by Gary Gutting
On one level, Discipline and Punish does for prisoners what The History of Madness did for the mad. It analyses our allegedly humanitarian treatment of a marginalized group and shows how that treatment involves its own form of domination. In contrast to the book on madness, the analysis focuses more on the causal origins of institutional structures and less on systems of thought; it is, that is to say, more genealogical than archaeological. But this is a difference in emphasis only, since, as we have seen, the genealogy of Discipline and Punish is based on an archaeology of thought about the prison, and The History of Madness has a central concern with the institutional consequences of our perceptions of madness.
What most sets Discipline and Punish apart from its predecessor is the idea that the prison-model has metastasized throughout modern society. As a result, the book is not, like The History of Madness, centred on a specific Other against which ‘we’ (normal society) define ourselves. Society itself appears as a multitude of dominated others: not only criminals but also students, patients, factory workers, soldiers, shoppers. … Each of us is – and in a variety of ways – the subject of modern power. Correspondingly, there is no single centre of power, no privileged ‘us’ against which a marginalized ‘them’ is defined. Power is dispersed throughout society, in a multitude of micro-centres. This dispersion corresponds to the fact that there is no teleology (no dominating class or world-historical process) behind the development. Modern power is the chance outcome, in the manner of genealogy, of numerous small, uncoordinated causes.
Foucault’s picture of modern power challenges the premises of most revolutionary movements, in particular, Marxism. These movements identify specific groups and institutions (for example, the bourgeoisie, the central bank, the military high command, the government press) as sources of domination, the destruction or appropriation of which will lead to liberation. In the premodern world, when power was effectively centralized in the royal court and a few related institutions, such a revolution could be successful. The Marxists are like military strategists who plan to fight the previous war; taking the French Revolution as their model, they are trying to cut off the head of the king in a world where there is no king. Even after the government offices, the military bases, and the official newspapers are taken over, there remain countless other centres of power that resist the revolution. Foucault himself cited the Soviet Union as an ‘example of a State apparatus which has changed hands, yet leaves social hierarchies, family life, sexuality and the body more or less as they were in capitalist society’ (P/K, ‘Questions on Geography’, 73). The fundamental transformation the revolutionaries seek requires central control down to finest details of a nation’s life. Here, perhaps, we have a Foucaultian explanation of the totalitarian thrust of modern revolutions.
This analysis suggests the reactionary conclusion that meaningful revolution, hence genuine liberation, is impossible: the only alternative to the modern net of micro-centres of power is totalitarian domination. Foucault would, I think, agree that these are the only global alternatives. But his conclusion would not be reactionary despair but a denial of the assumption that revolutionary liberation requires global transformation. For Foucault, politics – even revolutionary politics – is always local.
But locality itself is frequently a refuge of reaction. Particularly given Foucault’s democratization of oppression – depending on the local context, we are all victims – how can he avoid dissipating effective revolution in an endless series of trivial protests? The bankers, the lawyers, the full professors will all have complaints of exploitation (as, for example, employees or consumers) that would seem to be as legitimate as any others. Here, however, Foucault can appeal to his notion of the marginal, his replacement, from the 1970s on, for the romantic idea of the mad as the radically Other. Marginalized individuals and groups are, unlike the mad, genuinely part of modern society; they speak its language (even if with an accent), share many of its values, play essential social and economic roles. At the same time, they are, in contrast to most of us, perpetually on the borders of society. This is for either or both of two reasons: their lives my be significantly defined by values that are counter to those of the social mainstream (think of homosexuals, members of non-standard religions, immigrants from non-Western cultures) or they may belong to a group whose welfare is systematically subordinated to that of mainstream groups (think of migrant workers, children in ghetto schools, street-walking prostitutes, inmates of penitentiaries).
In contrast to the mad, the marginalized have values that can meaningfully challenge our own and needs that could be plausibly satisfied within our society. Their concerns can, therefore, be the focus of programmes for effective political action. Further, such programmes can be genuinely revolutionary without Utopian global ambitions. For us to authentically say ‘we’ with the mad would require demolishing our core values and institutions, but the claims of the marginal are based on critiques of specific features of our society that can be modified without total overthrow.
It might seem that a politics of the marginal is itself just another instrument of marginalization, since it consists of ‘our’ claiming the right to speak for ‘them’. Foucault was well aware of this danger and insisted on political actions designed simply to provide opportunities for marginalized groups to speak and be heard. So, for example, the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), which he, along with his companion, Daniel Defert, founded in the early 1970s, used Foucault’s status as an intellectual celebrity to attract media attention to prisoners who spoke directly on their own behalf.
Marginality is the political counterpart of what we encountered earlier, in an epistemological context, as error. Politically, of course, error must be understood not only as the falsity of a proposition but also, non-linguistically, as inappropriate behaviour or misguided values. Foucaultian politics, as I am understanding it, is the effort to allow the ‘errors’ that marginalize a group to interact creatively with the ‘truths’ of the mainstream society. To the extent that if the effort succeeds, the marginal group will no longer be a specific object of domination, and society as a whole will be transformed and enriched by what it had previously rejected as errors.
