Chapter I: Introduction

Michel Foucault is sure to remain one of the most enigmatic philosophers for some time to come. He died in 1984 shortly after the publication of the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality, but had in a major interview declared that what needs to be understood is not sex but "techniques of the self". He claimed to be fleeing Hegel, but assumed the chair of Jean Hippolyte at the Collège de France. He opposed the phenomenological account of the subject, but wrote and published an "Introduction" to Ludwig Binswanger's Dream and Existence. He found in Kant the anthropologism which he believed disastrous for later philosophy and the human sciences, yet for his Thèse Complementaire for the Doctorat des Lettres he translated and provided notes and an Introduction to Kant's Anthropologie du point du vue Pragmatique. He varyingly described his work as archaeology, genealogy, as being about power, discourse, games of truth, as being a history of the subject, and of being a history of the present. He has linked his work to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Max Weber, and the Frankfurt School, but has repudiated all of them. He has refused to debate the legitimacy of norms, but has supported such groups as Terre des Hommes, Amnesty International, Solidarity and the Prison Information Group.

What is true of Foucault's work, and as he himself has commented, is that he has tried to understand and show how human beings have become subjects. His first two published works however, do not fit within this project. Dream Imagination and Existence, his introduction to Binswanger, and Maladie Mentale et Personalitie, both published in 1954, belong to the tradition of "hermeneutic ontology".[1] His later anti-humanist, anti-phenomenological work he calls "historical ontology" (GE 237). The latter attempts to overcome subject-centred philosophy, and is no doubt partly motivated by its early hold on him. While he was later to abjure phenomenology, existentialism and Marxism, his earliest works abound with references to Husserl, Heidegger, René Char and others. He attests in numerous places to their influence on him.

I belong to that generation who as students had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism (RR 174).

...At the time I was working on my book on the history of madness...I was divided between existential psychology and phenomenology, and my research was an attempt to discover the extent these could be defined in historical terms (PK 115).

...People of my generation were brought up on these two forms of analysis, one in terms of the constituent subject, the other in terms of the economic in the last instance, ideology and the play of superstructures and infrastructures (PK 115).

The early influence on Foucault of phenomenology and existentialism is obvious especially in Dream Imagination and Existence. There he praises Binswanger's use of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. Binswanger's strength, or so it appears to the young Foucault, is to have merged anthropology, ontology and psychology into a truly concrete account of man's being. He describes his reflections on Binswanger thus,

...These introductory remarks have only one purpose: to present a form of analysis which does not aim at being a philosophy, and whose end is not to be a psychology; a form of analysis which is fundamental in relation to all concrete, objective, and experimental knowledge; a form of analysis, finally, whose principle and method are determined from the start solely by the absolute privilege of their object: man, or rather, the being of man, Menschsein (DE 31).

Anthropology becomes an ontological reflection on Dasein.

Let us say provisionally...that human being (Menschsein) is nothing but the actual and concrete context which ontology analyzes as the transcendental structure of Dasein, of presence-to-the-world (DE 32).

This represents the antithesis of Foucault's later archaeological and genealogical work. In Mental Illness and Psychology he could say that, "The understanding of the sick consciousness and reconstitution of its pathological world, these are the two tasks of a phenomenology of mental illness" (MP 46). But by the time of The Order of Things his position is, "If there is one approach that I do reject...it is that (one might call it the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject..."(OT VIV).

Eventually the notion of the "episteme" and subsequently his theory of discursive practice substituted for the phenomenological subject. Instead of an absolute subject, Foucault champions the death of man. But earlier in Dream Imagination and Existence he had allied himself with Binswanger in finding in the dream the sign par excellence of subjectivity. The dreamer is not Freud's somnolent cryptographer lost and diffused in his own codes and symbols. Freud's dreaming subject is always a lesser subject. In Binswanger and the early Foucault, dream is immediately linked to full-blown existence. "...The dream subject is not a later edition of a previous form, or an archaic stage of personality. It manifests itself as the coming-to-be and the totality of the existence itself" (DE 57).

One could say therefore that Foucault's philosophical career, or the career of the subject in Foucault, recapitulates the whole of modern philosophy. From finding the deepest truth of man's existence in the most internal part of himself, namely the dream, he moved the subject's identity to a position of radical exteriority; from dream to history, from self to non-self. Beginning with Descartes and his "I think" which assures him of the world, through to Rousseau's insistence on the solitary self, then to Kant and Hegel and German Idealism, and finally to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology; all of this represents the extreme privileging of interiority.

Such nodal figures as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and to a lesser extent Foucault, mark both the apotheosis and the disintegration of this movement. Heidegger who began privileging Dasein as the ontico-ontological foundation of any future account of being, finally dispensed with this quasi-subject altogether. Wittgenstein had both denied the existence of the thinking subject, and affirmed the truth of solipsism in the Tractatus. From his early assertion that the world is my world, he turned to a world that is irreducibly shared.

Foucault's early privileging of the subject increasingly gave way under the influence of history. In Madness and Civilization that movement had taken him only as far as to deny the reality of what is said about the mad subject, while preserving for it a hermeneutic depth outside of history. Eventually the last vestige of hermeneutics was purged, officially at least, from his work. Of this historicisation the subject he writes,

I wanted to see how these problems of constitution could be resolved within a historical framework...I don't believe that problem can be solved by historicising the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject...(PK 117).

Having dispensed with the phenomenological subject, Foucault's rival became, loosely speaking, Marxism. More specifically, it was the ideology-repression model which he challenged. It is here that his work invites comparison with the Frankfurt School. He rejected the idea that the subject is an ideological construct, while the true self is repressed. To this end he enunciated a new theory of power suitable to his analysis. Power does not say no to the subject, but creates it. The modern subject is formed especially through what he varyingly calls bio-politics, bio-power, noso-politics, and political-anatomy. That is, through minute and pervasive material practices exercised on the body, the modern well disciplined individual and society are produced. Foucault thus complements Max Weber's analysis of the rise of capitalism under the influence of Protestantism, with a more detailed and material study of how such formations occur. His study of sexuality especially, provided the framework for this sort of analysis.

Overcoming the ideology-repression model, Foucault found he had nevertheless retained domination as the fundamental force in the creation of the subject. It is that which he sought to escape in his last work. For that reason he sought to understand what the subject does to himself in becoming a subject; that is, he sought to understand "ethics", "techniques of the self", and "government". This reintroduction of the subject as agent does not mean that Foucault has come full circle however. The subject who acts on himself always does so within history and culture.

The break with phenomenology came in fact in 1960 with the publication of Madness and Civilization. There he traces the historical emergence of madness as a particular form of subjectivity, but seems to believe that the true subject is masked by that emergence. His following book, The Birth of the Clinic, examines the medical subject, but without this hermeneutic suspicion. By the time of The Order of Things (1966) it is the subject in general as a living, speaking and labouring being whose development he charts. His analysis amounts to a deconstruction of the subject as the source of all meaning and knowledge. He finds that in the 18th century the subject evolved as an "empirico-transcendental doublet". That is, the subject became the transcendental source of all signification in virtue of, and despite, his thorough-going empirical nature. Kant's Copernican revolution is the paradigm of this development.

According to Foucault the emergence of man, or the modern subject, logically coincides with the demise of a system of signification for which the subject was not necessary. His prediction is that since language can once again assume this function man is now redundant. How language replaces the subject is the topic of the Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Foucault does not there manage however to show that a pure and autonomous discourse can produce itself, instead he soon gave up that position and turned to a new account of the subject and the origin of discourse.

In 1975 he published Discipline and Punish and in 1976 The History of Sexuality, volume I. It is in this period that he characterised his project as a genealogy of the subject, or "historical ontology". At this point "bio-power" became the organising concept of his analysis. In the earlier of the two books he traces the development of the criminal subject and of the well disciplined individual to a politically motivated control of the body. Similarly in The History of Sexuality he finds in the bio-political control of bodies, and in the confessional techniques and procedures developed within Christian confession, the origin of the subject with a sexuality. His critical point is that this represents a vast apparatus of normalization and control.

With the publication of The History of Sexuality five future volumes were announced. In the event only two others were published, and only in 1984 after substantial revisions. It is in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self that Foucault turned his attention from forms of domination to "techniques of the self". Unfortunately Foucault died without giving a general definitive account of the genealogy of the various forms of modern subjectivity and of the relation of philosophy to that project, so that many questions about this remain.

It is clear at any rate that Foucault's own brand of philosophy is not possible without history. In that respect he is an "anti-philosopher", though it is hardly remarkable any more to be one. Heidegger explicitly announced the "end of philosophy", but others have in their own way affirmed this same conclusion. Wittgenstein says cryptically that the function of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle, and Richard Rorty who greatly admires both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, says philosophy should edify. For Derrida and others philosophy's task is deconstruction. The general theme of this turn is a deflation of philosophy's pretensions, so that it is not surprising that one of philosophy's most pretentious constructs, the absolute or transcendental ego, should be eclipsed in this movement. What philosophy is capable of, what it can bring to light, is now greatly reduced. This critique of philosophy can be traced at least to Kant and his own restriction on the scope of reason. But whereas Kant's critique left philosophy with some authority in ethics and epistemology, the intention of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and others, is to dismantle even that vestige of philosophy's prestige.

For Foucault the thinking which comes in the wake of philosophy is the genealogy of the modern subject. The historical nature of this task rules out it having a transcendental function, whether in the form of a transcendental logic or consciousness, or even the pragmatic quasi-transcendentalism of Habermas. Anti-transcendentalism does not characterise Foucault alone of course. It puts him in the unwelcome company of the various schools of empiricism, positivism, linguistic analysis and so on, as well as in the more hospitable climes of critical theory, Marxism and post-structuralism. These latter forms of thought along with genealogy question the ideal of a discipline of philosophy; they deny that there is a philosophical method, and that there is a philosophical knowledge the possession of which reveals what is distinctive about knowledge, the good, the mind, etc.

For its part genealogy recognizes the limitations of thought by seeking an understanding of ourselves as the product of power-knowledge; namely, as subjects in relation to knowledge, power and ethics. This threefold historical ontology of the subject does not however promise us mastery over ourselves; in that sense it is an anti-Enlightenment idea. On the other hand it is dedicated to knowing who we are, which Foucault says is a fundamental Enlightenment ideal.

Foucault thus straddles the debate over modernism and postmodernism. The point, he says, is not to put reason on trial or to be definitively pro- or contra-enlightenment. His middleground position is not that of Blumenberg though. The latter regards the mythical as a necessary correlate of Enlightenment—it allows us to live with scientific advances, it does not oppose them as an alternative hypothesis or explanation. Blumenberg's middleground consists in saying that on the one hand there is reason and science and on the other there is myth which is equally legitimate, and that they complement one another. Foucault's position is rather that who we are as rational or symbolic subjects is linked to structures of power and is historically analysable. The properly enlightened attitude to have towards such structures is "hyper and pessimistic activism" (GE 232). Enlightenment according to Foucault is not a matter of being more of less rational or more or less appreciative of the mythical, but of trying to live without normalizing power.

Thus for genealogy there is neither pure philosophy, nor can there be a pure philosopher. There is no philosophical knowledge which insures that the philosopher has anything interesting to say about that which concern us. On such issues as nuclear deterrence, farm subsidies, the middle east and so on, there is no "philosophical point of view" which could decide them. When the philosopher qua philosopher has anything interesting to say, it is, as Rorty puts it, because "arguments on such topics are punctuated by stale philosophical cliches...about which professional philosophers know the pro and cons by heart".[2]

The restricted domain of philosophy as genealogy is the history of problematiques. Echoing other anti-philosophers, Foucault says his interest is not in offering solutions to problems, but in understanding how such problems arose in the first place. His intention is not then to say, as Rorty seems to say about the philosophical problems he finds historically suspect, that they should not be our problems; that we should just drop them. That would be to escape history through history, which is not Foucault's position. The only therapeutic effect from doing the history of problematiques accrues through the creation of a dissonance in those for whom the problem exists.

It's true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison, are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them "what is to be done". But my project is precisely to bring it about that they "no longer know what to do", so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. The effect is intentional.[3]

He says further that change will only come from below, from the on-going struggle of those involved. Philosophy has no mandate for determining the schedule or direction of change.

I don't feel myself capable of effecting "subversion of all codes", "dislocation of all orders of knowledge", "revolutionary affirmations of violence", "overturning of all contemporary culture"...[4]

He sees himself as giving,

some assistance in wearing away certain self-evidence and commonplaces about madness, normality, illness, crime and punishment; to bring it about, together with many others, that certain phrases can no longer be spoken so lightly, certain acts no longer performed, to contribute to changing certain things in people's ways of perceiving and doing things, to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of sensibility and thresholds of tolerance. I hardly feel capable of attempting much more than that.[5]

All this is linked to the demise of what Foucault calls the universal intellectual. These intellectuals presume their status entitles them to speak from a position of truth on every subject and on everyone's behalf. They presume that their intellectual work is the key to fundamental change. They consider themselves beacons illuminating the way for non-intellectuals. Not only is such a position an anathema to Foucault, he regards it as an obstacle to the sort of change such intellectuals themselves envisage. Philosophy is simply not able to function as the foundation of any universality. Such a pretension stands in the way of the sort of action which can be effective. Sartrean engagement diverts attention and energy away from where it should be focussed; not at the top amongst the politicians and savants, but at the bottom amongst the inmates and outcasts.

What the philosopher can do is speak about his present. Illuminating the cultural and historical boundaries of his thought, he is able to explain how we have arrived at where we are now, but he has no better idea of where to go from here than any other thoughtful person. Those who chastise Foucault for not offering a norm that could justify engagement need to ask themselves whether philosophy is capable of supplying it and whether action will really founder in its absence.

In what follows I trace Foucault's account of the subject from his early archaeological rejection of phenomenology, through his discursive account of the subject, to his early and late genealogies. My intention is to be both exegetical and critical. Regarding the latter I compare Foucault with a number of other philosophers whose writings echo his own. I examine particularly his relation to the Frankfurt School. Since too Foucault's work relies on a lot of historical scholarship, I have filled in the historical details in places where I believe it makes things more clear. Regarding his earlier archaeological work I criticise and find fault with his account of discourse and the subject—I hope I have shown why Foucault abandoned that position. Of his genealogical work I hope to show its strengths, but also to suggest that certain omissions and contradictions are present there. Finally I examine his turn to "ethics", and question the efficacy of his work for creating new forms of subjectivity. There I question whether Foucault has not neglected the symbolic nature of the subject. Throughout I have occasion to correct some of his critics.

Foucault is not a systematic philosopher, he does not answer all the questions that could be put to him concerning the subject. Inconsistencies, contradictions and revisions exist in all of his books. His work represents nevertheless a novel and interesting attempt to find out why we are the way we are, and is motivated by a hope that we might be different if we can. His historical approach to traditional philosophical questions is refreshing, the concrete concern in his philosophy with the present is reassuring. His work is enlightening.

Chapter IV: The Subject and Discourse

A. History

B. Archaeology and the History of Ideas

1. Innovation

2. Contradictions

3. Comparisons

4. Change and Transformations

C. The Organization of Discourse

1. First Hypothesis

2. Second Hypothesis

3. Third Hypothesis

4. Fourth Hypothesis

5. The Statement

D. Complications with Discourse

A. History

In the "Introduction" to The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault surveys the recent developments in historiography and his own place in that development. History is no longer merely the history of political events. By stressing the event, traditional history obscured most of "what really happened". The historians attention is now turned to such things as,

models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, the fixing of sociological constants, the description of technological adjustments and of their spread and continuity (AK 3)

Grand history thus gives way to banal history.

Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories: the history of sea routes, the history of corn or of goldmining, the history of drought and of irrigation, the history of crop rotation, the history of the balance achieved by the human species between hunger and abundance (AK 3)

The result of this has been that traditional historical analysis has been replaced by one more relevant to these less prestigious histories. Questions of the linkage between disparate events, of causation and succession of events are diminished in importance. One does not seek for the significance and continuity of events in order to define a historical totality. Rather one is puzzled by the phenomenon of historical depth. Consequently one asks after the legitimate separation of the strata. In what way does stratification occur? What sort of series exists within these strata and what is their appropriate temporal modality? What is the relation between strata? Finally what chronological table is appropriate for determining the distinct series of events belonging to this material civilization.

Foucault notes that even outside of history proper, within those disciplines that go under the title of "the history of ideas", attention has been turned from charting massive chronological periods to the phenomena of disruption and discontinuity. Attention has been turned to those interruptions which shatter the right of thought to continuous development.

This new history required what he called an "epistemological mutation". Its first phase was determined by Marx, but despite his decentering of the subject through the analysis of relations of production, economic determination and class struggle, the nineteenth century continued to produce grand histories. Foucault detects in this a reluctance to abandon the Copernican revolution of ideas which placed man at the centre of the universe.

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject; the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject—in the form of historical consciousness—will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are two sides of the same system of thought. In this system time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness (AK 12).

Continuous history insures that any innovation or disruption be disarmed by showing that it is inevitably due to an active, creative, historical subject. Otherness is merely a failure to recognize the Same.

All differences, discontinuities and disruptions are smoothed away by the invocation of a "world-view", or a "system of values", or by the notion of a "civilization". In spite of Nietzche's genealogy, we witness the search for original foundations that would make rationality the telos of our history, and in spite of linguistics, ethnology and psychoanalysis, with their revelations that man does not control the language he speaks, that he does not define the limits of his actions, and that he is not the master of his desires. In spite of the loss of his sexuality to the unconscious, his speech to the form of language, and his identity to his society, continuous history claims its adherents from those who wish to bolster man's heroic efforts to become his true self. According to Foucault such heroism is folly.

B. Archaeology and the History of Ideas

In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault says his problem is to understand the division of discourse into unities that are not those of the oeuvre, the author, the book, or the theme. To that end he creates a panopoly of concepts, which by his own admission appear a bit bizarre. Nevertheless he maintains that traditional explanations are none to obvious either and leave many questions unanswered. In turn though he interrogates whether his "archaeology" can serve in the stead of the thesis he dismisses.

Whether Foucault's archaeology is necessary becomes an immediate question. It must be shown that the subject of archaeology and its methods of investigation and categories are different from those of the history of ideas. Is Foucault simply a historian of ideas? He claims that he is not, and sets out the reasons why.

The history of ideas has neither a well defined object nor certain methods. It has no sure frontiers and lacks rigour. The history of ideas plays two roles according to Foucault. First, it chronicles and recounts that which remains marginal to history. It tells the story not of the sciences in all their rigour, but of their failures and imperfections. For example it recounts the history of alchemy and phrenology and other less celebrated moments in our intellectual history. There is the history of so much quasi-philosophy that shows up in literature, science and daily life. It is the philosophy which has no system and no rigour; it forms the spontaneous philosophy of those who do not philosophize, according to Foucault. It consists not in the history of literature, but of writing that never constitutes an oeuvre: almanacs, reviews, news papers and one-time authors. It is the history of all that lies in the interstices of the great monuments of thought. It is the analysis of opinion rather than thought, or error rather than truth.

Second, the history of ideas also attempts a multi-disciplinary analysis of thought. So that it amounts to a putting into perspective, rather than a marginalization of history. It acknowledges the sometimes ignoble heritage of science or literature or philosophy. In that way it describes the basis for subsequent formalizations. It traces the genesis of an oeuvre or system from its received and unreflected origins. At the same time it shows how the great products of such a genesis fall apart; how themes decompose, follow new courses, recompose or are simply neglected. The history of ideas, says Foucault, is the discipline of beginning and ends, it charts obscure continuities and shapes developments into the linear form of history. It is thus well placed to relate the relations amongst disciplines; how concepts in science become diffused and appear in literature or philosophy; how problems, themes, notions, migrate from the philosophical field to that of science, politics and so on. The history of ideas thus studies interference within disciplines.

The two forms or roles that the history of ideas has are corollaries of one another. It describes the transition of non-philosophy to philosophy, of non-science to science and of non-literature to literature. The analysis reveals that these slow transitions, with all their complicities, gave rise to work of enduring stature. Foucault says that genesis, continuity and totalization are the basic themes of the history of ideas and determine its form of historical analysis. It is no wonder that it appears to the historian of ideas that any deviation from its methods is an abandonment of history itself.

Archaeological description abandons the history of ideas. It systematically rejects the postulates and procedures of that discipline and attempts to produce a quite different history of what men have thought. Foucault claims that between the history of ideas and archaeological analysis there are many points of diversion. He notes four which are crucial; "the attribution of innovation, the analysis of contradictions, comparative descriptions, and the mapping of transformation" (AK 138). He says an examination of these four points will distinguish the unique character of archaeological analysis and indicates its descriptive efficacy.

Before plunging into such an investigation Foucault lays the groundwork with four "principles".

1) It is not the task of archaeology to define the thoughts, themes, images etc, that are explicitly or implicitly present in a discourse. It tries to define the discourse itself as a practice obeying certain rules. Archaeology does not treat discourse as a document, that is, as a sign of something else. It harbours no suspicions about the opacity of discourse, so that it does not seek in its depths for its essential message. Rather archaeology treats discourse as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline. It does not treat discourse as an allegory for which there is a deeper more profound meaning.

2) Archaeology does not seek the slow course of transition that relates one discourse to that which precedes it or coexists with it or even follows it. It does not search for that crucial moment when suddenly discourse is crystalised within a solution of imprecision, nor for when it may dissolve again. Its problem is the specificity of discourse. It tries to show that the rules by which a particular discourse operates are irreducible to any others.

3) Archaeology is not centred on the oeuvre. It is not concerned with the creation of the work; so that it is neither a psychology nor a sociology nor even an anthropology of the creation of an oeuvre. Foucault says that the oeuvre is not relevant for discussion for archaeological analysis. It defines rules for discursive practices that run right through individual oeuvres and governs and dominates them, so that one cannot say that the creative subject is the raison d'être of an oeuvre (AK 139).

4) Finally archaeology does not try to recapture thought at the moment when it was expressed in discourse. It does not seek the purity of thought before its adulteration by language. It does not seek any origin, it retains its exteriority by its systematic description of discourse as an object.

1. Innovation

The history of ideas treats discourse as a domain of opposites; every element is either old or new, traditional or original, familiar or deviant. Every formulation therefore belongs to one of two types. They may be rare and therefore highly valued for having appeared for the first time, and so deserving of being regarded as the product of its creator. Alternately the formulation maybe quite ordinary and easily identifiable as belonging to the tradition. Each of these two types in turn are analysed differently in the history of ideas. Of those formulations that are rare the history of ideas chronicles inventions, and changes and transformations. It outlines how truth emerged from its dubious past surrounded with error. The historian traces a continuous evolution on the basis of these rare occurrences. Those formulations that are easily identifiable as belonging to the tradition reveal the inertia of history. They point to the sedimentation of the past. Statements of this sort are treated according to what they have in common, so that their uniqueness is diminished along with the stature of their author and his locale. One describes the extension of these statements; the frequency of their repetition in related circumstances, the general horizon they define for subsequent thought, etc. The history of ideas therefore operates along two tracks, each organised around the notions of succession of thought in its rarety revealing the emergence of truth. On the other hand it describes intellectual history as a continuous field of effects in which submerged relations are refloated.

Neither of these two sorts of analysis in the history of ideas is found alone. Every analysis describes the conflict between old and new. It describes both how the old represses the new, but also how it facilitates it as well. It relates the repercussions of discoveries and the speed of their diffusion. It notes the intractability of the traditional with its absorption of the novel. Nevertheless the fundamental bipolar analysis begins with the problem of the origin; to find in every text, every oeuvre, the moment of rupture from which it sprang forth. The challenge is to discover the emergence of the different from the already said.

There are two methodological problems associated with these descriptions of the origin; those of resemblance and procession. Of procession it is presumed that every formulation can be ordered in a single series and dated according to a single homogeneous chronology. What precedes and what follows does not accord with some temporal line in every instance. Precession is not an absolute measure allowing one to determine what is original and what is repetitive. Foucault says that the mere mapping of antecedents is not sufficient to establish a discursive order. Any hierarchization of originalities will always depend on the discourse being questioned. What may be original in one discourse may be repetitive in another. Furthermore it does not seem to be the case that antecedents belong to the same series in the same mode of exteriority. Foucault takes an example from linguistics.

...Does Grimm, with his law of vowel-gradations, precede Bopp (who quoted him, used him, applied and modified what he said) in the same way and on the same temporal line; and did Coeurdoux and Anquetil-Duperron (in observing analogies between Greek and Sanskrit) anticipate the definition of the Indo-European languages, and precede the founders of comparative grammar? Was Saussure "preceded" by Pierce and his semiotics, by Arnauld and Lancelot with the Classical analysis of the sign, and by the Stoics and the theory of the "signifier", in the same series and in accordance with the same mode of anteriority? (AK 143)

The resemblance between two or more successive formulations is also problematic. Foucault asks in what sense and by what criteria it can be affirmed that one formulation is really only a reformulation of what appeared elsewhere. The question asks after what constitutes identity when it comes to discourse. After all it is clear that two sentences identical in every respect can be used to make different statements. Foucault notes, for example, that the various remarks on evolution in the works of Diderot and Lamark or Benoit de Maillet and Darwin, cannot be considered as the same discursive event repeated at different times. Perfect identity is no guarantee of repetition and far less so is partial identity. The claim is that what is said by different speakers is analogous. Foucault maintains that such analogies can always be found but that they will depend upon the discursive file considered.

The result of this is that to ask after the originality of the text is in a sense to beg a whole series of questions. It is to involve oneself in the bipolar game of determining the new and the old. These questions, says Foucault, presuppose and only make sense, given an already defined and homogeneous field. It is the very nature of this discursive field which Foucault questions however. Do Darwin, Lamark et al actually belong to the same discursive field so that one can compare them, look for influences, deem one the originator and the other the disciple. This leaves untouched many questions about discourse and requires a superficial account of resemblance.

...To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port-Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Curvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are the harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up (AK 144).

Archaeological description is nevertheless concerned with succession in discourse and aims to be systematic. It is not concerned to decide the originality or banality of new formulations. Every statement belongs to a discursive practice which determines its regularity. Whether a statement is original or banal in no way diminishes or enhances the significance of that regularity. Foucault is interested in the condition in which statements operate and which insure and define their existence. It is not a matter of determining whether one statement is more expected than another, or more provocative than another, but of comparing the regularities which govern the discourse in which they appear.

It follows then that it is not the task of archaeology to uncover inventions or the dawn of some truth. Foucault says he is not interested in drawing up a list of "founding saints". He says that from the point of view of the enunciative function, that regularity is not less operant for the discovery than for the text which repeats it.

To characterise statements by their regularity then, it is not necessary to distinguish whether they are novel or familiar. It is the regularities of the statements which change. Foucault says that one does not find the same regularity in Turnefort and Darwin, for example. Neither the grammar, nor the logic of the statement are particularly descriptive of it. Statements belonging to different discursive regularities may nevertheless exhibit the same grammar and logic. "We must distinguish then, between linguistic analogy (or translatability), logical identity (or equivalence), and enunciative homogeneity. It is with these homogeneities and these alone that archaeology is concerned" (AK 145-146). Enunciative homogeneity always underlies any seemingly novel statement. The history of discourse is not mapped then by the signposting of inventions, discoveries etc. There is no origin in the sense of a wellspring; no fecund moment to which all subsequent history can be traced. Every discursive event belongs to a historical web which determines its nature.

One of the things at stake in Foucault's analysis is the notion, or role, of "genius". It is typical to account for discourse in one of two ways; what is common is attributed to the role of tradition and what is novel is credited as the work of genius. Effectively Foucault historicises genius which has had the privilege of being ahistorical. The argument requires that since every statement must originate in a creative consciousness, someone of particular brilliance must be able to step outside of history in order to account for deviation from the discursive norm. The idea that deviant statements are themselves attributable to an enunciative regularity obviates the need for genius and reaffirms the historicity of those statements.

Every statement in every discourse invokes a whole set of rules of formation. Those rules however do not show themselves in any single statement. Foucault says that they traverse groups of statements. In fact the obviousness of the rules of formation varies with the nature of the statement within a discourse. Statements which serve more or less as premisses of the discourse are most obviously rule governed, says Foucault, while statements resembling conclusions have more tenuous links.

One can thus describe a tree of enunciative derivation: at its base are the statements that put into operation rules of formation in their most extended form: at its summit, and after a number of branchings, are the statements that put into operation the same regularity, but one more delicately articulated, more clearly delimited and localized in its extension (AK 147).

It is the task of archaeology to elucidate this tree of derivation of discourse. As the roots of the tree, archaeology places the "governing statements" of that discourse. For example, in Natural History, included would be definitions of observables, demarcations of possible objects for study, methods of observation, etc. At the branches of such a tree would be all those inventions and discoveries which animate Natural History; such as fossil series, the notion of genus (which is a conceptual innovation) and technical developments (AK 147). Foucault is quick to point out though that this is an enunciative derivation, not a logical one. Governing statements are not axioms, and discoveries and inventions are not the conclusions of a deduction. Such an assumption would make archaeology a totalizing discipline just like the rejected history of ideas.

Foucault says his analysis of discursive formations is not an attempt to divide history into periods allowing one to say that at a particular time everyone thought the same way in spite of their apparent differences. Each discourse has a singular enunciative homogeneity and its own temporality. No discourse embodies all the possible forms of thought implied by language. Archaeology describes discourse in such a manner that totalization is impossible. The "period" therefore is only accepted once it is recognized as an "enunciative period". It is similarity of enunciative function then, and not temporal contiguity, which determines succession and precession.

2. Contradictions

A fundamental presumption of the history of ideas is the coherence of discourse. It is an inherently suspicious discipline for it must always search for the hidden, usually "deeper", principle of cohesion which belies any manifest contradiction. This principle of coherence operates to expel the other from the domain of the same. This principle of coherence, Foucault says, is both the result and the guide for analysis. It defines the text, or oeuvre, or the point at which discourses meet. To discover this coherence though, it must be presupposed in the object of analysis and must be hounded down without compunction for difference. The history of ideas comes face to face with the hermeneutic circle therefore.

The means of determining coherences are many and so too are the coherences found. For example, one can define a field of logical coherence by the analysis of the truth of propositions and their relations. In that case one uncovers a systematicity in spite of the grammar and extension of meaning of the sentences concerned. Or one may trace a theme which requires, contrary to the logical method, a generosity of interpretation. These coherences may be sought in the conscious expression of an author which for one reason or another his words eclipse, or they may be sought in those structures which constrain him without his realization. Finally, says Foucault, there is that coherence which is imposed by biography. In which case a whole array of considerations may be invoked which pertain to any individuals intellectual development. The point of these forms of coherence is to suppress contradiction. "Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and text, the ideality and the contingent body of expression" (AK 150).

The result of this analysis is that only "residual" contradictions remain within the discourse. These may be of two sorts. They may be fairly banal; of the nature of a mistake for example. Or they may be momentous, usually a fundamental contradiction lying at the very origin of the discourse and which in fact becomes a principle accounting for the form of the discourse and its more minor contradictions. Such a contradiction is not an accident of discourse preventing it from revealing truths. Foucault says even that it constitutes the very law of the discourse's existence. On the basis of such a contradiction the discourse emerges and ceaselessly tries to free itself of it. Contradiction is therefore the principle of historicity of discourse.

For the history of ideas contradiction exists at two levels. At the level of appearance contradiction is resolved by the unity of the discourse. At the level of foundations it is contradiction which is the seed of discourse. Discourse appears either as an ideal figure corrupted by accidental contradiction or the empirical figure which harbours an inherent flaw. The analysis of discourse in the history of ideas consists in demonstrating the linkage between two sorts of contradiction it engenders.

Foucault says that for archaeology contradictions are neither surface appearances to be effaced, nor depth structures to be revealed. He says contradictions are objects to be described. Archaeology seeks not to resolve contradictions in discourse and between discourses, but to describe the "spaces of dissension" they create (AK 152).

Archaeology distinguishes three types of contradictions. There are those which though contradictory at the level of their assertions are nevertheless archaeologically related or derived. They are products of the same rules of formation. Then there are the "extrinsic" contradictions between different discursive formations, and which result from neglecting that difference. For example, Linnaeus' fixism contradicts Darwin's evolutionism only if one overlooks the fact that Linnaeus belongs to the discourse of Natural History and Darwin to that of Biology (AK 153). Between derived and extrinsic contradictions there are also "intrinsic" contradictions, these are of special interest for archaeological analysis. They too, like derived contradictions, are part of the same discursive formation, but they are not opposed alternatives with their opposed supporting systems. For example, in Natural History, "methodological" analysis was opposed to "systematic" analysis. Intrinsic contradictions are fairly complex. In Natural History they may involve different objects, different taxonomies, even different theories. Archaeology therefore maintains the irregularities of discourse in its descriptions of contradictions.

3. Comparisons

To describe discursive formations, archaeology must compare them. It must distinguish those which appear together though are opposed, and those which appear at different times but are none the less related. It must also relate discourses on the basis of all that which does not belong to discourse but which serves as its milieu. Unlike an epistemological or architectonic description, archaeology does not analyse the structures of a theory. Archaeology operates amongst a plurality of discourses. Even when it is concerned with a single type of discourse, for example, of psychiatry as in Madness and Civilization, or of medicine in The Birth of the Clinic, archaeology always involves a wide field in its description of that discourse. It considers institutions, events of note, practices, politics, economics, demographics, etc. Archaeology often treats several discourses concomitantly, as in The Order of Things. In that case distinct positivities are compared and opposed to others of another period.

Foucault says that comparison in archaeological analysis is limited and regional. It does not seek to describe a Weltanschauung, but to define the particular configuration of a discourse. It describes at the most an "interdiscursive configuration". In fact he says that if one could extend what he said about Natural History, the Analysis of Wealth and General Grammar, to the whole intellectual scene of the Classical period, then he would consider his work as incorrect. In that case he would have described the spirit of the period, something he claims not to be doing.

Foucault says that it is in fact methodologically impossible to uncover or describe the spirit of a time. He could have compared, for example, Natural History, General Grammar and the Analysis of Wealth, with any other discourse, but that would only yield different interpositivities and different interdiscursive configurations. General Grammar does not have the same relations with Natural History as with Biblical criticism for example. Furthermore not every discourse is related, as would seem to be required by a Weltanschauung.

When Foucault analyses discourse he is interested ultimately in its rules of formation and in their relation with those of another discourse. He says that there are five tasks to be performed therefore.

1) To show that different discourses with similar rules produce different concepts. He says such a procedure aims to reveal "archaeological isomorphisms".

2) To show that the rules of formation in related discourses are not isomorphic, that is, to show that each discourse defines its own "archaeological model".

3) To show how different concepts play the same role within their respective discourse, that is, to show that they are "archaeological isotopes".

4) To reveal "archaeological shifts" by showing how the same concept can have distinct roles in different discourses.

5) To establish "archeological correlations" by showing how amongst various discourses there may be one of particular importance for the others, such that it determines in part what they say.

These five tasks, these descriptions, do map in discourse the direction of influence, communication and information. But though those are all possible objects for investigation they take place at the level of the subject, which is not Foucault interest. He wants to describe them at the level of their possibility, which is not that of the subject. Any movement at the level of the subject is only possible because the rules of formation of the discourse sanction it.

Because Rousseau and others reflected in turn on the ordering of the species and the origins of the languages, this does not mean that relations were made and exchanges occurred between taxonomy and grammar; or because Turgot, after Law and Petty, wished to treat coinage as a sign, that economy and the history of language were brought close together and that their history still bears the trace of these attempts. It means rather—if, at least, one is attempting to make an archaeological description—that the respective arrangements of these three positivities were such that, at the level of oeuvres, authors, individual existences, projects, and attempts, one can find such exchanges (AK 162).

It is the province of archaeology to reveal too the relations between discursive formations and such non-discursive formations as institutions, politics, economics, etc. The non-discursive is not a cause of the discursive though. A causal analysis would try to show how consciousness is determined so that values, perception, rationality, and so on, could all be accounted for on the basis of that cause. That is a far too positivistic explanation for Foucault. He wants to show in what way non-discourse takes part in the emergence of discourse. To show how political practices affect possible ways of investigation, the objects at the investigator's disposal and even the role that discourse is forced to play outside its traditional function. It is a question of understanding the ramifications for a discourse of its articulation of non-discursive practices which are external to it.

Archaeology then does not consider discourse as the symbolic or literal expression of subjects, nor as the outcome of a causal series. The aim is not to guarantee the sovereignty of discourse, but to discover its genesis and its function.

In other words, the archaeological description of discourses is deployed in the dimension of a general history; it seeks to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated; it tries to show how the autonomy of discourse and its specificity nevertheless do not give it the status of pure ideality and total historical independence; what it wishes to uncover is the particular level in which history can give place to definite types of discourse, which have their own type of historicity, and which are related to a whole set of various historicities (AK 164-165).

So that what is rejected is any historical totalization. Foucault wants to insist on the historicity of discourse without reducing it to non-discursive factors.

4. Change and Transformations

The history of ideas has the advantage of a fairly orderly account of change; ideas follow one another in a more or less evolutionary manner. Echoing charges that were brought against The Order of Things that he could not account for change, Foucault says rhetorically that archaeology seems only to treat history to freeze it. By making discursive formations subservient to rules of formation it seems to impose on them a debilitating synchrony. Its chronology consists merely, it seems, of the dates of the appearance and disappearance of discourse. History itself seems thus to disappear. There seems to be no possibility of development in a discourse located as it is in a "discontinuous temporality". That at least is what archaeology may imply with a superficial reading. Foucault says that the synchrony of discursive formations is only apparent. Archaeology only suspends the notion of temporal succession, in order to revel discourse's own temporality.

Archaeology does not conceive of discourse as a static block immune to change or influence. It takes note of the fact though that discourse is surrounded by countless events that could conceivably affect it. The point is that very few external events are significant for any particular discourse. Foucault tries to account for this rarity by searching for the correlation between discourse and those events. It is not a matter of favouring synchrony over diachrony.

Foucault says that archaeology does not treat as simultaneous that which is successive. It does not deny that succession is the absolute rule of discourse though. There are two models in the history of ideas used to account for change, neither are satisfactory, according to Foucault. One is the linear model of speech in which the effects of coincidence and superposition are neglected. The other is the model of the stream of consciousness in which the present constantly slips away in its openness to past and future. Discourse, he says, does not have the historicity of a consciousness which works through language. Discourse is not a language spoken by a subject. It is a practice with its own rules and forms of succession.

C. The Organization of Discourse

Foucault ended The Order of Things prophesying the death of man. Since man appeared when language was in retreat, does not the return of language herald his death. The problem became to show how man could be replaced by language. The Archaeology of Knowledge is therefore about the way language, in the form of discourse, produces and organises knowledge.

In 1966 Foucault noted the novelty of his project.

One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regards to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that "meaning" was probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us, in space and time was the system.[9]

This means that discourse cannot be reduced to the intentions of a subject. Foucault tries to show that knowledge is produced by a discourse that produces itself.

The Archaeology of Knowledge is about "statements" and "discursive formations". Foucault uses the latter term when he wants to draw attention to the rule governed nature of discourse. Discursive formations are composed of statements, so that an investigation of one serves an explication of the other.

But what Foucault means by "statement" is not what is usually understood by that term. Discursive formations are similar to what we designate with the term "science". A statement belongs to a discursive formation which is something like a science. Statements therefore are not common. They are not phrases like "the cat is on the mat", or "shut the door". Statements are not just any group of signs conforming to the grammar of a language.

Foucault has difficulty making this point however. Normally "the cat is on the mat" would not be construed as a statement belonging to a science because the person who uttered it did not intend that it should be. What Foucault must show, since he does not think it fruitful to examine the speaker's intentions or the manifest meaning of the utterance, is that it would not be produced by the rules of formation of a discourse. I argue later that he cannot do this; he tries to get round this problem using an unworkable distinction between sentences and statements. I will return to this point.

Foucault's statements have been referred to as "serious speech acts".[10] Speech acts require a context for their meaning to be specified. Further that context can be serious, in which case a speech act would belong to a serious discourse (for example, a religion or science). The speech act would itself be serious in the sense of crucial; its presence would then be significant for its discourse. Extending this model to Foucault, the implication is that statements exist in virtue of belonging to a discourse, and that a discourse is comprised of statements which can modify it. But not just any statement can fit within a discourse. The discourse because of what it already contains cannot accept just any statement.

Calling statements "serious speech acts" is a useful way of indicating the peculiar way in which Foucault uses the terms "discourse" and "statement". I will show later though why one should not push this analogy to far. I think it glosses over a serious flaw in Foucault's argument; namely, he presents a topology of discourse that even on its own terms does not work. Foucault's primary interest is in showing how statements are produced, not how they are understood. He is not concerned with showing that one must know the context within which a linguistic configuration is composed in order to understand it as a statement. He wants to show that the context produces the statement, though not in the sense that the speaker must know his audience in order to formulate the appropriate speech act. He wants to show that discourse and not individuals produce statements. Foucault does this by showing that discourse is a rule governed body of statements to which a subject must confirm if he wants to use that discourse.

The question is how are we to account for the unity and existence of these discursive formations. Foucault enunciates four traditional explanations and claims that each is inadequate. The first hypothesis is that statements form a discursive formation if they all refer to the same object. The second hypothesis is that statements form a discursive formation by having in common a certain style. Nineteenth century medicine, for example, could be characterised as a group of descriptive statements. The third hypothesis was that statements constitute a discursive formation in virtue of a common stock of concepts among them. Finally he says that it was a common theme which linked statements together in a discursive formation. Foucault rejected each of these because all presuppose something anterior to discourse.[11]

Each of the four traditional hypotheses required the active intervention of a subject who expressed, or lent speech to, something which was non-discursive. Foucault wants to show that it is discourse itself which produces statements. He also want to avoid a crude Marxism; he does not believe that discourse is produced by institutions or the material conditions of life. We shall see that in order to exclude both the subject and the material conditions of life from the creation of statements Foucault presents an unwieldy topology of discourse.

In four successive hypothesis he insists that objects, concepts, themes and types of enunciations emerge with discourse. They do no exist in some non-discursive silence waiting to be articulated in language. The time of their birth is the moment they are articulated in discursive practice, that is, in rule governed discourse. Language does not re-present that which is prior to language.

1. First Hypothesis

Discursive formations are not organised around a common object, but rather objects are produced by discursive formations. For an object to be produced it is necessary that discourse have a mechanism of production. That mechanism is the "rules of formation". Foucault says,

The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choice) are subjected to what we shall call rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division (AK 38).

It becomes clear how considerably different the discursive formation is from the traditional unities.

Foucault asks what rules account for the existence of objects in discourse. He refers exclusively to "objects of discourse". Objects of discourse are rare, for example, yeast is a considerably different object for a baker and a microbiologist. As an object of microbiological discourse, yeast is classified, studied, analysed under a microscope, and is an object related to a regime of true and false statements. It is in relation to a network of institutions, texts, research projects—the whole world of microbiology. This is not an idealism of course, Foucault does not believe that objects are the effects of language. It is just that objects do not exist as the very specific objects that they are in a body of knowledge, apart from what is said about them. Brunshvic was fond of saying that the history of Egypt was in fact the history of Egyptology. We are not to conclude that the Egyptians owe their existence to Egyptologists of course, only that the world exists as we know it.

To uncover the rules according to which the appearance of objects are subject, Foucault says, that one has to; map the "surfaces of their emergence"; describe the authorities of delimitation"; and "analyse the grids of specification" (AK 41-42). The surfaces of emergence are the locations where objects are present. In nineteenth century psychopathology, for example,Foucault says that it is the family, the social grouping and the church, which are the surfaces of emergence. Each has norms beyond which transgression was explained by psychopathology. In our time the arts, psychiatry, medicine, and so on have determined new surfaces of emergence allowing new objects to appear.

