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I lift the term "hedgerow" from Doonesbury,
as much to characterize my own ambiguous position as
the author of a piece on what Foucault's influence on
the writing of the history of sexuality has been and
ought to be, as to characterize what I will argue that
influence should be. In a series that ran sometime
after Saving Private Ryan had opened, Mark
Slackmeyer, one of the original baby-boomer cast of
characters of that strip, is visiting his dying father.
Slackmeyer was, of course, an opponent of the Vietnam
War and had famously judged all the Watergate
conspirators to be "Guilty, guilty, guilty." He and his
father, a conservative, a veteran of World War II and
of the Normandy invasion (although, as it turns out,
really a veteran of the typing pool) have,
unsurprisingly, never gotten along. But now Slackmeyer
suddenly feels sympathetic interest in his father's
wartime experiences. In one of those ripostes Trudeau
frequently gives to his conservative characters when
they capture the hypocrisies of his contemporaries,
Slackmeyer's father refers to the baby-boomer,
post-Ryan elegiac attitude to World War II
veterans and the Normandy invasion as "hedgerow envy."
The term not only captures the inauthenticity of the
sudden nostalgia for a life-threatening challenge in
support of an unmistakably good cause of all of us who
had never and would never want to go anywhere near a
battlefield. Because it is a nostalgia for danger held
from a safe, theoretical distance, the term also
captures the uncomfortable position of claiming to have
a position on a matter of critical dispute that is also
a matter of political dispute, without any expertise in
that field, based on the tenuous applicability of a
larger theoretical position and a comfortably
unthreatening fellow-feeling with those political ends.
Such political sympathy from afar based on safe
theories certainly have all the inauthentic
possibilities of Trudeau's hedgerow envy. And the term
all too closely describes my own entry into debates
over the history of homosexuality, with no Greek, no
Latin, no expertise in any of the requisite fields and
only an interest in Foucault's philosophical and
aesthetic positions and an intellectual envy of the
work of that history to justify me. My only further
justification will be my claim that hedgerow envy, in a
more generalized sense of having a non-historical stake
in the meaning of a historical narrative—which is
part of its inauthenticity and its theory—is also
a central part of how Foucault's history works and of
the light I think it casts on some of the debates his
history has incited and played a part in over the
historical meaning of sexuality and homosexuality. If,
by attaching that term to a particular, influential
part of Foucault's project, I can recuperate the value
of hedgerow envy in all of its inauthenticity, I am
perfectly, if inauthentically happy, to hope that that
recuperation attaches to my argument as well.
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Before discussing what I am calling Foucault's
hedgerow history, though, I want to start with some
closer connections drawn between his history and the
history of sexuality. There are three levels of this
connection, which occur at greater and greater levels
of generality and thus in closer and closer
approximations of the inauthentic distance of hedgerow
envy. The first level is a recurrent interest, both
among allies and critics, in connecting his work,
especially the three volumes of his History of
Sexuality, to his biography—in particular not
only to his own homosexuality, but to his taking, in
late interviews, gay S/M practices as exemplary of the
shaping of one's own practices, self and life, that he
came to see as a positive response to the discipline of
sexuality. The second level has been the very real
importance of some of his claims about homosexuality
(that concept's history and its lack of applicability
to sexual practices prior to the nineteenth-century) to
debates through the 1980s and 1990s over the history of
homosexuality and the implications of that history for
an antihomophobic politics. Finally, at a more general
level, although obviously connected to the prior one,
Foucault's description of the disciplinary power of
sexuality as a field of knowledge, while it has seemed
to so many of his liberal critics and even sometime
allies, as taking away all ability to engage in any
political action at all, has played a strangely
productive—strange, evidently only to straight
notions of production, though—role in gay
political action.
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The attachment critics make between Foucault's life
and his thought is in all ways the worst. This has
nothing to do with his own ostensible antagonism to the
concept of an author.[1]
If explaining a text with regard to the biography of
its author has a value despite Foucault's beliefs, then
it will have the same value for his case.[2]
And although biographers frequently refer
apologetically to Foucault's often quoted appeal in
Archaeology of Knowledge not to ask who he is or
to demand that he remain the same (17; see for
instance, Macey, xiii), one only need respect this
request to the extent that one agrees with Foucault in
the first place that such questions and demands are
irrelevant to understanding a work. Of course, if one
does think that, then one will hardly look to his
biography in order to understand them. But if one does
not, Foucault presents no special case, his appeals to
the contrary notwithstanding. The problem has been that
connecting Foucault's life with his work has too
frequently been homophobic and, even when not, has been
reductive at best. Given the fact that he died from
AIDS early enough in the life of that plague so that
melodramatic emplotments of such deaths did not seem as
excessive as they do now, it was inevitable that
anti-postmodern critics would connect his death with
his thought. Of these formulations, George Steiner's is
relatively restrained: "This obsessed inquirer into
diseases and sexuality—into the mind's constructs
of Eros and the effects of such constructs on the body
politic and on the individual flesh—was done to
death by the most hideous and symbolically charged of
current diseases" (105). Steiner in all probability
meant "hideous" as a judgment about how horrific it was
that people died of AIDS. Still, in what sense does
Foucault's death from AIDS tell us anything about
"obsessions" that pre-date the existence of the disease
by twenty years. And, although the disease has
certainly been symbolically charged for some, not all
symbols are even remotely useful ones for evaluating
someone's thought, even for those who think that
authorial lives are in principle pertinent, least of
all those symbols that arise from fear and ignorance. A
more fully worked out and notorious example of
connecting Foucault's life to his works, James Miller's
The Passion of Michel Foucault, at least means
to be an admiring book which connects what Miller takes
to be a life-long obsession with limit-experiences to
his work in ways that are at least narratively
satisfying, at any rate for those who enjoy Victorian
melodrama. Regardless of whether one agrees with
Halperin's evaluation of Miller's book as homophobic,
however, one can only think it elucidates Foucault's
thinking for those who have no interest in the details
of that thought since it regularly quotes out of
context and really deals with no book before
Discipline and Punish on its own terms.[3]
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Perhaps the best place for arguing why one should
not connect even what might seem the most personal of
Foucault's meditations with his life would be in his
defenses of S/M, the practice of which he separates
from sadomasochism, understood as a feature of
consciousness:
I do not think that this movement of sexual practices
has anything at all to do with the bringing to
daylight or the discovering of sadomasochist
tendencies deeply buried in our unconscious. I think
that S/M is much more than that; it's the actual
creation of new possibilities of pleasure that one
might never have imagined before. . . . I think that
we have here a sort of creation, of a creative
enterprise, of which one of the principle
characteristics is what I would call the
de-genitalization of pleasure. The idea that physical
pleasure is always a matter of sexual pleasure and
the idea that sexual pleasure is the base of all
possible pleasures is something that I think is truly
something false. What S/M practices show us is that
we can produce pleasure beginning with very strange
objects and using certain bizarre parts of our bodies
in very unusual situations, etc. (Dits, II,
1556-57).
