by Gary Gutting
We see, then, that Foucault’s project of a history of modern sexuality was, even as he began it, expanding to a history of modern biopower. And from the late 1970s on, he took up the themes of such a history. So, for example, he returned to issues in the history of medicine and psychiatry, now from the broader perspective of his new view of power. Also, he began studying what he called ‘governmentality’: the art, developed from medieval pastoral models, of rulers’ care for the populations under their control.
But even more significant was another direction of expansion, toward what Foucault came to call a ‘history of the subject’. This had already begun to emerge in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault occasionally noted how the objects of disciplinary control could themselves internalize the norms whereby they were controlled and so become monitors of their own behaviour. In the context of sexuality, this phenomenon becomes central, since individuals are supposed to discern their own fundamental nature as sexual beings and, on the basis of this self-knowledge, transform their lives. As a result, we are controlled not only as objects of disciplines that have expert knowledge of us; we are also controlled as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects of our own knowledge.
13. Foucault in his apartment in Paris, 1978
This new perspective leads Foucault to question the modern ideal of sexual liberation. I discover my deep sexual nature through self-scrutiny and come to express this nature by overcoming various hang-ups and neuroses. But am I really freeing myself, or am I just reshaping my life in accord with a new set of norms? Isn’t promiscuity as demanding an ideal as monogamy, the imperative to be sexually adventurous as burdensome as a prudish limitation to the missionary position? The magazines, self-help books, and sex manuals that guide us to a life of liberated sexuality seem to induce in us as much insecurity and fear about our sexual attractiveness and ability to perform as sermons and tracts did in our grandparents about the dangers of sexual indulgence. More importantly, is my acceptance of the demands of liberation any more an expression of my ‘true nature’ than were our grandparents’ acceptance of the demands of traditional morality? Foucault suggests that, in both cases, the acceptance may merely be an internalization of external norms. The irony of our endless preoccupation with our sexuality, Foucault says, is that we think that it has something to do with liberation (HS, 159).
Even more importantly, Foucault’s new perspective led him to the view that his study of sexuality was really part of an effort to understand the process whereby individuals become subjects. He was, he concluded, writing not so much a history of sexuality as a history of the subject. This transition arose from the fact that he had found sexuality to be an integral part of our identity as selves or subjects. To say that I am homosexual or that I am obsessed with Albertine is to say something central about what I am in the concreteness of my subjectivity. Here Foucault seems to return to the standpoint of individual consciousness, which he earlier rejected in his choice of the philosophy of the concept over the philosophy of experience. I, however, would suggest that he never really left this standpoint, but instead rejected transcendental readings of subjectivity that ignored its fundamentally historical nature. In any case, he now felt the ability and the need to give an account of the historical process whereby we become subjects. The question is not how consciousness emerges from unconscious matter but how a conscious being assumes a particular identity, that is, comes to think of itself as directed by a given set of ethical norms, which give its existence a specific meaning and purpose.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault began looking at the way the modern consciousness of an ethical self emerged through the secularization of Christianity’s hermeneutics of the self (as in the confessional practices we discussed above). His original plan was to develop this theme at length in a separate volume on medieval Christian views of sexuality, which he called Les Avoux de la chair. (This was to be the second volume of the history of sexuality, followed by the four volumes, on children, women, perverts, and couples.) Foucault says he finished a draft of this volume but was not satisfied with what he had written and set it aside. Although the draft apparently does still exist, it has never been published (Foucault’s family have insisted on following his terse injunction: ‘No posthumous publications.’). Nor is the draft available in the Foucault Archives in Paris; very few people have even seen it and there are no detailed accounts of its content. (Some who have seen it say it isn’t really a complete draft, as Foucault suggested.)
In any case, as Foucault reflected further on his project, he decided that he needed to begin not with the Middle Ages but with ancient Greek and Roman views on sexuality and the self. He had concluded that to properly understand the Christian hermeneutic view of the self, he had to trace its origins and differences from ancient ideas. He began brushing up his school-boy Greek and Latin and had many discussions with two of his friends and colleagues in the Collège de France: Paul Veyne, a Roman historian, and Pierre Hadot, an historian of ancient philosophy. This major redirection, combined with ill health (which turned out to be the AIDS from which Foucault eventually died) seriously delayed the project. It was only in 1984, just before his death, that Foucault was able to publish two volumes on the ancient world: The Use of Pleasure, which discussed Greek texts of the 4th century BC, and The Care of the Self, which covered Greek and Roman texts from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD.
