The disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same
process. (171)
That explains why Foucault asserts that having undertaken to write the history of sexuality, ‘‘now we should study the history of friendship, or friendships’’ (171).
12
Among Men
For the Foucault of the beginning of the 1980s, the idea of friendship represented more than a historical detour that allowed him to evoke new kinds of relations between individuals. It also allowed him to imagine a ‘‘relational system’’ that could become the principle of a di√erentiation internal to a society: the ‘‘gay mode of life’’ could thus become a divergence, an ‘‘other space’’ in which individuals would produce themselves as a social group thanks to a common sexuality.
Foucault made no secret of the fact that his reflections were inspired by his acquaintance with gay ‘‘communities’’ in the United States, in New York, and especially in San Francisco, an acquaintance begun enthusiastically in the mid-1970s, when he began giving courses at a number of universities, notably Berkeley.∞ He says in 1981, while giving a description of gay life in big American cities, ‘‘In the United States . . . the interest in friendship has become very important; one doesn’t enter a relationship simply in order to be able to consummate it sexually, which happens very easily; what people are drawn to is friendship.’’ He then asks, ‘‘How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life?’’ Then he goes on: ‘‘This notion of mode of life seems important to me. Will it require the introduction of a diversification di√erent from the ones due to social class, di√erences in profession and culture, a diversification that would also be a form of relationship and would be a ‘way of life’? A way of life can be shared among individuals of di√erent age, status, and social activity.’’≤
One sees clearly that Foucault acts here as the theoretician of a form of sociability that neoconservative discourse in France today polemically labels
‘‘homosexual separatism’’: a way of life chosen and constructed by a group of individuals, one that, as Foucault puts it, ‘‘can yield a culture’’ (138).
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What Foucault calls ‘‘gay culture’’ is closely linked to what we today call
‘‘gay communities,’’ to the existence of bars, clubs, bathhouses, sexual meeting places—for alongside this ‘‘new system of relations’’ that he ardently wished for, Foucault also insisted on a second direction in which gay culture should move in order to escape from regimes of social and sexual normality: ‘‘the intensification of pleasures.’’
There is no doubt that Foucault is thinking of San Francisco when he
gives this series of interviews in the 1980s. One has only to read what he says of sadomasochistic practices as the crucible in which a subculture with new personal identities is forged:
The idea that s&m is related to a deep violence, that s&m practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid. We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—
through the eroticization of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasures—I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange
parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on. . . . The practice of s&m is the creation of pleasure, and there is an identity with that creation. And that’s why s&m is really a subculture. It’s a process of invention.≥
Foucault finds in gay communities spaces in which new ways of life are invented, yet obviously that does not imply that he will always necessarily approve of what is produced there. ‘‘Danger’’ is everywhere, for Foucault, and all groups give o√ the e√ects of power toward which one should always show a certain ‘‘distrustfulness.’’∂ This general attitude of distrust must continually be transformed into a ‘‘critical practice’’ and elaborated as a ‘‘critical analysis. ’’ The role of the intellectual is therefore always ‘‘negative.’’∑ Yet when the sociologist Robert Bellah asks him if, in the struggle against certain instances of state power, one couldn’t imagine a certain ‘‘participation with others, if not a party, perhaps a part of a party, if not a church, at least a congregation, in any case some kind of context in which the individual would not feel entirely alone,’’ Foucault responds to him:
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f When I speak of this attitude of suspicion, it’s only a general attitude.
Because there is no relation to power, in any society, that is not dangerous, that is not on the level of [here some words are missing], of sexual relations, of small communities, and so on. This is why I think general suspicion is necessary. I don’t think we can oppose a good kind of community to a bad kind of community. They are all dangerous, but
each represents a particular kind of danger and also a particular degree of danger, so we can’t always react in the same way. Sometimes we
should use the support of this or that kind of community in order to
resist a greater danger from another community. . . . These strategies and shifts in strategy are very important. So the general attitude of suspicion is not necessarily a solitary attitude.∏
One could conclude from these remarks that for Foucault the gay ‘‘community’’ is in no way free from ‘‘danger,’’ for all communities, of any kind, bring danger with them. Yet the constitution of these communities remains for him an important, even a fundamental part of the struggle to invent new forms of existence and to invent new styles of life—all in order to escape from the much more serious looming danger of the rigors of the norm and of the totality of a ‘‘disciplinary’’ society.π
Given that Foucault always thinks of ‘‘gay ways of life’’ within the horizon of sexuality (for him the link between the individuals who participate in the culture is first of all and primarily a shared sexuality, that is to say, homosexuality), his reflections on the ‘‘culture’’ to be invented are always circumscribed by monosexuality.