Because of the gossip surrounding both Foucault's
activity in the bathhouses of San Francisco and his
death from AIDS (were there really no such similar
places in Paris, or is the location of Foucault's
activity part of a mythmaking element to the story we
now tell of his death?), his espousal of S/M as an
example of cultivating "bodies and pleasures" as a
counterattack against the power-knowledge of sexuality
(History of Sexuality, 157) can seem to link his
theories to his life. This may take the homophobic tone
of Steiner's suggestion of the darkness and obsession
of Foucault's thought, or that of Miller's melodramatic
narrative of someone interested in limit-experiences in
both life and work. It may take the openly hagiographic
form of Halperin's analysis of the queer politics
entailed in Foucault's espousal of S/M (Saint
Foucault, 85-91), coupled with the evaluation that
he led an "intellectually and politically exemplary
life" (Saint Foucault, 7). The problem with all
these connections is that they reduce the challenge of
Foucault's thought to a reaction to a specific practice
rather than using a reaction to a practice to test our
ability to accommodate a way of thinking.
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There is after all a clear line of connection going
from Foucault's interest in S/M to his more general
statement that the value of doing history is to get
free of oneself. One starts the connection with his
espousal of askesis as a response to explain his
statement that rather than "bemoaning dulled pleasures,
I am interested in what we can do by ourselves":
Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has a bad
reputation. But askesis is something different: it is
the work that you do on yourself to transform
yourself or to allow a self to appear that,
fortunately, you never quite reach. Is this not our
problem today? We have dismissed asceticism. It's now
up to us to advance into a homosexual askesis that
will enable us to work on ourselves, and
invent—I do not say discover—a manner of
being that is as yet improbable (Dits, II,
984).
The common ground between the practice of S/M as the
invention of new pleasures that would allow us to see
bodily pleasures as de-genitalized in an unfamiliar
way, and an askesis construed, in accordance with its
original meaning, as an exercise on oneself rather than
simply a self-denial, an exercise that will allow us to
create new forms of self and being, is fairly clear.
And yet, if this response did not appear in an
interview for the gay journal Gai Pied[4]
and if the word homosexual were left out, the text
would perfectly accord perfectly with Foucault's
description in his introduction to The Use of
Pleasure of his motive for writing history:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would
hope that in the eyes of some people it might be
sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only
kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting
upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity
that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to
know, but that which enables one to get free of
oneself. After all, what would be the value of the
passion for knowledge, if it resulted only in a
certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one
way or another and to the extent possible, in the
knower's straying afield of himself? (8)[5]
From the askesis that allows us to invent new modes
of being to a history that enables the knower to stray
afield of himself, there is only the distance between a
rule and an instance. If this is the only kind of
curiosity worth acting upon with any obstinacy, though,
one must assume that it should motivate more than gays
(or straights) practicing S/M. My point here is not to
enfeeble the espousal of S/M by turning it into a more
easily digestible general principle of self-detachment.
Rather the reverse, I think the force of the example of
S/M for the audience that does not practice it is to
stress that self-detachment, not to say the more
difficult losing one's fondness for oneself, may
involve harder acts of empathy than we usually imagine.
If many of Foucault's liberal critics seem to shy
before the hedgerow they are being asked to leap, that
is no reason to let them off the hook by creating the
authentic connection of a hagiography that excludes
them from the possibility of comprehending.[6]
If hedgerow envy is inauthentic, it still seems
preferable to its absence.
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Ultimately the problem is that Foucault proposes an
extreme form of self-detachment as an end. For allies
of that position, proposing to attach Foucault back to
his life, even merely as exemplary, does not really
refuse him the detachment he seeks. It refuses to grant
the value of detachment he espouses. His critics, of
course, may mean to deny that he achieves that end, or
to deny the value of the end, but to do so by attaching
his thought to his life via that which they find in it
that is most sensational and melodramatic has, to be
understated, an air of insufficient detachment to
evaluate the thought. But the second form of attaching
Foucault to the writing of the history of sexuality
suffers none of these problems. Instead it takes two
significant ideas from the three volumes of the
History of Sexuality and uses them as guiding
ideas for further work in that history. I put these
ideas simplistically, with the promise to refine them
more satisfactorily further down: 1) in the first
volume of the history, Foucault famously states that
while "as defined by the ancient civil or canonical
codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts," "[t]he
nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage," and
2) in The Use of Pleasure, in contrast to either
of these definitions, the Greeks of the classical
period, rather than categorizing sexual activity in
terms of the sex of the desired object, thus dividing
among homosexual and heterosexual, categorized in terms
of the dominance or passivity of the desired role, thus
classing boys and women—as passive—together
as objects of desire for men. These ideas taken
together imply, at least for some critics, the
historical constructedness of first homosexuality, and
as a consequence of heterosexuality as well since
heterosexuality was created as a concept only in tandem
with the creation of homosexuality as a concept in the
nineteenth century, and thus finally of sexuality as a
whole.[7]
This connection, of course, does not in any sense run
afoul of Foucault's idea of detachment. Indeed, it
derives quite pointedly from his desire, as we will
see, to use history to estrange us from our own ways of
thinking, to make them look historical rather than
necessary givens, either natural or logical. And there
is no question that these claims, if in more
historically careful and refined terms, do play
important roles in Foucault's history of sexuality. If
I question the closeness of their connection to
Foucault, it will not be to question the validity of
the histories of sexuality that follow upon him but
rather to question whether, finally, taken in the
largest sense, he is making historical claims at all.
And my point will be that one can get the values of the
histories of sexuality written in his wake only by
accepting his recognition that the value of his work is
not in its historical validity (which will not be the
same as saying that his claims are invalid).
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Before looking at these specific arguments, however,
we should note that the historical constructedness of
sexuality is in one sense not a conclusion from the
historical evidence but a necessary presupposition to
doing the history of sexuality. Foucault recognizes
this explicitly in his introduction to The Use of
Pleasure, in which he claims that he needed to
begin by presuming the historically changing nature of
sexuality:
To speak of sexuality in this way, I had to break
with a conception that was rather common. Sexuality
was conceived of as a constant. The hypothesis was
that where it was manifested in historically singular
forms, this was through various mechanisms of
repression to which it was bound to be subjected in
every society. What this amounted to, in effect, was
that desire and the subject of desire were withdrawn
from the historical field, and interdiction as a
general form was made to account for anything
historical in sexuality. (4)
The logic is quite clear. Only if we treat sexuality
as historically changing, treat its
elements—desire and the subject of
desire—as parts of the historical field, can we
do a history of sexuality. Otherwise, we write a
history of external variations that befall a natural
constant. We will write how different historical
periods allow or repress sexuality but not how
sexuality itself changes through history. Halperin
follows this logic and clarifies it: "Sex has no
history. It is a natural fact, grounded in the
functioning of the body, and, as such, it lies outside
history and culture. Sexuality, by contrast, does not
properly refer to some aspect or attribute of bodies.