The authorities of delimitation are those who designated something as an object for discourse. In the nineteenth century the medical profession was the major authority that designated the particularities of madness, though legal and religious authorities were also involved. Finally the grids of specification are the systems according to which the kinds of a particular object are analysed and related. Madness, for example, in the nineteenth century was determined by the soul, the body, biography, and neuropsychology.

2. Second Hypothesis

To analyse the formation of enunciative modalities Foucault says that one must investigate; "who is speaking"; the institutional sites" from which the subject practices his discourse; and finally the role the subject presumes in his discourse. This investigation will allow one to discover the rules operating behind the diversity of statements and which produce knowledge.

Foucault maintains that his analysis of enunciative modalities points away from the unity and unifying function of the subject. It indicates the dispersion of the subject. The status of speakers, the sites from which they speak and the positions they can occupy, are not established by an act of consciousness but by discourse. The alternative as Foucault sees it is to posit a consciousness which creates this system of formation anterior to discourse. Only in that way is the influence of discourse avoided. Discourse is then a translation into speech of a previously established system. Decentering the subject has the effect therefore that discourse cannot be regarded as the sign of something else. Discourse is in fact an anonymous totality in which subjects are dispersed.

3. Third Hypothesis

The formation of concepts cannot be accounted for by a horizon of ideality, nor by a progress of ideas, nor by the subject. One must see instead an organisation in which disparate concepts can appear. That organisation involves various "orderings of enunciative series". Foucault says that there exists in discourse a set of rules for arranging statements in series. In that series of statements concepts derive their value. For example, he says that the difference between natural history during the sixteenth century and that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was not the result of a new body of knowledge which redefined already existing concepts. In natural history in the seventeenth century there was a new way of arranging statements which sought to recreate the perceptual process. That project demanded a particular ordering of descriptive, classificatory and observatory statements, as well as deductions, presumptions, etc. That ordering, rather than consciousness, formed concepts.

Foucault says that by examining the forms of "coexistence" and "procedures of intervention" among statements, one will uncover the way concepts are formed. He calls the "field of presence" all those statements formulated in one discourse and taken up by another; the "field of concomitance" those statements active in more than one discourse; finally the "field of memory" constitutes all the discarded statements of a discourse. These fields, these relations, determine, unknown to any investigator, what he does and says within a discourse.

Concepts are the recurrent elements in statements formed by their relation with one another. This is similar to Saussure's account of the production of meaning by the system of signs that constitutes a language. It is not then a matter of tracing the meaning and origin of the manifest concepts. One performs a typical step back from meaning to the system. Concepts are formed by the relations in discourse which place particular statements in proximity with one another. It is not the individual who refines a concept and thereby creates new ones. Nor is it against a horizon of transcendentally ideal structures of concepts that they gain their particularity.

4. Fourth Hypothesis

In the chapter on "The Formation of Strategies", Foucault says that in discourse the organisation of concepts, objects, and enunciative modalities, form themes or theories. He calls these themes and theories "strategies". The problem is to determine why one strategy rather than another exists at a particular time. There is no transcendental necessity to the appearance of strategies, but neither is it a matter of chance. The problem is to account for the historicity of things. Descartes, for example, could not explain why history had not come to an end, why everything was not already known, without saying something strained like "life is short", or "people are lazy". On the other hand getting rid of the cogito like Foucault, presents its own problems; particularly of finding a credible productive mechanism of knowledge.

A discursive formation exists whenever one can describe a system for the production of strategies. Such a description requires that one determine the "points of diffraction" of discourse, the economy of discursive constellations, and the function that a discourse has in a "field of non-discursive practices". The points of diffraction derive from one another and regulate each other. They are incompatible alternatives within a discourse. The points of diffraction contribute to a system of formation because each alternative implies a group of objects, concepts and type of statement. The discursive constellation is the relation that one discourse may have with another. They check the possible options opened by the points of diffraction. Foucault contends, for example, that the theory of value in economics in the eighteenth century was linked to the theory of language then present. Strategies are also determined by the function that discourse is forced to perform. for example, the role of the "analysis of wealth" in the emergence of capitalism.

The four systems of formation Foucault describes are in fact one system. He says they are dependent on each other, they do not function in isolation. Still his account of how this works is fairly abstract, and for the uninitiated his examples are not terribly helpful. One should keep in mind therefore the overall model of his account of discourse taken from archaeology. It is the model of surface and depth; of discovering beneath the present city the ruins on top of which it was founded. The city in this case is discourse, and the ruins on top of which it stands are the four systems of formation. Foucault cannot push the archaeology metaphor too far though, otherwise one would expect to find not the rules of formation below discourse, but another discourse; just as one finds the ruins of one city beneath the one presently standing. In fact we shall see that this does present a problem for Foucault. He cannot argue that it is the rules of formation which create discourse, because he has no means of discovering them. I will argue this by showing that Foucault cannot collapse truth into discourse, as he does, and remain an archaeologist of knowledge.

There is actually a second, topological, model of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault refers constantly to the "interior" and the "exterior" of discourse. The four systems of formation are methodological signposts for discovering the types of relations that must be established within a discourse for particular theories, hypotheses, or statements to be enunciated. It is on this model too that Foucault's theory of discourse founders, as we shall see. One could perhaps imagine the formation of a discourse as like constructing a house. Particular supplies are necessary for particular houses, and have no other use. Regarding discourse, Foucault shows what relationships must be present at hand for any discourse to be formed. He shows too that what a discourse can incorporate is limited by its rules of formations (like the foundations of a building).

5. The Statement

Foucault admits that in his explanation of the formation of objects, strategies, concepts and enunciative modalities that he used some key terms in an imprecise way. In Part III he sets out to rectify the situation. He particularly attempts to define what he means by "statement", but other terms are made more precise as well. It is evident from what he has said about the formation of concepts, objects, strategies and enunciative modalities, that he is using the term "statement" in a peculiar way.

If we agree to call verbal performance, or better, linguistic performance, any group of signs produced on the basis of a natural (or artificial) language (langue), we could call formulation the individual (or possibly collective) act that reveals, on any material and according to a particular form, that group of signs: the formulation is an event that can always be located by its spatio-temporal coordinates, which can always be related to an author, and which may constitute in itself a particular act (a "performative" act, as the British analysts call it); we can call sentence or proposition the units that grammar or logic may recognize in a group of signs: these units may always be characterised by the elements that figure in them, and by the rules of construction that unite them; in relation to the sentence and the proposition, the question of origin, time and place, and context are merely subsidiary, the decisive question is that of their correctness (if only under the form of "acceptability"). We will call statement the modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation with a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject, to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality (AK 107).

There is thus no formal criterion for recognizing a statement other than that it is a product of a system of rules. Unfortunately for Foucault, simply examining the archive will never reveal whether an utterance is a statement or not given this criterion. For example, `the cat is on the mat', may be a password used by spies, or a warning that the house pet is where he should not be, or even news that the well known boxer, nick-named "the cat" has been knocked-out. But since the rules are only the arche of discourse, and not the archive to which he has access, Foucault will never be able to know, for example, whether he has heard some domestic triviality, been privy to the world of espionage, or just learnt the fight results.

Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow call statements serious speech acts in order to draw attention to their performative aspect and to their literal meaningfulness (i.e. the absence of deep meaning). On this they claim that Searle and Foucault are philosophically allied. Searle, they say, is interested in how a hearer understands a speech act. That is done by placing the speech act in context with other related speech acts and within a background of shared practices. Foucault, they claim, presupposes the way these common speech acts are understood, but is not interested in them. "Foucault is interested in just those types of speech acts which are from the shared everyday background so as to constitute a relatively autonomous realm."[12] Dreyfus and Rabinow point in the right direction, there is a problem of recognition for the archaeologist, but their argument is not, I think, the right one.

The most obvious problem with making Foucault into a (serious) speech act theorist is that he rejects the central dogma of speech act theory. In traditional speech act theory the meaning of an utterance depends on the speaker's intentions. Considering the social setting, the speaker chooses the appropriate locution in anticipation of the possible interpretations his intention might be given. The audience in turn, recognizing the social setting, choose the correct interpretation and in so doing apprehend the speakers intentions. That is surely the antithesis of Foucault's position.

Foucault insists that statements are not the expressions of the intentions of a subject. They are instead the product of the rules of formation of discourse, and it is those rules which endow an utterance with meaning. A statement is understood by determining the positions it occupies within discourse; namely, by examining its strategic relations with other statements of the discourse. A statement is not understood by situating it in the material world and then interpolating the speaker's intentions.

It is misleading to call statements serious speech acts since it obscures the relation between statements, propositions, and especially sentences. Dreyfus and Rabinow build, I think, a straw man argument by contending that statements are speech acts. They try to manoeuvre Foucault into a positions where he must renounce his archaeology and his anti-humanism. In support of this they refer to "The Discourse on Language". However, Foucault's position there on the autonomy of discourse is not the same as it is in The Archaeology of Knowledge, and so cannot be used to buttress their argument.

Serious speech acts, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow, are formed when an utterance passes, "some sort of institutional test, such as rules of dialectical argument, inquisitional interrogation, or empirical confirmation."[13] They then quote from "The Discourse on Language", "it is always possible one could speak the truth in a void; one would only be in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of some discursive "policy" which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke" (DL 224). Dreyfus and Rabinow cannot use this quote to support the position that in The Archaeology of Knowledge statements are serious speech acts. This quote is contrary to the position there. In fact "The Discourse on Language" is a response to the unresolved problems that Foucault had with the notions of discourse and statement in The Archaeology of Knowledge.

The whole of that book is dedicated to showing that any statement is a product of a system of formation. Yet Dreyfus and Rabinow quote Foucault from "The Discourse on Language" as saying that one can speak the truth in a void, that one can make statements outside of a system of formation. Whereas, in The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault actually only says that sentences can be made outside the system. This is important however, it raises the perplexing question of where statements come from.

In the passage quoted from "The Discourse on Language", Foucault says that in order to be within the true, that is, to make acceptable and recognizable statements, one must confirm to the existing discourse. The model is of an endless number of possible statements, but of selection by discourse of what actually gets said, while every other possible utterance is repressed. This is precisely not the position of The Archaeology of Knowledge. The systems of formation are conditions of existence, not of possibility. There are no repressed statements. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, system and discourse produce one another in discursive practice. There is nothing lurking anterior to discourse, not even the system of formation. This creates the hermeneutical problem for Foucault that I have alluded to; he has no means of discovering either discourse or its rules of formation.

Dreyfus and Rabinow beg the question however of the relationship between sentences (and propositions) and statements, by calling the latter serious speech acts. Foucault nowhere refers to anything like serious speech acts. He refers only to the "rarity" of statements. Calling statements serious speech acts misleadingly attributes to Foucault the position that the whole linguistic field is comprised of speech acts, some serious and some not. Presumably it is the serious speech acts which are produced by the system of formation. The question remains where the non-serious speech acts come from. Dreyfus and Rabinow complicate things further; they do not say that serious speech acts are due to a system of formation, but rather that they are formed by a subject obeying the rules of a discursive policy. They invoke the concept of "obeying" in order to charge Foucault with overlooking the question of whether his rules of formation are meant to be prescriptive or descriptive.

Dreyfus and Rabinow construe statements as serious speech acts because it serves their argument to do so. If he deals with serious speech acts Foucault must be able to recognize them as such, otherwise, they charge, he could not describe them. Their position is that Foucault cannot discover the system of formation unless he first recognizes the products of that system. He must know the meaning of the serious speech acts if he is to recognize them as such. He cannot treat serious speech acts non-seriously, that is, as meaningless traces of a system that is itself not evident. "Unless he understands the issues that concern the thinkers he studies, he will be unable to distinguish when two different utterances are the same speech act and when two identical utterances are different speech acts."[14]

They claim that Foucault is concerned with serious speech acts, but that his method prevents him from dealing with them.

Unless the investigator has access to the meaning of the activity in question he will be unable to distinguish apparent similarity of use from the kind of similarity of use which establishes that two different utterances are, in fact, identical statements. Thus being both within and outside of the discourse he studies, sharing their meaningful truth claims while suspending them, is the archaeologists ineluctable condition.

Even if serious discourse never really has the serious meaning it claims but is only the rule-governed transformation of meaningless objects, subjects, concepts and strategies which archaeology reveals it to be; even if, in the last analysis, the archaeologist's monuments turn out to have been mute all along, this much still remains true: neither the serious scientist nor the archeologist could do their work if it weren't for the illusion that there is serious meaning. Indeed, archaeology is the discipline of listening sensitively to the very monuments one treats as mute.[15]

There are two things wrong with this position. The first is their theory of speech acts, the second is their understanding of the question of meaning. The problem stems from trying to make Foucault into a phenomenologist. They claim that as an archaeologist he brackets both meaning and truth. That is a fatal mistake because gathering evidence requires that the archaeologist know the meaning of the traces; if no meaning then no statements. Dreyfus and Rabinow claim that Foucault is involved in a "double phenomenological bracketing" of both sense and reference.[16] In fact Foucault brackets nothing. The question is not how are statements understood, but how are they produced. Foucault's answer is the system of formation, and not the intentional acts of the subject. Speaking of objects, Foucault says his investigation is not an analysis of meaning since that will not uncover the rules of formation which produce discourse. Analyses of meaning remain stranded at the level of consciousness.

Foucault does not, like Husserl, have a formal method that requires something be bracketed. He is not in the ineluctable position that Dreyfus and Rabinow construct. He does not bracket either meaning or reference and does not hold that meaning is "an illusion fostered by the rule governed rarety of statements". Foucault takes meaning quite seriously. He does not look below a statement to find its real meaning. He treats the statement as an "event" and wonders how it was produced. He tries to understand how once meaningful statements became meaningless.

Dreyfus and Rabinow charge that Foucault has failed to distinguish prescriptive rules from descriptive rules. They charge that at one moment Foucault talks as if the rules were meant to be prescriptive and that at another that they are descriptive. Foucault cannot have it both ways they say, and yet his project demands just that.

If rules that people sometimes follow account for what gets said, are these rules meant to be descriptive, so that we should say merely that people act according to them, or are they meant to be efficacious, so that we can say that speakers actually follow them. Foucault certainly does not want to say that the rules are followed by the speakers. The rules are not in the minds of those whose behaviour they describe.[17]

The rules are not in the minds of the speakers, they reside in discourse. If they were in the mind we would be back in the realm of transcendental constitution, a position Foucault rejects. Dreyfus and Rabinow say that if the rules are not in the mind they cannot be prescriptive, and yet Foucault says they are. They quote the following from The Archaeology of Knowledge, "This dispersion itself—with its gaps, its discontinuities, its entanglements, its incompatibilities, its replacements, and its substitutions—can be described in its uniqueness if one is able to determine the specific rules in accordance with which its objects, statements, concepts and theoretical options have been formed" (AK 81). This passage however does not imply that the rules are followed consciously.

Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow rightly claim, is not content simply to offer a description of the regularities found in discourse. Foucault wants to give the conditions for the actual existence of particular statements. He says that the rules, that is, the discursive relations,

determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal with them, name them, analyse them, classify them, explain them, etc. These relations characterise not the language (langue) used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice (AK 46).

Consequently for Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault is in the awkward position of maintaining that while the rules are prescriptive, that is, lay down what speakers must do to form statements, they are nevertheless not in the minds of the speakers, nor even known to them. If one followed Dreyfus and Rabinow, one could say that Foucault is a Descartes in reverse. The question is not how can the cogito reach the world, but how can the world (as discourse) reach the cogito. Contra Dreyfus and Rabinow however, there is no reason to suppose that prescriptive rules must inhere in the consciousness of individuals to insure their efficacy, nor even that the project of description precludes prescription.

Dreyfus and Rabinow themselves point to Foucault's solution. In fact their example of an analogue of Foucault's rules is a common one in the structuralist literature; it is the example of grammar. The rules of grammar are both prescriptive and descriptive. They must be followed by a speaker to be understood, but are not followed consciously. Like any code, the rules of grammar, like the rules of formation of discourse, always precedes the speaker. The speaker must follow the rules of the system to make statements. But it is not a conscious following, like following a recipe or a road map, it is more like riding a bicycle. It is a "knowing how", not a "knowing that". If one allows that the rules of formation can have a similar function as the rules of grammar, then the problem of prescription versus description is no longer crucial.

Actually the critique of Dreyfus and Rabinow misses the real failure of The Archaeology of Knowledge; namely the unworkable relation between the discursive and the non-discursive. Foucault is unclear on the relation between statements and sentences, between that which is from discourse and that which is not. He says that there are sentences and propositions, and that neither of these are statements. Yet he does say that discourse is composed of statements, and that they are meaningful because they are products of a system of formation. The question then is how are sentences and propositions which are not statements meaningful.

Foucault's answer to this question is not convincing. Indeed I think it is the reason why soon after the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, in "The Discourse on Language", that Foucault changed his position. In the former work Foucault had said that sentences and propositions were transformed into statements.

...One cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform a sentence into a statement unless a collateral space is brought into operation (AK 97).

The associated field that turns a sentence or a series of signs into a statement, which provides them with a particular context, a specific representative content, forms a complex web (AK 99).

If one can speak of a statement, it is because a sentence (a proposition) figures at a definite point, with a specific position in an enunciative network that extends beyond (AK 99).

Sentences and propositions become statements when they are located in the enunciative field defined by the system of formation. The trouble with this is that it must posit two domains of meaning, one for sentences and propositions and one for statements. Indeed Foucault seems to hold this position. Sentences can be meaningful in isolation, but statements rely on the context for their meaning.

Certainly one is not very sure what a group of words like "I'll tell you that tomorrow" means; in any case, one can neither date this "tomorrow", nor guess what is to be said. Nevertheless, it is a perfectly delimited sentence, obeying the rules of construction of the language (langue) in which it is written. Lastly, one might object that, without a context, it is sometimes difficult to define the structure of a sentence ("I shall never know if he is dead" or "I shall never be informed of his death when this event occurs"). But this ambiguity is perfectly definable, simultaneous possibilities can be posited that belong to the structure proper of the sentence. Generally speaking, one can say that a sentence or a proposition—even when isolated, even divorced from the natural context that could throw light on to its meaning, even freed or cut off from all elements to which, implicitly or not, it refers—always remains a sentence or a proposition and can always be recognized as such (AK 97).

If anything then Foucault's sentences are more like Searle's speech acts, since they always have a literal meaning, than are his statements. The role of the system seems to be subverted however. It posits a source of meaning outside the system of formation. The situation is not attenuated by pointing out that the meaning of sentences is ambiguous. How do sentences get "transformed" into statements? the suggestion seems to be that, for example, first Newton produced a set of grammatically correct laws concerning mass, which then became statements by their appropriation by discourse. This seems to be Foucault's ineluctable position, for he certainly would not want to say that, for example, Newton formulated his laws outside of the discourse present then about bodies in motion. The situation is that meaningful, though ambiguous sentences are produced apart from the system of formation. Given Foucault's notion of the system though, even statements cannot be devoid of ambiguity. In a system meaning can never be fixed since the relations between its elements are endless. One has only to examine Foucault's own examples of statements to see that their meaning is ambiguous.

This problem of sentences and statements is really just part of the more crucial problem of the relation of the discursive to the non-discursive. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault denies any efficacious role to the non-discursive in discourse. He grudgingly relents somewhat in "The Discourse on Language" however. A comparison of those two works will reveal the scope of the difficulty in the latter regarding the question of the relation of discourse and non-discourse.

D. Complications with Discourse

In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault wants to account for the production of discourse without reducing it to either the product of a subject or to the effects of institutions. His position is that discourse is determined by rules which are not accessible to the subject. Foucault believes that an explication of those rules will never reveal how discourse produces itself. To get at those rules he first had to clear away such traditional unities of discourse as the "oeuvre" and the "book", which are tied to the subject and do not really account for the unity and existence of discourse anyway. In their place Foucault substitutes the rules of formation of discourse. Thus there is a danger of lapsing into materialism. If you reject humanism what is the alternative—materialism? Foucault says no; discourse is produced by itself, not by the material conditions of life. Ironically the greatest threat to The Archaeology is materialism and not humanism. Humanism is disposed of in chapter one, it is the spectre of materialism which haunts the rest of the book.

The matter of humanism versus materialism hinges on the relation of discourse and non-discourse. Having discarded any form of humanism Foucault must guard himself against materialism, since if it is not man who produces and organises discourse it must be institutions. Institutions embodying the material conditions of life are would be infrastructure and discourse the superstructure. Foucault's tactical response, to preserve his claim that discourse produces itself, is to say that institutions are subordinated to discourse. He has a difficult time justifying that position. In The Archaeology the non-discursive is uneasy in its servile position, and it begins to re-assert itself in "The Discourse". Non-discursive practices and events are freed from their subordinate position, though only in an attenuated fashion. In later works they assume their full independence.

The question is: why does Foucault not simply opt for historical materialism. There too history is rule governed and it also is an anti-humanism. The answer to that question no doubt has a lot to do with the peculiar history of philosophy in contemporary France, and with the famous events of May 1968. About the history of philosophy in France, Foucault remarks in "The Discourse", "our age, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or through Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel..." (DL 235). Historical materialism is too closely allied to Hegel for Foucault's liking. It is riddled with too many problematic notions, for example, dialectic, class, class consciousness and class struggle, history, etc. Most damning of all was the failure of any historical materialism to predict or explain the events of May 1968. The Communist's cherished infrastructure-superstructure distinction failed to explain the uprising. Not only could they not explain the timetable of events (revolution was not expected for quite some time), they could not explain the new class alignments. It was not a struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, but a struggle against the marginalization of such groups as women, students, homosexuals, the unemployed, and workers.

On the advent of the events of May, Roland Barthes identified the challenge of what had to be thought by French intellectuals. "How can the two great epistemes of modernity, the materialist dialectic and the Freudian dialectic, be brought together so as to fuse and produce a new order of human relations...?"[18] Foucault is no Freudo-Marxist of course, but one can see his attempt to discover what he calls "the positive unconscious" of knowledge as an attempt to deal with the shortcomings of materialism without lapsing into psychologism.[19]

"The Discourse on Language" is a transition work. It begins Foucault's musings on power.

I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality (DL 216).

From this the relation between The Archaeology of Knowledge and "The Discourse on Language" is clear. The problem is still the production of discourse, the explanation given by phenomenology is still rejected along with its humanism, but the solution of a self-regulating and self-producing discourse is given up. Foucault now admits to the role of institutions, that is, the non-discursive, in the formation of discourse. He thus tends more towards a materialist account of knowledge and man. Earlier discourse produced itself so that materialism was no threat, but in "The Discourse" that option is not available.

There Foucault outlines three groups of rules that control and produce discourse. The first group he calls the rules of exclusion, the second are the internal rules of statements considered as events, (these are concerned with "principles of classification, ordering and distribution"), the third group of rules are those which determine the conditions under which a certain discourse may be employed.

The exact role and nature of the rules of exclusion is problematic. They are not discursive, they are repressive non-discursive rules which check the latter's fecundity. Such a division between non-discursive rules which repress and discursive rules which create is impossible to maintain however. Discursive rules also check discourse and non-discursive ones create discourse as Foucault makes clear. In an interview in 1977 Foucault dismissed the theory of power which had given the rules of exclusion their peculiar efficacy.

I think that in "The Discourse on Language" I conflated two concepts, or rather that for what I take to be a legitimate problem (that of articulating the data of discourse with the mechanism of power) I provided an inadequate solution. It was a piece I wrote at a moment of transition. Till then, it seems to me, I accepted the traditional conception of power as an essentially judicial mechanism, as that which lays down the law, which prohibits, which refuses, and which has a whole range of negative effects: exclusion, rejection, denial, obstruction, occultation, etc. Now I believe that conception to be invalid (PK 183).

In writings which followed, non-discursive power became fully productive.

Rules of exclusion control the production of discourse repressively, but do not produce themselves. Later granting them a productive function, Foucault entirely subverted the project of The Archaeology. In "The Discourse" it is the internal rules which properly produce discourse. These rules are also properly discursive, they are not the embodiment of power in non-discursive phenomena. In The Archaeology the whole of discourse was accounted for by internal rules. The non-discursive there functions only in as much as it is appropriated by discourse and made discursive.

In The Archaeology Foucault is not entirely clear on how the non-discursive is appropriated by discourse, and while in "The Discourse" the non-discursive is rehabilitated it is also disarmed, so to speak. There, there are only three internal rules; the "principle of commentary", the "author principle", and the "discipline principle". They are referred to varyingly as "principles", "rules", "principles of limitation", "principles of rarefaction", and "systems of control". All this represents a major difference between The Archaeology and "The Discourse".

Most importantly in the later text one finds an equivocation on the meaning of "statement" and "proposition". Foucault now says, "For a discipline to exist, there must be the possibility of formulating—and of doing so ad infinitum—fresh propositions" (DL 223). In The Archaeology Foucault had explicitly stated that propositions are not equivalent to statements. "I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a statement is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of statements only when there is a proposition" (AK 80). The distance between the two works is thus broadened.

In "The Discourse" the rules of exclusion are external to discourse, while the principles of commentary, the author and the discipline, are all internal rules. But there is also a third group of rules controlling discourse which are neither external nor internal. They are the rules which determine who may employ a discourse. They are, the "verbal rituals, `fellowships of discourse', doctrinal groups and social appropriation" (DL 227). It is an indication that Foucault is having problems with his topology of discourse that this third group of rules is not granted a location, especially as they were deemed internal rules in The Archaeology. Furthermore Foucault now seems to move the rules that were inside of discourse there, to the outside of discourse in "The Discourse". In doing so he subverts the entire topology of discourse of The Archaeology.

There discursive formations were composed of statements controlled by rules internal to discourse. In "The Discourse" there are disciplines composed of propositions-statements produced and controlled by internal and external rules, and also by a third group of rules which are neither. Disciplines replace discursive formations, and are defined not by the "space" or rules that make them possible, but by objects, methods and true propositions.

The difference between The Archaeology and "The Discourse" can be seen further by examining what Foucault means in the former by rules "residing" in discourse. For example, he says that rules do not constitute objects, but that they allow objects to appear and to be spoken about; what he calls being "placed in a field of exteriority". These rules are distinguished from primary and secondary relations. Primary relations are those between, for example, the family and the courts. Secondary relations would be what psychiatrists say about the relations between the family and criminality. Discursive relations differ from both of these.

They are not internal to discourse in the sense of linking concepts to words. They do not form a kind of meta-language. Discursive relations do not constitute a deductive or rhetorical structure between propositions or sentences. Discursive relations are not internal to discourse, but nor are they outside of it.

They are, in some sense at the limit of discourse: they offer it objects of which it can speak, or rather (for this image of offering presupposes that objects are formed independently of discourse), they determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal with them, name them, explain them etc. These relations characterise not the language (langue) used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice (AK 46).

Foucault wants to avoid a crude Marxism. He does not want discourse to be conceived of as a superstructure, causally determined by an infrastructure that is non-discursive. Nevertheless because he could not adequately explain how rules reside in discourse he had to alter his position. It is not clear why primary relations are not discursive relations, that is, why some relations are rules of formation and some not.

This is complicated further by the notion of the "pre-discursive". Foucault says that the rules of formation are not outside of discourse, they do not transcribe themselves onto the surface of discourse. The rules are immanent in discourse. The problem is however that everything seems to be in discourse, somehow even non-discursive practices belong to it.

Behind the completed system, what is discovered by the analysis of formations is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncaptured state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations. Moreover, these relations cannot be the very web of the text—they are not by nature foreign to discourse. They can certainly be qualified as "prediscursive", but only if one admits that this prediscursive is still discursive, that is, that they do not specify thought, or a consciousness, or a group of representations a posteriori, and in a way that is never quite necessary, are transcribed into discourse; but that they characterise certain levels of discourse, that they define rules that are embodied as a particular practice by discourse. One is not seeking, therefore, to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse (AK 76).

When Foucault calls a practice or relation non-discursive therefore, one should not think that it is alien to discourse. This is precisely the position that he failed to establish however, and if he had it would have rendered his notion of discourse useless anyway. Such a broad conception of discourse would put quantum mechanics on a par with polite chit-chat. In that case every utterance would count as a statement, a position he rejects.

By the end of "The Discourse" Foucault has effectively scuttled the project of The Archaeology. Like man, discourse has been dispersed. Just as man could not be both the opaque object investigated as well as the condition of possibility of that investigation which sought the clarification of his being, so too could discourse not be both the obscure object of investigation and also the condition of the possibility of that investigation. Foucault could not show how discourse alone, as a rule governed body of statements, could exist alongside of non-discourse (in the form of institutions or subjects, for example) and taking them into account, still produce itself. He was forced to evade their effect by making them into the pre-discursive and by subsequently declaring that the pre-discursive always belongs to the discursive. But then everything becomes discourse and the exercise is rendered meaningless.

Until now I have dwelt on the internal inconsistencies of Foucault's account of discourse. Now I want to consider an external argument which may account for his internal muddle. Foucault's topology of discourse does not adequately clarify the ontological position of the rules of formation. The rules are a priori, but also historical. They are necessary, but not transcendentally necessary, even though they determine what can count as knowledge. Foucault could therefore be called a Kantian without a transcendental subject. His position is similar to Wittgenstein's. In the Tractatus we find a transcendental logic (prop. 6:13), but no transcendental subject. Foucault's rules are not transcendental of course, nor atemporal or universal, but they do separate knowledge from illusion just like Kant's categories.

Discourse, like man, is therefore a paradoxical object. It is a quasi-transcendental logic located in a quasi-transcendental subject which produces itself as an object according to its own rules. Like the humanist's man, discourse is its own maker and its own norm. It is the measure of all things. Ironically it is Foucault who has warned us to be suspicious of this very position. Discourse too seems to be an empirico-transcendental doublet.[20]

In trying to circumvent this pitfall it seems that Foucault does not escape a tacit reference to a truth which has nothing to do with discourse. After all he is not in the same position as Chomsky, for example, who can claim that the validity of the rules which he finds determines what gets said is proven by their instantiation in the brain. Nor like the behaviourists can he claim that his rules garner their validity as reinforced behaviour patterns, and he cannot like the Marxist justify them as belonging to the economic infrastructure. Foucault's position is more awkward than all of these. He claims to have discovered his rules as regularities within discourse, but he does not claim that their validity determines the truth of discourse. Nevertheless Foucault's examples of discourse do tell us how things are in the world, so perhaps they do contain a covert reference to truth independent of discourse.

The bifurcation between sentences and statements (which tell us about the world) requires, in spite of Foucault, a prior ontological commitment. A minimal ontology of world and truthful description is required, otherwise discourse and non-discourse would be indistinguishable. Despite the archaeological pretensions, the discourses Foucault describes are not merely something he finds. The archaeologist requires a commitment to truthful or adequate description in order to recognize an artifact, and to recognize if as truly that artifact and as truly belonging to that discourse. It is not a question of (innefectually) attempting such a recognition in the light of the suspension of meaning and truth, as Dreyfus and Rabinow claim. The problem is rather that having refused both humanism and materialism, Foucault must distinguish discourse and non-discourse without validating the rules of formation by pointing to the truths arrived at by following them. Such a procedure would undermine discourse's right to be its own norm of truth, by referring to a validation procedure that can do without it.

Foucault's position on discourse is reminiscent of Spinoza's that truth is its own norm. For Foucault the truth of discourse (what it is truly about and what truly belongs to it) is determined by discourse itself. Discourse replaces truth and becomes its own norm. But Foucault therefore finds himself in the same difficulty as Spinoza. It is the difficulty of recognizing the true (or discourse) without external reference; for example, to a notion of coherence or correspondence, or even to the intentions of a speaker. It is only by invoking a monistic ontology that Spinoza can explain how a man, who hitherto did not know the true, can come to know it if truth is its own norm. Similarly Foucault collapses everything into discourse to explain how, if discourse is its own norm, one can distinguish discourse form non-discourse.

Admittedly Foucault does get around this problematic reliance on the validity of the rules of formation. He must do so because an external notion of truth would rival the rules of formation as the criterion for the membership of statements in their proper discourse. Foucault does not have to claim that the rules are valid, because the world and discourse are not two separate things, (just as in Spinoza ideas and bodies are not different things, thus explaining how a mind can know a body; namely, because the mind is the idea of the body). The point of the rules of formation is to show that the world is a product of discourse. But in that case, as we have seen, the distinction between discourse and non-discourse disappears, and Foucault's project is subverted. Since he does enhance our understanding of the world though, one must assume that he is actually ignoring his own method in his analyses of discourse.

In fact not only does Foucault share Spinoza's problem of discovering the truth once it has been made its own norm, he also share his difficulty of accounting for error and falsity. The difficulty in Spinoza follows from his ontology. For every body there is a corresponding idea which is a perfect expression of that body. Spinoza concludes that no simple idea is ever false, only incorrectly formed complex ideas can be so. With an "improvement of the understanding" error is avoided. One must pay attention to what is given in the understanding, and not contaminate it with what comes form the imagination. Foucault seems to have no way around a similar unhappy explanation. If all statements come from discourse, they should all be true. Error can only be a failure to recognize what is truly a product of the rules of formation of discourse and what is not. Not only is this an inadequate account of falsity, but it is, as we have seen, an impossible task, since Foucault's account of discourse precludes such a recognition.

What this indicates is that Foucault is not sensitive to the role of truth in investigation and in understanding as well. I think he is correct about the role of truth in the production of truth though. One can produce statements without any thought about how statements can be true. One does not need a theory of truth to produce true statements. I think Foucault's rules of formation do indicate a prodigious machinery involved in producing statements which do decentre the subject. He should be commended for working out specifically what others left to be vaguely called "forms of life", "paradigms", etc. What he does not realize is that he needs a notion of truth in The Archaeology, other than discourse itself, to be able to understand discourse and to distinguish it from non-discourse. What this means is that in that work Foucault has not altogether succeeded in decentering the subject.

Chapter V: Discipline and Punish

A. Introduction

B. The Development of the Prison

1. Torture

2. Punishment

3. Discipline

C. The Prison

1. The Delinquent

2. The Carceral

D. The Body

E. The Human Sciences and the Natural Sciences

A. Introduction

Discipline and Punish begins with the grisly recounting of the execution of Damiens, the regicide, in Paris 1757. Abruptly Foucault jumps eighty years to quote the rules drawn up for "the House of young prisoners in Paris". The juxtaposition is striking; from the world of ritualised torture we are transported to that of meticulous discipline and supervision. We are forced to ask what brought about this transformation; what accounts for the apparent humanization of penal procedures; and finally we are made to think about current practices.[21]

Discipline and Punish is subtitled "The Birth of the Prison". The book is not primarily a history of the prison, as the subordinate role of the subtitle indicates; it is about the development of modern punishment and its disciplinary consequences for the subject. More generally, since in the prison power does not hide itself, it's role in the development of the subject can be demonstrated there.

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity (DP 23).

When he comes to discuss the modern prison Foucault does so under the heading "Panopticism" and not "Panopticon", the name of Jeremy Bentham's proposed model prison. Panopticism refers to disciplinary observation and visibility. Foucault says that our's is a panoptic society, we are the object of constant surveillance and scrutiny. Punitive panoptic power has a common history with the modern subject; the history of the prison is part of the genealogy of the subject.

Foucault distinguishes his own study of the prison from those which have preceded his. His is first and foremost a history of the modern soul. His point of departure is political, not legal or sociological. He says that if one limited oneself to the study of changing legislation and the attendant penal practices then concomitant changes in public attitudes and the developments in the human sciences would appear merely as silent unrelated external facts. Or if like Durkheim one attempted a scientific account of social facts which charted the emergence of the autonomous individual, such things as increasingly lenient punishment would appear as a result of that emergence. In fact greater leniency is a new tactic of penal power according to Foucault.

He says that his study obeys four general rules which distinguish his work form his predecessors.

1) He says that punishment must be regarded as a "complex social function" (DP 23). This means going beyond a study of the repressive and penal effects of punitive mechanisms in search of its positive effects.

2) Punitive methods must not be regarded Whiggishly as a consequence of legislation, nor as indicative of social structures. Punitive methods are instead a specific part of the way power is exercised in general. Punishment is a political tactic of the exercise of power.

3) He says he will try to think the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences together to see whether they are essentially related. To that end he asks whether there is not an "epistemologico-juridical" process of formation linking them. He says he will try to determine if techniques for exercising power are the principle both of the humanization of the penal system and the human sciences.

4) Finally Foucault says he will try to determine whether the concern with the soul in penal practices, whose practical effect was the humanization and scientifization of penalty, was the result of power's effect on the body.

The overarching goal is to understand how the particular form of subjection effected by punitive power could give rise to a scientific discourse about man. This will be done by explaining the changes in punitive methods on the basis of changes in the "political technology" of the body. Penal leniency is therefore seen as a technique of power demanding the creation of the soul or man as the object upon which to exercise that lenient power. Penal leniency indicates not the final admission of the humanity of all men, but rather the need for the "criminal" as the legitimate object of that new form of power. Foucault aims to upset criminology's apple-cart; to threaten their ideas of the normal, the abnormal, the pathological, etc.

Asked in a discussion about criminology, Foucault bluntly replied that it is a "staggeringly" inept discipline, that it has no theoretical base and that its purpose is entirely utilitarian; that of providing an excuse for punishment now that it is no longer acceptable to be merely vengeful.

I think one needs to investigate why such a "learned" discourse became so indispensable to the functioning of the nineteenth-century penal system. What made it necessary was the alibi, employed since the eighteenth century, that if one imposes a penalty on somebody this is not in order to punish what he has done, but to transform what he is (PK 47).

Yet, says Foucault, everyone knows that prisons are incapable of transforming anyone. Criminology developed as a complement of penitential punishment and serves today as a hebetude for those guilty consciences of the legal system.

Rusche and Kircheimer's "great work", as Foucault calls it, is an exception . Their book Punishment and Structure written during their "American exile" tries to relate forms of punishment to modes of production. The book provides some useful points of reference says Foucault, though he does not adhere to such orthodox Marxist thought himself. They contrast the slave economy and its need for a large labour force for the production of goods with feudal society where the money based economy was just developing and where corporal punishment expanded since the body was often the only property the offender possessed. Comparison is also made with mercantile economies and the development at that time of penitentiaries, forced labour and prison factories. Industrial society in turn eroded forced labour because it required a free market. Accordingly the idea that work as punishment expiated wrongdoing was replaced by the notion that detention alone corrected the criminal. Foucault admits that objections can be made to so strict a correlation between punishment and economy, but he says "we can surely accept the general proposition that in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain "political economy" of the body..." (DP 25).

As a consequence we must accept that punishment is not a means for reducing crime. Punishment should be regarded as a complex social phenomenon not reducible to the juridical or moral structures of society. It is not entirely negative, repressive, preventative, eliminative or exclusionary—that is, punishment is not purely a matter of law. Punishment is also a mechanism which had produced the criminal subject.

Rather than dwell on the legal aspects of punishment, Foucault wishes to write its history against the background of a history of the body. He finds that such a history cannot sustain the idea that the intention of punishment is reform of the "soul". The power relations invested in the body, marking it, training it, torturing it, and so on, belong in a political field. The subjection of the body through physical and ideological means serves the political economy.

Foucault's thesis is that man's "soul" is actually a product of the exercise of power, particularly of power over the body. This can be seen in prisons where docile inmates are created with a combination of drugs, poor food, overcrowding, uniforms, etc. The soul is not therefore just an element of bourgeois ideology, it developed within definite material-physical practices. Foucault says that the soul is not born in sin and subjected to punishment, but rather born out of punishment itself. More specifically it was born out of an alliance between punitive practices and the human sciences which perfected and legitimated them. Foucault is quick to add too that neither the involvement of the natural sciences, nor of humane reforms, in punishment means that the truth of man is finally now accounted for.

B. The Development of the Prison

The history of the prison begins in the mid-nineteenth century. Foucault juxtaposes the prison's more lenient penal rituals with the "sovereign torture" which preceded it. The transition from torture to punishment involves not only a diminution in severity, but also a completely different juridical and political regime of power. The point is that discipline became essential to a form of punishment which required the prison.

1. Torture

We do not lack today for those who clamour for "law and order", by which they usually mean more severe penalties for the less clever offender. No one however would go as far as recommending the reintroduction of the amende honorable, which the regicide Damiens was unfortunate enough to have undergone . He was condemned on the 2nd of March 1757 to be,

...taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds;" then "in the said cart, to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten led, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the wind.

Quoting from newspaper accounts of the actual execution, Foucault recounts how even more grisly the actual spectacle was. The very meticulousness of the sentence indicates that this was not simply a gratuitous act of cruelty, there was a macabre logic it.

Tortuous public execution, and lesser punishments must be regarded as a "political operation" according to Foucault (DP 53). Until the end of the eighteenth century punishment was performed according to the King's fiat since he was the origin of law, and so the injured party in any offence. Every act of punishment was not only a means of redress for the immediately injured party, but also more importantly an act of revenge by the sovereign for the affront to him. The meticulousness of the execution did not aim to establish justice, but to re-establish and display the King's power.

Judicial torture was certainly cruel, but it was not savage. There were well defined procedures that regulated the cruelties carried out; the instruments used, acts performed, their duration, and so on, were all controlled. Further, while truth was the goal of torture, it was not pursued at any cost—unlike in some modern regimes, says Foucault. If one held out under torture and did not confess the judge was obliged to drop all charges. Later this was altered, but judges were still precluded from condemning to death those who had withstood torture. There is thus a juridico-political rationality to torture in the classical period; judicial because of the laws which proscribed the way the body was made to confirm the offenders guilt, and political because of the interests of the sovereign.

2. Punishment

At the end of the eighteenth century torture gave way to more lenient punishment. Although reformers then claimed that even in the lowest criminal there was a humanity which punishment should respect, Foucault claims that it was not out of sympathy for them that punishment became more lenient. What they opposed in the old regime was an excess of punishment that was bound to an irregularity in the power to punish, not to an abuse of the power to punish. That irregularity made punishment capricious and therefore less effective.

Penal reform was a means of limiting the sovereign's power. Judgeships were sold by the sovereign and were subsequently inherited or sold in turn. This led to a profusion of courts and legal systems, all badly coordinated. Judges were often corrupt as a result. The sovereign could suspend courts and judges, he could set up royal courts and could exercise his royal pardon—thus pitting himself against the magistrature. The growing bourgeoisie resented the excessive power of the lower courts and the privileges afforded the aristocracy by the higher courts. They reacted to a legal system which was badly conceived and run. Their growing mercantilism required a legal system better able to guarantee their rights of property. Reform therefore sought to punish better, not to punish less or more humanely.

Punishing better meant preventing crime rather than opposing it with a ceremonious display of superior power. Punishment had to become a sign linking crime with its particular punishment. Reformed punishment became a "semio-technique", which no longer needed to mark the body in the manner of torture. The point now was to inscribe on the mind of the offender and the public that crime would be regularly punished.

Although "homo criminalis" was not formed until some time later, Foucault claims that these techniques were the beginning of the objectivation of crime and the criminal. In fact the body was never neglected in this; crime and criminal were the necessary correlates of a punitive power which sought control over the body via the mind. Foucault therefore doubts that we have truly entered the age of non-corporal punishment (DP 101).

In the eighteenth century therefore he finds three modes of punishment, "three technologies of power" (DP 131). The first was ceremonial sovereign punishment, the second was reformed punishment, and third was the prison. In the prison the short lived attempt at reform of the mind gave way to a renewed assault on the body.