One might well be surprised by this. For even if bars or meeting places (not to mention bathhouses), and therefore a large section of the ‘‘gay way of life’’ of which Foucault is speaking, are necessarily monosexual, it is hard to understand why friendship and the ‘‘culture’’ founded on friendship should also be so. In his insistence on the idea of monosexuality, Foucault contradicts what he endlessly a≈rms about the necessity not to prescribe what a future culture might be, not to pose limits, but rather to open it out onto the improbable or the unthinkable.
It will not do to imagine that he proceeds in this way through inadvertence or because he was thinking only of the example of gay neighborhoods in the United States. Monosexuality is not something he has observed; it is
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something he has thought about; it is a politics. He insists on this explicitly when asked about the fact that since the 1970s many bars have ceased to be
‘‘private clubs.’’ His interviewer sees in this the e√ect of a new situation characterized by the greater freedom of the new moment. ‘‘Absolutely,’’
Foucault replies. But he hastens to add that this also has something to do with the fact that gays themselves are ‘‘uneasy about monosexuality.’’ A bit later on he returns to this point:
In the often-negative response some French people have toward certain types of American behavior, there is still that disapproval of monosexuality. So occasionally we hear: �
�‘What? How can you approve of those macho models? You’re always with men, you have mustaches and
leather jackets, you wear boots, what kind of masculine image is that?’’
Maybe in ten years we’ll laugh about it all. But I think in the schema of a man a≈rming himself as a man, there is a movement towards redefining the monosexual relation. It consists of saying, ‘‘Yes, we spend our time with men, we have mustaches, and we kiss each other,’’ without
one of the partners having to play the role of the éphèbe or the e√eminate, fragile boy.∫
There are several reasons for this insistence on monosexuality. The first recalls the considerations mentioned in earlier chapters about guys holding hands: the life of men among themselves, gay neighborhoods, gay ways of life all constitute spaces in which such gestures are possible without the participants risking violence or insult. To a≈rm that being gay means being able to hold hands also implies that one creates the means for holding hands.
There is also very clearly a second reason. Foucault continues in his interviews from the 1980s to critique the idea of a natural bisexuality or polysexuality—an idea that had, as we have seen, haunted the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s. Monosexuality as a way of life is the exact opposite of the myth of a great fusion of all individuals into an undi√erentiated sexuality: ‘‘The promise that we would love women as soon as we were no longer condemned for being gay was utopian. And a utopia in a dangerous sense . . . because it was at the expense of monosexual relations.’’Ω Yet these discourses on polysexuality had mostly ceased to be of any interest in the 1980s, so much so that it is surprising that Foucault takes the trouble to challenge them. There must be deeper reasons for his apology for monosexuality.
In point of fact, whether Foucault is speaking of a future gay culture or of
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f a historical model of friendship, what interests him is what happens among men: what kinds of feelings they can experience, what kinds of relations they can construct.
Yet, in order to show that intense a√ective links can exist between men thanks to a shared sexuality, Foucault always has recourse to examples in which it is not sexuality that is important. In the interview ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ he comes back to the idea that masculine monosexuality has been nearly impossible since the eighteenth century, except when imposed by outside circumstances such as the army or a war. He takes as his example the life of soldiers in the trenches during World War I:
You had soldiers and young o≈cers who spent months and even years
together. During World War I, men lived together completely, one on
top of another, and for them it was nothing at all. . . . And apart from several remarks on camaraderie, the brotherhood of spirit, and some
very partial observations, what do we know about these emotional
uproars and storms of feeling that took place in those times? One can wonder how, in these absurd and grotesque wars and infernal mas-sacres, the men managed to hold on in spite of everything. Through
some emotional fabric, no doubt. I don’t mean that it was because they were each other’s lovers that they continued to fight; but honor, courage, not losing face, sacrifice, leaving the trench with the captain—all that implied a very intense emotional tie. It’s not to say: ‘‘Ah, there you have homosexuality!’’ I detest that kind of reasoning. But no doubt you have there one of the conditions, not the only one, that has permitted this infernal life. (139)
This reference to emotional ties between men in the trenches doubtless owes a great deal to Dumézil.∞≠ Called up in 1916, at the age of eighteen, Dumézil spent two years of his life immersed in the horrors of the war, yet he also experienced a kind of freedom that at the time was only possible in such extreme situations. This explains why he was fond of saying that he had never been so happy as at that moment of his life, a fact also attested to by the dedication to his book, Mythe et épopée (Myth and Epic), which speaks of ‘‘the noisy parties we had in our twenties.’’∞∞ These deep emotional and homoerotic feelings, born under fire in the horrible circumstances of war, were celebrated by many English poets: Siegfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and others.∞≤ It seems more than likely, as historians of homosexuality have argued, that these wartime experiences had an important influ-
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ence on the development of gay culture in Europe (and especially in France) in the 1920s. Allan Bérubé has similarly argued that the ties that developed during World War II played a decisive role in the organization of gay life in the 1950s.