Unlike sex, sexuality is a cultural production" ("Is
There a History of Sexuality," 416). Like Foucault,
Halperin does not offer historical evidence for this
claim at the outset (though he does go on to say that
the history that follows will function as support for
the claimed historicity of sexuality). He proposes a
logical definition that allows the history to move
forward. And, therefore, as with Foucault, the history
that follows can only buttress the claim to the extent
that we are willing at least to entertain the
possibility of the subject having a history at
all.[8]
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Although, as we will see, there is strong evidence
for the historical accuracy of all of these claims,
they have all been contested, and the reasons those
arguments cannot be resolved satisfactorily will show
us why the claims are really not ultimately historical.
Let us start with the final most general one, since
from it will follow the contestation of the more
specific claims about the historicity of homosexuality.
John Boswell, who opposed quite pointedly the notion
that the category of homosexuality was an historical
construct, also argued that if it were, "if the
categories 'homosexual/heterosexual' and 'gay/straight'
are the inventions of particular societies rather than
aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay history"
(93).[9]
And the logic here is as unexceptionable as that of
Foucault's and Halperin's. In order to write an
historical account of a single people whose common
trait is that they are gay, gayness or homosexuality
must actually be common to all of those people. If,
therefore, gay history is to be the history of gay
people, then obviously there must be such people. At
issue in each of these statements is whether one wants
to write the history of sexuality, thus the history of
homosexuality, or the history of gay people. One's
position on the constructedness of homosexuality or of
its natural reality will derive at least in part from
which history one wants to write. And of course the
history one wants to write will have a connection with
one's view of the present situation of gay people.
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Although in principle, at this point, one might
foresee this argument being over the status of the
historical evidence for whether traits amounting to
homosexuality exist in cultures regardless of how they
categorize sexual acts, one needs to see that the
debate begins in different evaluations of what kind of
history will best forward differing positions about the
best political position regarding either the origin or
the essence of homosexuality. For those identified as
Foucauldians, showing the historical constructedness of
our understanding of homosexuality will show the
emptiness of those categories as a basis for claiming
knowledge about people one classifies in that category.
Hence the case that other societies, in particular
Classical Greece, did not have such categories implies
the historical limitedness of our own categories. David
Halperin makes this aim clear in both One Hundred
Years of Homosexuality and How to do the History
of Homosexuality. In the first book, he opens with
the statement that ". . . if we are ever to discover
who 'we' really are, it will be necessary to examine
more closely the many respects in which Greek sexual
practices differ from 'our own'—and do not
merely confirm current cherished assumptions about 'us'
or legitimate some of 'our' favorite practices" (1-2).
Although this sentence is posed as an epistemological
demand, the quotation marks around the first-person
plural pronouns indicate clearly enough the ethical
force behind the epistemology. And although Halperin
develops a more nuanced constructivism in his second
book, his statement of it only makes his ethical claims
clearer: "If we cannot simply escape from the tyranny
of homosexuality by some feat of scholarly rigor (as I
once thought we could) . . . we can at least insist on
taking our categories so seriously as to magnify their
inner contradictions to the point where those
contradictions turn out to be analytically informative"
(107). The point of what is an openly artificial
analytical act is to escape a tyranny, to show the
contradictions in current categories.[10]
Nor should one think that only Foucauldian
constructivism begins by assuming the historical case
supposedly at issue. Leo Bersani, for instance, has
argued powerfully for the idea that, contra Foucault, a
gay identity serves a vital ethical and political role
in a society that seems most to want homosexuality to
disappear (Homos, particularly 31-76). And
giving that identity historical duration often seems to
motivate an animus with which essential gay historians
attack constructivist ones.
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It would be hard to imagine a history immune from a
principle that motivates its composition, and there is
no necessary contradiction between having such a
principle and producing a history that adequately
performs the role of evidence for it, so the above
argument should pointedly not be taken as, by itself,
any very strong reason for skepticism about either side
in this argument, or a reason for faulting attaching
one of the positions to a Foucauldian influence. But as
one looks at the debate in further detail, one can see
how impossible it would be to resolve in terms of an
appeal to historical evidence. I will address two
approaches to the debate, one a specific argument for a
category of homosexuality held at least by the early
Roman empire and the second a more general claim that
regardless of what a specific society thought, the
reality of homosexuality existed and one can see
recognitions of that reality. Oddly, though those who
make these arguments oppose themselves to Foucauldians,
neither side contests entirely Foucault's central claim
about the Greeks, one Dover made in a less pointed way
before him and Halperin has argued vigorously after
him. Whether or not pederasty was the only form of
same-sex relationship the Greeks recognized, that
relationship nevertheless followed a categorizing of
sexual relationships that did not attend primarily to
the sexes of the participants: ". . . sexual
relations—always conceived in terms of the model
act of penetration, assuming a polarity that opposed
activity and passivity—were seen as being of the
same type as the relationship between a superior and a
subordinate, and individual who dominates and one who
is dominated. . . ." (Use of Pleasure, 215). From this
perspective, a dominant male desiring sex in the active
role with either a woman or a boy would be experiencing
the same kind of desire. Moreover, the taboo attached
to the image of the effeminate gay man, in Greek
society attaches to a man who, by an excess of desire,
shows a lack of virile self-control. And this would be
true regardless of whether that excess manifests itself
in the unmanly willingness to allow oneself to be
penetrated or in the unmanly excessive participation in
sexual relationships with women (84-85). From this
perspective, at least, it would seem that the Greeks
did not think of sexual relationships as divided up
along the line of the sexes of the participants as we
do, and by implication at least, that they experienced
desire differently in consequent ways.
