It follows the life of a Polish actress, Helena Modjeska (fictionalized as "Maryna Zalewska" in the book) who travels to Anaheim, California to co-found a phalanstery. Spoiler alert: the experiment involves less play and fewer orgies than you might hope, and more, well, grueling farming. It also doesn't yield long-term success even at the level of an agricultural cooperative: they "don't produce most of what [they] need" and they "don't sell most of what [they] produce." And yet even as the project is failing, Sontag has Zalewska write, in a journal: "It would be a poorer world if no one ever felt like us again." Indeed it would.
Brook Farm, a former Fourierist community here in Massachusetts, was named a National Historic Site in 1965. It is 3.5 miles from my apartment. Its phalanstery building, never completed, was destroyed by fire in 1846.
-JPB // Dedham, MA, April 24, 2020 (Revised Wednesday, April 29)