Foucault mentioned on several occasions his plan to begin working on a history of war once he had finished his History of Sexuality. More precisely, he was interested in a history of armies. It is clear that the military forms of masculine sociability, soldierly forms of male ‘‘friendship,’’ would have been one of the topics he would have investigated.
In the interviews he gave in the 1980s about gay issues, however, his main focus was contemporary politics and not history. Two ideas are always collapsed together in these interviews: first, the idea that a sexuality that is common to a disparate group of individuals is capable of uniting them in a shared ‘‘culture’’; second, that emotional ties between men can exist in the absence of any sexual relation. All the historical examples Foucault mentions fall into the second category. These examples are what enable him to begin to imagine what new kinds of relations between men there might be after the creation of new gay modes of existence. The set of relations Foucault imagines will take root in homosexuality, but some forms of relation that develop will have no necessary link with that sexuality. His way of putting things makes this quite clear: ‘‘Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen a√ective and relational virtualities.’’∞≥
In this light we can better understand why, in order to support his suggestions regarding the lives of men together, Foucault refers on several occasions to Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men, which is, after all, a book about the lives of women together.
There is a book that just appeared in the U.S. on the friendship between women. The a√ection and passion between women is well documented. In the preface, the author states that she began with the idea of unearthing homosexual relationships—but perceived that not only
were these relationships not always present but that it was uninteresting whether relationships could be called ‘‘homosexual’’ or not. And by letting the relationship manifest itself as it appeared in words and
gestures, other very essential things also appeared: dense, bright, marvelous loves and a√ections or very dark and sad loves. (138)
In fact Faderman’s book postulates that emotional relationships between women can hardly be reduced to sexuality and that in the end, as Foucault
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f saw, answering the question as to whether or not the women she studies, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, engaged in sexual relations is not all that important. We should also note that this set of historical problems was rooted in a separatist feminist tradition, one that now seems a bit dated, a tradition that held to the idea (developed by Adrienne Rich in a well-known article) of a ‘‘lesbian continuum’’ that ranged from simple friendship between women to sexual relations.∞∂
This idea of a continuum has been strongly critiqued by women histo-
rians and theoreticians, precisely because it amounts to a desexualization of lesbianism,∞∑ whereas it was precisely this desexualization that was of interest to Foucault. Faderman’s historical analysis permitted Foucault to imagine that a whole range of relations might be possible between people of the same sex. The suggestiveness of Faderman’s analysis, together with his own remarks about life in the trenches, led Foucault to the idea that this monosexual culture (women alone together a
nd men alone together) could provide the basis for a culture that was yet to be invented. Faderman’s book thus becomes for him a kind of metaphor for discussing gay male culture: he is simply trying to suggest that very deep relationships, ones involving no sexual relations, can be cultivated between men. Even so, it is a common sexuality (homosexuality) that holds together this new relational network—
one that creates a new principle of di√erentiation within society.
Foucault is perhaps moving a bit too quickly here in his conceptualization of what a ‘‘gay culture’’ might be. He seems to think of it only from the male point of view and as something that only concerns men. Of course he allows for the separate development of a lesbian culture. But he does not pose the question of how the two cultures might meet up. In this sense, even though queer theorists are fond of relying on his work, Foucault seems much closer to gay ways of life from the 1970s and 1980s than to today’s ‘‘queer’’ culture, which calls gay and lesbian separatisms into question.
We might even go a step further and wonder if what Foucault is presenting as a new system of relations does not fundamentally resemble some extremely traditional gay ways of life: multiple sexual encounters that sometimes lead to friendships, circles of friends composed of former lovers and their lovers and former lovers, male sociability, links between men of dif-ferent ages and di√erent backgrounds, visits to gay male bars, cafes, and restaurants. This does not seem far distant from the way many gay men led their lives in the twentieth century.
The gay culture of which Foucault speaks seems thus to be an expansion
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on a previously unimagined scale of traditional gay male culture, a culture that was, for various obvious reasons, primarily monosexual. Certainly the extraordinary expansion and visibility of these ways of life in the past twenty or thirty years has caused considerable transformation in them. Foucault, as someone who saw all this happen in person, must have been quite struck by the emergence of this phenomenon. But is it not, after all, the same ‘‘gay culture’’ found throughout the century? Finally, is not the only really innovative idea put forth by Foucault that of creating a new legal standing for these relations, one that would allow for the institutionalization of certain specific ties between people of the same sex (the adoption of one adult by another or a kind of domestic partnership that would not be concerned with whether or not the individuals involved had sexual relations)?∞∏
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 46