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One way to attack this picture as denying a natural
reality to homosexuality would be to pick out one part
of it and align it with current attitudes toward
homosexuality to show the persistence of those
attitudes, thus a persistent version of homophobia and
as a consequence, a persistent sexual identity beneath
the shifting conventions. An example of this approach
is Amy Richlin's pointedly titled "Not Before
Homosexuality: the Materiality of the Cinaedus
and the Roman Law Against Love Between Men." Richlin at
least intends to argue against Foucault and Halperin in
contending that
[it] is true that "homosexuality" corresponds to no
Latin word and is not a wholly adequate term to use
of ancient Roman males, since adult males normally
penetrated both women and boys. But it is partly
adequate to describe the adult male who preferred to
be penetrated. An accurate analysis is that here was
a concept of sexual deviance in Roman culture, which
was not homologous with the modern concept of
"homosexuality" but partook of some of the same
homophobic overtones our nineteenth-century coinage
owns. (529-30)
The figure Richlin identifies here is the
cinaedus, and she argues that there were people
who corresponded to this term, and that they were
treated with what amounts to homophobia. Both Foucault
and Halperin do deal with this figure, as we shall see,
so the question will not be over Richlin's having found
a bit of evidence that they ignored—the existence
of the cinaedus and a taboo against
him—but over the significance of that figure and
what kind of category he corresponds to. The first
problem is simply whether it is sufficient to pick out
one figure in a series of relationships categorized in
entirely different ways and claim that this is the
evidence of homosexuality in society. After all, if the
deviance of the cinaedus is still being
identified in terms of his anti-male desire to be
penetrated, then while there is something like what we
would describe as a gender aspect to his deviance, it
is not quite a sexual aspect. To this Richlin
essentially argues that if this figure corresponds to a
male who enjoys sexual relations, even if only of a
certain kind, only with other males, if he is depicted
according to the stereotypes applied in the
nineteenth-century to homosexuality construed as
inversion and in the twentieth-century to homosexuals
depicted in terms of their effeminacy, then regardless
of the Greek and Roman values surrounding pederasty, we
have a genuine trans-historical category that allows us
to do a meaningful history of homosexuality and
homophobia.
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If Foucault and Halperin, among others, had somehow
missed the figure of the cinaedus, Richlin's
case, though still limited, would have been stronger,
but in fact, her articulation of a commonality between
negative stereotypes about inversion in the nineteenth
century and negative stereotypes applied to the
cinaedus might have been taken word for word
from Foucault, who in the section in The Use of
Pleasure labeled "an image," makes the connection
explicitly. Beginning with a nineteenth-century
"stereotypical portrait of a homosexual or invert"
(18), Foucault then asserts that one can find exactly
the same image going back through Greco-Roman to
pre-Socratic Greek texts. He then asserts, however,
that it "would be completely incorrect to interpret
this as a condemnation of love of boys, or of what we
generally refer to as homosexual relations; but at the
same time, one cannot fail to see in it the effect of
strongly negative judgments concerning some possible
aspects of relations between men, as well as a definite
aversion to anything that might denote a deliberate
renunciation of the signs and privileges of the
masculine role" (19). He justifies this claim in a
passage that I referred to above explaining the
difference between the Greek categorization in terms of
active and passive sex and the modern one between
hetero- and homosexuality:
In the experience of sexuality such as ours, where a
basic scansion maintains an opposition between
masculine and feminine, the femininity of men is
perceived in the actual or virtual transgression of
his sexual role. No one would be tempted to label as
effeminate a man whose love for women leads to
immoderation on his part…In contrast, for the
Greeks it was the opposition between activity and
passivity that was essential, pervading the domain of
sexual behaviors and that of moral attitudes as well;
thus it was not hard to see how a man might prefer
males without anyone suspecting him of effeminacy,
provided he was active in the sexual relation and
active in the moral mastering of himself. On the
other hand, a man who was not sufficiently in control
of his pleasures—whatever his choice of
object—was regarded as "feminine." The dividing
line between a virile man and an effeminate man did
not coincide with our opposition between hetero- and
homosexuality; nor was it confined to the opposition
between active and passive homosexuality. It marked
the difference in people's attitudes toward the
pleasures. . . .(85)[11]
Foucault not only recognizes the existence of the
commonality of stereotype on which Richlin bases her
argument, he means by pointing to that commonality to
stress precisely the difference in acts of
categorization by which it is applied. Nor can we
adjudicate the dispute in terms of some empirical
element in the two ways of construing the
cinaedus. Both Foucault and Halperin note that
the term is not applied to all participants of same-sex
relations and is applied to men who have sexual
relations with women if their desire for sex is
immoderate. And both of them, despite the fact that the
term can be used of men who have sex with women, do
recognize the special role that desiring to be
penetrated plays in the definition of the term.
Richlin, for her part, begins by recognizing that the
common taboo she outlines does not refer to all
participants in same-sex practices and does also allow
that some men who were called cinaedi were so
labeled as a result of having sex with women: "authors
sometimes claim that a man's wife is involved with a
cinaedus and that cinaedi seem to be
faulted for excessive sexiness in general" (549). But
because the stereotype is importantly tied to an
enjoyment of being penetrated, she insists that
"overwhelmingly and explicitly, cinaedi are
said, with disgust, to be passive homosexuals" (549).
In other words, there is a broad agreement on the
empirical features of the category but a disagreement
on whether those features comprise a depiction of a
kind of homosexuality or of a kind of generalized,
immoderate sexual desire.
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To understand the unyielding quality of the debate,
we need to recognize that what is at issue in how to
read the evidence is precisely the issue the evidence
is supposed to solve. Boswell puts the essentialist
argument in its most general terms when he compares our
recognition of homosexuality in the Greek period to our
recognition of Newton's laws of gravity (96). The
Greeks clearly had no concept of a law of gravity but,
because that law describes features of the world in
which we live, regardless of human categories of
knowledge, the Greeks clearly did describe the forces
those laws explain. In like manner, even though the
Greeks might not have had concepts of homosexuality and
heterosexuality, if those concepts capture real
elements of the human psyche, then the activities they
do describe will correspond to those concepts and
exhibit their real existence. Of course the analogy
pre-supposes precisely the issue: whether the concepts
of hetero- and homosexuality do correspond to elements
of the psyche in the same way that the laws of gravity
describe certain forces in the universe. Halperin,
thus, proposes, as an alternative analogy, asking
whether it makes sense to describe those who work with
their hands prior to capitalism as a "proletariat."
(How to do the History of Homosexuality, 59-60).
In a vague way, it makes sense to see a commonality
among people in history who work with their hands and
whose labor produces surplus value for those who more
or less dominate them. But a proletariat exists
precisely as a function of being alienated, physically
unattached labor in relation to a capital-owning class
and thus the term only become meaningful in a
capitalist society when there is other than agrarian
labor. In the same way, one can find a recognition in
certain contexts of a distinction between same-sex
objects of desire and alternate-sex objects of desire.
But it will not get you very far in understanding how
the society construes sexual relations and how people
in it experience their desires and come by them to
think of that distinction as indicating the real
existence of a category of people that we could call
homosexuals, if in fact the entire conceptual apparatus
for making that distinction is absent from the society.
In effect, Boswell, Richlin and critics like them,
adduce the reality of the categories by pointing to
elements in Roman and Greek society that could be
described as showing the existence of homosexuality.
Foucault, Halperin and others, similarly point to the
same features as showing that the Greeks categorize
sexual practices in an entirely different way. Since
the only way to choose between one interpretation and
another will entail presuming whether the concepts of
homosexuality and heterosexuality actually do operate
trans-historically, it follows that pointing to those
features will not resolve the question.