3. Discipline

That Foucault does not immediately discuss the prison but detours through a discussion of discipline indicates why he thinks the prison had so abrupt a birth. It was linked to a series of disciplinary techniques and institutions contemporary with it. The point of discipline was to create docile bodies through observation (panopticism) and training.

a) Docile Bodies

A docile body is one that may be "subjected, used, transformed and improved" (DP 136). There was in the eighteenth century a theory of dressage of the body which required its docility. The body was meticulously analysed and rendered manipulable. The active body was treated as a mechanism; its parts were movements, gestures and attitudes or demeanour. These were disciplined by constant supervision and coercion. Discipline thus rendered the movements of the body both more powerful and more useful, and also more subjugated.

The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an act of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subject, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely (DP 137-138).

Discipline is firstly a matter of distributing bodies in space. It thus sometimes requires an enclosure; confinements for paupers and vagabonds, colleges, secondary schools and boarding schools, army barracks, factories, hospitals, were all disciplinary in intent. These enclosures themselves were for the first time partitioned so that individual bodies within it were separated and properly distributed. Partition allowed for regular supervision of all inmates.

The time-table was the other major disciplinary tool of the reformers. Time spent on an activity was measured and regulated, as were the component acts of every activity. In this way the dimension of efficiency was added to discipline. The regulation of moving, working or studying bodies, sought an efficient coordination of them and their objects. Underlying this concern with time was the moral idea that time should not be wasted; it was an affront to God and expense to man. The point is that inmates were subjected to temporal scrutiny, as well as spatial discipline through exclusion. With neither time nor place to be alone, the inmate became the docile body the prison required.

Discipline of the body created an individual who as a result of spatial separation is "cellular", who is "organic" as a result of the coordination of a series of acts as an activity, who is "genetic" in virtue of the application of the temporal notion of development, and who is "combinatory" as a result of the joining of individuals together to form a whole more powerful than the sum of its parts (DP 167). What this means is that the great debate and discussion about social contracts is quite superfluous. Societies are not the result of pacts and agreements, but of the coercion of bodies by a series of disciplinary techniques.

b) Training

Disciplinary power employs a few simple techniques to insure success in training bodies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and the examination (DP 170). Hierarchical observation is a coercive mechanism employing means which render visible the targets of power. Architecture particularly began to serve the interests of power by excluding concealment; surveillance was its norm. Factories, schools, military camps, hospitals and prisons were arranged hierarchically so that no level of activity was not surveiled by a higher level. Foucault chronicles too a series of rewards and punishments geared towards normalizing individuals. From these banal practices modern man evolved.

The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an "ideological" representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called "discipline" (DP 194).

According to Foucault, the examination has been particularly potent in forming the individual by combining the disciplinary techniques of observation and normalizing judgement. Visibility was thus linked with the power to judge correct performance. Examinations leave a documentary trace which make of every individual a "case". Foucault suggests that by designating individuals in this manner, according to certain features and measurements, that the development of the examination is linked to the origin of the human sciences. The examination is part of the same process of the objectivation of man that one sees in the human sciences.

c) Panopticism

Prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks and hospitals, which it turn resemble prisons. According to Foucault this represents the flow of discipline throughout society and is a measure of its success. Bentham's "Panopticon" was more than just an architectural innovation therefore. Bentham describes the benefits of his new "inspection-house" thus,

Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — public burthens lightened Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock — the gordian knot of the Poor Laws not cut, but untied — all by a simple idea in architecture! (DP 207).

Clearly it was not just a simple idea in architecture, it was an idea of discipline expressed in architecture and reinforced by it.

The panopticon was designed as an annular building surrounding an inner tower. Tower and building were such that the inmates of the building were hidden from one another, though completely visible to the observer in the tower who was not visible to them. They were subjected to constant unverifiable surveillance, that is, to the anonymous efficient power of a machine which could afford to be non-corporal in application. One of the chief virtues of the panopticon according to Bentham was in fact that it could be much less overtly coercive. It's subtlety and malleability recommended its use in a variety of forms throughout the social body according to Bentham. A well disciplined society was envisaged by the extension of panoptic mechanisms.

Panopticism insures discipline through constant observation. The well disciplined society could not tolerate the free movement of marginal groups it felt threatened its well being. Surveillance of students and their families, workers, soldiers, madmen, the sick and infirm, Gypsies, peasants, prostitutes and so on, created a docile and useful population. Utility was especially important in the burgeoning economies of the eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that at this time there was a concerted effort to control the large floating populations of beggars, unemployed, Gypsies and vagabonds; the disciplinary society has no use for such people, especially since they were considered a drain of its resources.[22] Foucault thus reminds us that the Enlightenment which championed liberty also invented the disciplined individual and society.

C. The Prison

Penal detention was an innovation coming at the end of the eighteenth century, though it was not without precedent. The novelty of the model prisons of the eighteenth century was the application of disciplinary techniques which had been developed elsewhere. The infiltration of these techniques into legal institutions had the consequences we have seen. It also spawned a discourse which sought to justify the creature it had created.

Deprivation of liberty, so the story goes, is the one penalty which affects all equally. Time is the currency by which one pays one's debt to society. No wonder that in a society that so treasures liberty, at least at the ideological level, that the prison seems such a natural mode of punishment. Add to that the role of transforming offenders and the prison's raison d'etre seems unassailable. Besides the mere deprivation of liberty could not justify actual prison conditions and the disciplinary project at work in them. The effects of the prison do not just operate at the ideological level; Foucault says that delinquency and an extra-legal "carceral archipelago" were the direct result of this enlightened way of punishing. Provocatively he says that we cannot do without prisons, delinquents and the carceral archipelago because they are too useful to us.

We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot "see" how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without (DP 232).

1. The Delinquent

The extra-legal mandate given to prisons for transforming individuals has had the consequence of creating delinquents. The concept of delinquency ties crime to the individual in virtue of his life. The law deals with the offender's act, while the prison deals with his life. Delinquency is defined by norms, not by law. On the basis of a combination of biographical and sociological knowledge an offender becomes a delinquent. The scientific presentation of which has become the province of criminology. But science did not discover the delinquent to whom it subsequently applied the techniques of the penitentiary. The delinquent and the penitentiary are twin "brothers" (DP 255).

The formation of delinquents is not strictly a failure of the prison system as is so often remarked by those who note the alarming statistics of recidivism. Indeed since the prison's inception its failures were well known. Despite this the prison has always been offered as its own remedy. The answer to the failure of the prison has always been more frequent and more lengthy imprisonment.

This leads Foucault to be suspicious about this so-called failure. He proposes that this failure is actually part of the regular function of the prison (DP 271). The production of delinquents is advantageous particularly in societies in which the judicial and prison systems have been encroached upon by the police.

Prisons and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency. The police-prison system creates a manipulable delinquency. This delinquency with its specificity is a result of the system, but also becomes a part and a instrument of it. So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms; police, prison and delinquency, support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents—the target and auxiliaries of police supervision, which regularly sends back a certain number of them to prison (DP 282).

Foucault observes that prisons cannot but produce delinquents whatever reforms are introduced. The delinquent is an epistemological object of the human sciences formed within the penitentiary apparatus and useful to it. To call this a failure is disingenuous. Perhaps no one designed and then subsequently created the delinquent or criminal, but their cultivation and exploitation was deliberate—as even Bentham's plan attests to.

2. The Carceral

Prisons are given offenders by the courts to transform. This mandate has led to a para-legal carceral apparatus. Empowered to normalize its inhabitants, the prison has become a heterogeneous institution. It is the site of punishment, therapy and cure; the cell, the workshop and the hospital. We are no longer in the age of jailers and inmates but of the "teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the "social-worker"-judge etc." (DP 304). From this glut of experts and expertise the carceral archipelago was born. The carceral archipelago is a series of institutions beyond the criminal law dealing with its actual and expected transgressors. It comprises colonies for condemned or acquitted minors, the maisons centrales, almshouses, colonies for vagrant children, institutions for abandoned or indigent children, orphanages, houses of apprentice, factor-convents, charitable societies, moral improvement societies, workers estates and lodging houses, reformatories, workshops and disciplinary schools. For Foucault the carceral archipelago and the panoptic society are two side of the same coin.

His point is that the prison transformed the punitive procedure through disciplinary mechanisms into a penitentiary technique which spread through society via the carceral archipelago. The effects of this are wide ranging and important, but all are fundamentally directed towards a normalization of the population. Law is mixed with prescriptions of the human sciences so that offences become departures from the norm, which in turn is used to justify punishment.

D. The Body

Until the period of reform at the end of the eighteenth century the body was the undeniable target of penal intervention. Through the supplice, or penal torture, the offenders body was inscribed with the truth of his crime. The body was forced to bear the sign of justice in public so that the horrible spectacle might justify itself through the visibility of its logic. The semio-techniques which succeeded torture almost immediately gave way to a renewed interest in the body, but it was not the same body as that punished in the classical age.

The body was no longer a reservoir of truth, it need no longer bear the signs of the truth of its guilt. There developed a new "political anatomy" and a "new politics of the body" in which the body had a "new form" (DP 103). The body was involved in a new political field, in new power relations which disciplined it, marked it, and sometimes tortured it; the body was bond to new economic relations and realms of knowledge.

It is a question of situating the techniques of punishment—whether they seize the body in the ritual of public torture and execution or whether they are addressed to the soul)-in the history of this body politic; of considering penal practices less as a consequence of legal theories than as a chapter of political anatomy (DP 28).

The role, status and identity of the body is a central theme in Discipline and Punish. In the programatic first chapter of the book there is however an indication of what may be a difficulty with Foucault's analysis of the body. He says of man that,

A "soul" inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy of the body (DP 30).

The question is the exact status of such a body imprisoned by the soul. Punition evidently went through the body to reach the soul. The soul imprisons the body since without it the body could not justifiably be disciplined. But it seems then that the body though punished retains a fundamental independence. It seems malleable and corruptible but nevertheless recuperable in its pristine truth—but why should this particular object escape power-knowledge.

Power seemingly operates outside the body without creating it, but by creating the soul it restrains the body. The soul leaves penologists no option but to treat the body. Even so-called modern penal practices remains trapped within the logic which objects to purely physical intervention as the raison d'etre of prisons, but which has only the mechanism of physical intervention within prisons to effect reform. Interestingly Foucault says that it was the modern prison and its punishments, and not the obvious barbarities of the eighteenth century which taught him that there is a political technology of the body.

Whether there is pure incorruptible body Foucault does not say. But there must be a body which is stable enough for power to mold. He notes himself that there is no power without resistance. That resistance might be the primordial body analogous to the pure madness of Madness and Civilization. Actually Foucault did later repudiate the notion of a pure body (MF 234), but the problem remains that on the one hand he requires a body stable enough to resist power, but which should not be able to serve as something like the essence of man. The undisciplined body seems to rather like a Derridean sign of something that was never present, but can still serve a critical function.

The Human Sciences and Discipline

Foucault sets himself the task in Discipline and Punish of showing that it was on the basis of techniques of power exercised on the body, in penal practices particularly, that man was constituted as an object of science (DP 23-24). The human sciences in turn were cited by the authorities of the penal-justice system in support of their actions and proclamations (DP 18, PK 47-48). This was not therefore merely an ideological exercise. The effects of power were felt at the level of the body. It is true today that industrial society can afford to be less restrictive in its control of the body, but this does not mean that now power only operates through ideology. Even if one explains the docility of the population with the notions of consumerism, hedonism, cooptation, and so on, the body can not be ignored. Foucault says, "one needs to study what kind of body the current society needs..." (PK 58).

Today consumption, and not just production, provides the outline for determining the make-up of the useful body. For example, if today bodies flaunt their sex and are better looked after, it is because a vast industry from cosmetics to clothing to holiday resorts, relies upon it. Eliciting power's effects only at the level of ideology is wrong not only because it neglects the body, but also because it presumes a faulty humanism.

...What troubles me with these analyses which prioritise ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize on (PK 58).

The subject is rather a product of the way the body has been treated.

Throughout Discipline and Punish Foucault makes the point that the human sciences were weaned on the disciplinary procedures of the nineteenth century.

And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born (DP 141).

Is this the birth of the sciences of man? It is probably to be found in these "ignoble" archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and behaviours has its beginnings (DP 191).

I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful...The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of the analytical investment, of this domination-observation (DP 305).

That the human science's birth was ignoble is not a new theme in Foucault. In fact to understand why he believes that the genesis of the human sciences is tied to penal practices in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to recall the arguments of The Archaeology of Knowledge and "The Discourse on Language".

In the chapter on "The formation of objects" Foucault maintains that objects do not exist in some pre-discursive silence waiting to be seized upon by language and so made public. Objects emerge in discursive practice according to certain rules of formation.

...Discursive practice (is) a place in which a tangled plurality—at once superposed and incomplete—of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears (AK 48).

We have already seen that the way to chart the creation of objects is threefold.

1) By determining where they developed; their "surfaces of emergence".

2) By describing the "authorities of delimitation".

3) By analysis of the "grids of specification".

In Discipline and Punish the prison is the primary surface of emergence of the human sciences. The authorities of delimitation are the warders, judges, doctors, military officers, policemen, etc. The grids of specification are the systems by which types of objects, in this case criminals, are classified according to its discourse, namely criminology. Here we have delinquents, recidivists, docile and non-docile bodies, souls, the "criminal class", etc.

In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault maintains that all of this occurred within discourse. In "The Discourse on Language", as we have also seen, he relented on the inclusiveness of discourse. Considering the relation of power to discourse Foucault acknowledged that not all relations producing discourse could be discursive relations. This is particularly evident in Discipline and Punish where the discourse of the human sciences are produced in part by non-discursive, physical control of the body. Of course in "The Discourse" the so-called "external rules" were restricted without being productive. Discipline and Punish is Foucault's first major work in which we see the results of his "productive" account of power.

If Foucault were merely saying that the human sciences originated in the carceral archipelago and discovered their object there, then that would not be too controversial. Indeed it seems that is where the human sciences did originate. After all other sciences have their origins in non-scientific practices and beliefs. The question is whether Foucault's thesis is not the more radical one that the human sciences actually have no real object and that they are incapable of escaping their origins as the natural sciences seemingly have done.

The history of science shows that pseudo-objects can give way to real objects or ill-defined objects to well-defined objects. It shows too that being wrong need not be fruitless—in Kuhn's terminology, that "abnormal science" leads to "normal science". It is not clear that the human sciences are the same in this respect as the natural sciences though. The relation of the human sciences to its background does not seem to be the same as that of the natural sciences to its background.

Foucault himself says that the natural sciences have transcended or escaped their origins, whereas the human sciences have not. Whether or not they can is a question I will come to.

It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born from techniques of measurement; the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation (developed during the Inquisition)...But what this politico-juridical administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the science of nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man...The great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology (DP 226-227).

One should not be misled by a seeming purification of the human sciences. The use of tests, interviews, consultations, etc, does not substantially alter the inquisitorial procedure form which the human sciences were spawned. These attenuated techniques merely subject individuals to different disciplinary authorities, they do not free individuals from discipline.

Foucault's point is that the human sciences cannot, like the natural sciences, free themselves from their origins. The human sciences necessarily remain wedded to the disciplinary matrix in which they were formed. Bacon and others tried to formulate a methodology of the natural sciences.

(But) what Great Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the human sciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible (DP 226).

Nearly the same point appears in The Order of Things. There the human sciences differ from the natural sciences precisely because they depend on them for their existence.

In The Archeology of Knowledge Foucault describes the process whereby sciences are formed. For each discourse there is a "threshold of positivity" where it achieves autonomy and individuality; a "threshold of epistemologization" when the discourse validates norms of verification and coherence and when it can serve as a model or critique of knowledge; a "threshold of scientificity" when statements of a discourse comply not only with the archaeological rules of formation, but also with laws for the construction of propositions; and finally a "threshold of formalization" when the discourse can define its necessary axioms, elements, propositional structures legitimate to it, and its allowable transformations, thus allowing it to deploy this formal edifice itself (AK 186-187). The human sciences have only crossed the threshold of positivity, they cannot cross the rest.

In Discipline and Punish the human sciences cannot be natural sciences because of their origins in disciplinary practices. Such practices are non-cognitive; they are a "knowing-how" rather than a "knowing-that". The point is virtually the same however as that of The Archaeology of Knowledge; the human sciences are essentially linked to a series of non-cognitive background practices which cannot be made the object of theoretical observation and elaboration. In the natural sciences those practices are not essential and can be overcome.

E. The Human Sciences and the Natural Sciences

In The Order of Things the dependence of the human sciences on the natural sciences is the source of their instability. The proximity of the human sciences imperils in turn the natural sciences with psychologism, sociologism and anthropologism. "Anthropologism is the great internal threat to knowledge in our day" (OT 348). It seems that, for example, physics does well to avoid anthropologism, but it is not clear how the human sciences could do so or even benefit from doing so. The human sciences cannot lose sight of the role of the investigator in the investigation. Men and electrons cannot be investigated in the same way. Such things as purpose, desire, reason, which if applied to the natural sciences would constitute anthropologism, are essential for a coherent human science.

This argument proceeds by begging the question however. It does not follow from the proposition that men are different objects than, say electrons, that they must be investigated differently; it is a matter of what you want to say in your investigation that is all.[23] Behaviourists treat men like electrons because they wish to predict and control their behaviour, and they have had success in doing so. Clearly though there are other things one would like to say about men and other things one would like to do with them, for which behaviourism is utterly useless.

Since Dilthey, the debate as to whether there is any difference between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften has raged. While Dilthey fought of the positivists insisting on the autonomy and uniqueness of the human sciences, there are now those who feel the need to fight a rear guard action against what has been called "universal hermeneutics".[24] Positivism in this case no longer threatens to engulf man, but rather the claim that even the natural sciences are hermeneutic enterprises threatens positivism with redundancy and the human sciences with absorption by a hermeneutic monism; a night on which all cows could only be understood as being black. Human and natural sciences would disappear as they became methodologically indistinguishable. This would not have the effect though of making man the positivistic natural object Dilthey feared.

The positivistic account of science has its origins at least as far back as Descartes' Discourse on Method and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. According to Heidegger, enamoured with Galileo's science and dissatisfied with scholasticism, Descartes sought to give philosophical expression to that science and particularly to the former's notion of mente concipere. If the idea of positive science was born in the sixteenth century, then doubts about it probably began then too. Opposition to positivism was given pointed expression in the nineteenth century by amongst others, Mach, Duhem and Poincare, while Kuhn and Feyerabend in our time effectively ended the idea that there is a scientific method.

Positivism was not only challenged by philosophers of science, one finds it too in Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, in the Frankfurt School and others. Foucault agrees with all of these that it is not possible to uphold the idea of a pure theory, or knowledge, or science. The rules of formation of discourse indicate such an impossibility. Foucault however takes his distance from the hermeneutic leanings of some of the others.

(The) precondition (of knowledge)-brackets mine) may not, of course be analysed as a donnee, a lived experience, still implicated in the imagination or in perception, which mankind in the course of its history took up again in the form of rationality, or which each individual must undergo on his own account if he wishes to rediscover the ideal meaning that are contained or concealed within it. It is not a pre-knowledge or an archaic stage in the movement that leads from immediate knowledge to apodicticity...(AK 182).

Knowledge is produced in quite particular situations according to particular rules of formation which may or may not cross the threshold of scientificity. Whether that threshold is reached is a matter of the integrity and autonomy of the discourse once it is founded. It is not then in Foucault a matter of separating the sciences according to their methods; practico-predictive in the case of the natural sciences and hermeneutico-historical in the case of the human sciences. It is not the case either that human and natural sciences are indistinguishable because both are hermeneutic.

What seems to distinguish the human science and the natural sciences is their relation to the rules of formation. The natural sciences can cross the threshold of positivity, epistemologization, scientificity and formalization. The natural sciences can operate as sciences in spite of the background from which they arose, the human sciences cannot. It may seem that Foucault thus sanctions a neo-positivism. These thresholds are themselves historical however; science does not eventually transcend the episteme.

This means that science is not a nomological activity and that it does not provide access to the "essence" of the material world. Science does not have privileged access to phenomena. Foucault's account of discourse and its scientifization means that there is no description of how the world is in-itself. Discourse is always for-us. Hermeneutics is equally for-us, one does not penetrate the noumenon in pre-reflective consciousness, or in the lived-world, or even in the lived-body.

By tracing the lowly origins of the human sciences to the treatment of the body, Foucault excludes the idea of a human essence.

...If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different" behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.[25]

What then is so objectionable about the human sciences? Neither they nor the natural sciences operate outside of the episteme, neither grant access to the essence of things, neither are rule governed or law giving, neither conceal in their depths a truth revealed by hermeneutics. Man after all, Foucault declares, has been constituted so that he "must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science (OT 366-367).

Foucault's attack on the human sciences is fourfold.

1) He shows that positivism generally is ill-founded;

2) that its ideology is pernicious;

3) that the human sciences cannot cross the threshold of scientificity;

4) and that their origins were in disciplinary and normalizing practices which they continue to support.

The point then is not whether man is better understood hermeneutically or positivistically, but rather how have

class=Section8>

we been created as beings of depth on the one hand, and as objects of science on the other. In his later concern with self-creation, Foucault says we have to find ways of refusing both these alternatives. To be sure there are problems with such a position—as we shall see.

Chapter VI: History as Genealogy

A. Introduction

B. "The Discourse on Language"

C. Nietzsche and Genealogy

1. Descent

2. Emergence

D. Descent, Emergence and History

E. Genealogy in Discipline and Punish

F. Conclusion

A. Introduction

The notion of genealogy first appears in Foucault in "The Discourse on Language" in 1970. In that work genealogy's relation to archaeology is unclear and problematic. Prior to Discipline and Punish, Foucault's first genealogy, he described his books as archaeologies. Madness and Civilization was written as an "archaeology of that silence" which is madness. The Birth of the Clinic is an "Archaeology of Medical Perception", The Order of Things is "An Archaeology of the Human Sciences", and finally there was The Archaeology of Knowledge itself.

By 1976 Foucault could distinguish archaeology and genealogy as follows.

If we were to characterise in two terms, then "archaeology" would be the appropriate methodology of (the) analysis of local discursivities, and "genealogy" would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the description of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which thus released would be brought into play (PK 85).

Brought into play for what? Earlier we were told that genealogy liberates knowledge from the "hierarchical power associated with science" (PK 85). That is, it refuses to subject knowledge to the strait-jacket of a theoretical and formal unity that characterises scientific discourse.

Archaeology and genealogy are linked. Both are philosophies of history as well as methods for doing history, and both are as a result actual works of history. Both are opposed to historical totalities. Both address history's minor or local discursivities; its banalities. Their opposition to humanism and power makes them both "political". In "The Discourse on Language", Foucault drew cryptic attention to the relation between archaeology and genealogy. Genealogy, he says, deals with,

the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivistic and, to play on words yet again, let us say that,...the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism (DL 234, emphasis mine).

When he says "play on words", I think Foucault intends "play with my own previous words". For in The Archaeology of Knowledge he says of the archaeological method that,

If, by substituting the analysis of rarity for the search for totalities, the description of relations of exteriority for the theme of transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumulations for the quest of the origin, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one (AK 125, emphasis mine).

From happy archaeologist to felicitous genealogist.

The thematisation of power in Foucault's genealogical writings is one way in which it differs from archaeology. His first genealogy, Discipline and Punish, begins his musings on power. Though I think the book's subtitle, "The Birth of the Prison", is meant to remind us of the archaeology of The Birth of the Clinic. In spite of this I think the thematisation of power does radically separate genealogy from archaeology. We have seen already that power upsets the productive function of discourse assigned to it by archaeology. Foucault is disingenuous to link archaeology and genealogy as he does, making the latter the complement of the former, as if archaeology is a sort of synchronic analysis completed and made politically efficacious by the diachronic analysis of genealogy. If we examine "The Discourse" more closely we will see that the relation is not as straight forward as he there maintains.

B. "The Discourse on Language"

There is no mention of archaeology in "The Discourse". Its disappearance is as ignominious as that of the episteme in The Archaeology which immediately followed The Order of Things and where it played such an important role. We will see also that the term genealogy disappears from The History of Sexuality, the major work following Discipline and Punish. In "The Discourse" genealogy is contrasted with what Foucault vaguely calls the "critical perspective" (DL 232), "the critical aspect" (DL 233) and "the critical enterprise" (DL 233). He says they differ not in object or field, but in point of attack and perspective.

We have seen that archaeology is the study of the rules of formation of discourse. I have already listed the four sets of rules concerning the formation of objects, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies, that Foucault lists in The Archaeology. In "The Discourse" however it is genealogy which is concerned with the formation of discourse and there is no mention of rules there.

The rules of formation of discourse in The Archaeology are internal to discourse, while the rules Foucault lists in "The Discourse" are partly internal, partly external, and partly neither. There are, he says, internal rules of appropriation, external rules of limitation and rules of appropriation which are not given a location. I have already noted how this upsets the topology of discourse in The Archaeology. More importantly however is the role of these rules in "The Discourse" with regard to the role of the comparable rules in The Archaeology. The rules of "The Discourse" are not productive; they operate only after discourse has been produced.

Having enunciated the three systems of non-productive rules in "The Discourse", Foucault claims that a number of methodological principles are thus required for subsequent analyses. These are the principles of reversal, discontinuity, specificity and exteriority. He then says that his analysis will fall into two groups; the "critical" and the "genealogical". The critical group requires the principle of reversal, while the genealogical group requires the other three. The principle of reversal is a reminder that such seemingly positive factors as the author, discipline, and will to truth, are not in fact producers of discourse, but rarefiers of it. Their function is negative (DL 229).

Foucault says two remarkable things about what genealogy is not. The analysis of the will to knowledge is not genealogy since it belongs to the rules of exclusion. It is explicitly included amongst the critical group (DL 232). I do not think this alone explains the absence of genealogy from The History of Sexuality.[26] Secondly, Foucault also says in "The Discourse" that a study of penality is not genealogy. He says rather that it is part of the critical project (DL 232). Clearly then genealogy is an unstable concept in "The Discourse".

To understand further genealogy in "The Discourse" it is necessary to consider the three other principles which it, as opposed to critical analysis, brings into play. As we saw, these were the principles of discontinuity, specificity and exteriority. An analysis of these principles in fact resembles the account of archaeology in The Archaeology. The first principle of discontinuity is no different from what Foucault says of discontinuity there. Discontinuity implies that discourse is not the articulation of a vast continuous unsaid. The principle of specificity says that there is no "prediscursive fate disposing the world in our favour" (DL 229). That is, discourse is not a place where the world articulates itself. As in The Archaeology the world is created by discourse. The principle of exteriority states that discourse has no hermeneutic depth which accounts for its existence. Discourse in both The Archaeology and "The Discourse" is to be understood as an event caught in so many external relations which account for its existence, and not as a sign of something other. This and genealogy's productive function make it similar to archaeology. However genealogy is fundamentally different. But if there is an ambiguity in Foucault early on about the distinction between archaeology (the critical project) and genealogy it is partly no doubt due to the difficulty of separating them in practice.

To tell the truth, these two tasks are not always exactly complementary. We do not find, on the one hand, forms of rejection, exclusion, consolidation or attribution, and, on a more profound level, the spontaneous pouring forth of discourse, which immediately before or after its manifestation, finds itself submitted to selection and control (DL 233).

It is necessary to turn to Foucault's work following "The Discourse" to see how he develops the notion of genealogy.

C. Nietzsche and Genealogy

Foucault's essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" followed, in 1971, "The Discourse" by one year. His account of Nietzsche's and his own genealogy is strikingly similar to what he says about archaeology in Part IV of The Archaeology. Particularly Foucault attacks the notion of "origin". I think in fact that the absence of rules in the genealogical project reflects a concern that they took the place of the origin which Foucault had disparaged. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", he began in earnest to move away from the inclusive picture of discourse which characterised archaeological description. Foucault is being playfully ironic therefore when he invites his audience to call his genealogy structuralist.

And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this—if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them—structuralism (DL 234).

Of course genealogy is not structuralism; the great importance given to such nondiscursive factors as power, the body and discipline excludes such a possibility. By contrast Foucault adamantly denied being a structuralist during the time when archaeology was ascendent and his work more amenable to a comparison with structuralism. He even referred to his archaeological work on the clinic as a "structural analysis" (BC XVIII). However in another of his archaeologies he wrote,

In France, certain half-witted commentators persist in labelling me as a "structuralist". I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterise structural analysis (OT XIV).

Genealogy, like the archaeology which preceded it, is opposed to traditional continuous history. They have this in common with structuralism. Genealogy, says Foucault, "must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality" (NGH 139). It is opposed to any teleology, any search for origins and any ideal significations. Genealogy is not nomological.

1. Descent

Two features characterise Nietzsche's genealogy according to Foucault; these are "descent" and "emergence". Both he adopts for his own genealogy. Both replace the discredited traditional metaphysical notion of origin. Descent does not trace a historical continuity. In direct opposition to Husserl's idea of an original but sedimented meaning, Foucault's genealogy does not "demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes" (NGH 146). On the contrary, genealogy as descent finds only a concatenation of accidents, deviations and dispersions. Descent then is not a matter of establishing foundations.

Finally, says Foucault, the analysis of descent requires a study of the body. Discipline and Punish is thus foreshadowed. Every descent inscribes its effects in the body. The inscribed body in turn is active in descent; it gives rise to desire, conflicts, errors, etc. The task of such genealogical analysis is to "expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body" (NGH 148).

Dreyfus and Rabinow's account of genealogy as it is presented in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" is generally speaking lucid and helpful. Invoking the analogy of a distant view to explain genealogy is, I think, misleading however. They say,

The interpreter as genealogist sees things from afar...The methodological point (to be spelled out in Foucault's detailed analyses) is that, when viewed from the right distance and with the right vision, there is a profound visibility to everything.[27]

In opposition to this however, Foucault says,

Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary...(NGH 140).

In as much as any history is a sort of distant viewing Dreyfus and Rabinow are trivially correct about genealogy. But to suggest that from the right distance things have a profound visibility seems to suggest, though they do not intend to, that Foucault is doing hermeneutics. Certainly depth now resides on the surface, obviating the "excavation" of meaning. But the withdrawal required for the distant view replaces excavation and is functionally equivalent to it.

The genealogy that Dreyfus and Rabinow describe shares with hermeneutics a suspicion of surface meaning which must be effaced in order to apprehend a more fundamental and more real meaning. Genealogy does not primarily look differently at things than does traditional history, more importantly is that it looks at different things.

Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times (NGH 137).

2. Emergence

Emergence is "the moment of arising" (NGH 148). But as descent forswears continuity, emergence bans finality. That is, emergence does not represent a result or a telos. A present need should not be rendered as an origin. Emergence should not be made the actualization of purpose. Instead emergence is always produced by conflicting forces. Study of emergence must analyse the conflicts and combinations of these forces. Such emergences occur in the "non-place" between disinterested adversaries. In that non-place the perpetual ritual of domination is played out.

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination (NGH 151).

The violence of class domination and of certain men over others is sublimated in values and political rights. In this constant struggle points of emergence correspond to conquests, reversals, substitutions and displacements. Metaphysics had on the other hand interpreted history as the slow unfolding of an original purpose. Genealogy makes of historical interpretation the understanding of the usurpation of these systems of rules by interested parties who subsequently shape them to their own desires and needs.

D. Descent, Emergence and History

Wirkliche Historie replaces traditional history in Nietzsche. Having given up the search for absolutes, history can now shake off metaphysics. Immortal man can thus no longer serve as the measure of all things. Everything, including man, is subjected to development. The point is that everything has a history, nothing is immutable. Even the body has a history.

We believe in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influences of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. "Effective" history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men (NGH 153).

This is a theme which we have seen Foucault takes up in Discipline and Punish. There the body's instability is a function of its political anatomy. But neither here nor in Discipline and Punish does Foucault tell us just to what degree the body is unstable. It is too unstable to serve as the basis of self-recognition and for understanding others. However it evidently is stable enough for us and Foucault to be able to talk about an entity called the body at all. After all it is not as though the body has changed out of all recognition or even that it could. If the body has a history then there must at least be a body which can have a history. That requires that the body have at least a minimal stability. Otherwise one would not have history, but sheer chaotic transformation. The ephemeral has no history. Traditional continuous history and effective history at least have in common a material world of relative stability. If the world was an alchemist's paradise and everything was his dreamt of philosopher's stone, then there would not even be effective history.

Stability in traditional history is not difficult to understand. It is guarantied by the notions of origin and finality. Of course traditional history studiously ignored that which did not fit into its scheme. Its histories were always of grand events, of empires, battles and so on. Disruptions in the continuity were usually attributed to genius in the case of the history of ideas, and such things as courage and foresight in the political arena. The stability of effective history is not explicable in this manner.

Events in traditional history are the embellishment of a structure, which insures continuity. Foucault says that by contrast events in effective history are the result of a conflict of forces (NGH 154). This conflict is the possibility condition of effective history. The outcome of conflicts between forces is not entirely arbitrary; it will reflect those forces, just as a resultant vector does its constituent vectors. Furthermore all conflicts are regional; which forces can conflict is not arbitrary either. Conflicts are also always linked to interests, which too adds a degree of stability to events.

It is not the task of history to insure stability however. Traditional history did so with various metaphysical conceits. Genealogical history has a more important role to play than the handmaiden of philosophy, says Foucault. Inspired by Nietzsche's The Wanderer, he says that history's task is to become a "curative science". Unfortunately Foucault does not develop this point which raises a number of questions. Particularly it raises the question of what health and sickness could be in a history of conflicting forces. The medical and the military metaphors seem to be at odds with one another. Perhaps history's cure is only self-treatment; "historian, heal thyself". This seems to be the thrust of Foucault's later aestheticism.

Five years after "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" he claimed that genealogy is history which is tactically useful in todays struggles (PK 82). This seems to suggest that genealogy is not just a cure for historiography, but for history itself. But if genealogy is a cure for history, it must not be thought of as a return to true (that is, healthy) history. Rather it can only be an interested answer to what is regarded as pernicious.

The genealogical use of history is strictly anti-platonic, says Foucault. By this he means that it is anti-metaphysical. It requires that history be mastered, and so freed from a "suprahistorical" history (NGH 160). It has three modalities which are versions of those found in Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations. First, history serves genealogy as parody. Its own parodic nature highlights the same in traditional history. Second, genealogy undermines the idea of identity. A dispersion of conditions heralds our birth, not a single forgotten identity striving for re-cognition in events. Finally history has a critical function. But it is not the expected criticism of the past in the name of a present truth. History's critical function is directed towards a destruction of man—Foucault's anti-humanism is never far from the surface. He says that traditional critique becomes "the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge" (NGH 164).

This could be construed as a traditional critical achievement. Namely, that on the basis of a genealogical study it is revealed that the man animated by the will to know is a pernicious historical construct best done away with. What is not traditional about this though is that it does not imply or require that we make such a recommendation on the basis of what we now believe to be the truth about man. Criticism can be made in the name of something other than truth: sympathy or beauty, for example.

Indeed Foucault questions the obviousness with which truth is employed as a critical concept. Beginning with Socrates at least, it has been believed that truth is immediately related to practice. Knowing the truth is the preliminary stage of enlightened practice. Linking truth with power, Foucault raises his suspicions about this appealing notion. The traditional model envisages a practice which is receptive to truth. The absorption of truth by practice has no effect on truth though it does enlighten the practice. But if truth and power are essentially linked then this model is inappropriate. The relation between truth or theory and practice is complicated and raises many questions; we shall see them in what follows.

E. Genealogy in Discipline and Punish

Following the programatic "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" by four years Discipline and Punish was Foucault's first genealogical study. Even though he only uses the term "genealogy" once in that book he does refer to it in other places with that epithet. It is as though he is keen to avoid another convenient label for his work, and it is true that the term does disappear with his next book The History of Sexuality.

Calling Discipline and Punish a genealogy, Foucault insists that it is also a work of history. Significantly Foucault qualifies the sort of history that genealogy is as a "correlative history" (of the modern soul and judgemental power) (DP 23). By this he draws attention to its marginal character. As he maintained in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" genealogy seeks its subject in those "unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history..." (NGH 139). In this case not the history of the human soul; a noble and worthy subject for a historical study indeed. But rather a correlative history of the soul, namely, a history of the human body.

It is the task of genealogy therefore not just to write the history of the banal, but to show that history belies the traditional history of great events. Do we not recognize this when we say such things as "behind every great man stands a woman". In Discipline and Punish this takes the form of substituting a history of the body for the history of the soul. Thus genealogy betrays our lowly origins. Plato is thus discarded in favour of Nietzsche. In opposition to Schopenhauer who finds the origin of religion in a metaphysical sentiment of the hereafter, Nietzsche says it is an invention (Erfindung), an artifice (Kunsttück) and the work of a magician (Schwarzkünstler) (NGH 141). Similarly Foucault finds the origin of the soul in so many practices of the control of the body.

It is significant too that Foucault says that his genealogy is of "the present scientifico-legal complex..." (NGH 23, emphasis mine). This foreshadows his declaration that he is writing a history of the present (DP 31). This indicates the interestedness of genealogy. This alone does not distinguish genealogical history form traditional history though. It is after all a common claim of traditional history that study of the past provides us with a better understanding of the present. It is even accepted by many that knowing history can change the present; this is the idea that if we forget the past we are bound to repeat it. Genealogy's interestedness is more than that however. It is not a happy coincidence of genealogy that it is relevant for the present. Genealogy starts with the present and proceeds backwards in its ancestral search. Traditional history begins in the past and very often stays there.

Genealogy is therefore always political. It attacks present interests. In Discipline and Punish Foucault's genealogy unearths an entire carceral archipelago and those who have an interest in sustaining it. In an interview he was more explicit on this point,

...If one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then it is possible only if one has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question...My historical work was undertaken only as a function of those conflicts. The problem and the stake there was the possibility of a discourse which would be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of a historical truth which could have a political effect (PK 64).

Genealogy must be both true and effective. In another place Foucault says genealogy's usefulness is tactical utility in present struggles. This sounds rather like the Platonic identification of knowledge and practice. It remains to be shown that this is not the case. One can already note though that Foucault does suggest in his formulation that a discourse could well be true though not effective. I will return to this matter later when discussing theory and practice.

Foucault tells us what it would be for his study of the prison to be effective at the end of his book. Genealogy is a propadeutic. It does not set out a course of action. It calls attention to a problem. In Discipline and Punish genealogy draws attention to the use of mechanisms of normalization and the proliferation of its associated powers in new disciplines (DP 306). Genealogy's effectiveness is measured by the extent to which it serves particular struggles; in this case the struggle against the carceral archipelago.

This is a rejection of what Foucault has called the role of the "universal intellectual" (PK 126). The universal intellectual's writings were the struggle. This has been such a potent myth that some, for example, have even attributed the French revolution to Rousseau. Genealogy is not so pretentious. It is a sort of diagnosis, like archaeology (AK 131). But it is the sort of diagnosis which is at the same time a cure—in the manner of psychoanalysis.

Between Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality Foucault developed the idea of genealogy in a number of interviews, lectures and essays. In one such interview he stressed again the importance of Nietzsche for his work. Coming after Discipline and Punish this is important because of the absence of any such reference in that work. That absence was intended to avoid being labelled a Nietzschean. But interestingly he does relate his work to Nietzsche and in that context he contrasts himself with Marx. He acknowledges Marx's importance for contemporary historiography and so by extension his importance for genealogy. Nevertheless he distinguishes the genealogical project from any Marxist interpretation of it.

If I wanted to be pretentious, I would use "the genealogy of morals" as the general title of what I am doing. It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse—whereas for Marx it was the production relation (PK 53).

Nietzsche, says Foucault, did not require a political theory in order to think about power.

That is why no doubt that Discipline and Punish abjures political analysis and concentrates on disciplinary techniques. It reveals why genealogy does not address itself to the question of the legitimacy of disciplinary power. Such an analysis would require a political theory. This is a point of difference between Habermas and Foucault; Habermas thinks the problem of legitimation is one that must be addressed, though he thinks it requires not a political theory but a theory of communication. According to Foucault, confining power to a political theory would blind genealogy to the disciplinary mechanisms which need to be examined. A theory of the state cannot adequately explain disciplinary procedures. Such a theory has recourse only to instrumental categories and to the notion of ideology. Disciplinary procedures would have to be either conscious activities performed by the state because it sees that its interests and its citizens interests are so served, or they would not be consciously performed and so part of an ideology. Genealogy reveals the poverty of such an explanation. Foucault shows that much of discipline does not involve the state, he shows further that there power is not ideological; power does not operate behind peoples backs, but on them.

In another interview Foucault was asked about the military model of power. He said that the model provided him with the notion of "strategy" which is a more fruitful way of understanding the genealogy of knowledge than such alternatives as types of consciousness, modes of production or forms of ideology (PK 77). What this indicates is that whatever the changes in Foucault's position, the point of departure has always been a rejection of humanism and particularly of phenomenology.[28]

In a lecture at the Collège de France Foucault broadened genealogy's attack on Marxism. Genealogy attacks the scientific pretensions of Marxism (PK 84). In Discipline and Punish too he maintains that the scientific status claimed by the human sciences is in order to grant them a critical immunity so that they can continue to operate with good conscience despite their perniciousness. Genealogy is anti-science. Not that it sanctions speculative knowledge or a Wittgensteinian mysticism, but it seeks to defend knowledge against the imperiousness of science.

F. Conclusion

In this chapter I have not dealt with genealogy as it appears in The History of Sexuality, such a discussion is better placed after an exegesis of that work. I shall therefore return to the subject of genealogy there. We have seen so far that Foucault's concern with genealogy replaced that of archaeology. At the beginning of that transition he stressed the continuity between the two methods, though it is clear from the beginning that they are quite different. The rules of formation of discourse which archaeology discovered entirely disappeared as Foucault developed the idea of genealogy. It is true however that the problem which archaeology and genealogy faced remained largely the same: namely, both try to account for the human life-world without having to invoke either a theory of a transcendental or empirical subject.

Chapter VII: The History of Sexuality

A. Introduction

B. The Repressive Hypothesis

1. The Birth of Discourse

2. The Effect of Discourse

C. The Science of Sex

D. The Deployment of Sexuality

1. The Objective

2. Method

3. Domain

4. Periodization

E. Sex and Bio-Power

A. Introduction

Published in 1976 with the subtitle "La Volonté de Savoir", volume one of The History of Sexuality marked the beginning of what Foucault saw then as a fairly massive study of how we in the west have become subjects with a sexuality. That the English edition appeared two years later with the subtitle "An Introduction" was already an indication of Foucault's changing valuation of what he had written there. That change became readily apparent in 1984 with the publication of the second and third volumes of the series. There Foucault pushes back the historical boundaries of our sexual genealogy and alters what he takes to be an alternative to the present state of affairs. It would though be a mistake to radically separate the first volume of the series from the later two. All are linked by a common search to trace the origins of our self-understanding as sexual beings, or "how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of "sexuality" (GE 208).

In fact Foucault begins volume one with an analysis of how we have misunderstood ourselves as subjects of sexuality. That misunderstanding is due to an exaggeration of what he calls "the repressive hypothesis". Foucault discounts the idea that an extravagant and visible sexuality, dominant in the seventeenth century, gave way in the nineteenth century to what we now call Victorian morality. Instead he reveals that there was in fact a "discursive explosion" concerning sex at that time which belies any Victorian reticence. Foucault's intention is to understand why today we still chastise ourselves for allegedly repressing our sexuality. He wishes to study what is perceived as a paradox but which he suspects is a ruse; namely, that our society which claims to be sexually repressed talks incessantly about sex.