It may seem that what I am calling ‘creative interaction’ is just a cover for assimilating marginal groups into the social mainstream, and so destroying their most distinctive values. But interaction need not involve a leveling assimilation, particularly if it is achieved by giving the marginal group a serious voice in the terms of the interaction. On the other hand, there is the converse question of whether, or to what extent, a given marginal group is worth interacting with. We may, quite legitimately, decide that the needs and values of certain marginal groups (for example, neo-Nazis or apocalyptic religious cults) are simply incompatible with our basic values and that we can, at most, tolerate them.
A final difficulty: why should our political practice be so focused on marginal groups? Why not, for example, a neo-conservative politics of deepening our commitment to mainstream values or extending them to other societies? This is a crucial question for those who, like Foucault, share the liberal assumption that self-critique and appreciation of the Other should be at the heart of our political agenda. Unfortunately, unlike liberals such as John Rawls, Foucault has little to offer in response. His own political stance seems to derive simply from his own individual commitment to constant self-transformation. His focus on marginal groups follows from his horror of being stuck in an identity. Here, for Foucault, the political is at root personal. To those who not share his horror, he can only reply – in words he once deployed in a similar context – ‘We are not from the same planet’ (UP, 7).
Chapter 9
Modern sex
The irony … is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance.
Because he was homosexual, writing a history of modern sexuality must have been a particularly personal enterprise for Foucault. His biographers suggest that as an adolescent he
suffered from having sexual interests that French society of the 1940s and 1950s regarded mostly with shame or outrage. Even the generally tolerant milieu of the École normale was not entirely hospitable to homosexuality. Foucault makes it clear that one of his reasons for accepting a job in Sweden was the hope, not entirely fulfilled, of finding a more open sexual climate. Even though the details of Foucault’s sex life remain sketchy – and why shouldn’t they? – there is every reason to think that the experience of gay marginality was an important part of his life. On the other hand, he was as unwilling to accept the identity of ‘homosexual’ as he was any other. He seldom wrote or spoke on record as a ‘gay man’, and, when he did – for example, in a few interviews with gay publications – his attitude toward the activist gay community is more that of a sympathetic observer than a committed participant. He is most attracted by what he sees as recent gay explorations of new forms of human community and identity.
In any case, homosexuality was just one of many topics to be covered by Foucault’s history of sexuality, which in addition to a volume called ‘Perverts’ would also have volumes on children, women, and married couples. Moreover, his general introduction to the project, the only volume of the series actually published, shows that, as in Discipline and Punish, his treatment would expand beyond marginalized groups to everyone in modern society. In fact, it seems clear that, from the beginning, Foucault’s work on sexuality was developing a dimension beyond that of power relations. It was becoming a history of the formation of subjects in not only a political but also a psychological and ethical sense.
The starting-point is, however, still Foucault’s conception of modern power, which is most explicitly set out in volume one of the History of Sexuality. As a result, Foucault’s initial treatment of sexuality is a fairly straightforward extension of the genealogical method of Discipline and Punish. The method is applied to the various modern bodies of knowledge about sexuality (‘sciences of sexuality’) in order to show their intimate association with the power structures of modern society. The focus of this aspect of Foucault’s discussion is what he calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’. This is the common assumption that the primary attitude of modern society toward sex (beginning in the 18th century, reaching a peak in the Victorian Age, and still exerting strong influence today) was negative; that, except for the closely delimited sphere of monogamous marriage, sexuality was opposed, silenced, and, as far as possible, eliminated.
Foucault does not deny the fact of repression. The Victorian age covered bosoms, censored literature, and waged vigorous campaigns against masturbation. But he denies that modern power is primarily exercised through repression and that opposition to repression is an effective way of resisting modern power. Rather, he thinks that modern power created new forms of sexuality by inventing discourses about it. For example, although same-sex relations have occurred throughout human history, the homosexual as a distinct category, with defining psychological, physiological, and perhaps even genetic characteristics, was created by the power/knowledge system of the modern sciences of sexuality.
According to Foucault, sexual repression is a superficial phenomenon; far more significant is the ‘veritable discursive explosion’ (HS, 17) of talk about sex that began in the 17th century, with the Counter-Reformation’s legislation on the practice of confession. Penitents were required to ‘examine their consciences’ with a thoroughness and nuance previously unheard of. It was not enough to say ‘I slept with a woman other than my wife’; you had to say how many times, just what sorts of acts were involved, whether the woman was herself married. Nor was it enough to report overt actions. Equally important were thoughts and desires, even if not carried out. But even here it was not enough to say, ‘I thought about sleeping with a woman other than my wife’. You also had to determine if you had dwelt on the thought, found enjoyment in it rather than rejecting it immediately; and, if you had entertained it, whether this was done with a certain inadvertence or with ‘full consent of the will’. All these factors were needed for the confessor to determine the degree of guilt (for example, mortal versus venial sin), impose an appropriate penance, and give advice for moral improvement. The result for penitents was an ever deeper and more precise self-knowledge, the outcome of a ‘hermeneutics of the self’ that revealed as fully as possible their inner sexual natures. Foucault’s suggestion, however, is that this nature is not so much discovered as constituted by the required self-examination. What I am sexually depends on the categories I am required to use in making my confession.