-
I do not mean this account of the debate to suggest
a throwing up of the hands, in the manner of Stanley
Fish, with the clichéd conclusion that all
historical debates are ultimately matters of
interpretation with no interpretation-free facts that
can decide matters. My problem with such a conclusion
is, in the first instance, not that it might not be the
case but that, even if it is, it does not have much to
say about the specific issue of writing the history of
sexuality, which project would be left in the same fix
that all history is in. But, second and more
pertinently here, despite the above presentation of the
dispute, my neophyte's reading of this historical
debate leaves me entirely persuaded by the argument
made by the critics who follow Dover and Foucault and
more particularly by Halperin's account of it in his
two books. Or, rather more specifically, I am persuaded
by the accounts of the sexual categories of the Greeks
and Romans to see our own as at least historically
local, as hardly necessary conditions of human thought
even if I am agnostic about whether or not those
categories can be meaningfully superimposed on past
descriptions of practices and events—whether or
not such a superimposition would look like reading the
physics of the past through Newtonian categories or
like reading pre-industrial, feudal agrarian economies
through the categories of capitalist class structure. I
want to argue further that this estrangement from the
categories of the present remains the real aim of
Foucault's writing (whether one calls it history or
philosophy) and the more important element in them for
telling us how to do the history of sexuality. This
will lead finally to what I take to be the most
important connection between Foucault's work and the
history of sexuality aimed at supporting an
antihomophobic politics, which is not the details of
the history he writes but the rightness his picture of
discipline has for many gay critics (in contrast to the
wrongness it has had for so many liberal critics), how
recognizing this rightness necessitates what I have
been calling hedgerow envy on the part of many of those
of us who as theorists, treat Foucault as a theorist,
and why hedgerow envy may not, in this case, be a bad
thing.[12]
-
To get at what I all too grandly call "the real aim
of Foucault's writing," I will, in my capacity of
general theorist, treat one of his more philosophical
and theoretical moments, his articulation of his theory
of genealogy in his reading of "Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History." "Genealogy," as the term that succeeded
"archaeology" in Foucault's thinking, is all too
frequently construed as a specific way of doing
history, a new method, as archaeology arguably was. In
this perspective, genealogy undoes our delusions about
the meanings of institutions by pointing to their
actual past affiliations, and thus exhibiting their
actual discontinuities.[13]
And certainly the essay starts by posing genealogy as
"gray, meticulous and patiently documentary" as
"demanding a precision of knowledge, a large amount of
materials, and patience" (Dits, I, 1004). But
Nietzsche would be an odd avatar to choose to embody
such documentary patience and meticulousness. His
Genealogy of Morals proposes only the sketchiest
of histories and bases them on virtually no documentary
evidence. What Foucault does find in Nietzsche to share
is a genealogy that stands in opposition to a history
that bases itself on "the metahistoric unfolding of
ideal significations and vague teleologies" (1004-5).
In other words, genealogy is characterized by its
skepticism of teleology and origin more than by any
specific documentary method or itinerary that would
arrive at that end.
-
In the course of the essay that follows, Foucault
continues to talk about how genealogy "will attend to
the details and accidents of beginnings," how its
intention will always be to see "the face of the other
emerge, all masks finally fallen" (1008). In other
words, genealogy, despite the essay's attack on
philosophy (by which it means any belief in meaning or
teleology), has a Nietzschean, philosophical
expectation about what it will find through its
historical researches and that expectation, as much as
the researches, and determining their courses, defines
it. The final pages of the essay confirm the role of
this expectation in a startling claim that genealogy
has three uses each of which corresponds to and
recuperates by parodying or reversing one of the forms
of history outlined in Nietzsche's "On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life" (Untimely
Meditations, 57-123). There Nietzsche describes
three modes of history, each one of which can forward
the needs of the present or, if engaged in without
perspective or limit, obstruct those needs: monumental
history, antiquarian history and critical history. To
oppose monumental history, Foucault proposes instead a
history that parodies beliefs, thus "de-realizing us"
(1021). As against antiquarian history, which seeks to
discover continuities in the past, Foucault offers a
history that "systematically dissociates our identity"
(1022). The final use of history sacrifices the knowing
subject—"le sujet de connaissance" (1023) and
this use recuperates the critical history that in
Nietzsche serves the will to truth. Nietzsche's essay
is itself an attack on the historicism that he sees the
Germans as priding themselves on. His point with each
of these forms of history is that they have value only
insofar as they aid the present. Foucault's genealogy
goes one step further in this attack on history as a
field of knowledge. It does not present a new kind of
history but undoes the knowledge claims of the old
ones. Far from being a more vigorous historicism that
would discover the real truth the past has to tell us,
behind the illusions of an overly philosophical
history, it is rather an attack on the philosophy of
history that uses its researches to parody and invert
the forms of history. Genealogy has the project of
detaching us from ourselves; historical research is its
instrument, not its end.
-
If one reads the first two volumes of The History
of Sexuality for the genealogical theme that undoes
identity, one will find that the two positions that
have influenced the subsequent debate over the history
of homosexuality—that the nineteenth-century
invented homosexuality as a personality, while prior to
that there were merely acts of sodomy and that Greek
categorizations of sexual acts cannot be understood
through the categories of hetero- and homosexuality,
which categories thus appear as historically local
rather than universal—are actually secondary to
his more central claims and so consequently is the
empirical truth of them. Let us start with the first
volume of the series, whose French title is The Will
to Knowledge. Foucault makes all too clear in his
introduction that will—erased from the title of
the English translation—is indeed his theme:
And finally, the essential aim will not be to
determine whether these discursive productions and
those effects of power lead one to formulate the
truth about sex, or on the contrary falsehoods
designed to conceal that truth, but rather to bring
out the "will to knowledge" that serves as both their
support and their instrument. (11-12)
Foucault's objection to the will to knowledge
follows from his objection to the concept of man in
Order of Things and of the discipline that
enforces self-regulation through knowledge in
Discipline and Punish. In all cases, the claim
to know human essence ties individuals to the limits of
the identities imposed upon them. Sexuality,
constructed as a science, as it has been in the West,
imposes identities on individuals. Freedom from those
identities does not depend on proving that the
knowledge claims of nineteenth-century scientific
sexuality are false, only that they are not
intellectually necessary, that lives can be conducted
in their absence. Thus Foucault claims indifference to
whether discursive productions and power lead to truth
or falsehoods. He aims only to disengage from the
productions and the power a will to knowledge that may
be identified as a constraining will, regardless of the
status of the knowledge it discovers.
