Classical bodies and modernity

Stallybrass and White again: The classical form “was far more than an aesthetic standard or model.” It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical body “structured, from the inside as it were, the characteristically ‘high’ discourses of philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, as well as literature, as they emerged from the Renaissance. In the classical discursive body were encoded those regulated systems which were closed, homogeneous, monumental, centred and symmetrical . . . .

“It began to make ‘parsimony’ of explanation and ‘economy’ of utterance the measure of rationality, thus institutionalizing Lenten rule as a normative epistemological standard. Gradually these protocols of the classical body came to mark out the identity of progressive rationalism itself. These are the terms of Foucault’s ‘regimen’ and Weber’s ‘rationalization,’ the strong forms of functional purity which, certainly by the eighteenth century in England, led to the great age of ‘institutionalizing’ – asylums, hospitals, schools, barracks, prisons, insurance and finance houses – which, as Foucault has suggested, embody and assure the maintenance of classical bourgeois reason. Furthermore Foucault’s concentration upon the contained outsiders-who-make-the-insiders (the mad, the criminal, the sick, the unruly, the sexually transgressive) reveals just how far these outsiders are constructed by the dominant culture in terms of the grotesque body. The ‘grotesque’ here designates the marginal, the low and the outside from the perspective of the classical body situated as high, inside, and central by virtue of its very exclusions.”