Although these books were titled Volume II and Volume III of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, there is no sense in which Volume I, which we have been discussing here, can be regarded as an introduction to them. Put roughly, the project Volume I is introducing is one in which modern sexuality would be studied as an example of bio-power: biological (in a broad sense) knowledge as a basis for socio-political control of individuals and groups. This is a project Foucault never carried out, although there are some elements of it dispersed in his writings before and after Volume I. Volumes II and III are part of a study of ancient sexuality as an example of the ethical formation of the self. It has no overlap with the earlier interest in bio-power, although there is a connection through the shared topic of the Christian hermeneutics of the self. It would have been less misleading if Foucault had not presented theses two books as continuations of his original history of sexuality. He may have envisaged some broader project that would have approached sexuality through both bio-power and the formation of the self. But at the end of his life he seems to have rather been moving away from the history of sexuality. His new direction, as we shall see, connects the formation of the subject not to sexuality but to what he came to call ‘games of truth’.
Chapter 10
Ancient sex
Sex is boring.
Those who have struggled with the obscurities of Foucault’s archly intense prose are vastly relieved by the easy lucidity with which he writes in his last two books. Had his final illness led to a peaceful reconciliation reflected in his writing? Or was it merely that, wanting to finish this project before he died, he didn’t have time for baroque complexification? Rather, I think, Foucault had entered a world that was removed from the present he so often found ‘intolerable’ and that suggested modes of existence he found immensely appealing.
His topic, the ethical formation of the self, emerged, of course, from his analysis of modern power relations, which he saw penetrating even the interiority of our personal identity. No doubt the reason he so resisted any fixed identity was his realization that even what might seem to be his own autonomous choice of identity would be just an internalization of social norms. But, as Foucault traces the historical constitution of ethical identity back beyond the Christian hermeneutics of the self and its modern secular successors, dominating power comes to have little place in his story.
He still plays on the duality of the term ‘subject’, speaking now of the ‘modes of subjectification’, whereby an ethical code enters individuals’ lives and constitutes their identity. And his general structure of subjectificati
on – derived from an archaeological analysis of ancient texts – is certainly open to power relations. This structure involves, as its basis, the acts that concern sexual behaviour (what the Greeks called ta aphrodisia – the ‘things of Aphrodite’ and what Foucault labels the ‘ethical substance’). It further involves the sense in which individuals are made subject to the ethical code. This, which Foucault calls the ‘mode of subjection’, might be a matter of anything from conforming to social conventions to carrying out a programme of self-fulfilment. Beyond the question of what it means to be subjected to the moral code is the question of the specific means by which the subjection is carried out, the ‘forms of elaboration’, which might, for example, include self-conscious following of practical rules or, on the contrary, a sudden, overwhelming conversion. Finally, there is the ultimate goal (telos) envisaged for the project of morality; for example, the attainment of self-mastery or purification for an afterlife.
Although this schema allows for the operation of power, the way Foucault applies it to ancient sexual ethics emphasizes ethical subjectification as something carried out by individuals who seem in control of their destiny. They might, to combine some of the above examples, be carrying out a project of self-fulfilment by meticulously following a set of practices (‘techniques of the self’) designed to produce self-mastery. Likewise, Foucault speaks, with apparent admiration, of the Greeks’ ‘aesthetics of existence’, in which a life is created like a work of art. It also becomes apparent that Foucault’s focus is much more general than sexual ethics. As he commented in an interview while working on The Care of the Self: ‘I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self … than sex – sex is boring’ (‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, EW I, 253).
But, we will point out, Foucault himself has already shown, especially in the History of Sexuality I, that there can be only an illusion of self-creation. What we may think is our freedom is, like modern sexual liberation, only an internalization of the constraints of power relations. Foucault may be attracted by the ancients’ project of creating beautiful lives, but he of all people is surely aware that this very project is entwined with the power structures of Greek society. Consider, for example, the Greek practice of homosexual love between men and adolescent boys. Even though this is free of Christian strictures about intrinsically evil, unnatural acts, it is, as Foucault emphasizes in The Use of Pleasure, problematized for political reasons. The boy, who is sought as the passive partner of a dominating male, is nonetheless being groomed as a future leader of the polis. How could such a person be a sexual object on the same level as women and slaves? For all of Plato’s talk of ideal beauty and the soul’s self-mastery, the issue of ‘Platonic love’ cannot be detached from the power relations of Athenian society.
The key to this issue is the concept of problematization, which I have just casually introduced but which is in fact a key notion of Foucault’s later thought. Problematizations formulate the fundamental issues and choices through which individuals confront their existence. The fact that my existence is problematized in a specific way is no doubt determined by the social power relations in which I am embedded. But, given this problematization, I am able to respond to the issues it raises in my own way, or, more precisely, in a way by which I will define what I, as a self, am in my historical context.