-
This aim shapes Foucault's later influential claim,
quoted above, with regard to the homosexual becoming a
personage in the nineteenth century. If one attends to
the modifications with which Foucault surrounds that
claim, it will be clear that he does not claim that
there were no such things as personality types tied to
sexual desires prior to the nineteenth century but
merely that it was possible under different contexts to
think about sexual practices in the absence of identity
concepts. One should note to start that the claim comes
in a list that purports to show that what happened in
the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was not the interdiction of sexual acts but the
definition of sexual identities. The first item in the
list contrasts the attempt to regulate childhood
masturbation with the attempt to forbid incest. In the
second instance, the aim was to eliminate all instances
of the act. In the first, masturbation supported an
apparatus for overseeing and regulating childhood more
closely. Foucault then moves to the second example:
This new pursuit of marginal sexualities entails an
incorporation of perversities and a new specification
of individuals. Sodomy—that of the old civil or
canonic laws—was a category of forbidden acts;
their perpetrator was only their juridical subject.
The homosexual of the nineteenth century has become a
personage: a past, a history, a childhood, a
character, a form of life; a morphology as well, with
an indiscrete anatomy and perhaps a mysterious
physiology. (42-3)[14]
Even taken in isolation, the passage does not claim
that the concept of sexual identities did not exist
prior to the nineteenth century, or even that prior
periods did not have identity concepts that they linked
to those who showed a preference for genital activity
with members of their own sex. It specifies that sodomy
in canonic and civil laws referred to a set of acts not
to an individual; the laws did not define a subject
except in the juridical sense.[15]
Foucault's remark a few pages earlier makes the
specification about those codes even clearer: "Up to
the end of the eighteenth century, three major explicit
codes—apart from customary regularities and
constraints of opinion—governed sexual practices:
canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law"
(37). Foucault begins with the recognition that the
laws defining sodomy were not the only ways European
culture defined sexual practices prior to the
nineteenth century. Indeed, since the heightened
attention to childhood masturbation he describes in the
preceding point, which participates in the same process
as the nineteenth century definition of the homosexual,
begins in the eighteenth century—although in
other discourses than the old codes—he could
hardly have thought that those codes comprehended all
the cultural definitions of sexuality.[16]
-
But with these qualifications, what purpose can this
statement any longer serve? Granted, homosexuality,
with the precise psychological etiologies and even
biological specifications with which the nineteenth
century first endowed it, may be a recent construction.
But if past cultures did have categories through which
they classified those whose tastes ran toward one
sexual practice as opposed to another, and if one of
those categories contained those who preferred same-sex
practices, then effectively one cannot claim that
homosexuality—except as specifically defined by
nineteenth century discursive practices—is a
cultural construction. First one should note that, when
posed the question of whether homosexuality was innate,
or socially conditioned, Foucault refused to answer
because "I think it's simply not useful to speak of
things that are outside of my field of expertise. The
question you ask does not come under my area of
competence, and I don't like to speak about that which
is not actually an object of my work" (Dits, II,
1140). In other words, Foucault does not think that his
work has as a consequence the claim that homosexuality
is culturally constructed. This might seem surprising
if one does not consider what the passage does claim
and how far that claim goes. First, Foucault wants to
show that the activity of giving sexual preferences
characterological ties of a kind that made them a
proper object of knowledge was a nineteenth-century
innovation. Since The History of Sexuality
argues that we still live with discourses that define
sexual preference as a matter of psychological
identity, seeing that form of categorization as
historically local is all that matters to his claim
here. As long as, first, one can instance a form of
categorization that does not see sex acts in terms of
sexual identity—for instance sodomy as defined by
the old civil and canonic laws—and second one can
see the definition of homosexuality in terms of
etiology, mode of living, biology, etc. as a
nineteenth-century innovation (does anyone argue that
these definitions of homosexuality existed prior to the
nineteenth century?), then his claim holds up. And
second, if that claim holds up, and we see the modern
practices of sexual definition not as
knowledge—or at least as merely
knowledge—but as a practice of constraint, his
genealogy will have achieved its end. He does not need
a theory of what homosexuality is to assert that any
claim as to what it is amounts to a form of
constraint.[17]
Nor does he need an historically accurate account of
what was prior to it for the genealogically ironic
Nietzschean critical history to have called into
question the domain of knowledge that produced the
concept of homosexuality.
-
If, when he wrote this passage, Foucault did believe
that prior to the nineteenth century, culture did not
construct identities out of sexual practices, he would
have to have given up this position by time he wrote
The Use of Pleasure since the very theme of that
book is how the Greeks constructed their understanding
of the subject, and of how they judged the choices
subjects made according to their different sexual
morés. He did, as we have seen, think that the
Greeks thought about both sexual relations and about
the basis on which ethical decisions should be made
with regard to sexual relations through very different
categorizations both of sexual practices and of what
counts as an ethical choice or problem. But he also did
argue that they thought one's sexual partners, one's
ability to restrain one's sexual impulse, one's
preference for activity or passivity all did derive
from and thus indicate something like a character. If
the cinaedus discussed above was not really a
homosexual, he nevertheless was a personage and his
quality as personage was manifest in his sexual
comportment. What was manifest and how it was
manifested was entirely different, but Foucault's point
in contrasting how the Greeks thought about their
sexual comportment was hardly that they didn't think
about it at all as significant. In contrasting how they
made their judgments, he makes clear that they did make
judgments. Their moral reflection on sexual conduct
(and, of course, not entirely sexual, since they way
they thought about it also pertained to other domains
in which restraint or excess were relevant), he says
"did not speak to men concerning behaviors presumably
owing to a few interdictions that were universally
recognized and solemnly recalled in codes, customs, and
religious prescriptions. It spoke to them concerning
precisely those conducts in which they were called upon
to exercise their rights, their power, their authority
and their liberty. . ." (23). The reflection spoke to
the Greeks on a different basis and about different
qualities of their personality, but it did speak to
them about the significance their acts had as more than
merely acts.
-
This distinction conditions Foucault's discussion of
how the Greeks categorized the significance of one's
sexual preferences. His contention that they did not
attend to the sex of one's object choice but rather to
who was active and who passive, who dominant and who
submissive, as is well known, comes almost entirely
from Dover's Greek Homosexuality.[18]
But he is not particularly concerned to argue that the
pederasty Dover analyzes represents all or the main
forms of Greek same-sex practices. And, while he does
insist that homosexuality does not accommodate how the
Greeks thought about sex, that is neither the central
point of his book nor even of the chapter in it on
pederasty. He more or less assumes Dover's definition
of pederasty but argues that what matters is not the
particular shapes that set of practices took but the
fact that the Greeks both problematized it and
theorized it: what is historically singular is not that
the Greeks found pleasure in boys, nor even that they
accepted this pleasure as legitimate; it is that this
acceptance of pleasure was not simple, and that it gave
rise to a whole cultural elaboration. In broad terms,
what is important to grasp here is not why the Greeks
had a fondness for boys but why they had a "pederasty";
that is, why they elaborated a courtship practice, a
moral reflection, and—as we shall see—a
philosophical asceticism around that fondness.