There are at least three objections that can be made against the repressive hypothesis. The first objection is whether sexual repression is really a historical fact.[29] The second objection Foucault calls "historico-theoretical", namely, whether power's relation to sex can properly categorised as repression, and whether censorship, prohibition and denial are the forms power has assumed in our society. The final objection is a "historico-political" question, namely, whether the discourse critical of sexual repression is actually opposed to the power that repression relies on, or whether that discourse is not actually part of a more general structure which accounts both for the discourse which represses and for the discourse which opposes it.

Foucault then is saying something more interesting than simply that the repressive hypothesis is mistaken. It has never been the point of Foucault's analysis to identify mistaken statements. Even his attempt in The Archaeology of Knowledge to define the statement was meant to serve his analysis of discourse. What occupies Foucault in The History of Sexuality is the "general economy" of the discourse on sex since the seventeenth century (HS 11). For the last one hundred years the repressive hypothesis has been part of that general economy. To label it as merely a mistake would be to miss its productive role in the creation of sexuality.

Why sex became a discursive fact is a fundamental question of The History of Sexuality. This is not the same question as why do human beings feel the need to understand or regulate sex and sexuality. Foucault is interested in the specificity of what gets said. What interests him is that in our society there evolved a discourse on sex with a scientific status. Accordingly the study of the history of sexuality requires an analysis of the regimes of power-knowledge-pleasure which inspires, determines and sustains the scientific discourse on sex.

Foucault is thus not denying the reality of sex and sexuality.[30] The reality of sexuality cannot be separated from the manner in which it is "put into discourse" however (HS 11). Foucault referred to this process in The Archaeology of Knowledge in the chapter on "The formation of objects". In later writings he conceived of this process under the heading of "problematization". In every problematization there is a given, but which is amenable to various problematizations. His critical point is that sexuality has been problematised in the west according to a scientia sexualis which has had a disciplinary function. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault tries to show how in this process the subject with a sexuality was created.

B. The Repressive Hypothesis

1. The Birth of Discourse

Since the seventeenth century we have witnessed not an increasing reticence concerning sex, but a "discursive explosion" according to Foucault. The notion that sex was controlled and repressed by expurgating it from speech does not bear historical scrutiny. There was to be sure a "policing of statements", but at the level of discourse that does not represent a hindrance or prohibition. The discretion urged on sex took place within a general incitement to speak about it.

The Catholic pastoral and particularly the sacrament of penance after the Council of Trent mark the beginnings of our contemporary discourse on sex. The complex procedure developed at that time for the care of the soul, particularly regarding the implications for one's soul of sins of the flesh, required and entrenched the idea of the individual as a being with a sexuality. According to Foucault the pastoral mandate did more than just insure the "health" of the soul, it contributed to the very creation of the soul. Making desires and intentions culpable, instead of just actions, was an important moment in that creation. The soul and its desires is the model for the contemporary individual and his sexuality, according to Foucault. The point is that sexuality and the subject of sexuality are simultaneous necessary developments. If sexuality is to be more than just sexual behaviour it requires a subject, the same way in which personality requires the person if one is to avoid behaviourism. Pastoral care of the soul was the first step on the way to the creation of sexuality and its subject.

2. The Effect of Discourse

The discursive explosion surrounding sex was no mere verbosity. The creation of diverse sexualities was the result of that discursive explosion Foucault calls "The Perverse Implantation". We have seen already that the productive power of discourse is a theme running throughout Foucault's work, and we meet it here again.

The manifold sexualities—those which appear with the different ages...those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices...those which, in a different manner, invest relationships...those which haunt spaces...all form the correlate of exact procedures of power (HS 47).

For this reason Foucault says that our society is immediately and directly perverse; heterogeneous sexualities are a consequence of the power/discourse apparatus surrounding sex in our society. Perversity does not have the status of a strange other. For example, while homosexuality came to be regarded as a perversion this was not always so. The middle ages did not even employ the category homosexuality, it could not be regarded as a perversion until it was regarded as a type of sexuality.[31]

The history of sexuality makes plain that a conception of perversion as contra-natura is untenable, perversion and sexuality are not natural phenomena. There is another account of perversion that Foucault does not consider, but which he implicitly rejects. In his widely anthologised essay "Sexual perversion"[32] Thomas Nagel gives an account of perversion freed of any naturalistic overtones, but which is completely ahistorical. According to Nagel perverse sex is not unnatural, but incomplete. Perversion is a radical deviation from sexuality conceived of as an ideal type. A non-perverse sexual relation is one of erotic reciprocity between two subjects. So for example, sex with children, animals, objects, would be perverse, while homosexuality would not. What is unacceptable in Nagel, from Foucault's perspective, is precisely the idealization of sexuality. Sexuality and its perversion cannot be accounted for without an analysis of the historical practices which, at least in part, have constituted them.

Roger Scruton has tried to improve Nagel—mostly it seems with the arguments of Strawson from his famous paper "Freedom and Resentment". Scruton argues that human sexual behaviour cannot exist except within a moral framework.[33] That is, all that is valuable about sex in human life is inherently moral, so that there is no way to alienate morality from sex without destroying it. Scruton however is wholly unconvincing when he tries to argue that this implies that one sexuality is more moral or natural than another. In fact he is reticent on all points where he is required to make a practical evaluation on the basis of his ideas. This because he confuses Strawson's point that we cannot alienate our moral attitudes, with the idea that we must act so as not to alienate them. Sexuality maybe inherently moral, but that is not why I value it, just as I do not value friendship because it is moral)-I just value it.[34] Similarly Scruton cannot use the argument that since sexuality and morality are linked, that Foucault's history is both irrelevant and wrong.[35] Ethical systems do change, symbols are disenchanted, and values lose their meaning. Scruton cannot avoid the historicity of sexuality by pointing to its complicity with morality therefore, nor ground his conservatism on it.

According to Foucault the designation of some forms of sexual behaviour as perverted is part of a historical practice which in fact created sexuality. Sexual behaviour until the end of the eighteenth century was regulated by three explicit codes and by traditional social constraints. Concerning primarily the marital relation, the Christian pastoral and civil and canonical law determined what was licit and what was illicit sexual behaviour. Such things as the sexuality of children and sodomy go relatively unremarked by these three codes. What was condemned was unlawfulness in general, not perversion. For example, adultery was treated less harshly than sodomy without it being considered an act entirely different from it.

At the end of the eighteenth century scrutiny of sexual behaviour was no longer directed primarily at the married couple. Their's was still the only legitimate alliance and though this norm became stricter the couple themselves were allowed greater discretion and privacy. The new object of scrutiny was the sexuality of "children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sexuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; the reveries, obsessions, or great transports of rage (HS 38-39)". At this point the designation of some forms of sexuality as unnatural began in earnest.

Foucault, in one of his characteristic reversals, says this appearance of so many peripheral sexualities heralds not a period of laxity, but of more control. Pedagogy and therapy became the chief means for the control and surveillance of sex. Medicine particularly, says Foucault, undertook to manage sex through its creation of sexual pathology. His point is that these developments in the way sex was treated cannot be subsumed to the forms of prohibition or interdiction.

Instead Foucault offers a fourfold distinction for understanding the relation between sex and power.

1) Power has always promoted sexuality and not sought to eradicate it. Instead of creating barriers to sex, power produces "lines of penetration" and so takes hold of the body of those in question. Foucault mentions particularly the way in which the child's body was infused with power and sexuality (cf. PK 56, 217).

2) This treatment of the various peripheral sexualities entailed an "incorporation of perversions" and a "specification of individuals" (HS 43). The sexual deviant was no longer merely the juridical subject of an action, he became a species. The medicalized sodomite became the homosexual. In fact the nineteenth century abounds with new sexual species; zoophiles, mixoscopophiles, prebyophiles, etc. (HS 43). This was not intended to eradicate deviant sexuality, but to manage sex in general.

3) Power enters into complicity with pleasure, it does not oppose it. Foucault seems to be saying that the exercise of power in the field of sex entails a form of voyeurism.

4) Finally he says that "devices of sexual saturation" have pervaded social life. Foucault would therefore reject Marcuse's claim that modern industrial society has made the monogamous couple the sole bearers of sexuality. Instead one observes a complete sexualization of the population.

It is necessary then, if one follows Foucault, to give up the position that the nineteenth century was marked by unbridled bourgeois hypocrisy. One must give up the idea that an excessive puritanism muted sexuality, to which perversion was the inevitable reaction of those who refused to be silenced. Foucault says quite explicitly that power "produced and determined the sexual mosaic" (HS 47). One does not explain the genesis of the sexual mosaic then by pointing to its economic utility. Those roots must rather be traced to the medicalization and scientifization of the body and its pleasures.

C. The Science of Sex

A "scientia sexualis", formed through the commingling of power, knowledge and sex, has become the chief means through which human beings recognize themselves as subjects of sexuality. It is this scientific discourse which must become the object of a critical analysis. A methodological caution is advised at the outset though, says Foucault. Even if it is accepted that during the last two hundred years the discourse on sex has greatly expanded and that it has been responsible for the present sexual mosaic, one could still maintain, wrongly according to him, that this was just one more way to silence sex. The scientifization of sex could be regarded as one more attempt to repress it. Foucault argues that the concept of repression is unable to explain the discursive explosion concerning sex and whose endpoint was the scientia sexualis. Furthermore organising the discourse on sex around the concept of repression obscures the role of truth in that discourse. In a critical analysis of the discourse on sex what needs to be examined is how sex became an object about which it is necessary and possible to utter truths.

The bringing together of truth and sex did not begin in the nineteenth century, but it was then that process assumed the mantle of science, namely, of medicine. Foucault points out that unlike biology in the nineteenth century which became increasingly scientific and devoid of power relations, the medicalization of sex furthered the links between truth and power present in its discourse. Borrowing a phrase from The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault says that the biology of reproduction and the medicine of sex seem to have conformed to different "rules of formation" (HS 54). The medical discourse on sex was not separate from a range of moral, political and economic considerations which constrained the truth of sex.

The inculcation of sex with truth, knowledge and power began in the west in the middle ages. According to Foucault it is the practice of confession which marks the birth of that process. The Lateran Council of 1215 codified the sacrament of penance and made its once yearly observance obligatory. Techniques of confession gradually replaced a range of accusatory procedures and tests for getting at the truth in both religious and civil matters. For Foucault the significance of the confession is its relation to power, which he says is obvious in its ritualistic procedure as well as in the discrepancy in the status of the confessor and the penitent. The truth produced in the confessional is not therefore devoid of power.[36]

From the beginning sex has a privileged place in confession. Particular scrutiny of sex was demanded of it, the injunction of the confessional was to speak the truth about all of one's thoughts and actions concerning sex. Foucault's point seems to be that the confessional became a sort of proto-sex-laboratory, anticipating later "sexologists". Foucault lists five procedures for how this confessional technique became the norm for a science of sex.

1) "Through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak" (HS 65). That is, the sexual confession assumed scientific credibility through the use of such things as the examination, the questionnaire, hypnosis, free association, etc.

2) "Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality" (HS 65). An exhaustive examination of sex was justified on the basis of its supposed pervasiveness. In some way or other sex was found to underlie every thought, behaviour or pathology.

3) "Through the principle of latency intrinsic to sexuality" (HS 66). Since the individual conceals his sex and since sex also conceals itself this sanctions an experts discourse which seeks access to it.

4) "Through the method of interpretation" (HS 66). This is a corollary of point 3, the truth of sex requires a hermeneutic in order that it may be known. As an object of decipherment sex became an appropriate concern of science.

5) "Through the medicalization of the effects of the confession" (HS 67) The truth of sex acquired a therapeutic value, thus insuring that it remained within the province of the medical authorities. It became as a result not sinful but normal or pathological.

The history of sexuality is in fact the history of the scientifization of the confession of sex. Foucault says that sexuality is, "the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis" (HS 68). Sexuality coalesced in the medical procedures of the nineteenth century and was the endpoint of a process beginning in the middle ages with the sacrament of penance, going through the Renaissance with its pedagogical modifications and leading up to the present. That history which connects the confessional with the clinic produced sexuality in such a way that it contains both the truth of sex and its pleasure. Those who privilege repression in the history of sexuality actually presume the ahistoricality of sexuality, and so in fact can write only a history of the repression of it.

D. The Deployment of Sexuality

Under the general heading of "The Deployment of Sexuality", Foucault considers the objective, the method, the domain and the appropriate periodization of his study. Actually the "deployment" of sexuality alludes to Foucault's intention to write a political economy of the will to knowledge concerning sex. Deployment expresses the relation between sexuality and power/knowledge which Foucault wishes to uncover.

1. The Objective

Although not the first to express doubts about the repressive hypothesis, psychoanalysis had done the same according to Foucault, he was the first to situate his opposition within a new theory of power. The theory of power on which the repressive hypothesis relies he calls "juridico-discursive". Five features distinguish that theory of power.

1) "The negative relation" (HS 83). Power's relation to its object is always one of negation. It censors, denies, masks, refuses, etc. It creates only gaps, discontinuities, lacks, etc. Power does not produce.

2) "The insistence of the rule" (HS 83). Power lays down the law, in this case for sex, thus creating the licit and the illicit. It creates an order of sex by placing it in relation to the law. Articulated in language this produces a body of rules.

3) "The cycle of prohibition" (HS 84). Power prohibits sex and its pleasures, and does so effectively with the threat of punishment.

4) "The logic of censorship" (HS 84). The injunction that power lodges against sex is threefold; it forbids, prevents and denies. Power links the three by making each the principle and the effect of the others.

5) "The uniformity of the apparatus (HS 84). Power over sex varies only in scale, not in kind. Law, taboo and censorship are the mechanisms by which power operates. Its form therefore is juridical, its effect is obedience.

According to the juridical model, power functions as a law. The obedience that law commands makes itself felt negatively as domination, repression, etc. It is indeed odd that such a barren conception of power should have gained such widespread acceptability. Typically Foucault asks what strategic significance such an anomaly could have. The juridico-discursive theory of power in fact masks power's actual workings and makes it more palatable. Power is only tolerable on the condition that it is concealed. A thoroughly cynical account of power would limit power's effectiveness. The juridico-discursive theory is thus an ideological necessity of industrial society. It assures us that submission to authority is the means to insure our freedom.

According to Foucault this is not just fanciful rhetoric, but can be historically instantiated. The juridico-discursive theory of power arose in the middle ages along with the monarchy and the apparatus of state power. The monarchy justified its power as the necessary counterbalance to that of the landowners, war-lords, the church and others. Law was not simply a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchs; it was the monarchic system's mode of manifestation and the form of its acceptability. In Western societies since the middle ages, the exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of law (HS 87).

The juridico-discursive theory of power thus does not describe the way power was said to be exercised.

Today the juridico-discursive theory of power still holds sway; "we still have not cut off the head of the king" (HS 88-89). This blinds us to what we should now see; that power is guarantied not by right and law, but by techniques of normalization and control. It hides a vast extra-legal landscape. In the prison for instance such extra-legality is fairly blatant, but Foucault's point is that it is pervasive in our panoptic society. That extra-legality will remain hidden if one cripples one's critical analysis in advance by tying power to law. Foucault's point is that there can be abuse of power without abuse of law. Regarding sex, this means too that the juridico-discursive theory of power cannot illuminate its history.

Foucault says however that his intention is not to provide a new and more acceptable theory of power. Instead he says he wants to expound an "analytics of power". If power is a set of relations, then the problem is to provide an analytic of those relations. Despite this he says a theory of power is still methodologically necessary.

...It is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material (HS 90-91).

We shall come to that different theory shortly.

2. Method

The question Foucault poses for himself is what relations of power are at work in a true discourse on sex. To this end he advances five propositions concerning power.

1) Power is not a commodity; it can not be seized, shared, traded, etc. It exists only within relations.

2) In any relation power is immanent. Power is not something that takes hold of economic relations or sexual relations, for example, and molds them accordingly. Power is there from the beginning in all such relationships.

3) Power is not the prerogative of a dominant group. Power comes from below.

4) Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective.

5) Resistance is concomitant with power, it is not an other which opposes power.

His analysis, he says, of the history of sexuality will therefore proceed according to four rules.

1) The rule of immanence. Sexuality is immanent within the complex formed by strategies of power and techniques of knowledge. This means that there is no pure field of sexuality which could be the possible object of scientific inquiry. There is no pure sexuality apart from the complex of power and knowledge within which it was constituted.

2) The rules of continual variation. The historian of sexuality is implored not to distinguish the powerful from the powerless. The distribution of power-knowledge is dynamic, not static. The relations between parents and children, or doctors and patients, for example, have never been bifurcated by the presence or absence of power.

3) The rule of double conditioning. The relationship between local centres of power is not properly described as that between microlevel and macrolevel, or between infrastructure and superstructure. Centres of power require and reinforce each other.

4) The rule of tactical polyvalence of discourse. As power is immanent in discourse, it is also inherently strategic. Discourse must therefore be questioned as to what effects of power and knowledge it insures, and also what confrontation of forces requires such a discourse.

3. Domain

It is often remarked that sexuality has been reduced to the function of procreation and so restricted to the married heterosexual couple. Such an overall strategy does not explain however what were in fact a variety of objectives in the treatment of sex, nor the various means used to achieve them. There are a number of sexual politics, says Foucault, and the married couple is too broad a category to explain the treatment of sex across different age groups and different social classes. There has been no single strategy for the treatment of sex.

Since the eighteenth century it is possible to distinguish four strategic domains of sex featuring specific mechanisms of power and knowledge. The four strategies are;

1) The hystrization of women's bodies.

2) The pedagogization of children's sex.

3) A socialization of procreative behaviour.

4) A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.

To these correspond four objects of power-knowledge;

1) The hysterical woman.

2) The masturbating child.

3) The Malthusian couple.

4) The perverse adult.

The strategies did not aim to deny the sexuality of men, women and children. Their aim, according to Foucault, was the management of sex, while their effect was the creation of sexuality.

(Sexuality)...is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power (HS 105-106).

Sexuality in fact is a relatively recent invention. "We have had sexuality since the eighteenth century, and sex since the nineteenth", according to Foucault (PK 211). The development of sexuality is linked to the treatment of the body, it is not a feature of sex. Sex is not the biological substrate of sexuality. The real substrate of sexuality is power-knowledge.

What Foucault is referring to is the demise in the 19th century of the account of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, on the difference between men and women.[37] According to Aristotle, women lack sufficient heat to warm the blood and thus purify the soul. Hippocrates's notion of the four humors is expressed in Galen who believed that women were cold and moist, and men warm and dry. Vesalius (1514-74) gave up the notion of the humors, believing sex difference to be merely morphological. The only anatomical difference he noted between men and women was the genitals. But even on this point Vesalius accepted Galen's view that female genitalia were simply an imperfect and inverted version of the male's (cf CS 107). According to Galen, women lacked the necessary heat to propel the genitals outward.[38]

It was not until 1750 that the traditional account of sex difference came into serious question. The first illustration of a female skeleton was published in 1796; before that no skeletal differences between men and women had been remarked. It was only in 1829 that Carl Ludwig Klose declared that any comparison between the sex organs of men and women was worthless. It was in the 19th century too that women became more than mere incubators for the seed planted in them by men. True, de Graaf had in 1672 proposed that the female "testis" produce an egg, but no theory of ovulation existed until the 1840's. The first mammalian egg was observed in 1827, and the first human egg only in 1930. It is only in recent years with advances in biochemistry that a comprehensive account of ovulation and reproduction has been possible.

The point is that the nineteenth century insisted on a difference of sex because it was necessary for an ideology which required women to be subservient to men. Anatomists and physiologists actively contributed to theories of social hierarchy which suggested that women were less developed than men, having the qualities of children and "primitives". The Enlightenment which promoted equality, also sanctioned a "science" of the social differences between men and women, and between them and aboriginal people. As Foucault has remarked, the latter was particularly useful to the apologists of colonization.[39]

It is not Foucault's position that prior to the deployment of sexuality, a pure pleasure devoid of power was the prerogative of an equally pure body. Before the deployment of sexuality there was, he says, a deployment of alliance. Indeed, he says further, there is probably no society which has not regulated relations between men and women. These traditional means of regulation became increasingly anachronistic in the eighteenth century however with its changing political and economic structures. The deployment of alliance had maintained a social homeostasis by determining which unions were licit and which were not. It did so primarily on the basis of the status of the partners and through regulation of the exchange and transmission of wealth (for example, dowries, inheritances, divorce settlements, etc.)[40] The deployment of sexuality on the other hand concentrated not on the social body, but on the physical body. Its concern was the body's pleasures and sensations, which it sought to analyse and to manage. The economic importance of the deployment of sexuality was not due to the regulation of the exchange of wealth, but through its control of the body as a producer and consumer. With the deployment of sexuality the population itself became the object of techniques, centred on the body, which aimed at its control. The system of alliance regulated who could marry and who could only have the status of a concubine, and so determined who was legitimate and therefore an heir and who was not. It never took the population as its object however.

The deployment of sexuality actually took place alongside of the deployment of alliance. In fact the deployment of sexuality would have been impossible without the development of the family. The family became the site par excellence for the application of the inquisitorial techniques made common by the sacrament of penance. The family, according to Foucault, is not a site of fundamental sexual restraint. It is a social, political and economic structure which fostered the development of sexuality. Preserving the family became the mandate of those who saw in the hysterical mother, the impotent father, the homosexual, the exhausted child, etc. a threat to its existence (HS 110). "The family was the crystal in the deployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sexuality which it actually only reflected and diffracted. By virtue of its permeability, and through that process of reflection to the outside, it became one of the most valuable tactical components of the deployment" (HS 111).

4. Periodization

Those who would subsume the history of sexuality to the history of its repression cite a chronology marked by two outstanding events. In the seventeenth century they remark the advent of the stringent treatment of sex which continued until the twentieth century when that treatment was again liberalised. Agreeing that in our time that strictures on pre-marital and extra-marital relations have diminished, that the sexuality of children is less scrutinized, that "perverts" are more tolerated and that the law has largely divested itself of policing sex, Foucault nevertheless quarrels with this traditional chronology. What needs to be investigated, he says, is the diffusion of what has recently been liberalised. That diffusion does not accord with the cycle of repression and liberalization between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

The techniques with which it is claimed that sexuality was repressed and with which Foucault claims that sexuality was produced began, as we have seen, with medieval Christian penance. The reformation marks a decisive break in what Foucault calls the "traditional technology of the flesh" (HS 116). From the sixteenth century there evolved until the eighteenth century a technology for transforming concupiscence into discourse. The end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a new technology of sex. Freed from the ecclesiastical authority of what had preceded it, this technology nevertheless remained within the thematic of sin, according to Foucault. Under the aegis of pedagogy, medicine and economics, sex became the concern of the state and of the individual. The church thus lost its monopoly on the discourse on sex. This marked a fundamental transformation, whereby the technology of sex became fundamentally an aspect of medicine and the problem of the flesh became problems of the organism. Sex was no longer a matter of death and punishment, but of life and illness (HS 117).

The most important outcome of the desecularization of sex was a divergence of the medicine of the body and a medicine of sex. Medicine isolated a sexual "instinct" for which it provided a sexual pathology, namely, the perversions. Further, it linked sex with heredity and so imposed on the individual the responsibility for the non-transmission of sexual diseases. Political authorities likewise took this as a justification for their own concern with demography. The result of which was a state directed racism deployed around the general thesis of a connection between heredity, perversion and demographic degenerescence.

Interestingly Foucault defends the role of psychiatry in the medicalization of sex. Though psychiatry arose in the incitement to discourse concerning sex, it nevertheless opposed the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system. Foucault having so often cited the normalizing use of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization and in Discipline and Punish here credits it as the only member of "the great family of technologies of sex" which was politically at odds with prevailing theories of sex. In the same way psychoanalysis was praised in The Order of Things as opposed to the normalising forces of a general theory of man, psychiatry here is praised for opposing the reductionism of a theory of sex.

Not only do the techniques which created sexuality not follow the chronology dictated by the repressive hypothesis, but neither is their point of application in accordance with it. If one maintains that sex was repressed to serve the economy, that is, to create a large labour force, one should be able to confirm this with a number of observations. One should observe greater control of those producing the working population, namely, the poor, working class. One should observe particularly strict control of the young adult male, so as to insure no useless sexual activity. But, says Foucault, this does not seems to be what in fact happened. Instead it was the economically and politically dominant classes whose sex was most closely scrutinised. "The direction of conscience, self-examination, the entire long elaboration of the transgressions of the flesh, and the scrupulous detection of concupiscence were all subtle procedures that would only have been accessible to small groups of people" (HS 120). One might add to that they could only be applied to people with sufficient time, education and motive. When those techniques spread through the rest of the population they were considerably simplified and so attenuated.

Similarly it was the families of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in which sex was problematised. The idle woman and the schoolboy whose sex was the centre of so much attention were not members of the working class. In fact, says Foucault, the working class were largely unaffected by the deployment of sexuality until the middle of the nineteenth century when the movements for "moral improvement" began. Even then the role of the medical, juridical and religious authorities in the deployment of sexuality amongst the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were not the same.

The chronology of the deployment of sexuality thus casts doubt on the common notion that sexual repression began in the seventeenth century and reached its zenith in the late nineteenth century after which it was liberalised. Three points follow therefore;

1) There was no period of sexual repression or restriction.

2) There was no single sexual politics.

3) There was no restriction of the sexual pleasures of others imposed by a dominant class.

What actually happened was that the bourgeoisie applied the technology of sex to themselves. Foucault is emphatic that this was not a new asceticism so often associated with the Reformation and the rise of capitalism. There was no renunciation of the flesh or of pleasure, but rather a rigourous scrutiny of the body and its health. At stake was the vigour and longevity of the body and of the ruling class itself. The ruling class thus controlled, defended and strengthened itself. The techniques it used to do so were extended to the other classes only later as a means of "social control and political subjugation" (HS 123). It was the self that was originally enslaved, not the other. The ruling classes did not excise sex from their bodies, but rather gave themselves a precious body via the technology of sex which required care, protection and cultivation.

Sex functioned for the bourgeoisie in the same manner that "blood" had for the aristocracy. It was a means by which they made themselves precious, by which they marked themselves as a particular class. The bourgeois concern with sex did not merely repeat the aristocratic concern with blood however. Blood affirmed the antiquity of ancestry and the importance of alliances. Sex on the other hand was tied to the strength and health of the physical body, but also to its degenerescence. The aristocracy sought to hang on to privilege, the bourgeoisie sought to gain hold of it. According to Foucault the many tracts written at the end of the eighteenth century on physical hygiene, on the art of longevity, on the ways of having healthy children and of caring for them, on the ways to improve lineage, etc, all attest to a bourgeois sense of self-improvement and self-interest. It also attests, he says, to a certain form of racism particularly evident in the second half of the nineteenth century during the colonization of Africa.

Foucault's presentation of the history of sexuality does not leave the interpretation of the left unscathed. First it makes clear that condemnation of bourgeois hypocrisy regarding sex misses the point. Sexuality was produced by the bourgeoisie's concern for the body. Secondly it denies that class struggle consisted in opposition to repression by the bourgeoisie. The theme of repression and liberation are not suitable for analysing the history of sexuality.

Concerning class struggle one of Foucault's highly original points is that it was only in that way that the working class came to have a body and a sexuality requiring care. The body and its sexuality was not liberated by class struggle. Consciousness of the body is a primordial form of class consciousness. The bourgeoisie developed as a class as they began to concern themselves with their physical prowess. Their disregard for the bodies of the proletariat was obvious from their exploitation of them. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century when such conflicts as cohabitation, proximity, contagion, prostitution, etc, arose, and when industry required a stable, competent, disciplined workforce that the proletariat were allowed a body which like that of the bourgeoisie also required attention and had a sexuality. However when the proletariat acquired a sexuality they were subjected to a regime of surveillance and regulation in the form of schooling, public hygiene, housing policy, public relief and medicine. These politically diffused the new class consciousness of the proletariat and assured the continued ascendency of the bourgeoisie.

Foucault says that this explains the resistance by the proletariat to the deployment of sexuality. It may appear contradictory to claim both that consciousness of the body is a form of class consciousness and that the working class resisted the imposition of bourgeois morality and its body. In their new-found concern for the body what the working class objected to was the restriction imposed on them by a state which also had concern over their bodies. Furthermore it is not Foucault's position that the history of the working class is exclusively concerned with the body. In fact the experience of resistance must also be counted as a primordial form of class consciousness.

Although Foucault is critical of traditional leftist interpretations of sexual politics, he does in the end salvage one of their main precepts. We must affirm, he says, that there are class sexualities. Originally sexuality meant bourgeois sexuality, its dissemination through the social body created other sexualities with specific class effects. Foucault does not apprize the notion of class sexuality in the traditional leftist sense however. For most commentators the end of the nineteenth century marks the beginning of sexual liberation and permissiveness. It was the period when sexuality began to shed its class distinctions. Foucault claims the opposite, it was a period in which a new element for sexual differentiation was introduced. The bourgeoisie having distinguished themselves through their sexuality from the aristocracy who used "blood" as their mark, sought at the end of the nineteenth century to put a space between themselves and the proletariat. They did that with repression!

Intensity of repression and not the sexual quality of the body became the means of social differentiation. Everyone now had a sexuality, but the sexuality of the bourgeoisie harboured different secrets and different truths in virtue of the restrictions placed upon it. "Those who had lost the exclusive privilege of worrying over their sexuality henceforth had the privilege of experiencing more than others the thing that prohibited it and of possessing the method which made it possible to remove the repression" (HS 130). It was now through repression that the bourgeoisie made its body precious, and it was through psychoanalysis that it relieved itself of the burden of that repression. Foucault's example of the class effects of psychoanalysis is striking; amongst the lower classes incest was regarded as a conduct which required policing by schools, doctors, judges, etc, while amongst the bourgeoisie it became merely a phantasy to be analysed or ignored.

To return then to the question which Foucault asked at the beginning of The History of Sexuality,

Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence (HS 8-9).

The answer is that against the universal deployment of sexuality the bourgeoisie insured their special status with repression. Everyone had a sexuality but that of the bourgeoisie had a peculiar depth and quality. The general acceptance today of the repressive hypothesis attests to the rise of the bourgeoisie. But Foucault hastens to add that if liberalisation has been recently possible without any political concessions being required this should indicate to those who think otherwise that it was not capitalism which required repression.

E. Sex and Bio-Power

The Classical age marks the beginning of what Foucault called bio-history and bio-power. "If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life" (HS 143). Sovereign or state power changed considerably with this development. New mechanisms of power entailed a new logic of power. Prior to the Classical age state power had been essentially a right to seize property, including one's body and one's life. Increasingly state power became essentially the right to administer life. Even in those instances today where the state retains the right to life, for example, in compulsory wartime military service or capital punishment, that right is exercised on behalf of the people (so we are told anyway). We do not go to war to protect the sovereign, or redress a wrong done to him as was once the case. Such actions are taken today to insure the life and livelihood of society (HS 136-138).

State power, which beginning in the seventeenth century became increasingly administrative, was organised around two poles. The first to form was, as we saw already in Discipline and Punish, "an anatomo-politics of the human body" (HS 139). This saw the development of the disciplines, which by treating the body as a machine, insured its usefulness, docility and efficiency. The second pole constitutes a "bio-politics of the population" (HS 139). These regulatory controls were aimed at the reproductive body. Their concern was demographic: health, birth, longevity. The two poles, one anatomical and the other biological, and around which power over life developed and functioned, were joined in concrete arrangements which during the nineteenth century formed part of a great technology of power. The deployment of sexuality was one of the most important of these arrangements.

The political importance of sex is the role it can play in the discipline of bodies and populations. As Foucault maintained in Discipline and Punish that sort of discipline was indispensable for the rise of capitalism. Such an economic development cannot be explained by the infusion into the population of a "hard work ethic", that is, a new ascetic morality. The body is not so easily elided. Capitalism required the controlled insertion of bodies into the process of production, but it also required that the whole population be adapted to those same processes. That required bio-power.

Bio-power represents the moment when life and history coalesced, that is, when human life became part of the order of knowledge and power. Man's bio-history chronicles the effects on his life of such things as famines and epidemics, but bio-power marks the point at which that bio-history ceased to be just a chronicle of such menaces. Bio-power brought man's life within his own control. What might be called a society's "threshold of modernity", says Foucault, is the point when it can wager its life on its political strategies. The nuclear age, he adds, is the upper limit of that modernity. If we are political animals as Aristotle claims, we have become such that our politics now threatens our animality (HS 143).

It is a mark of the continuity of Foucault's work that already in The Order of Things he had characterised modernity as fundamentally historical. At the end of The History of Sexuality, in what appears to be an oblique reference to The Order of Things, Foucault refers to the "rupture" of the "classical episteme" wrought by the historicization of man (HS 143). In The Order of Things the result of man's entry into history was the empirico-transcendental doublet. Man became both the object of knowledge and a subject with knowledge. One finds nearly the same event in The History of Sexuality, but this time described from the vantage point of bio-power.

If the question of man was raised—insofar as he was a specific living being, and specifically related to other living beings—the reason for this is to be sought, in the new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power (HS 143).

The empirico-transcendental doublet of The Order of Things becomes a biological-historical doublet in The History of Sexuality. Man's biology means that he remains an object, but as a result of a regime of power-knowledge he becomes also a subject. Man's subjectivity is not a product of a transcendental constitution. The History of Sexuality (and Discipline and Punish too) can therefore be regarded as a complement to The Order of Things; in the latter Foucault demonstrated the internal untenability of phenomenology, while in the former work(s) he demonstrates it's external untenability by showing how the subject is really constituted. While phenomenology is deconstructed in The Order of Things along with the human sciences it supports, it is the political and administrative side of that same humanism which is so treated in The History of Sexuality.

Foucault's critical position in The Order of Things is an opposition to the normalising force of humanism in all its guises. For that reason he praises ethnology, psychoanalysis and linguistics, all of which are incompatible with humanism. For example, he says that "nothing is more alien to psychoanalysis than anything resembling a general theory of man or of anthropology" (OT 376). One finds a similar attack on the normalizing function of bio-power in The History of Sexuality. "A normalized society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life" (HS 144). Bio-power normalizes not because it is equipped with a general theory of man of course, but because in administering life it functions as a norm. The control and regulation of life in modern society occurs for the most part not through law and threat of punishment, but through normative administration. If the aetiology of what now ails man is different in The Order of Things from The History of Sexuality, so too is the required therapy. In the former work the normalising effect of phenomenology and the human sciences was to be overcome by a new conception of language. The return of language heralds the death of normalized man. The Foucault of The History of Sexuality would never say that a structuralist/linguistic account of language is what could overcome bio-power. There is no proffered solution to the effects of bio-power in The History of Sexuality, although I would say that knowledge of the history of bio-power is presumed to give us the opportunity of thinking differently and so perhaps of living differently as well. Knowledge of the deployment of sexuality can at least tell us that our liberation does not hang in the balance of an anti-repressive struggle. There is then what one might call an attenuated Socratism in Foucault. Knowledge, as long as it is historical knowledge can make a difference for human life, though not in the sense that it can give definitive solutions or alternatives. Knowledge in Foucault is never a sufficient condition for acting differently, at most it can be a necessary condition for those who have no first-hand experience of what is at issue. Prisoners do not have to read Discipline and Punish to discover what is really going on in prisons, and homosexuals do not have to read The history of Sexuality to learn of the normalizing effects of the discourse on sexuality, but perhaps experts and intellectuals do. (see PK 126-133)

Return to Table of Contents

Chapter VIII: Sex, Power and Ideology

A. Introduction

B. Marcuse

1. Repression

2. Eros and Sexuality

C. Illich's Notion of Gender

A. Introduction

The resilience of modern industrial society even in the face of its most intransigent critics has been duly noted by many. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno paid particular attention to the "culture industry" and its ability to absorb and defuse and ultimately to profit from society's subversion. Martin Jay in his history of the Frankfurt School drew attention to this,

Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted.[41]

Society's homeostatic capacity has a double irony for the culture critic. Not only can society find a niche for the products of its alienated, critical members, but it has also learnt to profit from the very fact of alienation, as countless films have made clear.

Not all of society's malcontents are treated in so benign a fashion of course. The carceral archipelago may hide its face to the outside, but on the inside the force and the effects of its power are brutally obvious. That was one reason Foucault chose to study the prison, there power is not required to mask itself that it might be tolerable. Tom Wicker, an American journalist discovered the same thing upon his visit to Attica prison during the revolt there. As he crossed into the area of the prison held by the inmates he reported that he became,

acutely conscious...that I was leaving behind the arrangements and instruments by which civilization undertook to guarantee me order and safety—the law with its regulations, officers and guns. At the moment I stepped from under their protection, I realized not only how much I ordinarily assumed their presence, without acknowledging or even recognizing it, but also how much, even in a civilization, law seemed to assume in the same unspoken manner, its dependence, at bottom, upon guns.[42]

Nicos Poulantzas too has criticised those who neglect the states use of violence. For example he takes issue with the position of the Frankfurt School that state power is grounded in the manufacture of consent. Marcuse's turn to Freud to understand why a revolutionary consciousness failed to develop does seem to bear out his point. If human desire and not class struggle explains the genesis of societies, then state power can afford to be coercive or manipulative without being violent. Such things as careerism and consumerism can replace police batons and hanging judges. Even Foucault's notion of bio-power neglects "the role of violence in grounding power", according to Poulantzas.[43] Violence, he says, "permanently underlies the techniques of power and mechanisms of consent, it is inscribed in the web of disciplinary and ideological devices; and even when not directly exercised it shapes the materiality of the social body.[44] For his part Foucault would say of Poulantzas that he is one of those who "in political thought and analysis...still have not cut off the head of the king" (HS 88-89). The assumption of Poulantzas which Foucault rejects is that there is an ideal form of power which operates according to a fundamental lawfulness. In fact Foucault does not deny the violence of power, it is to be found in the prison for instance, but in other disciplinary mechanisms it is not an obviously functioning aspect of the system. After all if Foucault's reversal of von Clausewitz's formula is correct and politics is a continuation of war by other means this should indicate two things about his idea of power; first that it is not identical with war, and second that it is not free of war's violence either (see HS 93,102, & PK 90-91). Alex de Tocqueville during his travels in America over one hundred years ago noted the gentle way of state power,

The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.[45]

Society's resilience thus relies on at least three strategies. First, it deals with its critics by absorbing their discourse with its own. Thus modernist art, psychoanalysis, existentialism, to name just a few potentially disruptive movements, become just novel commodities in a system which craves novelty. Careerism and consumerism belong to this strategy. Secondly, there is the carceral archipelago, supported by the police, the army and the judiciary, which deals with society's less useful and less powerful offenders. Finally those who can be neither co-opted nor need be excluded are silenced through marginalization.

A fourth strategy is needed however to describe the treatment of sexuality. Each of the previous three strategies suppose a source of opposition foreign to the structure of society which it must try to recuperate. While it is true that Foucault sometime talks as if a recuperation was at stake in the treatment of sexuality, that is not in fact his position. For example, he says that the response of power to "the revolt of the sexual body" was..."an economic (and perhaps also ideological) exploitation of eroticisation, from sun-tan products to pornographic films" (PK 57). Foucault's provocative point in The History of Sexuality and in Discipline and Punish, and this is the fourth strategy, is that society's resilience is also due to the fact that it produces its opponents. An example of which in the latter work is the delinquent, while in the former Foucault mentions those who demand greater sexual liberty.

...Between the two world wars there was formed , around Reich, the historico-political critique of sexual repression. The importance of this critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that it always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not outside or against it. The fact that so many things were able to change in the sexual behaviour of Western societies without any of the promises or political conditions predicted by Reich being realized is sufficient proof that this whole sexual "revolution", this whole "antirepressive" struggle, represented nothing more, but nothing less—and its importance is undeniable—than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality (HS 131).

Since industrial society did not require a repressed sexuality to insure its development, a liberalised sexuality cannot threaten its survival. Ideology and power were not marshaled to suppress the potential disruptiveness of sex. In a sense those who seek the liberation of sex are dupes of its very deployment. The dialectical irony of their seemingly enlightened view of sex is that it merely affirms the deployment they should oppose. Rather than seeing through the tactical use of the repressive hypothesis in the deployment of sexuality, they assume both repression and sexuality. Their political program is scuttled because though they do away with repression they retain sexuality, thinking it to be pure while it in fact is equally a product of the regime which they charge with producing repression. Unwittingly convinced by the deployment of sexuality that repression is a fact, their opposition to the former leaves the latter intact. The ease with which opposition to repressed sexuality was accommodated was not due to its profitability for industry, but to the rather late and superfluous role the repressive hypothesis played in the deployment of sexuality.

Foucault's skeptical attitude towards the movement for sexual liberation thus follows from his productive theory of power. It is a mark of the continuity of his work that one finds this same attitude to the idea of liberation in his earlier writings. I have remarked this already in Discipline and Punish; "the man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself" (DP 30). Similarly in his first book Mental Illness and Psychology, Foucault points to the impossibility that psychology might liberate madness; "there is a very good reason why psychology can never master madness; it is because psychology became possible in our world only when madness had already been mastered and excluded from the drama" (MP 87). While in Madness and Civilization he castigated psychology for its "monologue of reason about madness" (MC XI), in The Order of Things this criticism is extended to the whole humanist project which he charges with actually creating the man whom we are implored to treat with such reverence. This explains Foucault's refusal to engage traditional philosophical arguments; they presume a notion of the true self that he rejects. We will see later that this is why he prefers to do genealogy of ethics rather than the philosophy of morals (cf GE 240). It also explains his preference for a critical philosophy whose two imperatives are, first, to refuse to be what you have become, and second, to create yourself in an aesthetic manner.

Since Herbert Marcuse is probably the most well-known of those who argues for a non-repressive sexuality, for Eros instead of Thanatos, I shall turn now to a discussion of his position in order to draw a contrast with Foucault. I shall not discuss Marcuse's position regarding the Frankfurt School, but shall refer to that in a later chapter.

B. Marcuse

1. Repression

It is worthwhile comparing Foucault with Marcuse not just because the differences between them serves to highlight Foucault's work, but also because he refers to that difference (cf. PK 80, 99). I shall limit my comments to Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Whether his position changed in later works is not especially relevant for my purposes.

The purpose of Eros and Civilization is to explain the absence of revolution, or at least of revolutionary consciousness in modern industrial society. Why did fascism and not Marxism prevail? Reich, whom Foucault associates with Marcuse and with the repressive hypothesis (cf. PK 80, 91, 100, & HS 5, 131), had addressed this question in his Mass Psychology of Fascism. Marcuse reports that he and the other members of the Frankfurt school felt that Reich had oversimplified the problem, that he was too hasty in explaining fascism as the objective correlate of sexual repression.[46] Nevertheless Reich's insistence on the essential role of human psychology in political life was accepted. The problem was to make Reich more subtle and more theoretically sound.

Repression and instinct are thus essential concepts in Marcuse's thoughts on sexuality. The form of repression varies with time and place; in that way psychic structures can merge with history. For example, like many others, Marcuse identifies progress in psychology and in technology with progress in repression. Foucault of course rejects the repressive hypothesis, but he also rejects the idea that there is a true subject masked by technology and the human sciences; their perniciousness must be sought elsewhere. What Marcuse tries to show in part one of Eros and Civilization, Foucault rejects.