There is an implied contrast – although Foucault never makes it explicit – between problematization and marginalization. In the ancient context where he introduces the term, it is the lives of free Greek males that are problematized, not those of marginalized groups such as women and slaves. Marginalization corresponds to the strongest constraints that a society exercises on individuals. Even the marginalized are not entirely determined by a society’s power structures, since they are capable of engaging (and succeeding) in revolutionary movements against what dominates them. But they can define themselves only through their struggle with power. The ‘mainstream’ members of a society, those who are not marginalized, are less constrained. The power network defines them in a preliminary way but allows for a significant range of further self-definition. Unlike the marginalized, they have available ‘niches’ within the society that provide them room for self-formation in their own terms. The ‘problematization’ of the free Greek male lies in this domain.
My suggestion is that, in moving to the history of the subject (and to the history of ancient sexuality), Foucault implicitly switches his primary focus from those whose lives are marginalized to those whose lives are merely problematized. In this way, without denying the pervasiveness of power, he tacitly acknowledges that it allows some people to lead lives of relative freedom and self-creation. In ancient Greece, this included at least some free males; in our world it includes, among others, those of us who have the ability and opportunity to write and read books like Foucault’s.
It may seem that problematization is a third Foucaultian historical method, supplementing (or replacing) archaeology and genealogy. Strictly speaking, this is false, since problematization is not a historical method but an object studied by such methods. The turn to problematization is a switch from marginalized to problematized individuals. But Foucault’s way of engaging with ancient problematizations of sexuality does involve a major change in his historical methodology. He first requires a careful exploration of the structures of ancient discourses about sexuality, for which archaeology is, of course, the primary instrument. At the same time, he has little concern with the power relations that are entwined with ancient knowledge of sexuality. The Use of Pleasure refers, as we have noted, to the political roots of the ‘problem of the boy’, and The Care of the Self has a brief (and, by Foucault’s own admission, quite derivative) chapter on the social forces behind the transition from Greek to Roman views of sexuality. But the genealogy of power, in the sense of Foucault’s earlier work, is muted in these two books.
This is because genealogy is concerned with the lines of power connected to our present system of domination. It is, as Foucault said in Discipline and Punish, a history of the present. But the power regimes of ancient Greece and Rome are too distant to figure in our understanding of our present power structures. When only these structures were Foucault’s concern, he needed, as he originally planned, to go no further back than medieval notions of pastoral care. But once the topic became problematizations and self-creative responses to them – matters that develop in the interstices of a power regime – the ancients immediately became interesting. Not, however, because of the specific origin of their problems, which would require a genealogical study, but because of the kinds of creative responses the ancients gave to these problems.
Foucault is reluctant to give up the term ‘genealogy’, perhaps because it keeps him connected to Nietzsche. But he no longer presents it as an instrument of suspicion, following the pervasive tracks of modern power. Instead, it is a (generally appreciative) account of the ancient world’s ‘arts of existence’; that is, of ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to make their life an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’ (UP, 10–11). Beyond the word, there is little that remains here except the generic idea of a causal account of the self’s formation. But this account is no longer a reconstruction of complex external lines of power but of internal programmes for ethical transformation. It is, in fact, much closer to history of philosophy than genealogy in Foucault’s original sense. Or, perhaps better, it is philosophy itself done in an historical mode.
We will return to Foucault’s final ‘philosophy’ below. But first we need to look at his archaeology of ancient sexuality, to understand how the Greeks and Romans problematized sexuality and what Foucault thought we might learn from their problematization. As always for Foucault, archaeology is a comparative matter. In this case, the fundamental comparison is with the Christian view of sexuality. Here he is once again Nietzschean, although without the rhetorical viole
nce of The Antichrist: the rise of Christian sexuality is the corruption of a more admirable antique view. At the same time, Foucault makes it clear that there is no question of a return to the ways of the ancients, which have their own severe limitations and, in any case, could not exist in our world. Ancient ways can serve only as heuristic guides for own projects of self-creation.
According to Foucault, there are relatively few differences between the ancients and the Christians on the level of moral codes and conduct. The ethical rules laid down and the actual patterns of behaviour these rules determine are, despite some striking exceptions such as same-sex relations, quite similar. But fundamental differences arise when we look at the formation of ethical subjects.
The root of the differences, says Foucault, is the Christian claim that ta aphrodisia are intrinsically evil and so primarily objects of ethical denial. For the ancients, by contrast, sex was a natural good. It became an object of ethical problematization not because it was essentially forbidden but because some aspects of it could be dangerous. This was because the goods of sex were on the inferior level of our animality and because they often involved great intensity. The danger was not, as for the Christian, that they might become an important part of our lives – this the ancients saw as inevitable and fitting – but that we might disrupt our lives through excessive indulgence.