A large part of the history of modern sexuality is the secular adaptation and expansion of these religious techniques of self-knowledge. Confession may no longer be made to a priest but it is surely made to one’s doctor, psychiatrist, best friend, or, at least, to oneself. And the categories that define the possibilities of one’s sexual nature are not self-chosen but accepted on the authority of ‘experts’ in the new modern sciences of sexuality: the Freuds, the Kraft-Ebbings, the Havelock Ellises, the Margaret Meads. Such experts present as discoveries about human nature what are actually just new social norms for behaviour.
Of course, there is a distinction between sexuality as a social construct and sex as a biological reality. Foucault does not deny that there are, for example, undeniable physiological facts about human reproduction. But he maintains that once we move from sheer biology to the inevitably hermeneutic and normative concepts of psychology, anthropology, etc., the distinction breaks down. The Oedipal complex, for example, is tied to assumptions about the meaning and value of the bourgeois family; it is not just another fact, like the physiology of conception. Even what seem to be simple biological facts, for example, the distinction of male and female, can turn out to have normative social significance, as is demonstrated by the case of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century hermaphrodite, who was raised as a female but, in her twenties, came under the scrutiny of doctors who decided that she was in fact a man and forced her to live as one. Foucault published the poignant memoirs Barbin wrote before committing suicide at the age of thirty.
Given his critique of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault is able to develop a history of sexuality that often parallels his history of the prison. Just as the modern sciences of criminology define categories of social dysfunction (juvenile delinquent, kleptomaniac, drug addict, serial killer, etc.) that are simultaneously sources of knowledge and of control regarding their ‘subjects’, so the modern sciences of sexuality define categories of sexual dysfunction (homosexual, nymphomaniac, fetishist, etc.) that have a parallel role as power/knowledge. Foucault cites the case of Jouy, a slightly retarded 19th-century French peasant, who would occasionally entice young girls of his village into what Foucault describes as ‘harmless embraces’. No doubt such things had gone on in French villages for centuries, but someone reported Jouy to the authorities who brought down upon him the full brunt of the new science of sexuality. After detailed legal and medical examinations, he was found guilty of no crimes but was nonetheless confined to a hospital for the rest of his life as a ‘pure object of medicine and knowledge’ (HS, 32). Many of us today will be shocked at Foucault’s insouciance over what we might well judge sexual molestation, but Foucault would no doubt see our reaction as itself a sign of the effects of the modern power/knowledge system.
Three of Foucault’s six planned volumes were to treat specific marginalized groups: children, as the object of the campaign to suppress masturbation (The Children’s Crusade); women as subjects of the sexually based disorder of hysteria (The Hysterical Woman); and homosexuals and other groups judged sexually ‘abnormal’ (Perverts). All of these, like the criminals of Discipline and Punish, were constituted and controlled by hierarchical observation and normalizing judgements. Further, as in the case of criminality, there was no real possibility of eliminating or even substantially reducing the targeted behaviours, so the de facto function of the power apparatus was simply to control segments of the population. A fourth projected volume was T
he Malthusian Couple, where Foucault’s topic would have been various power structures designed to limit the population and improve its quality. This, again as in Discipline and Punish, is readily seen as an extension of disciplinary power to non-marginal groups.
In the concluding chapter of the introduction to The History of Sexuality, Foucault seems to be moving beyond sexuality as such and develops a notion of biopower, which embraces all the forms of modern power directed toward us as living beings, that is, as subject to standards of not just sexual but biological normality. Biopower is concerned with the ‘task of administering life’, a process that operates on two levels. On the level of individuals, there is an ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’; on the level of social groups, there is a ‘bio-politics of populations’ (HS, 139. The first level implicitly complements the primarily epistemological treatment of medicine in The Birth of the Clinic, making explicit the political significance (in a broad sense that includes the social and the economic) of the medical norms defining a healthy individual. So, for example, the modern medical notion of obesity corresponds to the marginalized social class of ‘fat people’, and modern techniques of drug treatments of illness are inextricably tied to the economics of the pharmaceutical industry. The second level concerns the modern focus on a nation’s entire population as a resource that must be protected, supervised, and improved. Thus, capitalism requires universal medical care and education to ensure an adequate workforce; racist ideologies call for eugenic measures to protect the purity of the population ‘stock’; and military planners develop the concept of ‘total war’, as a battle between not just armies but entire populations.