Marcuse calls his book, "A Philosophical inquiry into Freud". Referring to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Marcuse rejects as pessimistic the idea that modern industrial society requires repression, and affirms that a non-repressive society is possible. Marcuse, like Habermas, retains faith in Enlightenment. Unlike Rousseau, one of the first critics of the Enlightenment, Marcuse holds out the possibility of a virtuous civil society. According to Rousseau, society is incapable of the sort of Enlightenment foreseen by Marcuse and Habermas. Rousseau merits only one mention in Eros and Civilization, but it is a significant one none the less. From Plato to Rousseau, Marcuse says, the only honest answer to the question of how one might instigate freedom in a repressive society is through an "educational dictatorship".[47] This theme occurs again in One Dimensional Man. Rousseau lacks Freud's theory of the unconsciousness and the instincts of course, but says Marcuse, regarding such a dictatorship "it's entirely possible for Rousseau to have said something sensible".[48]

This reference to Rousseau helps determine the difference between Marcuse and Foucault. Whereas Marcuse cites Rousseau with qualified approval, Foucault groups him with Bentham as a technician of discipline.

I would say Bentham was the complement to Rousseau...The Rousseauist dream...was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privilege of royal power or the prerogative of some corporation , zones of disorder. (PK 152).

Foucault, unlike Marcuse, puts little faith in learning from someone else to be free. Power for Foucault is not separable from knowledge. What for Marcuse and Rousseau are the conditions for freedom are for Foucault the conditions which create the man whom they seek to free.

To return to Freud, Marcuse says that there is a "hidden trend" in psychoanalysis which amounts to a defence of western civilization. Since Freud showed that repression is historically specific, he also left open the possibility, according to Marcuse, that it is not historically necessary. So far the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle during the socialization of the person has always involved the repression of instinctual needs. Marcuse calls the present form of the reality principle: the performance principle. His aim is to show how that repressive version of the reality principle can be obviated in favour of a non-repressive reality principle. Eros would lie at the heart of this reality principle.

Marcuse says that the reality principle develops the function of reason. Rationality is thus imposed on man, phantasy however escapes that imposition. Phantasy can therefore serve as a base of resistance to the reality principle. Memory too, since it can present a past not subservient to the performance principle, can serve that resistance. According to Marcuse then, memory and phantasy are the elements of a critical theory in Freud.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual...Regression assumes a progressive function. The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present. Moreover, the restoration of memory is accompanied by the restoration of the cognitive content of phantasy...The recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future liberation.[49]

Primal memories of pleasure suggest that an alternative to the performance principle is possible, phantasy suggests what that alternative might actually be. Furthermore the repressed instinct of Eros, which the performance principle requires, has its own dynamism. Eros seeks expression, it seeks liberation from repression. Thus in history (of industrialization) Marcuse finds the necessity of repression, while in psychoanalysis he discovers an anthropology which grounds the possibility of liberation.

The difference with Foucault is obvious and profound. We have seen that for Foucault history does not reveal the necessity of repression. Industrialization required the disciplines, but there is no necessary connection between discipline and sexual repression. One could just as well postulate that what industrialization needed was to promote promiscuity and along with it a large labour force. In fact there never was a problem with the supply of labour, the problem was to make that labour useful; that required discipline.

The opposition between discipline and repression is fundamental to the difference between Foucault and Marcuse.

I...would distinguish myself from para-Marxist like Marcuse who give the notion of repression an exaggerated role—because power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way (PK 59)

Through discipline human beings are turned into subjects. History is an essential structure of the subject in virtue of discipline. History plays no such role in Marcuse. The psychological events which constitute the subject for Marcuse require a "world" but are devoid of history. Subsequent to the formation of the subject the role of history is merely to aggravate the tension between the two instincts of Eros and Thanatos. By cultivating Eros, repressive history is overcome. Foucault would never say that history is a contingency of the instincts.

A look at their different accounts of the genesis of the subject points to the different conceptions of history in Foucault and Marcuse. According to Marcuse,

...Animal drives become human instincts under the influence of the external reality...But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their needs and satisfaction is a socio-historical world. The animal man becomes a human being only through a fundamental transformation of his nature, affecting not only the instinctual "values"...Freud described this change as the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle.[50]

With the establishment of the reality principle, the human being which, under the pleasure principle, has been hardly more than a bundle of animal drives, has become an organised ego...Under the reality principle, the human being develops the function of reason...Man acquires the faculties of attention, memory, and judgement. He becomes a conscious, thinking subject, geared to a rationality which is imposed upon him from the outside.[51]

In any world what so ever animal man becomes a human being, that is, a thinking subject. This means that at any time in history man becomes a thinking subject. In every world the pleasure principle must give way to the reality principle to insure "the perpetuation of the human race in civilization".[52]³ In the reality principle the vicissitudes of history are made present. The history of western society has required that the reality principle take the form of the performance principle; it is thus marked by surplus repression and so "stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its members".[53] History's role is merely to determine whether the reality principle will subordinate Eros to Thanatos.

There is no concept of "world" in Foucault, no discussion of instincts, no ontogeny of the human being, and history has an altogether different function. History is not a massive block imposed on the subject, overshadowing and overwhelming him, forcing him to behave and think in a particular manner. That conception in Marcuse is the Marxist half of his Freudo-Marxism. History in Foucault is always a productive micro-history which must be understood in relation to his micro-physics of power. It is through a micro-physics of power that the subject is created.

An analysis of the workings of this micro-physics of power constitutes a history from below. Power does not move from the centre to the periphery. "Power comes from below..." (HS 94). Power and history cannot be conceived of as a uniform repressive force emanating from one centre and imposed on everyone located outside that centre. Foucault's work can thus be favourably compared to that of E.P. Thompson, for whom resistance to power is an organising theme of his work. Gramsci's notion of hegemony too resonates in Foucault's idea of the multi-centredness of power, except of course that Gramsci stresses the role of ideology which Foucault replaces with a political economy of the body.

Though Marcuse regards the subject as an accomplished event in the world, it is not really an historical event since it must always happen and always in the same manner. There is always a singular subject which results from the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Depending on the economy he is more or less repressed that is all. In Foucault on the other hand there is no single subject; the subject is created as rational, delinquent, homosexual, etc, none of these need coincide. The subject is a historical construction of power, particularly of power exercised on the body. The subject is thus properly historical, he need not exist. Each subject is historically necessary to the extent to which his genealogy can be traced, but he is not transcendentally necessary, or in the case of Marcuse, not metapsychologically necessary.

As a result of this, history has a different function for a critical philosophy in Marcuse and Foucault. Foucault's criticism of contemporary society is grounded in history, Marcuse's in psychology. On the basis of a primal experience of pleasure and in conjunction with phantasy the subject, in Marcuse, can become conscious of dissatisfaction. on the basis of psychology he concludes that in contemporary society man suffers a surplus repression, which because it cultivates Thanatos and not Eros, threatens the very life of man. He thus grounds the dialectic of Enlightenment in psychology, the contingency of surplus repression however indicates a hopeful alternative not found in Horkheimer and Adorno.

If there is a hope for an alternative way of living in Foucault it is not grounded in psychology. His genealogical studies of the subject engender that hope by pointing to the historical contingency of the subject. In the realization that we have not always been who we are now, Foucault believes that we may also come to the realization that we need not be who we have become. The struggle today is to refuse the forms of subjectivation which genealogy has revealed (GE 208-226). In Foucault's genealogical "tool-box", history is used to cut through domination, repression and subjectivation (LCM 208).

2. Eros and Sexuality

If we speak so solemnly about sex today, says Foucault, it is because we do so with the assurance that such talk is immediately subversive (HS 6). He detects a certain self-righteousness in those who clamour for sexual liberation. Foucault shows in fact that their discourse only confirms the deployment of sexuality. He does not therefore share Marcuse's confidence in the subversiveness of sex. Marcuse writes,

The unpurified, unrationalised release of sexual relationships would be the strongest release of enjoyment as such and the total devaluation of labour for its own sake. No human being could tolerate the tension between labour as valuable in itself and the freedom of enjoyment. The dreariness and injustice of work conditions would penetrate explosively the consciousness of individuals and make impossible their peaceful subordination to the social system of the bourgeois world.[54]

For Foucault the genealogist who discovered that we have had sexuality only since the eighteenth century and sex since the nineteenth century, such a position is not only impossible but also naive. In preparation of The History of Sexuality he records that his working hypothesis was that sexuality was the historical expression of sex (PK 210). How then to understand his final contention that both sexuality and sex are historical constructions, and how especially that sex is a product of sexuality? The point is that Western man has not always had a sexuality, he has not always thought that a profound truth about his being lay concealed in his sex. Sexuality like every other object, as we saw in the Archaeology of Knowledge, is a construction.

The object sexuality coalesced in the eighteenth century, though it had its beginning as early as the fourth century with the writings of the church fathers, especially Tertulian. The Lateran council of 1215 and the council of Trent in 1545 mark important dates in the further development of the Christian pastoral which Foucault believes was essential for the development of sexuality. When the Lateran council of 1215 imposed on all Christians the duty of a once yearly exhaustive confession, the procedure by which sexuality was formed began in earnest. As we have seen, in order to aid the confessor the church codified in manuals a vast interrogative procedure. The none too subtle questions the confessor was advised to pose, concerning such things as positions assumed, places touched, and so on, gave way after the council of Trent to a more discrete inquiry (HS 18-19). Within this procedure, says Foucault, the man of conscience was born; the man with a true sex was soon to follow.

Sexuality coalesced in the eighteenth century as we have also seen. In its creation, biological theories of sex, the medicalization of the body, philosophical and juridical conceptions of the individual, administrative requirements of the modern state and a vast technology for producing docile and useful bodies were grafted on to the man of conscience. The man for whom carnal pleasure was a pressing problem of conscience received a true sexuality to aid his self-examination. Whether or not he was sinning against nature could now be determined. Christianity may have required that sex be hidden, it never doubted that there man would find his true nature though.

On the basis of sexuality it was then possible to determine one's true sex. This perhaps explains why homosexuality and hermaphrodism have presented modern society with such difficulties. The homosexual has the wrong sex for his sexuality, while the hermaphrodite has a sexuality without a definite sex. Regarding the hermaphrodite, Foucault says that it is only recently that they have been required to have a single true sex. For quite a while, he says, it was simply agreed that they had two (HB VII). Though hermaphrodites were persecuted in some cases during the middle ages, the records show that they were largely tolerated. All that was required was that at baptism the father or godfather should designate the sex which the child would retain. At adulthood the hermaphrodite was free to affirm or deny that choice, but could not later change without being regarded as a sodomite (HB VIII). Sex is thus a legalism of the 19th century.

All that changed with the advent of sexuality. Under the aegis of medicine especially, all hermaphrodites became only pseudo-hermaphrodites. Medicine saw through such anatomical deceptions, it found in spite of appearances, the one true sex. Foucault's point is that a similar process has taken place in all of us. The case of homosexuality lays somewhere between the obvious treatment of hermaphrodism and the more subtle creation of sexuality. The celebrated tolerance of homosexuality in Classical Greece was in fact the non-existence of "homosexuality". Sexuality was not always a species-designating term. Prior to the eighteenth century it was not possible to categorise people on the basis of sexuality.

Foucault's skepticism concerning "liberation sexology" is thus understandable. Those who demand equal rights for homosexuals or for women are merely demanding the right to be recuperated. Demanding the rights of heterosexual males amounts to the same as demanding to made use of by the economic system in the same way. The point is not to demand the rights of sexuality, the movement forfeits its critical edge thereby. Rather one should do away with sexuality and the economic structures it requires and supports.[55]

If Foucault were to propose a utopia it would not be one of good sex, one where everyone would feel comfortable with their sexuality, as the saying goes. Foucault has no nostalgia for a better time, even the Greeks had their problems he says (GEGE 232). Liberation will not mean better orgasms as in Reich, nor an erogenisation of the life-world as in Marcuse. Foucault calls not for more and better sex, but for less sexualization. "...One should aim instead at desexualization, at a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms" (HS 191). He looks for "the end of this dreary desert of sexuality, the end of the monarchy of sex"[56] Foucault's utopia would be one of bodies and pleasures, not sex and sexuality.[57]

The desexualization of the body is the critical intent of The History of Sexuality. The critical intent of Marcuse, on the other hand, consists in an objection to desexualization. He complains of a shrinkage of the sexual body. Sexuality has become only genital sexuality. The body has been, "all but desexualized in order to conform to the requirements of a specific social organization of the human existence".[58] Freedom from repression would restore to the body its erotic dimension, present now only as genital sexuality. The body's "unrepressed development would eroticize the organism to such an extent that it would counteract the desexualization of the organism required by its social utilization as an instrument of labor".[59]The gulf between Foucault and Marcuse thus appears quite wide.

That gulf does narrow somewhat however when one makes more explicit Marcuse's understanding of Eros. Eros refers to the life instincts. Marcuse speaks of an "erotic reality" where the life instincts flourish without repression.[60] He speaks also of the necessity of transforming sexuality into Eros. Under the reign of Eros there develops on the basis of the sex instinct a "libidinal rationality" which promotes civilized freedom.[61] Whether Eros can actually be distinguished from sexuality is hard to say; we shall come to this point shortly.

Marcuse's libidinal rationality does seem similar to Foucault's world of bodies and their pleasures. Libidinal rationality frees the body of an exclusive genital sexuality, which Foucault would have to agree represents the demise of a sexual norm. Marcuse however anticipates the "resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality", something Foucault abjures.[62] Although Foucault would agree that an exclusive genital sexuality is won at the expense of the body and its pleasures, his account of its genesis is different from Marcuse's. In Foucault genital sexuality is a creation of power/knowledge acting upon a body that primordially has neither sex nor sexuality; in Marcuse it results from the repression of a primordial polymorphous sexuality in response to the injunctions of capitalism.

While Eros is not genital sexuality it still belongs to what Foucault calls the "grid of sexuality". The reign of Eros may transform all relations, including sexual relations, into erotic relations, but they still require sexuality as their organising principle. Marcuse himself alludes to this, "it may not be accidental that Freud does not rigidly distinguish between Eros and Sexuality..."[63] Foucault then can neither accept Marcuse's account of the origin of repressed and non-repressed sexuality, nor his critical transformation of sexuality into Eros since it is in fact only a sublimation of sexuality. This does raise the question though of whether Foucault can describe the body and its pleasures without some notion of the erotic and therefore of sexuality as well. I will return to this point.

It is in fact a question whether our society can do without a notion of sexuality and so whether a historical deconstruction of sexuality can actually rid us of it, or even help to rid us of it. I will return to this very important point, for now I will merely raise a suspicion; if sexuality is not simply a historical event, not simply a historical construction, but is also a symbolic practice in the manner in which religion is a symbolic practice, this presents a grave problem for the efficacy of Foucault's critical project, since the meaning of a symbolic practice for us can be unaffected by its history.

I turn now to a short discussion of Ivan Illich, who I believe makes an interesting complement to Foucault, while at the same time sheding some light on the suspicion just raised.

C. Illich's Notion of Gender

The striking parallel between Illich's book Gender[64] and The History of Sexuality does not necessarily mean that Foucault's influence on Illich has been decisive for the latter's work. Illich does say that The Archaeology of Knowledge and Power/Knowledge influenced his own study of "modern webs of utterances".[65] He says further that The Birth of the Clinic and The History of Sexuality were pioneer works in the study of the way in which the body of the subject of the welfare state has been constituted by the discourse of various experts.[66] The similarity between the work of Foucault and Illich is however better explained by their common stock of historical sources. Both refer to and endorse the works of George Duby, J.L. Flandrin, J. Boswell, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès and others. In fact Illich says that the greatest influence on his work is that of Ariès. Regarding Foucault this is not just a bibliographical point, it indicates the essential role of social history in his work.

Foucault and Illich agree that sex and sexuality are historical constructions. Both agree that capitalism required sex and sexuality without thinking that economics explains their genesis. Instead both find in the Christian pastoral the essential ingredient for the fabrication of both. We have seen already Foucault's exposition of this, I shall now give a brief summary of Illich's.

Modern sexology, he says, must be overcome by the historian. Those who do find that we do not have sex until the late eighteenth century,[67] that before the Renaissance nobody thought of himself as a homosexual or that heterosexuality was normal.[68] Illich concurs with Foucault that sex did not always provide a diagnostic framework of man's being.

The creation of sexuality entails, according to Illich, a transformation in the social basis; from a society based on gender to one based on sex. Before men and women understood themselves as beings of sexuality it was on the basis of gender that they organised their lives. Sex and gender are in fact antithetical according to Illich.

English nouns belong to masculine, feminine, or neuter gender. I have adopted this term to designate a distinction in behaviour, a distinction universal in vernacular cultures. It distinguishes places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women. This association constitutes social gender because it is specific to a time and place. I call it vernacular gender because this set of associations is as peculiar to a traditional people (in Latin, a gens) as is their vernacular speech.

I use gender, then, in a new way to designate a duality that in the past was too obvious even to be named, and is so far removed from us today that it is often confused with sex. By "sex" I mean the result of a polarization in those common characteristics that, starting with the late eighteenth century, are attributed to all human beings. Unlike vernacular gender, which always reflects an association between dual, local, material culture and the men and women who live under its rule, social sex is "catholic"; it polarises the human labour force, libido, character or intelligence, and is the result of a diagnosis (in Greek, "discrimination") of deviations form the abstract genderless norm of "the human". Sex can be discussed in the unambiguousness of science. Gender bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical. Only metaphor reaches it.[69]

With some reservations Illich intends the notion of gender to serve a critical philosophy. The loss of gender is a condition for the rise of sex and of an economy of scarcity. Illich describes gendered societies as a form of dance; each partner performs his duties to complement the other. He does at the same time admit though that gender is a Weberian "ideal type", that is, that it is a limit concept which designates neither a historical reality, nor even a true reality.[70]¹ He says too that women in gendered societies are usually always subordinate, though they do have their domain of power which in a sexed society they lose.[71] Despite this "sad loss of gender", Illich does not suggest a nostalgic return to preindustrialization.[72]2 But he does suggest that society need not be the ideological fiction that it has become; we were not always this way. A symbolic, metaphorical understanding of ourselves can save us from a scientia sexualis, which has no relevance for our lived-world anyway.

One does not find such an alternative in Foucault. Illich tries to show how our society once understood itself, and how our society might once more do so. Illich insists on the necessity of a symbolic understanding of ourselves, while Foucault contrasts an ars erotica with our scientia sexualis. But it is not clear that an erotic art is a possible alternative for our western society. It would probably require a "non-Foucauldian" historical jump for us to adopt anything like an oriental ars erotica. Foucault himself recognized this later,

One of the numerous points where I was wrong in (The History of Sexuality—K. O'B.) was what I said about this ars erotica. I should have opposed our science of sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture. The Greeks and Romans did not have any ars erotica to be compared with the Chinese ars erotica...(GE 235).

The point is that one need not do history to find other ways of living and thinking. Cultural anthropology is just as good as history in reminding us of the idiosyncrasies of our way of living. But cultural anthropology cannot show us how we might live differently. It does not give us the shock our own history does, it leaves our values and our history untouched. It merely suggests that other values, other ways of thinking, etc, are possible for people with a different history. History can suggest that an alternative is possible for us, though perhaps it cannot say what that alternative might be. So that a purely symbolic understanding of ourselves would also lack this critical function.

...It is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices—historically analysable practices. There is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them (GE 250).

Illich may be right that we need to understand ourselves symbolically, but Foucault is surely right that we are never constituted purely within a symbolic system. This relation between who we are, that is, how we have been formed, and how we understand ourselves is not sufficiently dealt with in The History of Sexuality. This oversight perhaps explains how Foucault could think that an ars erotica could be a possible alternative for us and our scientia sexualis. His later refusal to speculate on possible alternatives to our present state indicates, I believe, precisely the critical limits of historical scholarship for an understanding of ourselves (cf. GE 231-232).

In his following work, The Use of Pleasure, Foucault returns to history, this time to classical Greece, to understand how we have become who we are. There he expands on what a critical theory of sexuality might be, that is, what kind of understanding of sexuality it is possible for us to have. There and in associated writings and interviews he also comments on the relation between any such understanding and our lived-world of practice. I shall discuss this in the next chapter.

Chapter IX: The Use of Pleasure

A. Introduction

B. "Problematization"

C. Ethics and Morality .

D. Greek Sexual Ethics .

1. "Aphrodisia"

2. "Chresis"

3. "Enkrateia"

4. "Sophrosyne"

E. Greeks and Christians

A. Introduction

Published in 1984, eight years after The History of Sexuality and just before his death in June of that year, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self mark a new phase in Foucault's project of explaining how human beings have become subjects. Ethics is in fact the subject of both books, so that the history of sexuality is now subsumed to a genealogy of ethics. The difference between volume I of The History of Sexuality and volumes II and III was sufficiently great that Foucault felt compelled in the first chapter of volume II (titled "Modifications") to deal specifically with their relation. As the title of the chapter suggests The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are not simply continuations of the preceding work.[73] The modifications in the later volumes constitute both a revision of and an addition to The History of Sexuality. The latter book essentially understood the development of sexuality as the development of a scientia sexualis, namely, of that which is trans-individual. The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self concentrate on the relation the individual has with himself in the development of sexuality. Though this alters the function of power in the development of sexuality it does not exclude it. The question now is; what power does one yield over oneself? Whether power comes from above or below, whether it is a commodity or a relation, whether it is ubiquitous or not, these are no longer the essential distinctions for describing the deployment of sexuality. What must now be determined is according to what rationality one engages in a power relation with oneself.

It remains the task of both works to describe the historical singularity of sexuality. According to Foucault now, the constitution of sexuality can be explained by the culmination of the effects of; 1) a scientific discourse whose object is sexuality, 2) a system of power which regulates it, and 3) the forms within which individuals can, and are also obliged to, recognize themselves as subjects of sexuality (UP 4). It is this third point which Foucault calls "ethics". The first point we have seen already, he says, in the studies on medicine and psychiatry, while the second belongs to his study of punitive power and of bio-power. Though this tripartite schema gives the impression that there is a separation of science, power and the self, we shall see that it really implies a new account of power.

Foucault now says that his earlier studies did not serve an examination of the role of the self's relation to itself in the constitution of sexuality. Why this is so is a matter I will come to. At any rate, Foucault does say that the problem of how the subject experiences himself as a subject of sexuality is bound up with the question of desire. It is as a desiring subject that modern man has acquired a sexuality. Although, he adds, the problem of desire was also prominent before the advent of modern man. For example, desire is the principle of the early Christian notions of concupiscence and the flesh. What needs to be determined is the role of the desiring subject, whose history is longer than that of sexuality, for the latter's history. That is, if sexuality is a singular historical figure, how can it share with what preceded it this most important principle of desire. The danger is that sexuality could then be regarded as a historical constant (UP 4). The opposite is what Foucault wishes to maintain. The desiring subject too is an historical figure whose genealogy must be traced.

In any case, 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 doing a genealogy (UP 5).

A genealogy of the desiring subject thus serves a genealogy of the subject of sexuality. Foucault says that desire lies at the core of the problematization of sexuality in our time (UP 254). This does however indicate a difference with The History of Sexuality, no such genealogy of the desiring subject is to be found there. As we saw, the deployment of sexuality focussed on four objects of power-knowledge: the hysterical woman, the Malthusian couple, the masturbating child, and the perverse adult. To this group must be added the desiring subject. Following the logic of The History of Sexuality what is also then required is a strategy comparable to hystrization, pedagogization, psychiatrization and socialization, for dealing with the desiring subject. That strategy is what he calls "the care of the self". This addition however requires a reconsideration of the deployment of sexuality as it appeared in The History of Sexuality. Unlike the other strategies, the care of the self is not characterised primarily by a relation of exteriority; it is not something done to the subject by an other. Not that the care of the self implies a radically autonomous ego.

...If now I am interested...in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practice of self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and social group.[74]

The point is that domination does not capture what Foucault believes is the role of the self in the creation of the subject of sexuality.

The deployment of sexuality must be rethought within the framework of the desiring subject. That is, sexuality is now the correlative of the creation of a subject whose hermeneutic depth is his desires. How the deployment of sexuality is no longer linked primarily to bio-power, but to ethics and to the notion of power as "government" found there, through which this new subject is created.

The notion of "governmentality" first appeared in 1979 when Foucault gave a course on that subject at the Collège de France. In 1981 he put this development in perspective.

If one wants to analyse the genealogy of (the) subject in Western civilization, one has to take into account, not only techniques of domination, but also techniques of the self. One has to show the interaction between these types of techniques. When I was studying asylums, prisons, and so on, I perhaps insisted too much on the technique of domination. What we call discipline is something really important in this kind of institution. But it is only one aspect of the art of governing people in our societies. Having studied the field of power relations taking techniques of domination as a point of departure, I would like, in the years to come, to study power relations starting from the techniques of the self.[75]

What Foucault now wants to show is that sexuality was deployed by a form of power peculiar to ethics. The desiring subject, he says, is both a product of that form of power as well as an object for it (UP 12). The deployment of sexuality is now linked to the creation of a subject with desires and to power as government. The couple, the child, the pervert and the hysterical woman are thus no longer the privileged centres of that deployment. In what follows I will try to show the extent of the novelty of The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, but also the continued validity of The History of Sexuality. All concern how we came to consider sexuality as the key to our being.

B. "Problematization"

The most important chapters of The Use of Pleasure are those of the "Introduction". In the first chapter, "Modifications", Foucault situates his text in relation to The History of Sexuality, without however actually referring to that work.[76] In the second and third chapters, "Forms of Problematization" and "Morality and Practice of the Self", he states the theoretical structure of his conception of ethics. I have already referred to the notion of problematization, here I shall examine it more thoroughly.

Though the concept of problematization appears late in Foucault's work he does try to show its implicit presence in his early work as well. Accordingly he says that he has sought to understand the problematization of madness, illness, life, language and labour, and of crime and criminal behaviour (UP 12). Undoubtedly there is a connection between the early and later Foucault, but problematization is nevertheless novel. One should recall that The Archaeology of Knowledge was written explicitly as the methodological corollary of his earlier work. Not only is the notion of problematization not to be found there, it is even antithetical to that text. The rules of formation of a discourse are not the same as forms of problematization, as we shall see. One should recall too that subsequent to The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault also described his earlier work as being all about power (PK 115). One can say though that Foucault has always been interested in the historical formation of the subject, problematization is the latest way of understanding that formation.

In the first reference to problematization in The Use of Pleasure, Foucault links it with thought and with practice. Practices are the basis on which problematizations are formed and it is through problematization that being is thought (UP 11). In an interview in May 1984, Foucault emphasised this relation between problematization, thought and practice.

The work of philosophical and historical reflection is put back into the field of the work of thought only on condition that one clearly grasps problematization not as an arrangement of representations, but as a work of thought (FR 390).

The concept of problematization thus introduces in Foucault's analysis the singular historical subject and the idea of freedom. This represents a dramatic and important change in his account of the genealogy and archaeology of discourse, and reflects I believe his new found interest in techniques of the self. Thought is an activity of the self and is often about the self. He says thought is freedom, namely, that thought allows self-detachment. We shall see that this is not the same as the critical or emancipatory reason of the Frankfurt School and particularly of Habermas. History has not been forsaken with this idea of freedom.

Actually, for a domain of action, a behaviour, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain; to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes (FR 388).

Material conditions only instigate problematizations, they are necessary but not sufficient. Hence problematization need not occur even when the required material conditions for it hold. Problematization also requires thought. But thought is not merely an expression of material forces. If that were true one could not account for the variety of thought and practices, for example, the various responses to mental illness in the second half of the eighteenth century. According to Foucault problematization is what transforms a practice into a problem. It determines what solutions are in fact answering to. Thus it is now problematization which explains Foucault's "nominalism" concerning sexuality, and not bio-power.

This sounds very much like the notion of episteme from The Order of Things, except that problematization is a work of thought. The ontological status of the episteme was never really clear, but one can say that it was not an object of thought. The episteme was an historical apriori which accounted for thought, problematization is an historical aposteriori made possible by thought. The freedom of thought consists in the choice of problematization therefore.[77]

Foucault illustrates his notion of problematization with the example of sexual morality. Sexual morality, or the codes according to which sexual behaviour is regulated, have been relatively stable since the fourth century B.C. (GE 240, UP 15-20). Sexual behaviour has not always been problematised in the same manner however. For example, Foucault says that since classical Greece one finds the idea that unrestrained sexuality is deleterious to health, one finds injunctions against marital infidelity, a negative assessment of homosexuality and praise for sexual abstinence. This does not mean that our morality is the same as that of the Greeks. According to Foucault we should rather note a common "thematic complex", namely, that since classical Greece a recommendation of sexual austerity concerning the body, marriage, homosexuality, and truth or wisdom, has been fairly constant. These represent the four points of problematization of sex. In classical Greece sexual behaviour was problematised as an activity through which one gave style to one's life, that is, sexual austerity was practised for the sake of respectable life. Foucault's research question is how did it come about that sexual behaviour is now problematised as a matter of morality.

The implication of this question for Foucault's analysis of sexuality becomes more apparent when one has his notion of ethics in mind—I turn to that next. Before that however it is worth raising again a criticism we first saw regarding The History of Sexuality, namely, that Foucault seems to believe that sexual behaviour need not be a problem for human beings at all. For example, he says,

Why was it in those areas—apropos of the body, of the wife, of boys, and of truth—that the practice of pleasure became a matter of debate? Why did the bringing of sexual activity into relations occasion anxiety, discussion and reflection? Why did these axes of everyday experience give rise to a way of thinking that sought to rarefy sexual behaviour, to moderate and condition it, and to define an austere style in the practice of pleasure (UP 24)?

One can question whether sexual experience is really ever an "everyday experience", and whether the "practice of pleasure" is ever unproblematic. Of course sexual behaviour is an everyday experience in the banal sense that it occurs everyday, but it is probably never purely "natural", that is, unconstrained or unsymbolized. The same could be said of the practice of pleasure. There is no sense of the necessity of for a non-naturalistic understanding of sexual behaviour in Foucault. What is true is that in Foucault if something is understood ethically or morally, then it will never be a scientific understanding. But what does not seem to be there is that sexual behaviour is something which requires an ethical understanding and that a scientific understanding of it would be no understanding at all. I shall return to this point.

C. Ethics and Morality

Ethics and morality are terms generally used interchangeable. Both refer to a prescriptive code of behaviour or to a study of the validity and objectivity of that code. In Foucault however morality is a general category of which ethics is an aspect. He says that we commonly distinguish a moral code from the morality of behaviour. A moral judgement often refers to the "fit" between the code and an action. In morality therefore we speak of how one ought to act. How one ought to act concerns ethics, according to Foucault. That is, ethics refers to how one forms oneself as an ethical subject vis a vis a moral code. This means in effect that there are different ways to be moral. Foucault gives the example of the injunction against infidelity. There are different ways to be faithful, that is, different ways to practice austerity. This requires a closer look at ethics.

Ethics has four aspects:

1) The ethical substance,

2) The mode of subjection,

3) The ethical work or practice requisite for an ethical subject,

4) The goal of the ethical subject.

The ethical substance is what it is that one takes as the object of ethical concern. For example, it may be desire, intentions, or even feelings. What is interesting is that Foucault now says that sexuality is an ethical substance. In Greece the ethical substance was aphrodisia. To show how the ethical substance changes is part of Foucault's plan.

The mode of subjection refers to the way in which people acknowledge or perceive their relation to the moral code. For example, one may accept one's moral obligations in virtue of belonging to a community, or because the code expresses divine law, or even rational principles. The Greeks did so in order to give style to their lives.

The work of practice requisite for an ethical subject refers to what one does to the ethical substance. Foucault calls this a form of asceticism. It can include self-reflection, self-denial, it may require renouncing pleasure, or checking desire. All such practices refer to what one does to oneself.

Lastly there is what Foucault calls the telos of ethics, that is, what sort of ethical subject is aimed at. For the Greeks it was the man who was master of himself, though it could equally be the unworldly or tranquil individual, etc.

The following is thus a schema of the distinctions Foucault makes (GE 239-240).

(1) Effective behaviour of people

(2) Codes

(3) Relationship to oneself, i.e., ethics:

a) ethical substance

b) mode of subjection

c) type of asceticism

d) subject as telos

Ethics thus refers to a process of self-formation (UP 28). The activities through which one forms oneself as an ethical subject are essential for moral action. Just as a morality requires values, rules and interdictions, so too does it require the techniques of the self found in ethics.

Though code and ethics are not separable, one can, according to Foucault, distinguish moralities which are more or less "code oriented" from those which are more of less "ethics oriented". Pre-reformation Christianity was code oriented, he says, while Greece was ethics oriented. As we saw the moral codes of Greece and later were relatively constant, their ethics however were not. Instead then of seeking what elements of its moral code Christianity may have borrowed from Greece, Foucault thinks it more pertinent to ask how the practices of the self of both are related, differ, how they are defined, how they have been modified etc.

It is wrong then to think that Foucault has given up his earlier position on the relatively recent birth of sexuality. Our moral genealogy does not indicate a continuous development form the fourth century to the present. The history of ethics reveals that the ethical subject of Greece is not the same as that of later Christian times. For example, Foucault says that in Augustine the ethical substance has become desire, in Greece it was the act (GE 238). In turn this points to a different mode of subjectivation, a different ascetics and a different ethical subject. This implies that the historian of sexuality cannot rest content in the eighteenth century, nor make of confession its birthplace.

As I pointed out earlier the role of confession in the deployment of sexuality must be rethought within the framework of ethics and the new account of power as governmentality found there. In fact the very notion of a "deployment" of sexuality may have to be given up, since it belongs to the military model that supports the notion of bio-power. Foucault now says that "power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government".[78]

The reversal of von Clausewitz's formula, which in The History of Sexuality, Foucault found described the workings of bio-power is now inappropriate. The model of a field of forces is gone. And it is true that there is no mention of the "deployment" of sexuality in The Use of Pleasure. Sexuality does remain a historical figure, but Foucault's analysis of how we have become beings of sexuality has altered. I shall develop this point in the following pages, I turn now to his account of Greeks ethics.

D. Greek Sexual Ethics

1. "Aphrodisia"

The ethics of sexual behaviour in Greece was an ethics of pleasure. The essential moral problems concerned the manner of enjoyment of sexual pleasure. That is, the problem was to determine the correct use of pleasure (UP 36). According to Foucault the Greeks referred to pleasure as aphrodisia. It does not refer to what one might call pure pleasure however.

The Greeks did not experience aphrodisia as pure pleasure. Foucault says that "aphrodisia are the acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure" (UP 40). In the experience of aphrodisia though pleasure is not separate from desire and act (UP 42). Foucault refers to this as the "texture of the ethical experience of aphrodisia" (UP 43, cf. also GE 242-243). The significance of this experience is clearer when one considers, as Foucault does, the later Christian account of pleasure.

In the ethics of the flesh and the notion of sexuality which followed it, one finds in the Christian era a dissolution of the unity of act, desire and pleasure.[79] Pleasure is elided both morally and theoretically, that is, it is both denounced and made redundant for a notion of sexuality. Acts too are diminished and are meant solely to serve procreation. Desire however becomes the focus of rigourous attention (UP 42). Around desire the whole of the Christian sexual ethics revolve, even though it is one of its tenets that desire be eradicated (GE 243).

The unity of acts, pleasure and desire on the other hand in Greece, excludes the sort of moral injunction characteristic of the Christian era. That unity made impossible a separate evaluation of them.

The ethical question that was raised was not: which desires? which acts? which pleasures? but rather: with what force is one transported "by pleasures and desires" (UP 43)?

This means that there was no peculiar moral investigation of acts, pleasures or desires. Their unity circumscribed a different moral evaluation. In the field of social conduct there were two criteria of moral evaluation; a quantitative principle and a qualitative principle. Namely, one should be neither excessive in sex, nor should one act outside one's proper role. For a man, says Foucault, excess and passivity were the two main forms of immorality.[80] It is little wonder that homosexuality should have been "tolerated", while at the same time passivity should be a matter of grave concern. Greek homosexuality was faced with a double bind, which as Foucault and Dover show, they tried to circumvent with courtship ritual and so forth. Nevertheless as the notion of aphrodisia shows, the Greek problem with homosexuality belongs to a different order of things than our present day dispute.

2. "Chresis"

Moral reflection on the aphrodisia, according to Foucault, sought not to define a code of sexual behaviour, but to define a style for the use of pleasure, or, chresis aphrodision. At issue then was not which desires were shameful, or which actions forbidden in themselves. The correct use of pleasure required regimen, control, prudence, etc. Foucault finds that such considerations were generally concerned with need, timeliness and individual status. The point was to develop an aesthetics of existence through a power struggle with oneself (UP 253). That required a certain practical art or "savoir-faire". We are a long way from the Christian world of an internalised universal code.

3. "Enkrateia"

Not that the gradual development of Christianity required or was marked by a gradual interiorization of a moral code with pretensions to universal applicability. It rather involved a transformation of the self's relationship with itself and the techniques and practices upon which such a relationships are based. In classical Greece the sort of relationship one had with oneself was designated by enkrateia. Enkrateia is the effort one must expend on oneself in order to be moderate (sophron).

The goal of such efforts was self-governance, or self-mastery. One fought a battle with oneself which one won, not by annihilating oneself of course, but by dominating oneself. It was not then a question of vanquishing an other in oneself, nor of renouncing pleasure or desire as it would later be. Rather through training, or askesis, one formed oneself as an ethical subject. Such an effort was required for the virtuous life.

4. "Sophrosyne"

Sophrosyne, or moderation, characterises the ethical subject in his fulfilment; it is the teleology of moral experience (UP 37). Moderation is the result of the practice of self-mastery and is regarded as a form of freedom, namely, freedom from whims of the aphrodisia. The guarantee of that freedom was the constant exercise of power over oneself. Virility was thus an essential trait of Greek ethics; homosexuality was accepted on the condition that it not be effeminate. Femininity and moderation were incompatible.

With freedom, truth was the other requirement of moderation. One could not be at the same time an ethical subject without being a subject of knowledge. The role of truth in moderation is threefold: requiring that the passions be subservient to reason it is structural; prescribing the correct use of pleasure it is instrumental; and it is ontological since moderation requires that one know oneself. Foucault says though that for the Greeks, unlike for later Christians, truth was never an epistemological condition allowing the subject to recognize himself as a subject of desire, to know that desire, and to purify himself of it.

There is, says Foucault, an apparent similarity between Greek pagan ethics and later Christian ethics. In both one finds the general theme of the importance of sexual austerity, marital fidelity and of the need to care for the body. In both too homosexuality is a matter of particular concern. From the point of view of ethics this only conceals a more fundamental difference however. The ethical substance of Christianity is not aphrodisia, but acts and desire. Its type of subjection required not a savoir-faire, but the recognition of a universal law or code. Instead of an ascetics one finds in Christianity the pastor; obediance replaced self-control. Finally the telos of the Christian ethical subject was chastity; one did not master the passions, as in Greece, one renounced them.

E. Greeks and Christians

Foucault's turn to Greek ethics concerned those commentators for whom he was primarily a scholar of the "classical age" of France. But in fact neither The Use of Pleasure nor The Care of the Self are ever just a study of Greek and Greco-Roman ethics. In the former particularly every important point in that study is counterpoised with later Christian ethics. Without that comparison the book would have no point. The efficacy of Foucault's contention that today we must refuse to be who we have become requires that he show that we have not always been who we are now. We have seen already that regarding sexuality that an oriental style ars erotica for us is no option. An ars erotica does not belong to our past, hence it can serve no history of our present.

Foucault's account of ethics does show how we have been different. In the interview "Genealogy of Ethics" he illuminates that difference using the formula "act-pleasure-desire". The Greeks stressed acts, though already with the Stoics pleasure began to be elided. Thus the Greek formula: act-pleasure-(desire). The Chinese formula is pleasure-desire-(act), since the maximization of pleasure requires restraint of action. In Christianity desire is highlighted though eradicated, while the value of acts should become neutral and serve procreation; pleasure too is excluded. The Christian formula is thus: (desire)-act-(pleasure). Finally Foucault claims that the modern formula is desire. Desire is what we are told to liberate, acts are unimportant, and no one knows what pleasure is (GE 242-243).

The fourth volume of The History of Sexuality series was to be titled Confessions of the Flesh. There Foucault would re-enter the Christian era in which he began his genealogy of the sexual subject. The function of The Care of the Self is to cover the first two centuries of our era, showing the transitional links in Greco-Roman ethics between Greek and Christian ethics. With Greco-Roman ethics one sees the appearance of certain themes that become more explicit, but also significantly altered, as one moves deeper into the Christian era.

Foucault repeats in The Care of the Self the analysis of diet, marriage and the courtship of boys, for the Greco-Roman period that he had done for the ancient Greek era in The Use of Pleasure. In each case he shows what modifications have occurred in "ethics" since the fourth century and how they anticipate later Christian ethics. A heightened and modified austerity and anxiety distinguishes the sexual ethics of the first two centuries from what preceded it.

Austerity and anxiety were not absent in Greek ethics. One finds in their concern for sex and the body, marriage, and the love of boys, an exhortation to care and moderation. Each presents a danger to one's well-being, so that the pleasure in each must be used with circumspection. Foucault therefore notes an undoubted continuity with later ethics based on the theme of austerity, but says nevertheless one can note substantial changes.

Regarding sex and the body, the Greco-Roman period witnessed an "increased apprehension". In the fourth century B.C. the danger of sex was that it could exhaust the body and so debilitate it, perhaps even kill it. Connected to this was the idea that an exhausted body could not produce healthy progeny. One had to be doubly vigilant then to insure not only one's own health, but that of one's heirs as well. By the second century A.D. the apprehension about sex reflects an even greater suspicion about its deleterious effects on the body, and of its connection with disease. Sex lost much of the salubrious character that it had for the Greeks.

The transformation in the valorisation of women and marriage, and the love of boys, is even more marked than that of sex. The relationship of a man with a woman assumes a value of its own, it no longer depends on serving the status of the man. Austerity in marriage is marked by its ascension to a universal form in the Greco-Roman period. Marriage became the norm, while imposing on both partners rights and duties—particularly fidelity. Finally, the sexual austerity the Greeks required in the courtship of boys so as not to imperil their masculinity, and to give that relationship a spiritual legitimacy, served a different purpose in the second century A.D. There, says Foucault, austerity represented a recognition of the imperfection of that type of sexual activity.

Thus according to Foucault's scheme of ethics; in the Greco-Roman period the ethical substance was the frail individual; the mode of subjection is a universal form grounded in both nature and reason; the type of ascetics or moral work required is a series of practices of self-control; and the teleological subject of ethics is the self who is a master of himself. He outlines Christian ethics as follows; the ethical substance is the individual of finitude, and of the Fall and evil; the mode of subjection is conformity to the general law of a personal god; the ascetics is a "decipherment" of the soul and a "purificatory hermeneutics" of the desires; the ethical telos is a renunciation of the self, or a non-self (UP 239-240). Schematically we can represent this transition as follows;

ETHICS:	GREEK	GRECO-ROMAN	CHRISTIAN
Substance:	Aphrodision	Frail Individual	Frail Individual
Subjection:	Practical Art	Natural Universal Law	Supernatural Universal Law
Ascetics:	Personal Austerity	Personal Austerity	Personal Decipherment
Telos:	Self-Master	Self-Master	Non-Self

Christian ethics defines in a new way the "relation of the subject to his sexual activity", a new way of experiencing himself as a sexual being (CS 36). This new relation or understanding led to what we call sexuality. Sexuality refers to the privatisation of the relation between the subject and his sexual behaviour. By comparison in Greek and Greco-Roman ethics, sexual relations cannot be dissociated from social relations (CS 35-36, "Sex & Sol." 5). Foucault illustrates this point by contrasting Socrates with the fifth century monastic leader Cassian. The criterion of purity in Cassian is purity of thought. It does not consist in insuring that one remains in control or master of oneself in the presence of the object of desire. For Cassian, Socrates does not prove his purity by sleeping with Alcibiades without touching him. The Christian problem of sex is not one's relation to others, but one's relation with oneself.