(214)[19]
-
Foucault means to show the different ways the Greeks
constructed the subject, what kinds of choices made one
one kind of subject rather than another, and
accordingly what kind of choices manifested who one
was. Thus the significance of Greek pederasty was not
that it does not correspond to our cultural division of
homosexual from heterosexual (though it does not) but
that the various problems it caused the culture and the
forms of self-control those problems led to created an
alternative way of constructing one's identity.
-
If there is a shift in Foucault's thinking between
the first and second volume of the history of sexuality
in that the first volume—in this sense still
following upon Discipline and Punish and even
Order of Things—tries to depict forms of
thought without the concept of subjectivity or identity
while the second and third volumes try instead to
depict alternative means of constructing subjectivity,
alternative materials out of which it might be built,
there is no shift in the motive behind the depictions.
The Use of Pleasure is not, as some of its first
critics oddly seemed to think, a paean to the Greek
form of subjectivity as a positive alternative to our
own.[20]
Foucault's description of the shift that took place
between The Will to Knowledge and The Use of
Pleasure makes clear that his goal was to depict
the modern concept of subjectivity as historically
local by showing alternative constructions of the
concept:
. . . it seemed to me that one could not very well
analyze the formation and development of the
experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century
onward, without doing a historical and critical study
dealing with desire and the desiring subject. In
other words, without undertaking a "genealogy." This
does not mean that I proposed to write a history of
the successive conceptions of desire, of
concupiscence, or of libido, but rather to analyze
the practices by which individuals were led to focus
their attention on themselves, to decipher,
recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of
desire, bringing into play between themselves and
themselves a certain relationship that allows them to
discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it
natural or fallen. In short, with this genealogy the
idea was to investigate how individuals were led to
practice, on themselves, and on others, a
hermeneutics of desire, hermeneutics of which their
sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but
certainly not the exclusive domain. Thus, in order to
understand how the modern individual could
experienced himself as a subject of a "sexuality," it
was essential first to determine how, for centuries,
Western man had been brought to recognize himself as
a subject of desire. (5-6)
In the first volume of the history of sexuality,
Foucault meant to give a limit to sexuality as a domain
of knowledge by showing its inauguration in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite what he
says here, for that purpose, beginning with that field
of knowledge's pre-history in Christian confession
would have been sufficient. The goal of the genealogy,
which was still, as we shall see, just to think
differently, led him to decide that historicizing the
subject meant not a pre-history in which we were
blessedly free of thinking of ourselves as subjects but
a history of different kinds of subjectivities. This
would not be a history of successive conceptions of
desire. Such a history, delineating a line of
development would not be a genealogy, which, as we have
seen, must undo notions of essence and end by undoing
notions of development. Instead, it analyzes different
practices that different periods thought led to a
knowledge of the truth of being since, if the practices
are sufficiently disparate, the connection between our
own practices and their goal in that knowledge will
seem equally tenuous.
-
I have silently assumed Foucault's earlier
definition of "genealogy" in construing the term in
this passage, firstly because nothing in the passage
otherwise explicates the term. It cannot be true that,
if one's subject-matter is desire and the desiring
subject, the only kind of history one could write would
be a genealogy. Foucault might not approve of other
ways of writing such a history, but one could write one
nevertheless. Nor does telling us that by genealogy he
means analyzing practices rather than successive
conceptions by itself tell us why he calls that
alternative a genealogy. But second, his description of
the genre of the work he is now engaged in makes clear
its connection to the Nietzschean discussion of that
term in the earlier essay:
The studies that follow, like the others I have done
previously, are studies of "history" by reason of the
domain they deal with and the references they appeal
to; but they are not the work of a
"historian."…Considered from the standpoint of
their "pragmatics," they are the record of a long and
tentative exercise that needed to be revised and
corrected again and again. It was a philosophical
exercise. The object was to learn to what extent the
effort to think one's own history can free thought
from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to
think differently. (9)
The exercise is philosophical because the object is
not the history it depicts but the effort to think
outside the limits of one's own presumptions. This is
of course the classic effort of philosophy since at
least the Enlightenment. The goal of thinking
differently as its own end, though, makes the exercise
genealogical inasmuch as genealogy, as Foucault sees
its version of critical history, destroys the subject
of knowledge—the subject that knowledge produces
(Dits, I, 1024). From this perspective,
Foucault's historical depictions in and of themselves
cannot tell us much about how to do the history of
sexuality since neither his aim nor his method are
historical. Even the claims he makes in referring to
history must be carefully qualified and placed within
context to be maintained as historical. In particular,
it is hard to imagine him getting very exercised by
questions of how to refer to same-sex practices prior
to the nineteenth-century definition of homosexuality.
But this hardly means that the uses historians of
sexuality and homosexuality make of his work and of the
most frequently cited claims are somehow actually
improper or unFoucauldian. Rather it means that
Foucault tells us of the propriety of having a
philosophical object in one's historical perspective.
And this brings us back to hedgerow history.
-
Hedgerow envy, that wonderfully inauthentic desire
to have had a valuable experience without the trouble
of actually having experienced it, has the feature, in
addition to its inauthenticity, of the distance of
safeness. But from distance and inauthenticity we can,
I think, reconstruct a connection between Foucault's
aims and the features of his works that have led to so
much discussion. To do so, I will now turn to what I
described at the outset as the third level of
Foucault's influence at least on gay historians of
homosexuality: while Foucault's analysis of power and
particular its skepticism about liberation has seemed
either quietist or irrationally anarchist to many
straight liberal critics (though not all of them), it
has seemed strangely right (strangely, of course only
to those who don't share the sense of the rightness) to
many gay critics and activists (though not all of
them). Halperin offers numbers of reasons for this
sense that Foucault's position on power just does
describe the way things work and how one can work with
that situation. Two seem to me particularly pertinent.
One, he says, is the experience of the closet, whereby
being in it, while that is hardly freedom, still allows
a latitude of action that being out does not and coming
out hardly amounts to emerging "from a state of
servitude into a state of untrammeled liberty"
(Saint Foucault, 29-30).[21]
Second, he notes, that Foucault's sense of the workings
of power and resistance seem particularly pertinent to
the experience of confronting homophobia, with all of
its contradictory resources (31). Although he does not
discuss it here, claiming liberation on the basis of an
identity can hardly seem promising to gays since the
first homosexual liberation movement in the nineteenth
century in fact provided the material for homophobic
stereotypes that are still with us (Halperin, One
Hundred Years, 52). On the other hand, to the
extent that a constructivist position can be
transformed into a position that gayness is a "free"
choice, it can be the grounds for arguing that the
choice ought not to be made (Sedgwick, 41). Such
double-binds make very attractive the idea that one
should act precisely without theories of origin or of
pure states outside of power.