Sexuality-subjectivity-truth is the triumvirate of Christian ethics. What Foucault calls the "truth obligation" of Christianity was the requirement to discover, in spite of all illusions, temptations and seductions, the reality of what is occurring in ourselves.[81] The truth of the self was necessary so that finally one could renounce the self—this is a long way from the Greek affirmation of the self through a stylization of sexual behaviour.

Sexuality is thus a Christian construct; it is the libidinisation of sex.[82] It represents the movement whereby sex assumes an autonomous position within the subject. It is no longer an activity, as with the Greeks, which can be stylized. According to Foucault, Augustine's analysis of the Fall illustrates this point. Augustine says Adam covers his genitals in shame because they are now moving of their own accord. This autonomous movement he calls "libido". Sexuality is a force inside us beyond our control—a punishment for sin. Thus the spiritual struggle against libido requires a permanent introspective hermeneutics. So that if today we believe that who we are is linked to our "sexuality", so much so that we can resent its "repression", this is due in a large part to the techniques of the self which belong to Christian ethics.

The analysis of pre-Christian and Christian ethics therefore, forced Foucault to modify the thesis of The History of Sexuality, volume I, that sexuality is a product of bio-power and bio-politics. The techniques of the self which were ascendent during the Christian period are not bio-political techniques of domination. They are,

techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power.[83]

Christian ethics required the creation of a deep self. That is, sexuality, or sexual desire, was created as a deep structure on which Christian hermeneutics of the self could be founded. Sexuality is thus only a logical requirement of a hermeneutics made suspect by its genealogy.

Realizing this does not of course provides us with a means of being otherwise. Foucault does not in The Use of Pleasure or The Care of the Self replicate the prescriptive texts he analyses there. But there does seem to be in Foucault the hope that knowledge of who we were and who we are now will serve the desexualization that he looks forward to. Whether that is possible is, to be sure, a point of contention.

The problem of The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self was to understand the relation of the genealogy of the desiring subject to the creation of sexuality. Foucault in the Greeks the origin (not in the Husserlian sense) of the desiring subject, without at the same time finding the model of what was to become the problematization of desire. The transition to a full-blown ethics of desire would require the work of centuries. In the 18th and 19th centuries particularly it would also become entangled with the modes of bio-power described in The History of Sexuality, vol.1. Foucault's modified position is that the contemporary notion of sexuality as a deep truth of our being, is the product not only of bio-power, but also of power as "governmentality", that is, of ethics.

Although Foucault does not say so, it seems our own time is one of the ascendency of governmentality. Bio-power has already rendered the population docile, so that it overt presence can largely be dispensed with. We no longer have campaigns against masturbation, unnatural practices, indolence, and so on, but such things as diets, fashion, and holiday clubs, still attest to the presence of a power whose object is the body.

Chapter X: Foucault and the Frankfurt School

A. Introduction

B. The Frankfurt School and the Critique of Enlightenment

C. Foucault and the Frankfurt School

A. Introduction

Today the Frankfurt School is usually thought to essentially comprise Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Any study though of the school will mention the names of Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Pollock, Enrich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and others. Any history of the school will mention Karl Mannheim, Max Weber and be pervaded by a discussion of Marx and Marxism. One could even complicate matters further by referring to Husserl and Heidegger. By the time one gets to the present day and Habermas one must take cognizance of an array of analytic philosophers. One must then set limits to what can be attempted in a comparison of Foucault and the Frankfurt School. I shall concern myself with the period of the ascendancy of Horkheimer (who became the schools director in 1931), Adorno and Marcuse, and ignore the period from the school's founding in 1923 to 1929 while it was under the directorship of Carl Grunberg. Because of the differences between Habermas and his predecessors, a comparison of his work with that of Foucault is best left to a separate section.

Some justification is necessary for making the comparison of Foucault and the Frankfurt School at all though. After all Foucault is a Frenchman and brought up on a diet of French philosophy; especially of French Marxism, existentialism and phenomenology. Foucault said in one interview,

I belong to that generation who as students had before their eyes, and where limited by, a horizon of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism (FR 174).

In another interview he said that,

Throughout the period from 1945 to 1955 in France, the entire French university...was very much preoccupied with the task of building something which was not Freudian-Marxist but Husserlian-Marxist: the phenomenology-Marxism relation.[84]

He reports there too that a remarkable philosophical insularity marked his student days; critical theory was not on the curriculum.

...When I was a student, I can assure you that i never once heard the name of the Frankfurt School mentioned by any of my professors.[85]

The link between Foucault and the Frankfurt School appears tenuous therefore. Nevertheless in 1983 Foucault did stress his affinity with them.

...One can opt for a critical thought which has the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present; it is this latter form of philosophy which from Hegel to the Frankfurt School by way of Nietzsche and Max Weber, has founded a form of reflection within which I have tried to work.[86]

On a strictly philosophical level therefore the relation between Foucault and the Frankfurt School is at once clear and complicated. It is complicated from the point of view of their respective philosophical backgrounds. For example, Horkheimer says that his philosophy never escaped the influence of Schopenhauer through whom he first became acquainted with philosophy.[87] No such influence is to be found in Foucault. The point is that a generation and a heritage separate him from the Frankfurt School. Marcuse has identified the concerns of his generation,

I believe the transition from...the Heideggerian conceptual world to Marxism was not a personal problem, but a generational one...The Academic scene was dominated by neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, and suddenly Sein und Zeit appeared as a really concrete philosophy...That seemed to speak to us. That lasted until 1932...What Heidegger had done essentially was to replace Husserl's transcendental categories with his own; such apparently concrete concepts as existence and anxiety, he evaporated into bad abstract concepts...Then the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 appeared...After that, Heidegger versus Marx was no longer a problem for me.[88]

Foucault does not belong to the philosophical world described by Marcuse. On the other hand, the rejection of transcendental philosophy and particularly of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology does mark a fundamental affinity between the Frankfurt School and Foucault. Adorno, for example, says that his task has always been, "To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of the constitutive subjectivity..."[89] Of course Foucault does not use the strength of the subject to break through phenomenology, but rather its weakness. A humanism not found in Foucault animates the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless their anti-phenomenology does mean that they have a general common philosophical orientation; a concern not with historicity, but with history, and not a fundamental ontology but at most a philosophical anthropology. Freed from transcendental philosophy Foucault and the Frankfurt School were both able to turn their attention to a critical philosophy of the present.

My intention however is not to assimilate Foucault to the Frankfurt School. In what follows I will indicate the scope of their relation while pointing to their differences.

B. The Frankfurt School and the Critique of Enlightenment

The locus classicus of the Frankfurt School is undoubtedly Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. That work's theme is that in the course of enlightenment, reason perverts itself becoming merely instrumental. The result of which they conclude is that "the enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant".[90] This because instrumental reason forfeits its critical function for a purely positivistic role. This renders reason an overt supporter of a disenchanted world.

According to critical theory in a disenchanted worked reason is a source of oppression. This is precisely the "dialectic" of Enlightenment. The conquest of nature and the emancipation from mythology has left man in shackles. The domination of nature has meant man's alienation from it and his own reification. In short, "enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system".[91] The task of philosophy is therefore to criticise the positivism which underlies the dialectic of enlightenment.

This criticism has two aspects. It requires on the one hand a criticism of positivistic philosophy itself, and on the other, criticism of the socio-historical conditions which made that philosophy possible. However, the Frankfurt School never engaged in the kind of empirical enquiry that such a project demanded. Instead one finds, for example, pronouncements that neo-romantic metaphysics and radical positivism are both rooted in the present malaise of the middle class,[92] and that modern empiricism belongs to the passing world of liberalism.[93]

Similarly one notes a distressing lack of historical analysis in critical theory. Such concepts as bureaucratization, disenchantment, and reification have the same critical function as Foucault's genealogies while lacking their historical foundation. Leszek Kolakowski, a severe critic of the Frankfurt School notes the unhistorical character of their critique of enlightenment,

In general their concept of "enlightenment" is a fanciful unhistorical hybrid composed of everything they dislike: positivism, logic, deductive and empirical science, capitalism, the money power, mass culture, liberalism, and Fascism.[94]

Of course the starting point of the Frankfurt School always was theory. Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory called for renewed theorising, not the demise of theory. Positivism was attacked for its disparagement of theory. The problem with traditional theory is that it is pure theory and so formal and devoid of interests. Critical theory on the other hand is philosophy which keeps Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in mind.

...Critical theory in its concept formation and in all phases of its development very consciously makes its own that concern for the rational organisation of human activity which it is its task to illumine and legitimate. For this theory is not concerned only with goals already imposed by existent ways of life, but with men and all their potentialities...It is not just a research hypothesis which shows its value in the on-going business of men; it is an essential element in the historical effort to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of men.

The strength of critical theory is due in part to its open minded approach to Marxism. Although much impressed by its critical potential, the Frankfurt School did not regard Marx as faultless or closed to revision. Like Weber they did not expect a withering away of forms of domination, unlike Marx who expected just that with the rise of the proletariat. The bureaucratic structure of late capitalism especially, insured it a long life. Neither technological nor administrative progress meant the end of domination. Like Heidegger they deny that technology is a tool.[95] Technology has its own rationality which does not serve human emancipation.

The work of Weber and the Frankfurt School is thus pervaded by a sense of pessimism—they are the intellectual heirs of Rousseau—though Marcuse was later to offer grounds for a more hopeful future. In any event that pessimism accounts for their break from Marx on two fundamental points. First, they deny economic determination since the rationality of technology cannot be subsumed to the interests of capital. Second, they disparage the role of the proletariat in both social theory and social practice. Kolakowski thus characterises the Frankfurt School's position as "Marxism without the Proletariat".[96]

The Frankfurt Schools modification of Marx does away in fact with the notions of class, class struggle, and with historical and economic analyses as well as faith in science. Its utopian vision is not that of the German Ideology where Marx looks forward to an era of creative, non-alienating work, but rather Marcuse's pleasure world of libidinal rationality. This does not mean that their criticism of Marx was justified. Many people today find Marx deficient in one way or another, and most do not share his regard for the revolutionary potential of the working class. However whether critical theory is equal to its program of "man's emancipation from slavery" is also to be questioned.[97]

The foregoing is not meant as a definitive comment on the Frankfurt School, that is not necessary for my purposes. Instead I hope to have shown why their work invites comparison with that of Foucault.

C. Foucault and the Frankfurt School

There are numerous points on which Foucault and the Frankfurt School agree. A list would include the following at least,

1) the importance of Weber,

2) the link between theory and practice,

3) the inadequacy of Marxism and phenomenology,

4) the necessity of critique,

5) the critical efficacy of aestheticism.

Against this impressive agreement must be counterposed an array of substantial differences; a list of those includes,

1) the role of historical scholarship,

2) the role of the intellectual,

3) the goal of critique,

4) the role of power,

5) the identity of the subject.

What needs to be determined is whether such differences between Foucault and the Frankfurt School do not make the points they have in common into mere coincidences.

Foucault himself notes the ambiguity of his relation with the Frankfurt School. Their investigation of the career of rationality since the Enlightenment, he suggests, was always connected with the question of the legitimacy of power. Foucault does not question the importance or the relevance of such an investigation. He says that the relation between rationalization and the excesses of power have been made brutally obvious in our time. However he suggests an alternative to the general indictment of post-Enlightenment rationalism.

...That was the way of some of the members of the Frankfurter Schule. My purpose is not to begin a discussion of their works—they are most important and valuable. I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalization and power...[98]

We shall see later that Habermas too rejects the too general nature of the early Frankfurt School's critique of rationality.

According to Foucault, instead of studying rationalization per se one should concentrate on its localizations in madness, sexuality, criminality and so forth. Further one should not be concerned to adjudicate the norms of rationality, but rather to discover its various forms. Most significantly Foucault says,

Even if the Enlightenment has been very important phase in our history, and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history.[99]

It is precisely those remote processes that one never finds in the analyses of the Frankfurt School. On the other hand Foucault's appreciation of Weber is undoubtedly due in part to his historical account of disenchantment.

In fact the culture criticism of the Frankfurt School has in some respects more in common with the "crisis" philosophy of Edmund Husserl, than with Foucault's genealogies. The theme of crisis was fairly common in philosophy at the beginning of this century. In Husserl the crisis was one of European culture, namely, of that culture imbued with the ideal of truth. The reason for the crisis was the exile of the sciences from the life-world, so that, "in our vital state of need this science has nothing to say to us".[100] Emptied of truth, the life-world is threatened by irrationalism. Man stands at a crossroads, one way leads to his demise and the other to his rejuvenation. there is thus a sense of nostalgia in crisis philosophy which one finds also in the Frankfurt School. Husserl, despite his teleological ideas, points to the Greeks with approval because of philosophy's ascendancy over science. Heidegger lauds the pre-technological world, Weber describes bureaucracy as an iron cage and Horkheimer and Adorno despise the rise of mass culture. For his part Marcuse imagines a world governed by the life instincts almost like Rousseau's pre-social world.

I believe that "crisis" is always an unhistorical diagnosis of any culture, no matter how evocative it may seem. Foucault certainly abjures the notion of crisis. Just as there was no golden age, so too there is no time of peculiar crisis (GE 231). Of course one cannot deny the extraordinary horror of the Nazi period, which as German Jews, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, and earlier Husserl, were particularly faced with. But what Foucault would question is whether the mechanism of crisis is actually capable of explaining, or even describing, such a phenomenon.

Crisis seems to suggest that a form of anarchy has descended upon the world. It suggest that the usual rules and norms have been suspended and that some sort of revitalization is necessary. For the members of the Frankfurt School this process, as we have seen, meant "the eclipse of reason". The therapeutic imperative of such a one dimensional society was the revitalization of reason through a reapprehending of its critical function.

There is no room for such analysis in either Foucault's archaeology or genealogy. History is not a global process susceptible to crisis. In this sense Foucault is far less Marxist than the Frankfurt school. While they no longer organise history around the concepts of class and class struggle, they still retain Marx's unitary conception of history. In Foucault history is always micro-history. Amongst his histories of madness, of the clinic, the prison and of sexuality, one will not find a common explanatory matrix. Not even power functions in that role.

In the Frankfurt School it is the concept of ideology which plays this unifying role. Indeed the concept of ideology is necessary for maintaining that there even is a crisis in unremarkable times. According to the Frankfurt School, ideology is always a dominating force which conceals or masks the real interests of human beings. Science and technology are the most ideologically potent factors in modern industrial societies. Not only do they conceal their own interests, namely domination, they also coopt the interests of the proletariat. The demise of the working class is precisely due to this cooptation. Ideology thus has real effects though it is opposed to man's real interests. The role of critical theory is to criticise ideologically pervaded reality from the point of view of a counter-factual ideologically free true reality.

Foucault finds this opposition between ideology and truth problematic.

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant etc (PK 118).

This could serve as a summary of the differences between Foucault and the Frankfurt School. Foucault's Nietzschean conception of truth and man in particular, are at odds with the thought of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. Whereas their critical theory remains within the tradition of humanism, Foucault of course maintains an anti-humanism.

This means that in Foucault truth does not stand opposed to an ideology which in turn masks the truth about man. Both man and truth are instances of the fecundity of power. It follows then that though Foucault describes his own work as a "critique", that he cannot mean by that the same as the Frankfurt School. It is not the function of critique in Foucault to separate ideology from truth. Neither is it the function of critique to proclaim man's truth. Still when one compares critical theory to phenomenology (as Horkheimer does) then the former's affinity with Foucault's sense of critique is more apparent.

Horkheimer appreciates Husserl's criticism of science's objectivistic understanding of itself. It is clear from The Archaeology of Knowledge that Foucault would share Horkheimer appreciation. Neither accepted Husserl's own program of course, namely, that there is a pure theory which has practical critical efficacy. According to both Foucault and the Frankfurt School, what gives theory practical efficacy is its interestedness. Husserl's position is that only that which is ontologically grounded in a pure transcendental ego can lead us out of crisis. Both Foucault and the Frankfurt School would say that such an ego not only does not exist, but that it also could in any case have no critical connection with the life-world.

Both are able to criticise the present for their part because they understand it as a conglomeration of interests and effects of power, and not as a sum of sedimentations of an unconscious transcendental ego. In this sense the critique of Foucault and the Frankfurt School have in common the activity of debunking.[101] This points to Foucault's celebrated analogy of theory as a box of tools. Critique is not a program or alternative, rather it is the activity of opposing the present. Foucault says,

Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for law. It isn't a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.[102]

As a student of Nietzche's The Genealogy of Morals, Foucault does not substitute for Husserl's ontological-epistemological principle a moral principle like that of the Frankfurt School. We shall see too that this marks a point of difference between Foucault and Habermas. Not that Foucault does not perceive there to be a moral dimension involved, but rather that the matter is not decideable on the basis of a moral or any other principle. Foucault, like Rorty, is an anti-foundationalist. This we shall see too is why Habermas is more concerned than Foucault to defend the tradition of modernism against post-modernism.

Foucault has no program to save reason from its post-modern critics. He says a trial of reason leads one into playing the boring role of either the rationalist or irrationalist.[103] Members of the Frankfurt School however, concerned as they are with the legitimacy of power under the influence of Weber, required a renewed reason. Without a conception of a truly rational society their critique of existing power relations could not be grounded. We have seen already Foucault's criticism of those who address the question of power within the framework of legitimacy and illegitimacy; they are held captive by a juridico-discursive model which actually misses the way power works. Foucault's point is that power is not the sort of thing that can be legitimated by comparing any instance of it with its supposed legitimate exemplar in a truly rational society.

This points to a residual instrumentalism in the Frankfurt School's own critical theory. That is, they save for reason a critical function over against a merely instrumentalist one, but they present a picture of a truly rational society in which everything is made to accord with reason. They look forward to a time when social structures and social relations have a purely instrumental character.

This is perhaps most clear in Marcuse. Though the dialectic of Enlightenment has until now been disastrous for man, Marcuse looks forward to a utopian future. He goes so far as to suggest that a new science serving our real interests will replace our current disenchanting and dominating one.

Science, by virtue of its own methods and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man...(A new science—brackets mine) would arrive at essentially different concepts of nature and establish essentially different facts.[104]

Marcuse too concurs with Heidegger that technology is not a tool, but adds that it can become one. Technology can have an instrumental role in a purely rational society—Husserl maintains the same in The Crisis.

That sort of instrumentalism does not exist in Foucault, not even as a critical function. The prison, for example, will always involve relations of power which are para-legal. The prospect of a truly rational prison is a pernicious dream. It is Foucault who has drawn our attention to the ideological benefits of constant programs of prison reform. Since there is no outside of power, Marcuse's humanism according to Foucault, is just not tenable. The attempt to determine the legitimacy of any current state of affairs by relying on a conception of a truly rational society, namely one where power is subjugated to our instrumental designs, is equally untenable.

This brings us to the function of the aesthetic attitude in both Foucault and the Frankfurt School. If legitimacy grounded in a theory of reason is untenable in Foucault, he replaces it with something like acceptability grounded in an aesthetics of existence. The critical function of art in the Frankfurt School is not quite the same as it is in Foucault. For them art and the artist essentially replace the proletariat and take over the role it had in Marx's theory of history.

We have seen already Kolakowski's definition of critical theory as Marxism without the proletariat. The Frankfurt School did not expect that when the workers of the world united that an age of liberty, equality and fraternity would prevail. They placed their hopes instead in art. Actually it was really Adorno who, following Benjamin, championed the critical character of art. For Marcuse artists were just one of a number of marginal groups whose existence was a challenge to the status quo, while art itself was just one example of the subversive power of Eros. Indeed in his assessment of art, Adorno did not share Marcuse's optimism. Art's critical or negative quality disappeared with its commercialization. Most art had no negative component at all, and while avant-garde art did, it was purely negative. According to Adorno, contemporary avant-garde art is incapable of serving man's real interests in this disenchanted world. The point of his "negative dialectics" is precisely that; for the time being at least, the critical dialectic remains purely negative since it is incapable of overcoming the present and so including a positive moment. Art retains a purely critical function, it cannot for the moment provide an alternative vision of human life.

In Foucault the question is not what is the significance of art for social and political life, but rather how can life itself become art. The critical function which Adorno credits to art in Foucault belongs to his genealogy of problematics, while his aesthetics of existence plays a much more positive role than avant-garde art is capable of in Adorno. However in Foucault neither the genealogist nor the "aesthete" are an ersatz proletariat. Actually he does not need a substitute for the proletariat, he does not need a bearer of revolutionary consciousness who will break through all ideological barriers. Instead the task according to Foucault is to discover through historical scholarship the limits imposed on us and to try to go beyond them.[105] This is what he calls "critical ontology". It comprises his genealogy and his aesthetic attitude, or, concerns for the self of his last writings; genealogy is thus a sort of via negativa, while the care of the self is a via positiva. It must be admitted though that such a program remains the prerogative of society's elites—just like that of the Frankfurt School.

Foucault's genealogy, unlike critical theory, is not however a humanism. For Adorno it is the function of art and the artist to restore the humanism which has lapsed in industrial society. In Foucault's analyses of the various ways human beings have been made into subjects, including his latest work on how human beings have made themselves into subjects, there is no essential human subject to be revived or anticipated. Foucault relates his aesthetics not to a notion of authenticity, but to creativity. He indicates this difference with a reference to Sartre,

I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity—and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art (GE 237).

According to Adorno, in a rarefied society such creation will always remain in conformity with the prevailing ideology since one is never in a position to create ex-nihilo. In this regard Foucault is both more empirical and more optimistic. His various historical studies have shown that there always has been resistance to the prevailing ideology, while his theory of power itself proclaims the inevitability of resistance. Adorno and the Frankfurt School were too quick in writing the obituary of the working class and the phenomenon of resistance in general in modern industrial society.[106] It is true of course that one does not create ex-nihilo, but this need not mean that art merely affirms the status quo. The irony of all this is that Foucault's anti-humanism leaves room for optimism, while Adorno's humanism is entirely pessimistic.

From the foregoing it is, I hope, clear that Foucault's relation to the Frankfurt School is not a straight forward one. It would, for example, be highly misleading to call him a critical theorist. His own comments on the Frankfurt school reveal that they played no part in his philosophical education, but that he considers them to be very important. Most significantly he identifies his own work with the tradition within which Max Weber and the Frankfurt School have worked.

That tradition of thought he says "has the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present..."[107] That is, his work is addressed to the question "who are we"—the same question he credits Kant with posing in his essay "What is Enlightenment?" It is not then a matter of producing a philosophy of man within an analytic of truth with which one could then expound canonical statements as to the essence of man. Who we are now can be a matter of complete indifference for such a philosophy of man. For example, man may or may not be a political animal, but for Foucault what is more interesting is to study the array of techniques, practices and relations of power which de facto make us the political animals we know. Similarly, the question is not whether sexuality belongs to man's nature, but how today we live as sexual beings.

This critical concern with who we are at present is clear in the work of the Frankfurt School. Their analyses however were never as detailed and historical as Foucault`s. Their answer to the question of who we are remained within the framework of a neo-Marxist political analysis and so is clearly at odds with Foucault's genealogical project. Nevertheless they did offer us some perspicacious analyses of our times. We no doubt are the ideological products of a disenchanted world. Foucault's strength is to have escaped the confines of Marxist analysis, and to have broadened and deepened the Frankfurt School's appraisal of modern man's condition.

XI: Foucault, Habermas and Enlightenment

A. What is Enlightenment

1. The Stakes

2. Homogeneity

3. Systematicity

4. Generality

B. Habermas: Modernity versus Postmodernity

C. Habermas on Foucault

1. Problems of Commission

2. Problems of Omission

D. Foucault contra Habermas

1. Reason

2. Truth

3. Emancipation

4. Norms

E. Conclusion

A. What is Enlightenment

Since November 1784 when Kant responded in the Berliner Monatschrift to the question: Was ist Aufklarung?, modern philosophy has been burdened with a question for which it is yet to give an adequate answer. Hegel, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Weber, Habermas and many others have all addressed the question of Enlightenment, so that according to Foucault, if today some newspaper were to ask instead what modern philosophy is, the answer might well be; the attempt to define Enlightenment.

According to Kant Enlightenment represents a way out from immaturity.[108] Immaturity is a deference to authority instead of to reason, which is maturity. Enlightenment thus requires a new relation between will, reason and authority. Enlightenment is therefore somewhat ambiguous, it is both a process and a task. Man is both responsible for his immature state, and obliged to change himself. Kant defines two essential conditions for enlightenment, both are immediately ethical and political, according to Foucault. The first condition is that the realm in which reason ought to be used should be distinguished from the realm where one ought to be obedient. Man must progress from merely following rules or orders to the point where he is still obedient, but not at the expense of having forfeited his critical reason. Kant makes a distinction between the public and private uses of reason and says reason must be free in its public use, but submissive in its private use.

According to Kant man makes a private exercise of reason when he is a "cog in a machine", namely, when he fulfils a role in society. By fulfilling a role, man's life is circumscribed by rules oriented to particular ends. He must use reason in order to fulfil his tasks. He must adapt himself to circumstances but not be blindly obedient. There can be no free use of reason in this situation therefore. But when one reasons as a reasonable being and not as an agent with a role to fulfil, reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is the proper functioning of reason in both the private and public sphere.

The distinction of private and public use of reason raises the political problem of how the right to a public use of reason is to be guarantied. Enlightenment is therefore a political problem not merely because it is a process affecting the population, nor because it prescribes the appropriate behaviour for individuals. The state is implicated in enlightenment in virtue of the obligations of obediance and critique. The state must insure the right to critique when the obligation to obediance has been met. Kant's political suggestion is that the free use of reason is the best guarantee of obediance, as long as what must be obeyed conforms to universal reason. His modernity therefore was to turn reason's critical regard on itself within a political framework.

According to Foucault modernity is not so much an epoch or a period, but an attitude. He finds in Kant support for this position. By attitude, Foucault says,

I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos (FR 39).

Therefore rather than asking such questions as whether modernity is a sequel to enlightenment or a rupture with it, that is, rather than seeking to distinguish premodernity, modernity and postmodernity, it is more useful to chart the struggle of the attitude of modernity with that of countermodernity.

Baudelaire defines modernity as "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent" (FR 39). Foucault says that modernity is characterised by a sense of discontinuity, of disruption, of new beginnings. However for Baudelaire, according to Foucault, being modern is not a matter of recognising and accepting the transitoriness of life. Modernity consists in adopting a certain attitude to life's ephemerality, an attitude which seeks the permanent amongst the changing. Modernity is not a fashion, fashion merely questions or highlights the course of time, while modernity seeks the heroic in the present. Baudelaire says modernity is a relationship to the present and to oneself. One must adopt an ascetic attitude. The modernist is a "dandy" who withdraws form the momentary in order to make of himself an elaborate construction. He tries to make his entire life a work of art.

Moving from Kant to Baudelaire in his analysis, Foucault says that he does not presume to have summarised either the phenomenon of enlightenment or of modernity. He says that he wishes to show that man's relation to the present, his historical mode of being, and his self-constitution as an autonomous subject, is rooted in the Enlightenment. He says further that he has tried to show that this rootedness does not tie us to the Enlightenment by adherence to common doctrinal elements, but by a common attitude. That attitude is a philosophical ethos which "could be defined as a permanent critique of our historical era" (FR 42).

But Foucault says we must refuse to be blackmailed by the Enlightenment. By this he means that we must refuse to be pressed into deciding for or against the Enlightenment. He calls simplistic and authoritarian the position which requires mere approval or disapproval of the Enlightenment; either you choose for the tradition of rationalism or against it. Instead we who are indeed partly determined by the Enlightenment should examine ourselves. Such an analysis requires historical study, but not in order to discover the indispensable core of rationality in the Enlightenment, but rather to discover what is no longer necessary for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.

In his positive characterisation of Enlightenment Foucault makes three points. The first is that the philosophical ethos he refers to can be described as a limit attitude, the second that it is experimental, and third is that it provides a framework for action. He says that the limit attitude is not a rejection—not the Marcusian "great refusal". While Kant sought the proper limits of reason, the ethos of the Enlightenment transforms this pure critique into a practical one. The goal of that practical critique is to find possible forms of transgression by identifying the contingent constraints which are given as universal and necessary. He calls this a work of freedom and explicitly links it to his own writings saying it is both a genealogical and an archaeological project (FR 46). It is archaeological because it does not seek universal structures, but rather treats discourse as an historical event. It is genealogical because it does not rule out possibilities on the basis of actualities; rather it identifies the possibility of being no longer what we are.

So that this ethos does not remain vacuous, Foucault says that it must be experimental in its quest for self-creation of autonomous subjectivity. Through historical inquiry it must reveal the possibility for change and also engage the present to determine precisely which changes are possible and in what form. "This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical" (FR 46).

The philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves is "historico-practical". Foucault says that we must address ourselves to specific transformations, to the sort of small, partial revolutions in the social body that we have witnessed in the last twenty years. This is precisely what Foucault has called in another place, the role of the specific intellectual (PK 125-133). While he admits that the task of the specific intellectual is always limited and always in danger of being determined by a general structure beyond his grasp, he claims that this does not consign action to disorder and contingency. He says that the task has its generality, systematicity, homogeneity and its stakes.

1. The Stakes

The stakes of this philosophical ethos is the decoupling of intensified power relations from an increase in human capabilities. As it stands it is not true that man's autonomy has been insured by his accomplishments. Foucault is not so naive as to say that it is the opposite which is true, but always questions whether social developments are truly liberating. For example, in another interview he points to the control of sexuality presented under the guise of sexual liberation. "Get undressed—but be slim, good looking, tanned" (PK 57). He calls this "control by stimulation" (PK 57).

There is an on-going struggle to prevent the accomplishments of the specific intellectual from being co-opted; as the anti-psychiatry movement and the sexual liberation movement were. "One has to recognize the indefiniteness of the struggle—though this is not to say it won't some day have an end..." (PK 57). There does then seem to be a utopian thread in Foucault's thought despite his comments on the pervasiveness of power. At another place he has even said his books are tools for liberation, and that his work leads not to apathy, but to a "hyper—and pessimistic activism"[109]

This desire to disconnect power and capability is reminiscent of the Frankfurt School—particularly of Marcuse and Fromm (even though of course Marcuse severely criticised Fromm). Marcuse saw the problem as an attempt to increase Eros without increasing Thanatos. Both remarked that the modern industrial state was able to increase public welfare, but that they used that same welfare apparatus as a means of domination. Marcuse's catchy formulation is that the welfare state is at the same time the warfare state.[110]

2. Homogeneity

Within the practical sphere there is a homogeneity of practice which the philosophical ethos requires. Foucault says this leads to the study of practical systems (FR 48). This concerns neither what men think of themselves nor the conditions which determine them without their knowledge. These practical systems concern what men do and their reasons for doing it. They have both a technological aspect and a strategic side. The technological aspect concerns the forms of rationality which organise men's activities. The strategic aspect concerns the freedom of action and reaction within practical systems. The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses are insured by such practice.

3. Systematicity

These practical systems raise questions for our historical ontology. They cover, according to Foucault, three broad areas: relations to things, to others, and to oneself. These generally correspond to the questions of knowledge, power and ethics. Of course, as he admits, none of these three domains are isolated from each other; they are useful however as methodological distinctions. The major questions then of our historical ontology are systematised accordingly as,

How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions? (FR 49).

4. Generality

The specificity of these historico-critical investigations is their necessary relatedness to particular epochs and its materiality, practice and discourses. But the recurrence of certain issues points to the generality of these investigations as well. Foucault cites his own studies of the relationship between the sane and the insane, the healthy and the sick, the criminal and the non-criminal, as examples of this recurrence. The task is to grasp the determined character of what we know, of the relations of power and of our relations to ourselves in these recurrent themes. This involves studying the forms of problematization which define objects and the way in which we relate to ourselves and to others. This study invokes neither anthropological constants nor chronological variations.

What then is enlightenment? Foucault says that is part of a philosophical ethos which began with Kant. That ethos is geared towards a critical ontology of ourselves. It takes from Kant the idea of a critique of the present. Critique of our present requires an historical analysis which reveals the limitations imposed on us, while suggesting possible transgression of those limits.

B. Habermas: Modernity versus Postmodernity

While many philosophers have welcomed the advent of postmodernism Habermas remains, anachronistically it seems to them, a defender of modernism. Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard, for example, find Habermas's attempt to rescue reason with a theory of communicative action to be just another discredited version of foundationalism or "logocentrism".[111] Foucault too, though he never described himself as a postmodern (others have done so), rejects Habermas's version of modernity. For his part Habermas detects an irrationalism in Foucault. The question of modernism versus postmodernism seems particularly suitable for comparing the works of Habermas and Foucault therefore

Like most epithets "modernism" and "postmodernism" have no single definitive meaning. Lyotard characterizes modernism as the search for the legitimacy of a discourse in a more fundamental metadiscourse or metanarrative. Postmodernism, he says, "I define...as incredulity towards metanarratives".[112] Lyotard's rejection of modernism is thus a pointed polemic against Habermas. Stung by the latter's identification of postmodernism with neoconservatism, Lyotard responds that it is actually modernism which lacks a critical component. Lyotard accuses Habermas of quite simply ignoring the arguments of postmodern philosophers—"which at least saves them from getting a poor grade for their neoconservatism" he adds.[113]

The neoconservative metanarrative which Lyotard finds in Habermas's discourse is his search for the legitimacy of norms in consensus. Rational consensus is just the latest expression of the Enlightenment triumph of reason. For Habermas modernism is precisely the project of Enlightenment, while postmodernism represents the disastrous abandonment of it. While for Lyotard and others the Enlightenment, or modernism, is an exhausted project, Habermas insists on its vitality. Modernism, he says, is our only alternative to a politically pernicious irrationalism.

In that respect Habermas is considerably removed from the earlier Frankfurt School. He separates himself from what he calls their total critique of the enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer, he says, construe rationality too narrowly; their critique of what is really only instrumental rationality is undermined by conflating it with rationality per se.[114] Essentially Habermas's criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno amounts to an accusation that they are caught in the liars paradox. Namely, by attacking rationality they exclude the possibility of critique and are left with nothing but the end of philosophy—as is Foucault, he also claims.

...No matter what name (philosophy) appears under now—whether as fundamental ontology, as critique, as negative dialectic, or genealogy—these pseudonyms are by no means disguises under which the traditional form of philosophy lies hidden; the drapery of philosophical concepts more likely serve as the cloak for a scantily concealed end of philosophy.[115]

Though Habermas agrees that philosophy since Kant and Hegel has gone largely wrong, he does not see this as a result of a fundamental flaw in modernism. The apocalyptic philosophers of postmodernism have drawn the wrong conclusions about the state of philosophy. What is required is not philosophy's eulogy, but a renewal of its still cogent ideals. Those ideals are to be found in the young Hegel, who, he claims, had a social conception of rationality. The young Hegel "held open the option of using the idea of uncoerced will formation in a communicative community existing under constraints of cooperation as a model for the reconciliation of a bifurcated civil society".[116] According to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault, also hobble their critique of traditional philosophy of the subject by not taking account of the social character of rationality. Their pessimism is a result of that omission he says.

Such a charge could perhaps be made against Adorno and Marcuse since they explicitly thematised rationality in their own work. Foucault however rejected the sort of trial of reason carried out by Horkheimer and Adorno.[117] They conclude that instrumental rationality is not the guarantor of progress as the Enlightenment claimed, but instead the cause of reification, loss of freedom and domination. Reason can therefore provide no respite from the very process it engenders.

Habermas's counterclaim is that reason is more than instrumental rationality. By conflating rationality with instrumental rationality they do to reason and the Enlightenment precisely what they claim the latter did to myth, namely, objectify and demythologise it. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, "Myth turned into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise power."[118] To which Habermas responds that, "they take that which the Enlightenment did to myth and turn it back onto the process of Enlightenment itself. Critique becomes total: it turns against reason as the foundation of its own analysis".[119] Of course Habermas requires the further claim that the Enlightenment is more than the process of objectivation which Adorno and Horkheimer in their demythologization claim it to be. "...Should we try to hold onto the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?"[120]

This then is the reason for Habermas's defence of modernity; its intentions are admirable, cogent and worth preserving, and furthermore a total critique of rationality lands one in an unstable contradiction. Such conclusions do not rest on a historical study of the Enlightenment however. Like Horkheimer and Adorno before him, Habermas limits himself to a conceptual analysis of the philosophical motifs of that time. In both cases their analyses say more about their relation with the present than they do about the past. The bleak account of the Enlightenment found in Horkheimer and Adorno reflects their bleak account of their present—and it was indeed a bleak time. Habermas's rather more optimistic view of the Enlightenment is similarly echoed in his perception of the present. For example, he is more positive about bourgeois democracy, the denigration of which he says was one of the more serious errors of the older Frankfurt School.[121] For example he says,

...I am simply of the opinion that one can show that the formal features of bourgeois systems of law and constitution, or of bourgeois political institutions in general, demonstrate a conceptual structure of moral-practical thought and interpretation which must be considered superior to the built in moral categories of traditional legal and political institutions.[122]

Also unlike the early Frankfurt School, Habermas takes a more conciliatory attitude to that most potent aspect of modernity—capitalism.

I find it more elegant and plausible to give capitalism credit for being what it is—for what it has actually achieved thanks to its level of differentiation and its ability to set a course for itself. Let's give our Marxist hearts a shock: capitalism was quite a success, at least in the area of material reproduction, and it still is.[123]

Given the achievements of modernity therefore, Habermas concludes that reason cannot be as malevolent as Horkheimer and Adorno suppose.

For them the increasing rationalization of life, described by Weber, was thoroughly irrational. That is, at the heart of rationality one finds irrationality. The deep structure of western reason is the logic of identity which replaces the abstract with the concrete and reduces the Other to the Same. The self-destruction of reason, or, the dialectic of Enlightenment, follows from the working out of reason in history. Habermas quite simply rejects this. He accepts their critique of instrumental reason but refuses to follow them in identifying it with reason per se.

Habermas's account of the virtues of reason has changed during the course of his intellectual career, but the goal has always been to preserve for it an emancipatory function. In Knowledge and Human Interests he construes the critique necessary of reason as a critique of scientism and positivism. Against the reduction of knowledge to positive science he argues for three types of knowledge; empirical-analytic, hermeneutic and critical. These correspond to what he calls the three cognitive interests of the human species, namely, the technical, the practical and the emancipatory. These interests function in a quasi-Kantian fashion. They arose during the evolution of the species and so are not transcendental, nevertheless they now guide and constitute knowledge a priori. Habermas calls them quasi-transcendental.

Unlike transcendental logic, the logic of the natural and cultural sciences deals not with the properties of pure theoretical reason but with methodological rules for the organisation of processes of inquiry. These rules no longer possess the status of pure transcendental rules. They have a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of human life; from structures of a species that reproduces its life both through learning processes of socially organised labor and processes of mutual understanding in interactions mediated in ordinary language. These basic conditions of life have an interest structure.[124]

Whereas at the heart of western reason Horkheimer and Adorno discover the necessity of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, Habermas finds the unfulfilled but still possible emancipatory promise of modernity.

The theory of cognitive interest did not survive long however. A barrage of criticism assailed its quasi-transcendentalism. Not surprisingly that criticism resembled Foucault's objections to the empirico-transcendental doublet which he says characterises modern philosophy. Habermas's version of that doublet consists in an attempt to combine Kant and Marx. In response to the objections to that project he gradually elucidated a theory of communication in a new attempt to save the emancipatory power of reason.

The theory of communicative action, broadly speaking, belongs to the "linguistic turn" in philosophy. Language became the sign par excellence that consciousness could never be pure; the Same is always infused with the Other. This makes the Cartesian subject untenable. Like Wittgenstein, Foucault and many others, Habermas starts with language in forging a new account of the subject. For him however language contains an ideal element that Foucault and Wittgenstein would not countenance. This does however point to a parallel between the early Foucault and Habermas. The latter replaces consciousness as the ground of rationality with a language that can fulfil that function. Language and not man can thus provide the norm Habermas believes critical theory requires. Similarly Foucault substitutes a constitutive discourse for a constitutive consciousness. Both thus attribute to language what they believe is fatal to attribute to consciousness. Rorty and Derrida consequently detect a neo-foundationalism in both their works. Foucault seems to have remedied this in his later work.

For Habermas language is in fact secondary to communication. His questionable contention is that all communication shares a common structure or form. Every utterance involves a number of validity claims; that what we say is true, that it is comprehensible, that it is appropriate (one is in a position to make such an utterance, for example, that one be a doctor if giving a diagnosis), and that one is sincere. Without assuming these validity claims, communication is not possible. According to Habermas they are worked out in noncoercive communication, the result of which must needs be consensus. Rationality is precisely the reaching of consensus through noncoerced or undistorted communication.

The rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with no other means when disagreement can no longer be headed off by everyday routines and yet is not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force.[125]

Habermas links his theory of communication with a theory of society so that the latter becomes essentially a communicative community. Social relations are primarily communicative relations. In the Theory of Communicative Action he says that communicative action is action within a communicative community based on understanding, cooperation and agreement. Communicative action is thus only possible as undistorted communication. The norm of a critical theory of society becomes the promotion of free communication. Ideology, repression etc, are diagnosed and opposed as a result as distorted communication. Distorted communication obscures the potential for agreement and thus emancipation which underlies communication proper.

This normative grounding of critical theory in ideal communication is achieved according to Thomas McCarthy without recourse to a foundationalist or transcendental position.[126] He claims that the theory of communicative rationality has a theoretical and a practical relevance. It is the point of departure for Habermas's vast theorising about social and individual development and practically is a means for identifying social pathologies and suggesting possible remedies.

I believe this points to the problem with Habermas's theory, rather than its virtues. His theory of individual and social development is a very complicated affair which I shall not deal with. That edifice however rests on his theory of language and communication which can be shown to be rather dubious. The assertion that language contains the ground of reason and emancipation, when boldly stated, is difficult to accept.

The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.[127]

Many have denied that language contains any such thing. Refining his position Habermas now claims that it is communication, not language, which is the ground of reason. The argument for which is as follows;

1) The ability to converse presumes a communicative competence, namely, the ability to classify speech acts.

2) Every speech-act assumes four validity claims which are required for and explain understanding and agreement between subjects.

3) A genuine agreement or understanding is achieved by argument alone.

4) The better argument will prevail if communication is not hindered.

5) Communication is not hindered when each participant has equal access to and use of speech-acts; the "ideal speech situation".

6) Truth is a validity claim of constitutive speech-acts, (speech-acts which assert, report, narrate, explain, etc.); namely, it is a sign that the statement is justified.

7) A statement is justified if it commands a rational consensus in an ideal speech situation.[128]

The critical conclusion of this is that one ought to work to bring about a situation amenable to rational consensus. The shortcomings of this argument are fairly obvious and have been chronicled by many already. Basically Habermas exaggerates the role of reason in human affairs and has a far too idealistic notion of language, communication and society. Without begging the question it is not at all clear why the possibility of understanding in language should be given priority to the equally possible and perhaps more likely occurrence of misunderstanding. Nor is it likely that agreements so reached are more credible. These objections to Habermas cast doubt on his normative grounding of critical theory.

In Knowledge and Human Interests he declares that emancipation is a quasi-transcendental human interest, the evidence for which lies in the structure of language. The ambiguity of this fact of human existence which allowed it to function as a norm is also the reason why it cannot be accepted. A norm cannot be quai-transcendental. If it is empirical then it cannot be an ideal we ought too aspire to, and since we are not, according to Habermas, transcendental subjects, a transcendental norm can have no evocative power for us—in other words it gives us no reason for following it.

The subsequent attempt to make the ideal speech situation, or undistorted communication, the new normative ground of critical theory faces the same difficulty as the theory of human interests. The question is what sort of ideal is the ideal speech situation. McCarthy, surprisingly, construes it as an empirical ideal.

...The notion of communicative rationality does not serve Habermas as the telos of a philosophy of history, or as the equivalent of progress, or as the standard for the good life...He is not seeking to demonstrate conceptually that what is rational is (or will be) real and what is real is (or will be) rational, but to identify empirically the actually existing possibilities for embodying rationality structures in concrete forms of life.[129]

Indeed Habermas does seem to have relinquished the transcendental claims of his earlier work.

...The expression "ideal speech situation" leads to error insofar as it suggests a concrete form of life. What can be normatively brought into relief are necessary but general conditions for a communicative praxis of everyday life and for a process of discursive will-formation which would put participants themselves in a position to actualize concrete possibilities for a better and less endangered life, in accord with their own needs and insights, and on their own initiative.[130]

It would be a short circuit...to think that we have...formulated the ideal of a form of life which has become perfectly rational—there can be no such ideal.[131]

The ideal speech situation thus has little critical force. It seems that all we can do is opt for the ideal speech situation as a norm because it is a particularly good way of understanding social pathologies and social rationality. Actually I do not think it is, but I shall come to that later, that is Habermas's position though.

If we do not want altogether to relinquish standards by which a form of life might be judged to be more or less failed, deformed, unhappy, or alienated, we can look if need be to the model of sickness and health...But the attempt to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the idea of the good life should not mislead us into deriving this idea from the formal concept of reason which modernity's understanding of the world has left us.[132]

Habermas's norm recommends itself then not because it is an ideal structure of human existence, nor because consensus is a rare empirical event in human life, but rather because it is practically useful. It allows a critical discourse to function with the liberal comfort that it can be useful in the struggle against illegitimate practices.[133] This may have more consolation value than Foucault's supposed anormativity, it is not however more convincing.

I turn now to Habermas's analysis of Foucault.

C. Habermas on Foucault

1. Problems of Commission

There is not a word on structuralism , post-structuralism or indeed on any current French philosophy in The Theory of Communicative Action. Since that book however Habermas has increasingly made up for that neglect with a series of articles on the theme of modernity and postmodernity; the culmination of which is his latest book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity[134]. There his French brethren are duly scrutinized in light of his theories of communicative rationality, ethics and society.

Despite his coming late to Foucault's work, there is no doubt of Habermas's respect for him. In an eulogistic article on Foucault he attests to the former's influence.

Within the circle of the philosophers of my generation who diagnose our times, Foucault has most lastingly influenced the Zeitgeist, not least because of the seriousness with which he perseveres under productive contradictions.[135]

This sums up Habermas's attitude towards Foucault; respect but ultimate disagreement because of what he perceives as contradictions in the latter's work.

Perhaps the force of...contradiction caught up with Foucault in (the) last of his texts, drawing him again into the circle of the philosophical discourse of modernity which he thought he could explode.[136]

Though I do not think that Foucault did attempt to explode modernity, we shall follow for now Habermas's argument.

There are two chapters on Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. The first is largely a restatement of the major points of Foucault's oeuvre, while the second, "Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again", contains Habermas's critique. There he identifies contradictions and omissions in Foucault's work.

Essentially the trouble with Foucault's work is that he remains trapped in a position he wished to overcome. Habermas charges that both Foucault's theory of power and his concept of genealogy are saddled with an unholy transcendentalism and a traditional theory of the subject. It is ironic that dogged as he has been by quasi-transcendentalism, that Habermas makes this charge against Foucault.

It has to be said that Habermas's argument on this point is quite weak. In fact he does not really present an argument at all. Genealogy he claims plays the "empirical role of an analysis of the technologies of power that are supposed to explain the functional social context of the science of man." Furthermore, "the same genealogy plays the transcendental role of an analysis of the technologies of power that are supposed to explain how scientific discourse about man is possible at all".[137] Here the interest is in power relationships as constitutive conditions for scientific knowledge. Habermas has merely transposed Dreyfus and Rabinow's argument against Foucault's archaeology to his genealogy, namely that it is caught in an empirico-transcendental bind.

Habermas is careful to say that genealogy only plays a transcendental role, not that it is a full fledged transcendentalism. This minimalist notion of transcendentalism does not threaten genealogy; it is no more transcendental than any explanation. Every explanation can be construed as explaining how something is possible, but unless that notion of "possible" is transformed into "constitution" one does not have a transcendental explanation.

Keeping his formulation vague, Habermas does suggest a link between "possibility" and "constitution" in Foucault's notion of genealogy. Even here constitution is construed so weakly as to preclude any hard transcendental theory. Habermas says only that power relations are "constitutive conditions" for scientific knowledge and not that power constitutes knowledge. Foucault's position is that power is an inevitable concurrence of knowledge. It is not a mask of knowledge, rather it shows itself in knowledge. Which is merely to say there is no pure knowledge, no pure truth—a position Habermas himself holds. Power is only a constitutive condition of knowledge in the boring sense in which it could be said, for example, that weapons are a constitutive condition of war; without them war is not possible, and their size, force abundance and so on, determines what kind of war can be fought. They do not transcendentally constitute war however, just as relations of power do not transcendentally constitute knowledge.

In a related and equally surprising move Habermas concludes that Foucault's empirico-transcendentalism requires of him a traditional theory of the subject. Making truth dependent on power rather than the reverse preserves power's humanist origins.

...No one can escape the strategic conceptual constraints of the philosophy of the subject merely by performing operations of reversal upon its basic concepts. Foucault cannot do away with all the aporias he attributes to the philosophy of the subject by means of a concept of power borrowed from the philosophy of the subject itself.[138]

As we have already seen Habermas's argumentative strategy is to catch Foucault in a series of contradictions or "aporias", which would force him back into a defense of modernism. In that way Habermas hopes to vindicate his own position.

Of course one cannot overcome the subject with a humanist theory of power, but has Foucault really made this simple mistake? His account of power is not the result of a reversal of the philosophy of the subject. One only has to consider Habermas's account of a humanist concept of power to see that Foucault has not simply adopted its reverse. According to that theory,

the subject can take up basically two and only two relationships towards the world of imaginable and manipulable objects: cognitive relationships regulated by the truth of judgements, and practical relationships regulated by the success of actions. Power is that by which the subject has an effect on objects in successful actions. In this connection, success in action depends upon the truth of the judgements that enter into the plan of action; via the criterion of success in action, power remains dependent on truth.[139]

Actually it is not clear how one could even formulate a reversal of this position. Foucault has certainly not taken this manipulative theory of power and reversed it so that it is no longer the subject who manipulates power, but power which manipulates the subject. That indeed would imply a humanism, namely, there would in either case always already be a subject. That is certainly not Foucault's position. Power is not a commodity brought to bear on the subject. The subject is not deformed by power, but created by it.

The reversal that Habermas charges Foucault with making is again only plausible because of an ambiguous formulation. In this case it hinges on the notion of "success". Presumably in the reversal the success of truth is due to its power-dependency, but since success itself is conceptually tied to judgement it seems that Foucault has unwittingly preserved the traditional theory of the subject within his theory of power. Except of course that the notion of success is not present in Foucault. Genealogy has no room for notions like success or crisis. It would require both the concepts of origin and telos to give those notions any cogency—that is an anathema to Foucault. When in his genealogies he shows how particular subjects have been produced there is no unfolding of an origin or culmination in a telos. The creation of sexuality, for example, is not the successful action of power which had such a creation "in mind". In other words, success does not belong to the conceptual apparatus of genealogy because it neither has nor requires a criterion of success.

At any rate, all this according to Habermas explains how it is that Foucault becomes trapped in three fatal aporias. Genealogy, he says, effects three substitutions: analysis of meaningless structures replaces hermeneutics; claims of validity are replaced by the study of power complexes; and finally, value free historical explanations are substituted for value judgements. Habermas thus charges Foucault's genealogy with (1) "presentism", that is, being hermeneutically stuck in the present; (2) "relativism", being only able to understand itself in relation to its own present; (3) "crypto-normativism", that is, genealogy is "partisan"—it cannot account for its own normative foundations.

(1) Instead of overcoming hermeneutics, Foucault is left with an adulterated hermeneutics of the present. According to Habermas, Foucault cannot treat history as the meaningless embellishment of a structure for which no preunderstanding is required. At the very least he cannot exclude his self-understanding of his own point of departure in the present from his understanding of the past. This is not really an argument against Foucault however. His rejection of hermeneutics does not mean he believes that his own investigative position is irrelevant or excluded from his understanding of events. Rather it means that any understanding is not won by privileging the self-understanding of oneself or that of others. Further, Foucault's study is not of meaningless structures or "protuberances of power".[140] As Dreyfus and Rabinow put it, Foucault is "beyond structuralism and hermeneutics".

(2) The familiar charge of relativism raised against Foucault finds a voice too in Habermas. Limiting truth to each particular discourse obviates its universal significance he says. To make truth the pawn of power undermines the critical significance of genealogy itself. As long as one argues for or against truth, Habermas's charge of relativism is unanswerable. However since virtually no one proposes a correspondence theory of truth any more, it is not clear that relativism is a particularly threatening charge. It is especially not obvious that truth, however it is conceived, is necessary for a politically efficacious criticism.

One of course does not need a theory of truth in order to criticise; the real point it seems is that one must presume the truth of one's criticism to criticise effectively. That is, unless one presumes the truth of one's criticism one has no reason for adhering to it.[141] Following Rorty however, it could just as well be said that one adheres to one's critical convictions because they are edifying or that they get you what you want.[142] Rorty maintains that once truth as correspondence is done away with, in every subsequent discussion it can be replaced by edification, utility, etc., without making any difference to the status of the discourse. For example, if one says that Foucault's genealogy of the sexual subject is true, but does not mean by that it corresponds to reality (whatever that means) then does it really matter whether one says it is true or whether it is convincing, appealing, useful and so on. As we have seen Foucault expects that the value of his work lies in its use-value. Furthermore it is difficult to see how Habermas's own consensus theory of truth does not face the same relativism he finds in Foucault.

(3) Crypto-normativism is perhaps the most interesting charge raised against Foucault by Habermas, it is at least straight forward,

why should we muster any resistance at all against this all-pervasive power circulating in the bloodstream of the body of modern society, instead of just adapting ourselves to it? Then the genealogy of knowledge as a weapon would be superfluous as well. It makes sense that a value-free analysis of the strength and weaknesses of the opponent is one who wants to take up the fight—but why fight at all?[143]

Habermas says that this is answerable only from some normative position. Only a norm allows one to say that the status quo is wrong and should be opposed. Only a norm suggests the proper alternative to what is currently wrong.

Before turning to Foucault's response to these objections it is best first to outline the omissions Habermas says are an inevitable correlative of his position.

2. Problems of Omission

Genealogy, according to Habermas, cannot account for how social order is possible nor how individuals and society are related. Specifically Foucault cannot explain how society can emerge from a field of forces, some stabilizing element such as norms, values, processes for reaching agreement, etc, is required. Foucault's conceptual neglect is traceable finally to the absence of a conception of the "life-world". Habermas says there is a life-world in virtue of the normative structure of communication. Its absence in Foucault explains his other omissions and makes itself evident in the poverty of his empirical research. According to Habermas, Foucault writes bad history because he has a poor theory.[144]

Thus Habermas claims that he is not begging the question against Foucault, that is, asking him to respond to problems which for him are no problem at all. "...If what looks to us like a basic conceptual deficiency were also to affect the setup of empirical investigations...(this) could be pinned down to specific readings and blindspots."[145] For example, Habermas claims that neither Foucault's history of punishment nor of sexuality do justice to the modern age. Foucault's contention that the seeming humanization of punishment at the end of the eighteenth century in fact represents a refinement of power is "false in its generality", says Habermas. One searches in vain for the historical specifics with which he defends this claim. Instead we find the familiar Habermasian assertion that things are better than they used to be, so they cannot be as bad as Foucault says.

As soon as he passes from the classical to the modern age, Foucault pays no attention whatsoever to penal law and to the law governing penal process. Otherwise, he would have had to submit the unmistakeable gains of civil rights guarantees even in this area, to an exact interpretation of power.[146]

Foucault is only able to ignore the lifeworld and its normative content by systematically ignoring the advances of modernity.

Foucault's so-called "capillary" account of power—power penetrates throughout the social and physical body—is at the heart of the controversy concerning norms. According to his critics this account of power leaves no exit, no way of getting at the truth. Charles Taylor, following Habermas, puts it like this,

The idea of a liberating truth is a profound illusion. There is no truth that can be espoused, defended, or rescued against systems of power. On the contrary, each such system defines its own variants of truth. And there is no escape from power into freedom.[147]

Taylor's claim is that in fact Foucault must at least claim that his account of power is true, and that claim requires freedom. So that at least this meta-claim escapes the effects of power; and if it does, why not others too? Furthermore without freedom and truth it is impossible to criticise one's own present and so offer alternatives to it, as Taylor claims Foucault would like to do. Taylor quotes the following passage from Foucault as evidence of his ineluctable position.

Contrary to a myth whose history and function would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits...nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true (PK 131).

Foucault's critics claim that this idea is incoherent. We cannot oppose our own regime by recourse to the truth because truth proceeds form the regime. One can only criticise one regime from the standpoint of another. Liberation could only take the form of the substitution of one regime for another; hence no liberation is actually possible.

Power can be unmasked. Analysis can show that embedded in the seemingly innocuous are relations of power. This does not lead to liberation from power though, but from one instance of power to another. The new regime will impose its own truth in turn. We are left in the Nietzschean predicament therefore of having to affirm that since there are many truths there is no truth at all.

This indeed presents difficulties for anyone wishing for a norm-giving critique. It is true also that Foucault does in fact use a language that seems to imply a normative position. He speaks of "bio-power", "the disciplinary society", "the carceral archipelago" and so forth. He describes how in the modern period disciplinary institutions like prisons, boarding schools, the military, forged a number of mechanisms which both fabricated and subjugated human beings as subjects of knowledge and power. These techniques and mechanisms overflowed the domain of their birth and became the basis for the discipline of the entire population.

It seems then that Foucault's description of the way power has operated in producing the disciplinary society is not neutral. Despite this he says that he has not provided an analysis of power which allows one to say that such and such an exercise of power is illegitimate or not. Legitimacy and illegitimacy are ways of describing power within the juridical conception of it which Foucault rejects; namely that there is a social contract which determines the legitimacy of power and enshrines it in law. Perhaps it is true that Foucault has eschewed all norms though. He at least indicated that he once did or meant to, but it is not certain that he continues to do so.

Thus we have two schemes for the analysis of power. The contract oppression schema, which is the juridical one, and the domination-repression or war-repression schema for which the pertinent opposition is not between the legitimate and illegitimate, as in the first schema, but between struggle and submission.

It is obvious that all my work in recent years has been couched in the schema of struggle-repression, and it is this—which I have hitherto been attempting to apply—which I have been forced to reconsider, both because it is still insufficiently elaborated at a whole number of points, and because I believe that these two notions of repression and war must themselves be considerably modified if not ultimately abandoned. In any case, I believe that they must be submitted to closer scrutiny (PK 92).

Delivered as a lecture in January 1976, this post-dates The History of Sexuality. What this indicates is that at least up until 1976 Foucault was anormative, but that after that time it is not so clear that he remained so. It is worth noting that the normative essay "What is Enlightenment" was published in 1984, and it was at this time that he eschewed his reliance on "domination" and began to study "government" and techniques of the self.

Prior to 1984 Foucault's approach to the study of power was to treat it as a struggle. Inverting von Clausewitz's famous assertion that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Foucault says that power is a war continued by other means (PK 90). By this inversion he hoped to avoid the normative distinction of legitimate and illegitimate use of power linked to the juridical conception of it. Instead power is analysed strategically; a retreat here, an advance there—all in perpetual struggle. If Foucault was to admit later to difficulties with this model, it was already clear from the beginning what they might be. After all it is only a metaphor to say that power is a war by other means. It is a dubious conceit to apply exclusively military diction to the phenomenon of power. War though brutal and manifestly not subtle, is nevertheless also a legal phenomenon. War must be declared, there is a legal procedure for mobilizing armies and engaging in hostilities, there are rules of war, etc. Even in war it is recognized, in theory if not in practice, that there are legitimate and illegitimate uses of power, it is not permissible to attack civilians, for example.

For Foucault the advantage of the military metaphor was that it allowed him to do away with the idea that power is a property possessed by some and not by others.

...Hence one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with "dominators" on one side and "dominated" on the other...(PK 142).

But his critics charge that even this analysis of power can be construed, indeed must be construed, in the very manner Foucault wishes to avoid. The military model still allows one to ask who is subjugating whom and who is resisting whom.

D. Foucault contra Habermas

In a pointed rebuttal of Habermas, Foucault says, as we saw, that we must refuse the "blackmail" of the Enlightenment. Whereas Habermas says that we have no choice but to accept the intentions of the Enlightenment or lapse into irrationality, Foucault claims that such a threat misses the point.

Let us leave to their piety those who wish to preserve alive and intact the heritage of Aufklarung. Such piety is doubtless the most touching of treasons. It is not the legacy of Aufklarung which it is our business to conserve, but rather the very question of the historicity of the thought of the universal, which ought to be kept present and retained in mind as that which has to be thought.[148]

The point of the Enlightenment is not that one should be against irrationalism and for rationalism; that point is hardly worth making and reveals nothing about the career of rationality anyway, according to Foucault.

...There is the problem raised by Habermas: if one abandons the work of Kant or Weber, for example, one runs the risk of lapsing into irrationality. I am completely in agreement with this, but one should not forget—and I'm not saying this in order to criticise rationality, but in order to show how ambiguous things are—it was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was of course, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality (FR 248-249).

The Enlightenment thus requires of us not a critical neglect of rationality for fear of lapsing into irrationality, but rather a critique of reason. This updated critique of reason seeks, besides its limits, also its history, its effects, dangers and so on.

Habermas's underlying premiss is that one cannot consistently be a skeptic, and therefore any relativism is formally incoherent and false. One cannot reasonably reject reason, while an unreasonable rejection of reason is impossible. Some version of this contradiction Habermas finds in Foucault. According to Habermas, Foucault's account of Kant's essay is paradoxical. Kant requires that enlightenment be a critique of the present. While Foucault aligns himself with such a project he at the same time exposes the link between power and knowledge in modern times. Habermas therefore asks, "How can Foucault's self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakeable criticism of this very form of modernity?"[149]

There seems to me however one way in which, pace Habermas, that Foucault's criticism of modernity is entirely compatible with his thoughts on the Enlightenment. What is required is to distinguish "critique" and "criticism". Foucault says that for Kant the Enlightenment is characterised by a philosophical ethos which aims at a critique of the present. Its goal is maturity and autonomy for the subject. By critique Kant and Foucault means setting limits and determining proper function.

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (FR 5O).

Foucault's criticism of modernity does not exclude a critique of modernity. One does not forfeit the right to critique through criticism. The very point of Foucault's criticism is to indicate the need for a critique.

Habermas's characterisation of Foucault's attitude towards the Enlightenment is therefore inadequate. He attributes to Foucault a rejection of the Enlightenment's project of self-mastery through self-knowledge. Foucault's position is neither so categorical nor so simple. His position is actually that the human sciences, premised as they are on a empirico-transcendental doublet, can guarantee us neither self-mastery nor self-knowledge. The ethos of the Enlightenment is not incompatible with rejecting the empirico-transcendental account of the subject and the human sciences based upon it.

Criticising Foucault's "total" critique of the Enlightenment, Habermas says of him that he,

replaced the model of repression and emancipation developed by Marx and Freud with a pluralism of power discourse formations. These formations intersect and succeed one another and can be differentiated according to their style and intensity. They cannot, however, be judged in terms of validity which was possible in the case of repression and emancipation of conscious as opposed to unconscious resolutions.[150]

Foucault's critique is therefore contradictory and normatively useless as it provides no basis for action, according to Habermas. Foucault has said in his defense, that his concern is with showing how human beings become subjects; which certainly suggests a normative position. He has also said that in any genuine dialogue there is a morality at stake—the honest search for truth and respect for the other (FR 381-382). This too suggests that the bleak picture Habermas paints of him is too pessimistic. Indeed this sounds very much like Habermas's own ideal speech situation.

Habermas begins from the position that postmodernity is essentially antimodernity. His project is to salvage modernity. "...Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?"[151] Habermas's answer is that we must hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment. His reasons are precisely the opposite of those for which Horkheimer and Adorno condemned the Enlightenment. For Habermas the project of the Enlightenment is our only guard against an inhuman capitalism and a resurgent conservatism, while for Horkheimer and Adorno it is the cause of these ills.

The life world has to become able to develop institutions out of itself which sets limits to the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of an almost autonomous economic system and its administrative complements.

If I am not mistaken, the chances for this today are not very good. More or less in the entire Western world, a climate has developed that furthers capitalist modernization processes as well as trends critical of cultural modernism. The disillusionment with the very failures of those programs that called for negation of art and philosophy has come to serve for conservative positions.[152]

Habermas claims that Foucault is antimodern and includes him among the group he calls the "young conservatives". Young conservatives are irreconcilably antimodern. They devalue the traditional humanist values of imagination, self-expression and emotionality. They replace instrumental reason with will to power, Being, sovereignty, etc. But in so doing render themselves open to the charge of incoherence.

Habermas's criticism of Foucault and of other postmoderns is that their position is politically impotent because it lacks any normative standpoint. Having made reason varyingly subservient to epistemes, discourse and power-knowledge, Foucault has no means of offering a way out of the present (or any) morass. He has no foundation for a normative standpoint. On the other hand, Habermas contends that his own ideal speech situation does provide such a norm. The issue involves four components; the function of truth, reason and norms, and the possibility of emancipation. I shall examine each in turn.

1. Reason

Is Foucault's position hopelessly nihilistic then? I do not think it is so clear that it is. Assuredly his work leaves wide scope for interpretation, if for no other reason than he himself has offered different accounts of it. The archaeological works of Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic have been declared to have been about power all along (PK 115). In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault abandoned major aspects of the earlier work The Order of Things. Later he was to remark that his goal was not to analyse power but to use that analysis to study the formation of the subject (MF 208-209). In 1983, seven years after the publication of volume one of his History of Sexuality, Foucault reported; "I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that rather than sex...sex is boring" (MF 229). He has varyingly described his latest work as "genealogy of ethics" (MF 229), "genealogy of problems" (MF 231), and also as the "history of truth" (UP 12).

The criticism against Foucault is not that his account of modern times, the Enlightenment, and of power, is not convincing. Even his critics praise his scholarship for the most part. But Foucault is condemned for omitting the concept of truth. Habermas, Taylor and others, therefore claim that he is anti-rational, antimodern and formally incoherent. Freedom drops out of his analysis of power and with it goes the possibility of emancipation and so too the reason for writing his genealogies.

Habermas believes that his own ideal speech situation offers a possibility of emancipation. We saw above that ideal speech meant rational discussion free of pernicious constraints. To repeat, we have to find a way to set limits to an economic system and its administrative complements which have assumed their own dynamics and interests. Habermas begs the question against Foucault however. He presupposes that the present state of affairs is the intended result of a particular strategy and that we can directly bring about an alternative to it. There is it seems a hint of contradiction in Habermas's analysis. The present state of affairs of domination and repression is chiefly the result of a distorted economy; it is the irrational result of the rational activity of some agents. Further, this irrational state of affairs can generate a rational attempt to produce a rational state of affairs, namely, the ideal speech situation. As both therapy and goal of the therapy they presuppose each other. It seems that the relation between rationality conceived as the choice of right means for the chosen ends, and irrationality is not so clear cut? This has implications for the role of intention in rationality.

If the present society is irrational it seems to rule out action of the sort which one could expect in a rational society to change it. Action in a rational society should be free of the political and economic imperatives which Habermas says are characteristic of our society. It is not obvious that it is rational action or argument which will bring this state of affairs to pass. For example, on a more mundane level, it is probably more efficacious to punch a bully on the nose than to argue with him. A bully is probably not responsive to rational entreaties. The rational society Habermas seeks is perhaps not possible as a rational creation. I would say that it cannot be entirely a matter of rational creation. If as Kant says, people are lazy, then it might be that coercion and not rational argument is necessary. Less ominously, it might just be that the rationalization of society is an impossible goal—an "infinite task" in Husserl's language.

In 1971 in a discussion with some Maoists on the idea of setting up a "peoples court" to judge the police, Foucault questioned the efficacy of reason in the pre-revolutionary or irrational state. His interlocutors believed it necessary to establish such courts to mete out justice to the enemies of the revolution. The bourgeois trappings of the robe and the bench would be eliminated, but the essentials of a neutral third party deciding according to an ideal of justice, would be preserved they assured Foucault. He was more skeptical however, asking how such a court could be created from the ashes of the bourgeois judicial system without contamination by it.

In my view one shouldn't start with the court as a particular form, and then go on to ask how and on what conditions there could be a peoples court; one should start with popular justice, with acts of justice by the people, and go on to ask what place a court would have within this. We must ask whether such acts of popular justice can or cannot be organised in the form of a court. Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus (PK 1).

Returning to the bully example as an analogy, Foucault's advice is just to trust the judgement to punch him on the nose, attempting prolonged moral justification is counter-productive. What this points to is that rationality may not be the best guide for action particularly in irrational times. After all if rationality merely allows you to choose the appropriate means of attaining chosen ends, this does not guarantee that one will behave properly. One can commit rational murder, for example, along these lines by choosing the right weapon, time, victim, etc. Anything can be rationalized. Rationality cannot guarantee that the ends are good or even rational.

Just as one cannot assume that rationality is either a possible or effective way of escaping irrationality, neither can one assume that it is its own best defense. Again Foucault points to the danger of assuming the usefulness of the state for guaranteeing such rationality.

Is not the setting up of a neutral institution standing between the people and its enemies, capable of establishing the dividing line between the true and the false, the guilty and the innocent, the just and the unjust, is this not a way of resisting popular justice. A way of disarming it in the struggle it is conducting in reality in favour of an arbitration in the realm of the ideal? This is why I am wondering whether the court is not a form of popular justice but rather its first deformation (PK 2).

Rationality can subvert popular justice and lead back to bourgeois justice. A rational defense against such a rational attack is perhaps neither possible nor effective. Coercion rather than rational argument may be the appropriate way to deal with rational or irrational attacks on the state. Perhaps it is necessary to insure that political and economic structures of society are sufficiently rigid in order to avoid or withstand attack. As Jon Elster has pointed out however, this reintroduces an irrational element into society and with it the possibility of domination and repression.[153] The relationship between rationality and irrationality in society is evidently a complicated matter, probably more complicated than either Taylor's or Habermas's scheme would allow.[154]

It seems that Habermas feels that without god and without a secular alternative such as idealism or humanism, reason's legislative function in human life is all the more necessary. He seems to fear that otherwise "everything is allowed". Reason's normative function must be able to resist the collapse of metaphysics. His own attempt follows on from Kant, which he considers as preserving the intentions of the Enlightenment. Saving the critical function of reason in the face of the demise of metaphysics with the hope of insuring emancipation is not of course what Foucault regards as characteristic of the Enlightenment. For him, Kant and the Enlightenment represent a new philosophical ethos whose concern is our historical identity.

The legitimizing metanarratives which Habermas wants, and which Lyotard and Rorty agree characterise modernity, is not to be found in Foucault. He has no great divide theory to provide a criterion for determining what belongs on the side of legitimacy and what on the side of illegitimacy. For Foucault there is only the discomfort of oneself and others. The answer to the question "Why fight" will not be found in any metanarrative or any norm. David Hiley put it well when he describes Foucault's position as engagement without liberal hope or comfort. Habermas wants the liberal comfort that his analysis is grounded and Rorty, having given up groundedness, wants the liberal hope that struggle will enhance human solidarity.[155]

To Kant's query about what one can know, hope and do, Foucault's answer is decidedly cautious. What one can know is genealogy. What one can do is act in specific struggles eschewing all pretensions to speak on other's behalf; especially for such dubious groups as "society", "mankind", "the oppressed", etc. What one can hope for is the end of normalization. Foucault's position may lack the consolation value that one finds in Habermas and Rorty, but it is at least a more believable account of our present than either of them has offered. The model of distorted communication and Rorty's notion of "the conversation of mankind" fail to answer the question "why fight" because they fail in their perception of what is really going on. Habermas's theory of communicative action is far to intellectualistic to be applicable to the lived world, while Rorty simply ignores, for all his pragmatism, the problems there. Genealogy at least leads to a "hyper- and pessimistic activism", and that is a start (GE 232).

2. Truth

If as I have maintained it is not obvious that rationality is the sine qua non of the ideal state, then it seems too that the same can be said of the role of truth. In fact given the notorious difficulties of saying what exactly truth is, it is I think a bit disingenuous to say that Foucault's analysis founders on that point. Taylor himself gives quite a loose account of the role of truth in human affairs. He says it is necessary for emancipation, but it is not clear from his account of history how this might be so.

We have become certain things in Western civilization. Our humanitarianism, our notions of freedom—both personal independence and collective self-rule—have helped to define a political identity we share; and one that is rooted deeply in our basic, seemingly infrapolitical understandings: of what it is to be an individual, of the person as a being with inner depths—all the features that seem to us to be rock-bottom, almost biological properties of human beings, as long as we refrain from looking outside and experiencing the shock of encountering other cultures. Of course these elements of identity are contested; they are not articulated neatly and definitely once and for all, but the subject of perpetual revisionist strife...But they all count for us. None of them can be repudiated simply in the political struggle. We struggle over interpretation and weightings, but we cannot shrug them off. They define humanity, politics for us.[156]

So for Taylor who we truly are we have become; a contradiction it seems since he lacks a Hegelian teleology. This is clear in the example of the individual. The "individual" is a recent phenomenon to be sure, the ancient Athenians would not have understood such a notion. Without Descartes insistence on the cogito as the foundation of metaphysics, perhaps the individual would have appeared with quite a different form. Marcuse and others have called the individual the great bourgeois creation, thus pointing to the role of reform in religion and social life as the basis of our individuality. If who we truly are is a matter for "interpretation" and bound to "culture" then it seems that truth is being made to play an unusual role. This is not too different from Foucault's position—a relativistic one according to Taylor.

Do we in fact require a notion of truth to criticise our own regime, or to offer the chance of emancipation from it? I think the answer is no. We do not have to criticise in the name of truth or for the sake of truth. This is clear in the case of aesthetics. We describe or evaluate sculpture, for example, as ugly or beautiful, but not as true and false. In social affairs there is nothing contradictory about criticising simply because one does not like what is going on. For example, it is not necessary to know the truth about man, if there is such a thing, in order to say that the Soviet gulags are bad, or that Canadian native people have been treated unfairly. In fact if truth were required for criticism then critics would be silenced. All that is necessary for criticism is compassion and political insight.

Foucault himself says it is a matter of treating man as an aesthetic problem, and not as a problem of truth.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life (GE 236).

Foucault applauds Baudelaire and Nietzsche for making man's life an aesthetic task. That aesthetic construction does not require knowing the truth about "desire, life, nature, body and so on" (GE 236). We do not create ourselves as true beings according to knowledge of who we truly are or according to universal rules. The existential imperative to be authentic is therefore inappropriate (GE 237). From the absence of a true or authentic self, the only practical consequence, says Foucault, is that we must create ourselves. The relation one has to oneself will be a product of that creative activity. It will not be a relation to a notion of the true self.

It could be said that in spite of his genealogical approach to ethics, Foucault does resort to universal principle. Namely, there does seem to be an insistence on human dignity in all of his writings. Bio-power, for example, represents a deep affront to one's body which Foucault finds particularly onerous. His "declaration of human rights" too seems to require the idea of human dignity. His reluctance to admit to this is no doubt a chief cause of frustration for his critics.

Question: And what, then shall we do?

Foucault: Well, if you want to do something, why don't you start trying to make San Quentin less horrendous?

Question: No, that doesn't answer the question. If you're in the tradition of unmasking the origins of moral codes and our ethical practices, then where do you stand? How can you have any values at all? How can you have any grounds for action, even for joining a league for prison reform?[157]

Nowhere does Foucault explicitly refer to a principle of dignity of course, but even if one agrees that such a principle is latent in his work this does not imply that a humanism resides there. Neither does it function as the universal core of morality, nor hint at a fundamental ontology of man.

One should remember that the slogan "Foucault is an anti-humanist" refers primarily to his rejection of phenomenology. It does not mean that he rejects such sentiments as solidarity, respect, dignity, etc. In his essay "What is Enlightenment?", Foucault raises this point against Habermas and his other critics (FR 32-50, esp. FR 44). Humanism is no guarantee of emancipation, but rather is a disguised conservatism. It is in what he identifies as the Enlightenment task of self-creation that he believes that the values he shares with Habermas and others will be preserved.

Still the point is, Habermas would undoubtedly respond, that Foucault cannot insinuate his genealogy, based as it is on the ubiquity of power, into the project of the Enlightenment which requires an outside of power. The legitimacy of Foucault's aestheticism as a contemporary form of ethics, according to Habermas, depends upon its subversive potential for regimes of power. But since their is no outside of power, even in the later Foucault, he can share the values of the Enlightenment only by recourse to an aesthetic decisionism. That is, Foucault simply decides for his position without any compelling, necessary reason for doing so. This decisionism is a fundamental violation of the rationalism required by Enlightenment.

Two points thus need to be addressed; does Foucault's aestheticism violate his account of genealogy and power, and is the charge of decisionism worrisome in any case. Foucault eschewed all totalizations, including the one that man is produced by power. It is true that he does not think that a separation of knowledge and power is possible and that man has become the subject that we know within a certain regime of power-knowledge. Particularly, he claims that bio-power is essential for understanding how we have become who we are; it is not the only factor however.

What is ruled out by genealogy is a strict voluntarism. People do not and simply cannot decide what they want to be. It rules out too a primordial origin or telos which could count as a fundamental truth about man. A trajectory of progress cannot therefore be imposed on the history of man. This does not rule out though Foucault's version of aestheticism which excludes pure decisionism. Even turning one's life into a work of art is constrained by what Foucault has called "ethics" (cf. The Use of Pleasure). When he says that our lives should become like works of art he is not reformulating Sartre's productive nihilism. He is not saying that out of an absurd nothingness we should create ourselves as meaningful subjects. Foucault is more historical and so more cautious. He only says that we must create ourselves by shedding what we need not be. This does not mean that the subject has a definite ontological structure now obscured by sedimentations of the life-world. The paring away of what we need no longer be arrives at an historical necessity, not an ontological one. The "infinite task" of Foucault's aestheticism is the constant questioning of our history.

Habermas would still want to know why one should even bother with this task. His question is "why fight at all". He thinks, as we have seen, that a norm is required to justify engagement. Foucault's motive for involvement, it is true, can only be justified pragmatically. Like Rorty, Foucault considers this to be the only possible justification now that traditional metaphysics is no longer tenable. We fight, we treat ourselves as works of art and so on, because that way we get what we want. Doing something on pragmatic grounds is not decisionism. Decisionism is having no grounds whatsoever.

It is perhaps fairer to Habermas though to say that his position is that one must have good reasons for doing something, and that he does not regard pragmatic considerations as good reasons. This seems to beg the question however. Perhaps morality, like religion, is not fundamentally rational, or that the criterion of rationality in them is not the same as that for positive science. A good reason for Habermas is one that every rational subject must accept—here his Kantianism is obvious. Habermas can only make sense of what this means with a highly dubious account of language, ideal speech situations, linguistic competency, etc. Furthermore, although in his scheme, rationality imposes a norm on all rational subjects just in virtue of their being rational, one can still ask why be rational or why try to reach consensus. Being a language user does not oblige me to be rational. Being a rational language user helps me avoid contradictions, but why I should want to do that seems to have no other answer than "I want to avoid contradiction" and "being rational helps me get what I want". In fact, as Elster has shown being rational does not always help get us what we want. The point is that once one gives up the notion of an ultimate ground, of transcendental reason for example, then one is left only with pragmatic grounds and pragmatic or practical reason.

3. Emancipation

It is merely to beg the question to claim that without truth there can be no critique and no emancipation. It is to presume that emancipation is a state of affairs that can be intentionally brought about by action with regard to truth. There is a bias which requires that action be intended before one allows that it may promote emancipation. There is I think in Foucault's proposal to treat life as a work of art a way to conceive of emancipation without this bias.

But first something needs to be said about the charge that the pervasiveness of power, and not just the absence of truth, makes emancipation impossible. Empirically Foucault is surely correct in pointing to the pervasiveness of power. He maintains however that power is not only repressive and dominating, it is productive and it engenders its own opposition (HS 94-95). Lacan and others have maintained that immersion in relations of power are even necessary for there being a subject at all. Lacan and others have argued that the result of not entering into the symbolic order of language—which means into power relations—is not a free subject, but rather no subject at all; schizophrenia being the clinical manifestation of this. society without relations of power is impossible. This does not mean that a primordial truth about man can only show itself in form mangled by power, and whose demise will allow that truth's recuperation. It means that even when one creates oneself as a work of art, one always does so within a tradition, within a history; there is no alternative. .

Emancipation is possible in Foucault's scheme, but one must discard the political model of emancipation which considers it to be a sort of revolution. Jon Elster, I think, provides a way of how we might think of the possibility of emancipation within power relations but without the heroic intentional action which Habermas and others seem to want. I think this mechanism of Elster's is present in Foucault, though not explicitly.

Emancipation can be conceived of as a state which Elster calls a "by-product".

Some mental and social states appear to have the property that they can only come about as the by-product of action undertaken for other ends. They can never, that is, be brought about intelligently or intentionally, because the very attempt to do so precludes the state one is trying to bring about...I shall refer to them as "states that are essentially by-products"...Moreover, whenever we observe that some such state is in fact present, it is tempting to explain it as the result of action designed to bring it about—even though it is rather a sign that no such action was undertaken.[158]

Elster gives a number of amusing examples of states which are essentially by-products. Sleep is the paradigm; no amount of willing can cure insomnia. In fact willing will always deny one sleep. Being natural, spontaneous, admirable, are all states which too can only be by-products. Being cultured is a state which will always escape the petit bourgeoisie because the essence of culture is to possess it without acquiring it.[159]

States that are by-products cannot be brought about by instrumental reason. This is not to say that there is no role for reason; an insomniac may reason that it is better to avoid drinking coffee, for example. But states that are by-products are not consequences which can be guarantied by rational action. They may even be instrumentally useful while being the consequence of an irrational action. Elster's example is taken from elsewhere.

It is commonplace that behaviour which is not motivated by instrumental considerations may yet be instrumental in securing both the general interests and the individuals own interest. The Prussian soldiers who regarded themselves on leave from death did not set out to serve their own interests, but they were on average less likely to suffer casualties than soldiers less self-abnegating.[160]

Now I want to say that emancipation, liberation or even the ideal speech situation, are very much like states which are by-products. They cannot be guarantied, and since they require people to act morally they cannot be reduced to intentions only. Reasoning in order to be moral is even self-defeating since it betrays the spontaneity, sincerity and selflessness which characterise moral action. The point is that emancipation may be a by-product of a process which includes creating a work of art with one's life. The ideal state would then be a by-product also, and not the result of instrumental reason as Habermas and Taylor think.

In fact in Foucault what is at stake in any struggle is not "emancipation" or "liberation". Both these notions misconstrue social reality since they remain tied to a juridical notion of power. The political goal of Foucault is to resist normalising power, particularly bio-power. So that his rejection of Habermasian engagement should in no way imply a unworldly Stoicism or political quietism.

I think that there is plenty of evidence in Foucault's work to suggest that his position is what I have described. His anti-humanism is precisely the belief that knowledge, beliefs and practices cannot be made sense of by referring them to an intentional act of consciousness. The foundation of archaeology and genealogy is that instrumental reason cannot account for the historicity of the subject. His various formulations of epistemes, discourse and power-knowledge are ways to account for human states of affairs without invoking intention or reason.

Foucault's general program has, I have maintained, always downplayed the role of the cogito. One sees evidence for this in specific examples he discusses. Again in the discussion on popular justice he says, for example, that ideology underlying the traditional judicial system serves the interest of the bourgeoisie though without their complicity.

These ideological effects on the plebs have been incontestable and profound. The effects on the proletariat are also incontestable. This system is, in a sense, very subtle and works relatively well, even though the bourgeoisie is blind to the basic relations and real processes (PK 23).

Discussing how to treat one's life as a work of art Foucault also indicates the indirect nature of the process. He was asked about this aesthetic project.

Question: Of course, this kind of project is very common in places like Berkeley where people think that everything from the way they eat breakfast, to the way they have sex, to the way they spend their day, should itself be perfected.

Foucault: But I am afraid in most of these cases, most of the people think if they do what they do, if they live as they live, the reason is that they know about desire, life, nature, body, and so on (FR 35O).

As we have seen already it is the creative activity itself which produces the aesthetic object, and not the rational pursuit of truth. Leading such a life is ridiculous if too consciously pursued; like the frantic attempt to be fashionable or cultured, the aesthetic ideal will always recede from one's grasp.

Foucault's open-minded attitude towards reason means that, unlike Habermas, he does not perceive a threatening gulf between modernism and postmodernism. He construes Kant's answer to the question, "What is Enlightenment", not as a demand for rationalization of the life-world, but as a call for a constant criticism of the present. Foucault shares Lyotard's postmodernism in as much as he rejects the role of reason as a metadiscursive legitimation of modernity. There is no single form of reason that could function in that manner.

...I am not prepared to identify reason entirely with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate...For me, no given form of rationality is actually reason. So I do not see how we can say that the forms of rationality which have been dominant...are in the process of collapsing and disappearing...Other forms of rationality are created endlessly. So there is no sense at all to the proposition that reason is a long narrative which is now finished, and that another narrative is under way.[161]

One of the points of Foucault's genealogies is to show that it makes very little sense to say, "here rationality or irrationality is at work". Such generalities have no descriptive or explanatory force. Within the changing forms of rationality the question which remains is, "who are we". Continuing the legacy of the Enlightenment means continuing to pose this question, not rooting out irrationality wherever it can be found. According to Foucault this question was first posed by Kant, and posed in search of "an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves".[162]

As we have seen, the critical effect of such an ontology is Foucault's hope that it may free us from being what we have become but need not be. This "emancipation" for Habermas is a product of reaching consensus within an ideal speech situation. On this point Foucault and Habermas are in considerable disagreement. Habermas does say though that his study of distorted communication parallels Foucault's genealogy,

I too think that relations of power are incorporated in the least ostensive forms of communication, and that analysis of systematically distorted communication yields results analogous to Foucault's analysis of discourse.[163]

Despite the complement, Habermas is probably to "ecumenical" in his evaluation.

A study of distorted communication can only ever point to a lack of consensus or agreement, the reasons for which are, as we saw, unequal access to speech acts, coercion, lying and so on. If one takes Foucault's account of the creation of sexuality, for example, then the inappropriateness of Habermas's analysis is readily apparent. Sexuality was not produced only by communication, whether distorted or not. A range of techniques and practices were involved, which no amount of agreement could ever dispose of. One of Habermas's critics has made the same point with a different example, "Even the most flawlessly democratic and equal community of Classical Greeks could not have discovered the laws of thermodynamics in the absence of modern optics."[164] The point is that there are historical constraints and developments which have nothing to do with communication. Presumably for Habermas modern sexuality of the Marcusian sort is the outcome of distorted communication, but what would it look like if instead it had emerged from an ideal speech situation? In fact we do not know, nor can we. Nothing follows from the admonition "reach consensus". The conditions for an ideal speech situation are purely formal, they give no hint of their possible content.