-
Now this connection between the politics of The
History of Sexuality and at least gay politics may
seem in both good and bad ways the very opposite of
both the distance and the inauthenticity of hedgerow
envy. Imagine, for instance, how a straight critic who
finds Foucault quietist or anarchist might criticize
the position (it is, alas, only too easy if you try).
First, granting the appropriateness of Foucault's
analysis to the position within which gays who assent
to his argument see themselves, one ought not to
generalize too quickly from the contingencies of one's
own position to a theory of power and resistance in
general. If Foucault's critics are correct in arguing
that he does not offer a position from which to resist
power coherently and effectively, if power is
inherently negative and the only ethical choice is to
step outside it, then, even given all the ways those
from outside the gay perspective will tend to distort
it and not see its particularities, it will remain
theoretically true that gays' sense of their own
politics will still contain within it some version of a
position of freedom and their politics could be
recuperated on that basis to look like a liberal theory
of individual liberty.[22]
Second, to the extent that the kind of history of
homosexuality Halperin, for instance, writes shares
this politics as its motivating force—and
Foucault's histories, after all, certainly did have as
their motivating force a philosophy of questioning
value-free original positions and saw as a particular
instance of this position gay politics, as we have seen
in some of his statements in interviews—then that
suggests that those histories will be distorted by
their political presumptions. And finally, to the
extent that the histories following upon Foucault
imagine working out those politics within the very
limited position of arguing a couple of specific
Foucauldian claims as the basis for a history of
homosexuality when his aims and his themes were much
larger, then even despite their sympathy with
Foucault's basic apprehension of power, these
historians will even be improperly limiting their own
source.
-
Controversies of this sort, between the testimonies
of those in a certain subject position and those who,
from outside that position, appeal to values of
objectivity, which values are then contested on the
basis that objectivity is its own kind of subject
position, never have satisfactory outcomes, never go
anywhere new. I do not want to play ventriloquist, to
offer a justification for the application of Foucault
to doing the history of sexuality based on Halperin's
perception of the rightness of his description of
power. Not sharing the subject-position being attacked,
pretending to defend it from within would amount to the
kind of critical cross-dressing Elaine Showalter
criticized some years back.[23]
Instead, I want to suggest that the problem with the
straight objectivist position articulated above is not
that it sacrifices the values of authenticity for those
of a false distance, but that it is insufficiently
distanced and insufficiently inauthentic. The
insufficiency in the distance of the positions outlined
in the prior paragraph is easy enough to articulate.
Since all of three of those arguments fault Halperin's
description of gay experience for being insufficiently
objective, they amount to an attack on the place from
which that description comes rather than an analysis of
either Foucault's theory of power and knowledge or of
what it means to the claim that ethical positions must
be based on at least the concept of a power-free state,
a state moreover that one group within our society
finds literally meaningless for their experience
of how they must operate politically. Given that the
aim of Foucault's project is to get us outside of
ourselves, the refusal to engage in the project because
of our sense—even if accurate—that the
arguments of some of those who have been influenced by
him are insufficiently distanced amounts to a refusal
to engage in that project of distancing for merely
formal reasons. Foucault's aim of getting us to lose
our fondness for ourselves, to free thought from what
it silently thinks, is so completely in line with
Enlightenment ideals that to the extent that his
"histories" do effect that end, one would think that
their philosophical value would far exceed any details
of historical inaccuracy or accidents of political
implication. With regard to his theory of power and his
theory of resistance, if the ideal of liberation cannot
work for even one group, then its value for other
groups can only be local, not a universal ideal. So
again, one would think that liberal universalism would
compel an attempt to make sense of its own
provinciality rather than worry the source of the
information that indicates that provinciality.
-
But does such a defense really do Foucault justice?
Doesn't it make him "philosophical" at the cost of
robbing him of his political force? After all, these
most general theoretical statements of Foucault on
which I am fixing could be so readily detachable from
one history and affixed to another that making a case
for his writing at that level may take from it the
vital sting of its more specific political claims. Once
again, an effete Arnoldian holds up the pouncet box of
theory while serious forms of oppression surround us.
At the very least, one might accuse my argument of
wanting the kick of political arguments while
preserving itself from the dangers they incur by
remaining safely within the walls of indifferent theory
and so of enacting the inauthenticity of hedgerow
envy.
-
But inauthenticity is not really such a bad state
for a Foucauldian. It allows that self-crafting that
was the ethical aim of his history of the Greek Use
of Pleasure. Here, for instance, Foucault discusses
Sartre, authenticity and the art of self-creation:
From a theoretical point of view, I think that Sartre
set aside the idea of the self as something that is
given to us, but, thanks to the moral concept of
authenticity, he fell back on the idea that one must
be oneself and truly oneself. In my view, the only
practical and acceptable consequence of what Sartre
has said entails linking his theoretical discovery to
creative practice and not to the idea of
authenticity. I think there is only one possible way
to go from the idea that the self is not given in
advance: we must make works of art of ourselves.
(Dits, II, 1211)
Certainly Foucault had a deep skepticism for the
universal intellectual. But he was equally skeptical of
claims of authenticity and propriety, of arguments that
take their value from subject positions. His attack on
the concept of sexuality as a form of power that took
part of its force from the claim to be a universal
knowledge was in the service of freeing individuals
from being objects of knowledge. Since a concept of
universal freedom or a concept of authentic identity
simply re-introduces the constraints he meant to avoid,
the inauthenticity of an artificial theoretical
self-distancing can claim a tie—a tenuous and
inauthentic one to be sure—to the history of
sexuality and the historical provinciality Foucault
outlined. This inauthenticity cannot interdict the
deployment of identity as a political tool or the
statements by a group of Foucault's specific pertinence
to their situation, nor should it want to. It certainly
cannot fault subsequent histories of sexuality for
fixing on details of Foucault's theories because of
their political effectiveness. But it can demand of
critics who defend objective distance that they carry
that criterion to its logical if artificial and
self-undercutting end.
-
Inauthenticity has one trait in common with
Nietzschean genealogy: they are both motivated by the
will to knowledge and they each wind up, precisely
because of that motivation, worrying the will rather
than extending the knowledge. Foucault's liberal
critics frequently complain that his theories paralyze
political resistance. His answer is relevant here:
Who is paralyzed? Do you believe that what I've
written on the history of psychiatry has paralyzed
those who for some time experienced unease with
regard to the institution? And to see what has
happened in and around prisons, I don't think that
the effect of paralysis is very obvious. . . . On the
other hand, it is true that a certain number of
people—for instance those who work within the
institution of prison, which is not quite being in
prison—must not be able to find in my books
advice or prescriptions that allow them to know "what
to do." (Dits, II, 850-1)
I think this statement can be applied to the
supposed problem of what kinds of consequences his
history of sexuality has. His work does not seem to
block the activities of those it would support. It may
block the discourse of those on the outside looking in
from thinking they can act from an outside free of
power, but it also tells us what the value of that
position "outside" really is.
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