This raises a methodological problem for Habermas; in the absence of the product of consensus how, except in the most brutally obvious coercive cases, does one know that consensus is lacking. More simply, without consensus sexuality (which cannot be formally arrived at) how do we know that we have nonconsensus sexuality. Habermas can only argue in a circle. The history of sexuality makes plain that to speak of distorted communication or consensus is to miss the point. If sexuality is created by techniques, practices, institutions and discourse—all of which are infused with power—then there is no other ideal or true sexuality which underlies the only one we know. To think otherwise is to be one of Ricoeur's masters of hermeneutic suspicion.

Of course there is a great deal of nonconsensus and distorted communication surrounding such things as sexuality and punishment. Foucault does not deny that, he only denies that consensus or the ideal speech situation can function as a regulatory principle, that is, a principle that says in this way (consensus-) truth is determined. As a regulatory principle of truth, consensus can only ever be assumed and is ahistorical. Foucault does accept that consensus can function as a critical principle.

...It is perhaps a critical idea to maintain at all times: to ask oneself what proportion of nonconsensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of nonconsensuality is necessary or not, and then one may question every power relation to that extent. The furthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality (FR 379).

Critics question Foucault's recourse to this position on the grounds that he offers no reasons or ground for being against nonconsensus. Without some norm they claim he has no reason for favouring one regime of power over another. Surprisingly one does find the later Foucault referring to the rights of individuals. Asked too why he avoids polemics, for example, Foucault answered in a way that Habermas would wholly endorse.

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them...A whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other. In the serious play of question and answers, in the reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion (FR 381).

Foucault has also invoked the notion of rights in more obviously political and everyday struggles. For example, of homosexual rights he has said, "it is important to have the possibility—and the right—to choose your own sexuality..."[165] Most dramatic of all is Foucault's statement on behalf of the Comité International contre le Piraterie in support of its actions for the protection of Vietnamese boat people. Published posthumously in Liberation, it was given by the paper's editors the not inappropriate title "Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l'Homme". It is worth quoting at length.

We are here only as private individuals, who have no other claim to speak, and to speak together, than a certain shared difficulty in accepting what is happening...

Who, then, has commissioned us? No one. And that is precisely what establishes our right. It seems to me we must bear in mind three principles which I believe, guide this initiative...

1. There exists an international citizenry, which has its rights, which has its duties, and which promises to raise itself up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author or the victim...

2. ...It is the duty of this international citizenry always to make an issue of this misfortune, to keep it in the eyes and ears of governments—it is not true that they are not responsible. People's misfortune must never be the silent remainder of politics. It founds an absolute right to rise up and to address those who hold power.

3. ...Experience shows that we can and must reject the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation which we are offered. Amnesty International, Terre des Homme, Medecins du Monde are initiatives which have created a new right: the right of private individuals actually to intervene in the order of politics and international strategies. The will of individuals must inscribe itself in a reality over which governments have wanted to reserve a monopoly for themselves—a monopoly which we must uproot little by little every day.[166]

This does seem to strike a discordant note with the Foucault who warned about the ubiquity of power and the poverty of right. In 1976 he wrote,

The system of right, the domain of the law, are permanent agents of...relations of domination, these polymorphous techniques of subjugation. Right should be viewed, I believe, not in terms of a legitimacy to be established, but in terms of the methods of subjugation it instigates (PK 96).

Foucault did of course later admit to over-emphasizing the aspect of domination in his analysis of power, still one can defend the consistency of his position. In that same lecture he makes clear that a moral or political anarchism is not the consequence of his thought, he even suggests there that a new form of right might be possible.

If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but towards the possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty (PK 108).

Foucault is opposed to a legalism which confines right to that which is sanctioned by law. It would be a blatant contradiction if he opposed a natural theory of right to that legalism, but that is not his position.

It is possible to see in his CICP statement a new form of right not based on the principle of sovereignty. Indeed Foucault says that it is the absence of a sovereign which establishes rights. What establishes our right to oppose governments, laws, policies, etc, is not a charter, but simply the misfortunes of others. Foucault could hardly be more ethical and less the prophet of power. Habermas points out though that at least since Kant, a principle other than that of the sovereign and his monopoly on violence has been sought as the foundation of rights. He implies that it is disingenuous of Foucault not to acknowledge this. According to Ian Hacking, Foucault does acknowledge Kant; he claims that Foucault's ethics is a Kantianism.[167] In both Kant and Foucault, says Hacking, ethics is founded on an act of freedom which is outside the scope of our knowledge; in other words, in both, ethics is not grounded in knowledge, but is not outside reason. But according to Hacking therefore, "Those who criticize Foucault for not giving us a place to stand might start their critique with Kant".[168]

There is no doubt that this is a rebuke to Habermas and his own attempt to broaden Kant's ethics with the insights of a theory of communicative action. Not surprisingly this leads to a discussion of what philosophy is capable of. Habermas shares with Foucault the conviction that philosophy does not tell people how to behave, nor teach them what the good life is. Habermas remains distinctly modern in contrast to Foucault though, when it comes to moral theory. Whereas Habermas seeks a universal core to moral theory, Foucault did not relent on his historicism. According to Habermas, "in morality it is only the universal core of the moral point of view which is a matter for philosophy"[169] Since nothing concrete follows from the determination of the universal core of morality however, this position does not differ in effect from Foucault's equally formal assertion of our rights. In both cases the context or application of morality is determined by actors in the life-world and cannot be deduced from any precept or theory. But whereas Habermas still insists on a peculiar role for philosophers in the life-world, Foucault regards philosophy as essentially an interdisciplinary affair; without history especially, philosophy is blind.

4. Norms

I think the question of norms largely disappears if what I have said about aesthetics and states that are by-products in Foucault is true. Some norms are simply not efficacious. Nancy Fraser is surely wrong when she exaggeratingly claims that Foucault has not realized that normative questions are inescapable and lie at the very depth of our language.[170] This is not to say that there are no norms in Foucault. The norm to create yourself as a work of art is a peculiar one however and needs to be distinguished from norms that tell us how to behave and how not to. A comparison with Moritz Schlick helps bring this to light . He revised his hedonism to read not, "Do what you can to be happy", but "Be ready for happiness", realizing the former to be self-defeating."[171] At the most these norms can tell us what not to do; like advising the insomniac to avoid coffee. I think the same idea is present in Foucault when he says,

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political "double bind", which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures (MF 216).[172]

Traditional norms, which Foucault's critics charge him with omitting, produce a double bind because they do not fundamentally challenge the contemporary structure of power-knowledge, but rather disastrously commit one to it. Foucault's negative norm is a way out from the present regime.

E. Conclusion

In the end then Foucault does accomplish what Habermas and Taylor recommend but claim he is unable to do. In fact the efficacy of their own solution is in doubt based as it is on the use of reason in the search for truth. It is not at all clear that the ideal state can be approached instrumentally, or even what truth and reason refer to in human affairs anyway. Foucault is not an irrationalist however, his refusal to be blackmailed by the Enlightenment indicates a well founded doubt about the role of instrumental reason in human affairs. In place of the traditional rational cogito he offers the aesthetic subject as the possible guarantor Enlightenment. The aesthetic norm is a reasoned acknowledgement of the limits of reason just as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was. To refuse to be who we are, who we are told to be, may be the way to achieve the maturity which Kant says is the goal of Enlightenment.

Chapter XII: Conclusion

Judging the success of Foucault's work, Habermas takes the line that a formal incoherence vitiates it. Of course it is legitimate and worthwhile to look for inconsistencies and contradictions within a text. Not being a systematic philosopher, such things are to be found in Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, for example, we have seen that an incoherence in his account of discourse led him to abandon the position he had developed there and in The Order of Things. We have seen too that Foucault has been troubled throughout his work by a conflict between his rejection of a deep self and of his seeming acceptance of such things as a pure body, a pure madness, and pure pleasure. Finally, in his last works he sought an new ethic based on an aesthetics of existence, despite the pervasiveness of bio-power which would seem to undermine it. According to Habermas these contradictions are an artifact of Foucault's insensitivity to normative questions. He says Foucault requires a notion of what man truly is, something which his rejection of hermeneutics forbids him.

In The Use of Pleasure Foucault suggests a pragmatic ascetic criterion by which he would like to be judged.

The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one's history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently (UP 9).

...What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known...The "essay"—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergos changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication—is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an "ascesis", askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought (UP 9).

This ascetic theme is in fact present throughout Foucault's work. His concern has always been the history of the present and to think differently about ourselves. What we must question now is how effective genealogy has been for this project; this involves questioning the critical function of history and thought for an ethics as aesthetics.

What then is the efficacy of Foucault's genealogy of the subject for living and thinking differently? It no doubt served him well early on when he was concerned to undermine phenomenology's extreme privileging of the subject, but whether, as he seems to say, it can become the basis of a modern ethic is more questionable. In fact this difficulty is already evident in his early switch from archaeology to genealogy. Archaeological analysis of discourse which was able to leave out the constitutive subject, seemed also to leave out the ethical world in which the real subject acted. That is, it left out the power relations which became central to genealogical analysis. Until The Use of Pleasure and the work on "governmentality", genealogy too failed to adequately represent the subject in the life-world by overlooking his relation to himself. It is precisely that relation which Foucault believes could be the theme of a modern ethic.

Foucault did not actually address directly what a modern ethic would require, so that there are only fragments of his thought on this in a few last texts and interviews. It is clear though that he thought a meaningful modern ethic could not be grounded on either religion or science, nor, he said, do we want the state involving itself in our private lives (GE 231). He believed that an ethics not based on law, religion or science, existed in the Greek's aesthetics of existence and thought we required something similar.

As we have seen, Foucault did indicate that philosophy had a fairly direct link to the sort of ethics he envisaged. In philosophy as "ascesis" one tries to get free of oneself as a prelude to discovering new forms of subjectivity. But asking himself whether his genealogical studies in fact helped him to do so, Foucault could only answer that they had allowed him to rethink differently what he had already thought, and to have given him a new perspective on his project of a history of truth (UP 11). For that he particularly credited the kind of alienating, but penetrating insight that only history in the form of genealogy allows.

Thus it might be objected that Foucault's historical ontology commits the genetic fallacy[173]. For example it could be said that the reasons he gives for why we came to be subjects with a sexuality are not reasons why we now say we have one. To take another example; Philipe Aries has shown that the idea of purgatory, though always a marginal idea in Christianity, only became credible and popular in the 16th and 17th centuries when it was linked to a new need to personally intercede on the behalf of a particular dead person, and to new conceptions of heaven, hell and redemption.[174] Yet it is true that today if someone were to say that so and so is in purgatory awaiting the final judgement, he probably would not mean any of the things that someone in the 16th century did. The average believer today does not even know the history of the idea of purgatory.

The genetic fallacy is a danger for historical ontology therefore. Ironically it is no threat to hermeneutic ontology; the discipline Foucault rejects. Hermeneutic's answer to the question of why someone today would say they have a sexuality is that today they do have one. But not every historical explanation is a genetic fallacy of course. To accuse Foucault of committing it, it would have to be shown that there is a gap between why sexuality historically became a problem and why it is a problem today. That gap cannot just be ignorance of the historical conditions which gave rise to the idea, without making the argument true by definition. After all Foucault is not saying that when one says "I have a sexuality which is a deep hermeneutic truth of my being", that one has in mind all the historical facts that contribute to one being able to say that.

The genetic fallacy consists in saying that because it was true then, it is true now. The fallacy is that the conditions for its truth then, may no longer be conditions for its truth today. This then is an empirical matter; does the historical story Foucault tells convince or not, that is, do we recognize the history of sexuality in our present discourse on sex. Returning to the example of purgatory; one might say that the history of that idea no longer figures in contemporary discourse. In that case one no longer means all the things by purgatory that was once meant. If "the meaning is in the use", then purgatory does not mean what it once meant, even if one has shown that the discourse of the middle ages was a condition of possibility for present discourse. In that case it would be a genetic fallacy to think one has shown why we say what we do about purgatory by revealing the history of the idea.

The status of the "deep self" is perhaps less clear. The idea that each of us is a being of depth, an individual with a private life and the right to guard that privacy is fundamental to our idea of ourselves. Even when the individualism or the narcissism of our culture is bewailed, or when less "developed" societies are praised for their sense of community which industrialisation has not yet had a chance to extinguish, it is not the idea of the self which is criticised, but the selfishness of the self. Nevertheless the self does have a history and a genealogy. To what extent philosophy is responsible for fostering the idea of the self is difficult to say, but it is at least clear that philosophy with its emphasis on the cogito reflects its beginning in the 17th century and its subsequent development.[175]

The self is not just a philosophical conceit however. If today we live as private selves, then perhaps people like the solitary Rousseau, really did experience a new sensibility towards the individual. What the Romantics did to the self is well known, but their exaggeration no doubt echoes a more banal and broad based sentiment. It has been said that the nineteenth century is the first century of the bourgeoisie.[176] Privacy, the need for it and the right to it, especially marks a new development. This is expressed in the new valuation of romance, the young couple, the honeymoon, the delay of children, the keeping of diaries and so on. The privacy insisted on for sexuality and the celebration of its pleasures within private and often secret relationships, is particularly noteworthy in the 19th century.

The point is that perhaps today we do have a deep self. It may not be a hermeneutic depth, but it nevertheless has a reality for us. A sort of secular solipsism is part of our cultural heritage. "I am my world"[177] for us means I have a private life. Perhaps the emphasis on sexuality today is precisely because it is often the most private aspect of our private lives.

Whether we should be nominalists about the self is not then the issue. We are in no position anyway to give up the self, and it is not genealogy's task to convince us to do so. We do not just pick and choose who we are. The role of the self in processes of normalization is another matter. Genealogy's task there is to reveal the complicity of the rise of the self in that process. This Foucault has done particularly in his account of the medicalization of the body. The self with a sexuality may be for us a comfort and a final barrier against an intrusive world, but it is also a focus and mechanism of power.

It is not difficult however, to imagine cases where genealogy would make no difference to present practice or thought, and so lead to no new forms of subjectivity. Aries' fascinating history of western attitudes towards death from the early middle ages to the present with its documentation of burials, tombstones, prayers for the dead, last rites and so on in times past evokes a world strangely alien from our own. The question therefore is what difference can the past have for me. It is not likely that knowing the history of death would make any difference to how I would react to the death of someone I know. Knowing the history of sexuality, or the workings of power may have no effect either.

Perhaps if we think the way we do about death, sexuality, criminality, etc;, it is because we need to think like that. Blumenberg, Cassirer, Wittgenstein and others have argued that the well-being of human life requires certain forms of thinking. So that while we may not need to think the way we do of sexuality, madness, or even religion, we are not just free not to think of them or to think anything we want of them. For this reason too we reject a physiologist's account of sex, or a neurologist's view of the person, not because they are wrong, but because they do not describe how we live with sex or with people.

This constraint on thought, it has been argued, reflects our being-in-the-world. For example, Blumenberg says that myth or mythical thought, is necessary since only it can create for us a livable space within a world which threatens us. In a similar vein Strawson says that we could never give up our moral attitudes, and Wittgenstein says that we could not doubt such things as having a body or that what appears to be my hand is so, since to seriously do it would upset everything about the way we live. In fact some people can legitimately doubt that they have a body and it is catastrophic for them. Oliver Sacks relates the story of one of his patients he calls "the disembodied lady". Her proprioceptive nervous system was so damaged that her body lost virtually all sensation of itself. "I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself...it has no sense of itself", Sacks reports her as saying. To regain control of her body she had to rely entirely on sight; the way one controls such devices as mechanical arms or robots. Wittgenstein says that normally it makes no sense to say, à la Moore, "I know I have a hand", but Sacks' patient, whose body retained a sensitivity to superficial stimulus delighted in riding in an open car, did say; "I feel the wind on my arms and face, and then I know, faintly, I have arms and a face."[178]

This indicates that one never normally doubts such things as having a body, that it is nearly impossible to empathise with what it is like to be able to seriously do so, that it is catastrophic to be able to, and that those who can need to compensate for it to be able to function. It may be that all aspects of our life can be alienated from us, but probably not without cost and not for ever. In war for example, many such commonplaces are suspended, but when hostilities cease there does appear to be a need to build monuments, hold parades, give medals and so on. Blumenberg would say this represents the necessary mythicisation of the world for our well being.[179]

This necessity indicates the symbolic nature of the human being and the human life-world. To what extent Foucault can really be "beyond hermeneutics" is limited therefore. If the point is to discover what we are no longer free to be, the nature of that which constrains us, or that which we are not free not to be, must count for something. Perhaps these constraints represent some sort of hermeneutic or anthropological depth. Foucault's admission that moral codes have not changed much in our history lends some credence to this view. The necessity to think of sex within an ethical, or even an erotic framework, means that we cannot just think of it as an historical oddity bound to be eclipsed. Its meaning for us, functions like a hermeneutic depth. If we do not understand sex or sexuality morally or erotically, then we do not understand it as a human phenomenon at all.

Still I do not think that Foucault commits the genetic fallacy. First he is not saying that what was once meant by sexuality is what is meant today, or that what was true of it then is true today. Rather he says that it is a new idea, it did not exist before the 18th century. Second he is not saying we mean today by sexuality all the conditions which have made it possible for us to speak about it. Foucault says all that is what we "silently think" (UP 9), by which he means precisely what we do not have in mind. Third, he hopes to have shown in his history that Greek, Roman and Christian ethics, confessional practices and the bio-political control of the body remain the conditions today for someone saying that the deep truth of his being lies in his sexuality.

On the other hand one might refer to such a deep truth because one wants to affirm the importance and legitimacy of sex in our lives, or because one wants to defend homosexuality against censure, or because one is convinced by Freud's account of childhood. Still it remains true that all that could be done without our notion of sexuality as other cultures and times have made clear. Foucault's point, which must be debated on its historical merits if he is to be accused of committing the genetic fallacy, is that we have not escaped the dominating technologies, including techniques of the self, which are the conditions for our still meaning by sexuality: "the deep truth of my being". After all if we do not just choose the problems the life-world contains, neither do we just choose the answers we have given. The burden of proof should lie on those who want to show that our history does not account for our choices, problems and solutions, and not on those who do.

I do not think either that Foucault's genealogical project to "think differently" is scuttled by considerations such as these. As we have seen, he has maintained that it is not enough that certain practices be symbolic to insure their ontological stability. Sexuality may express much more than sexual behaviour, but nevertheless it only exists in virtue of a series of historically analysable doctrines and material practices which are not symbolic of anything else. What seems to be the case is that some symbols are disenchanted by their history and others not. Religion, for example, seems to bear its history well. Foucault's position is that sexuality and the deep self in general, to the extent that they have a normalising function, cannot withstand their genealogy. If that is true, there is at least a prima facie legitimacy to the suggestion that since we have not always been this way, we need not remain so.

Regardless, the world always requires a subjectivity of us of course, i.e., we can never be purely unconstrained intellectual beings. This is perhaps why Foucault sees in revolt an affirmation of subjectivity.

It is through revolt that subjectivity (not that of great men but that of whomever) introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life.

Of course the exact form subjectivity takes, is not determined only by revolt, and certainly not by thought. Who we are is determined by our imprecise way of being in the world. This, Foucault says, is why our lives have the form of a history and not an evolution. Genealogy's role in the formation of subjectivity therefore can only be indirect and slow going; it is one tool in a struggle.

The question facing Foucault though is his own, can one by thinking the past, think one's present differently? In other words; what is the efficacy of thought, particularly of historical thought? Can we really promote "new forms of subjectivity" (GE 212, 216), or even a new ethics. Does the life-world permit such activism. In the main Foucault does not address these points directly, though it is clear that he does not think that anything like "pure thought" can function in this way. The salutary effect of genealogy is that it creates a space wherein we can think subjectivity anew. Furthermore, as I have argued, Foucault does seem to be sensitive to the idea that in ethics much of what we desire is not instrumentally attainable. That is, thought cannot simply decide for a new subjectivity. Genealogy is not the working out of a new subjectivity, but a questioning of what we already are.

Those who detect a decadence in genealogy for its failure to provide answers, exaggerate the role of thought in the life-world. They assume that the world has the form of a question for which there is an answer. The debunking that genealogy accomplishes is not however simply an intellectual exercise, and besides, the life-world does not need genealogy to replace what it calls into question. Genealogy is only decadent for those like Husserl who make the life-world dependent on thought. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Foucault, because they have a less intellectualistic view of the life-world are never threatened by nihilism or decadence. For them modesty in thought can have no catastrophic consequences.

Genealogy does point to our existential rootedness in a life-world that is not reducible to a transcendental consciousness. This means that despite genealogy's debunking, the life-world will always demand a response from us. Nihilism is not possible in such a world, because nothing is ever only an intellectual problem. Sexuality, for example, does not disappear from our lives just because genealogy renders it ontologically suspect; indeed Foucault often spoke of the right to choose one's own sexuality. We still have to live as beings who make love, marry, have children, etc. That imposes on us the need to understand ourselves as lovers, parents, friends and so on, for which a notion like sexuality may well be necessary. But a genealogy of sexuality does provide us the opportunity to ask what degree of normalization exists in the way we live with sex, and to what extent we may dispense with it.

Genealogy or history cannot thus replace such an understanding. A sexual ethics not linked to our lived understanding of ourselves, as opposed to a scientific or historical understanding, is of little use to us. Foucault's particular turn to ethics acknowledges this, though he failed to work out the consequences of it. If that which we are not free not to be functions like a hermeneutic depth, then something like a hermeneutics is required to explicate it. Genealogy alone then does not suffice in working out the nature of the modern subject.

It is in this context that one should understand Foucault's aestheticism. Foucault is not demanding of art what he believes thought is incapable of giving. His aestheticism is based on the realization that there is a life-world, but that it does not simply present itself to us as a fait accompli. Art and artistry are models for a new form of attenuated engagement. Aestheticism is thus not a vapid narcissism in Foucault. That was never what it was in ancient Greece, from which he largely draws his inspiration. Aestheticism requires work on oneself without any presumption to truth, but nevertheless requires a rigourous self-discipline—which is why too it is not beyond power.

This is also why it is not a decisionism. It has also been claimed that any non-normative ethics or political theory is decisionistic since primacy is not afforded to reason.[180] Accordingly Foucault's aestheticism is portrayed as a blind leap, a desperate attempt to flee the ubiquity of disciplinary power. Actually aestheticism is the focussing of disciplinary power by oneself on oneself. At any rate, the claim is that had Foucault been fairer to the Enlightenment achievements of civil liberties, human rights, etc, such a leap would not have been necessary.[181] This misses the point however, genealogy and aesthetics do not disparage such gains as civil rights or lenient punishment. Foucault only points out that these gains have played a part in the creation of a subject who we perhaps need no longer be. For example, the sexual liberation movement may have reduced the level of anxiety surrounding sex, but it has also shackled us with the idea of having a true and normalizing sexuality. Genealogy makes clear that no decision will ever rid us of the notion of sexuality. Decisionism is only a threat to hyper-rationalists, where ironically the subject is free to opt out of the game of reason. In Foucault's life-world that is not an option.

To understand who we are now, philosophy must engage in a "political history of the production of truth".[182] That is, it must understand the alliance of power and truth which has made us who we are. This is not an unmasking of ideology, since in that case power would be allied with untruth. Sexuality, prisons, discipline, etc, would all be errors and illusions. For his part Foucault seeks the complicity of truth in the creation of sexual misery, decrepit prisons and so on.

That complicity rules out the Platonic identification of the true with the good. Truth is neither atemporal nor asocial, which is why it can have a political history. With regard to sexuality, Foucault shows that before sex was regarded as a matter of truth or reason, it was a subject of aesthetics. The point is that we are no better off for its colonization by truth, and that the rationalization of sex supports a normalizing power apparatus. That is why for Foucault the point of philosophy is not to think the truth, but to think differently. When the truth no longer serves our interests, as in the case of sexuality, philosophy's task is to try to imagine a new truth—that is, to see things differently.

Philosophy for Foucault does not seek the unchangeable amid the changing, but rather to identify that which can be changed in that which is presumed static. That is why his philosophy is inherently both historical and political.[183] It is also what gives it its vitality.

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Return to Table of Contents

NOTES

^{^[1]}When Maladie Mentale et Personalite was reissued in 1960, Foucault drastically revised it, dropping most of the existential-psychology jargon, adding a second part, and changing the title to Maladie Mentale et Psychologie. The book was thus brought into line with his more recent work on the history of madness.

^{^[2]}Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Ibid. 393.

^{^[3]}"Questions of Method: An interview with Michel Foucault", Ideology and Consciousness, Spring, no. 8, 1981. Quoted in Keith Gandal, "Foucault's Politics", Telos, Spring, no. 67, 1986, p. 123.

^{^[4]}Ibid. 11-12.

^{^[5]}Ibid. 13.

^{^[6]}Philippe Aries in The Hour of Our Death, and Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis, make this same point.

^{^[7]}Hayden White does not seem to have grasped Foucault's insistence on the need to look outside of the cogito for an adequate explanation of knowledge. He points in the right direction but draws the wrong conclusions. Despite all that Foucault has said about the death of man, the role of history and his theory of discourse, all of which decentre man, White still believes that he is interested in "deep structures of consciousness".

Foucault shares with Levi-Strauss and Lacan an interest in the deep structures of consciousness, a conviction that study of such deeps structures must begin with an analysis of language, and a conception of language that has its origins in the work of the recognized father of Structural linguistics, Fernand de Saussure. All three thinkers proceed on the assumption that the distinction between language on the one side and human phenomena on the other must be dissolved if human phenomena are to be understood as what they truly are, that is to say, elements of a communication system. (Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground", History and Theory, 12, 1973, p. 23).

White is correct that Foucault, Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Saussure share a common interest, but he is wrong about most everything else. Foucault is not interested in deep structures of consciousness. He is interested in showing how subjectivity is constituted without reference to consciousness. Foucault does not believe that there even are such deep structures. It is further not clear how such structures could be elements in a communication system—they would not be deep if they could be.

^{^[8]}Hayden Whites explanation of Foucault's criticism is incorrect. He says,

A science of the "human" is not possible, Foucault argues, not because man is qualitatively different from everything else in the cosmos, but because he is precisely the same as everything else. This belief that man is qualitatively different is sustained, however, by the ascription of a privileged place in the "order of things" to the thing called "language. (Hayden White, Ibid, p. 32).

Yet Foucault explicitly says that there can be no science of man precisely because man is a very peculiar and different kind of object than that of the hard sciences. If man were an object like every other then a science of him would be possible. White's statement amounts to saying that a science of physics is impossible because atoms are just like every other object

Further it is not Foucault's position that the qualitative differences between man and other objects relies on the special status of language. He says rather that it is the lack of any special status for language which has made the human sciences possible. He says explicitly (OT 386) that it is with the emergence of language in the privileged role of discourse that the demise of the human sciences is heralded.

^{^[9]}Quoted by Donald McDonell, "On Foucault's Philosophical Method", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. VII, no. 3, Sept, 1977, p. 537.

^{^[10]}Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 48).

^{^[11]}Foucault appears to have a problem therefore. Discourse is both the object of investigation and the condition of the possibility of such an investigation. He is caught, it seems, in the same empirico-transcendental paradox which he accuses the human sciences of. I shall work out later this inconsistency in his account of discourse.

^{^[12]}Dreyfus and Rabinow, Ibid. 48.

^{^[13]}Ibid. 48.

^{^[14]}Ibid. 88.

^{^[15]}Ibid. 88.

^{^[16]}Ibid. 98.

^{^[17]}Ibid. 81

^{^[18]}In Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, (Cambridge, Cambridge university Press, 1980), p. 172.

^{^[19]}Dominique Lecourt believes that had Foucault been consistent he would have embraced historical materialism. She treats The Archaeology of knowledge as a sort of prolegomenon to any future historical materialism. (Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, London, New Left Books, 1977, pp. 189-190.)

I believe that Lecourt is correct about the presence of the formative elements of a historical materialism in the book, but I think she is wrong in assessing its reticence as a failure. According to Lecourt what the book lacks is a class point of view. Foucault would agree that a class point of view is absent from the book, but not that it is missing. What Foucault insists on is the poverty of any explanation that has recourse only to the notions of class and class struggle. He points instead to determinations of discourse that have nothing to do with class, and to motors of change that have nothing to do with class struggle.

^{^[20]}Both Colin Gordon and Dreyfus and Rabinow make this point as well.

^{^[21]}Pieter Spierenburg has disputed Foucault's chronology of the disappearance of torture and the appearance of the prison. He convincingly shows that the move from the one to the other was not sudden. He does concur with Foucault though that around 1800 the penitentiary appeared and that torture largely disappeared. Although a sympathetic critic of Foucault, Spierenburg's strictly historical reading of Discipline and Punish, misses the philosophy there. He is concerned to show that the history of punishment and the prison in the eighteenth century is linked to the political genesis of the city. Foucault on the other hand is interested in the creation of the subject that we call the criminal, and more generally in the subject as a well-disciplined individual. (See, Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984.)

^{^[22]}For a more detailed history of discipline and its enforcement, see; Pieter Spierenburg, ed. The Emergence of Carceral Institutions: Prisons, Galleys and Lunatic Asylums 1550-1900. Published by the Centrum voor Maatschappij Geschiedenis, vol. 12, University of Rotterdam Press, 1984.

^{^[23]}Richard Rorty makes this point numerous times.

^{^[24]}Charles Taylor, "Understanding in Human Sciences", Review of Metaphysics, 34, Sept, 1980, p. 26.

^{^[25]}Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (LCMP 142).

^{^[26]}That disappearance has I think to do with Foucault's later notion of problématiques. He does describe The History of Sexuality as a genealogy, but as a genealogy of problems. (See, "Afterword" in MF 231 and 237.) I will return to this.

^{^[27]}Dreyfus and Rabinow, Ibid., p. 107.

^{^[28]}In the foreword to The Order of Things Foucault rejects phenomenology (OT XIV) and elsewhere identifies his intellectual roots with the same rejection. (See, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault", Telos, no. 55, 1983, p. 196-199.)

^{^[29]}Foucault is not saying that everything is alright with sex, but only that repression is not the right way to understand what is wrong with it. After all he has said, "we are all living more or less in a state of sexual misery" (see, "Power and Sex", Telos, no; 32, 1971, p. 153), and "I do not claim that sex has not been prohibited or barred or masked or misapprehended since the classical age" (HS 12).

^{^[30]}Compare for instance what Foucault said at one of his lectures,

What I tried to do from the beginning was to analyze the process of "problematization"—which means: how and why certain things (behaviour, phenomena, processes) become a problem. Why, for example, certain forms of behaviour were characterised and classified as "madness" while other similar forms were completely neglected at a given historical moment; the same thing for crime and delinquency, the same question of problematization for sexuality.

Some people have interpreted this type of analysis as a form of "historical idealism", but I think such an analysis is completely different. For when I say that I am studying the "problematization" of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such a phenomena. On the contrary, I have tried to show that it was precisely some real existent in the world which was the target of social regulation at a given moment...And even if I won't say that what is characterised as "schizophrenia" corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematised and the process of problematization.

(From "Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of PARRHESIA", notes to the seminar given by Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, 1983, Joseph Pearson, ed., lecture 6, p. 115, in private circulation.)

^{^[31]}In Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's study of medieval village life, Montaillou, this point is well illustrated. In his testimony to the Inquisition at Carcassone, Arnaud de Verniolles of Pamiers, a sub-deacon and outlawed Franciscan, admits to "homosexuality", but there is no sense in which he felt his behaviour to be perverse. It was merely a way of relieving lust, though sinful to be sure.

“I told Guillaume Ros, in perfectly good faith, that the sin of sodomy and those of fornication and deliberate masturbation were, in point of gravity, just the same. I even thought, in the simplicity of my heart, that sodomy and ordinary fornication were indeed mortal sins, but less serious than the deflowering of virgins, adultery or incest.” (Penguin Books, p. 146)

^{^[32]}Thomas Nagel, "Sexual Perversion", The Journal of Philosophy, 66, no. 1 (1969), pp. 5-17.

^{^[33]}Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, New York, The Free Press, 1986.

^{^[34]}Rush Rhees makes this point in his Without Answers, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

^{^[35]}Scruton, Ibid. "Epilogue".

^{^[36]}For a detailed discussion of the history of confession and of the use of confession manuals, the "good confession", and "sins of the flesh", see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1987.

^{^[37]}On this subject see two very fine papers; Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology", Representations, Spring 1986, no. 14, pp. 1-41. Also, Londa Schiebinger, "Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy", Ibid. pp. 42-82.

^{^[38]}“Consider first whichever parts you please, think of the man's turned inwards between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uteri (sic), with the testes lying outside next to it on either side; the penis of the male would become the neck of the cavity that had been formed; and the skin at the end of the penis, now called the prepuce, would become the female pudendum itself...In fact, you could not find a single male part left over that had not simply changed its position; for the parts that are inside in the woman are outside in the man...Now just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within mankind, the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for his perfection is his excess heat, for heat is nature's primary instrument...The woman is less perfect than the man in respect to the generative parts. For the parts were formed within her when she was still a foetus, but could not because of the defects in heat emerge and project on the outside.”

From Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans., Margaret May, vol. 2, (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), pp. 628-30. In Schiebinger, Ibid. note 20, p. 74.

^{^[39]}Rousseau's relegation of women to the lower orders on the basis of their physiology is well known. Even in Diderot's Encyclopédie, the article on the skeleton ends: "All of these facts prove that the destiny of women is to have children and to nourish them." (In Schiebinger, Ibid. p. 68).

^{^[40]}George Duby, whom Foucault cites as a source, discusses this matter in detail in The Knight, The Lady and The Priest, (Harmondsworth, Peregrine Books, 1985).

^{^[41]}Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Little, Brown and Co. (Boston, 1973), p. XIII.

^{^[42]}Tom Wicker, A Time to Die, quoted by Michael Ignatieff in A Just measure of Pain, Pantheon Books, (New York, 1978), p. XII.

^{^[43]}Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism. New Left Books, (London, 1978), p. 79.

^{^[44]}Ibid. p. 81.

^{^[45]}Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, quoted in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continum Publishing Co., (New York, 1986), p. 133.

^{^[46]}"Theory and Politics: A Discussion with Herbert Marcuse, Jûrgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz and Teleman Spengler", Telos, p. 127.

^{^[47]}Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Beacon Press, (Boston, 1974), p. 225.

^{^[48]}"Theory and Politics", Ibid. p. 140.

^{^[49]}Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p 19.

^{^[50]}Ibid. p. 12.

^{^[51]}Ibid. p. 14.

^{^[52]}Ibid. p. 35.

^{^[53]}Ibid. p. 44.

^{^[54]}From "On Hedonism", by Herbert Marcuse, quoted in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Macmillan Ltd. (London, 1984), p. 185.

^{^[55]}Foucault objects to the idea that capitalism required the repression of sexuality and to the idea that economic structures explain sexuality in the final instance. He does not think that sexuality can be understood apart from economic and material conditions however. Of power relations, which explain sexuality, he said he sought to "anchor them in the economic infrastructure...to discover them in their material play". (Interview with Bernard-Henri Levy, Telos, no. 55, 1983, p. 158).

^{^[56]}Ibid. p. 156.

^{^[57]}Compare also what Foucault says about the hermaphrodite Hercule Barbin, "...What she evokes in her past is the happy limbo of a non-identity" (HB XIII). Compare also what he says about the sexuality of children,

Some say that the child's life is sexual. From the milk-bottle to puberty, that is all it is. Behind the desire to learn to read or the taste for comic strips, from the first to last, everything is sexuality. Well, are you so sure that this type of discourse is effectively liberating? Are you sure that it will not lock children into a sort of sexual insularity? And what if, after all, they didn't give a hoot? If the liberty of not being an adult consisted just in not being a slave of the law, the principle, the locus communis of sexuality, would that be so boring after all. If it were possible to have polymorphic relationships with things, people and the body, would that not be childhood? This polymorphism is called perversity by adults, to reassure themselves, thus coloring it with the monotonous monochrome of their own sex...The child has an assortment of pleasures for which the "sex" grid is a veritable prison. (Ibid. p. 156)

^{^[58]}Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 38.

^{^[59]}Ibid. p. 39.

^{^[60]}Ibid. p. 146.

^{^[61]}Ibid. p. 199.

^{^[62]}Ibid. p. 201.

^{^[63]}4Ibid. p. 204.

^{^[64]}Ivan Illich, Gender. Pantheon Books, (New York, 1982).

^{^[65]}Ibid. p. 6.

^{^[66]}Ibid. p. 109.

^{^[67]}Ibid. p. 4.

^{^[68]}Ibid. p. 147-148.

^{^[69]}Ibid. p. 3-4.

^{^[70]}Ibid. p. 24.

^{^[71]}Ibid. p. 178

^{^[72]}Ibid. p. 178.

^{^[73]}It is true that in the very important interview of 1983, "On the Genealogy of Ethics" (MF 229-252), Foucault does refer to The Use of Pleasure as volume II of the series The History of Sexuality. The matter is not so simple however because he also suggests there that they do not belong together except in a general way. He confirms a shift in his work from a study of sex to one of techniques of the self, and adds,

...in the series about sexuality: the first one is L'Usage des Plaisirs...Then, a second volume in the same sex series, Les Aveux de la Chair, (not yet published—K. O'B.) deals with Christian technologies of the self. And, then, Le Souci de Soi, a book separate from the sex series, is composed of different papers about the self...(MF 230-231).

^{^[74]}Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview", Philosophy and Social Criticism, 1987, p. 122.

^{^[75]}Michel Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude", London Review of Books, 21 May—3 June, 1981, p. 5.

^{^[76]}On the other hand he does refer to BC, MC, OT, and DP, though without mentioning them explicitly. It is true that in the important Dreyfus and Rabinow interview that Foucault claims the ethical axis to be present in The History of Sexuality. This however is simply not accurate. There is nothing about "ethics" in The History of Sexuality. There is only an implicit reference to morality there in the criticism that prohibition has not been the fundamental manner in which sex has been treated. Indeed one does not even find "ethics" or "morality" as entrants in the book's index.

^{^[77]}In an unpublished manuscript Foucault makes somewhat more clear what this freedom of thought consists in.

...A given problematization is not an effect or consequence of a historical situation, but is an answer given by definite individuals...And the fact that an answer is neither a representation nor an effect of a situation does not mean that it answers to nothing, that it is a pure dream, or an "anti-creation". A problematization is always a kind of creation; but a creation in the sense that, given a certain situation, you cannot infer that this kind of problematization will follow.

One can only infer from a problematization what concrete aspect of the world it is answering to. (From Discourse and Truth, Ibid. p. 114-117).

^{^[78]}Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power", in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Ibid. p. 221.

^{^[79]}On the actual evolution of Christian sexual ethics, particularly regarding homosexuality, one should consult John Boswell's fine book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Foucault cites Boswell approvingly and one finds many echoes of Boswell's study in Foucault. Following Boswell, one should not think that there was a single Christian era characterised by a notion of flesh and then of sexuality. Until the late middle ages, for example, there was still a fairly "Greek" attitude towards homosexuality. Boswell shows the development of Christian ethics through the middle ages from its Greek origins which it eventually eclipsed. Foucault makes the same point with his exposition of "ethics".

^{^[80]}K.J. Dover makes the same point in his book Greek Homosexuality (London, Duckworth, 1978). Foucault's respect for Dover is clear in The use of Pleasure, he even wrote a very laudatory review of the book for the paper Liberation in 1982. Dover makes the point that forbidden acts amongst the Greeks, such as homosexual fellatio, were regarded as deeply shameful though not "against nature". Such acts were only against nature in the sense that they were non-procreative. Fellatio was forbidden and shameful because it required of one partner complete passivity and subservience. It was fit only for satyrs. (Foucault himself draws attention to this point in Dover in note 21, on page 269 of UP). In fact the preservation of the ideal of virility in homosexual relations was a difficult moral problem for the Greeks. Relationships with boys, who were not yet expected to be virile only partly solved the problem. The difficulty was to insure that the beloved boy would develop into a virile citizen; that was the responsibility of the older lover. Greek homosexuality was thus not a practice tolerated pure and simple.

^{^[81]}Ibid.

^{^[82]}Ibid. 6, also MF 234.

^{^[83]}Michel Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude", Ibid. 5.

^{^[84]}Gerard Raulet, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault", Telos, no. 55, spring 1983, p. 197.

^{^[85]}Ibid. 200.

^{^[86]}Michel Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", Economy and Society, vol. 15, Feb. 1986, p. 96.

^{^[87]}Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, (New York, The Continuum Publishing Company Co, 1986), p. IX.

^{^[88]}From, "Theory and Politics: A Discussion with Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz and Telman Spengler", Telos, no. 38, 1978-1979, p. 125.

^{^[89]}Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, (New York, The Continuum publishing Co, 1973), p. XX.

^{^[90]}Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (New York, The Continuum Publishing Co, 1986), p. 3.

^{^[91]}Horkheimer and Adorno, Ibid. p. 24.

^{^[92]}Horkheimer, Ibid. 140.

^{^[93]}Ibid. 147.

^{^[94]}Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 376.

^{^[95]}See, "Only A God Can Save Us. Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger", in Philosophy Today, winter, 1976, p. 276.

^{^[96]}Kolakowski, Ibid. 415.

^{^[97]}Horkheimer, Ibid. 246.

^{^[98]}Michel Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatum: Towards a Criticism of `Political Reason'", The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, (Cambridge, Univ. of Cambridge Press, 1981), p. 236.

^{^[99]}Ibid.

^{^[100]}Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, (Evanston, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), p. 6.

^{^[101]}P. Connerton draws attention to this aspect of critical theory in Critical Sociology, (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976), p. 16-17.

^{^[102]}Michel Foucault, "Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault", Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8, 1981, p.13.

^{^[103]}Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatum...", Ibid. 236.

^{^[104]}Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1964), p. 166.

^{^[105]}Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?", in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, Pantheon, 1984), p. 50.

^{^[106]}This point is made by Tom Bottomore, The Frankfurt School, (London, Tavistock, 1984) pp. 71-81. See also his "the Political Role of the Working Class in Western Europe", in Sociology and Socialism (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1984).

^{^[107]}Michel Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and revolution", Economy and Society, vol. 15, no. 1, Feb. 1986, p. 96.

^{^[108]}Kant says, "Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another." The motto of the Enlightenment he says is, "Aude Sapere": dare to know. Beck translates this as "Have courage to use your own reason". In, Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment", Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings. (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 286.

^{^[109]}See Telos, Ibid. 1983, and MF 231-232.

^{^[110]}Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Boston: Beacon Press) p. XIV.

^{^[111]}See Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), and Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity", Praxis International, vol. 4, 1984, pp. 32-44.

^{^[112]}Lyotard, Ibid. XXIV.

^{^[113]}Ibid. 73.

^{^[114]}Jürgen Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment", New German Critique, 1982, pp. 13-30.

^{^[115]}Quoted in Rorty, Ibid. 36.

^{^[116]}Ibid. 37.

^{^[117]}Michel Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatum...", Ibid. 2.

^{^[118]}Horkheimer and Adorno, Ibid. 9.

^{^[119]}Habermas, Ibid, pp. 21-22. My attention was drawn to this and the above quotation by David Hyley, "Foucault and the Question of Enlightenment", Philosophy and Social Criticism, 1985, pp. 63-83.

^{^[120]}Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity", New German Critique, 1981, p. 9.

^{^[121]}"The Dialectic of Rationalization: An Interview with Jürgen Habermas", with Axel Honneth, Eberhard Knodler-Buinte and Arno Widman, Telos, no. 49, 1981, p. 8.

^{^[122]}Ibid. 11.

^{^[123]}Ibid.

^{^[124]}Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, (London, Heineman Educational Books Ltd. 1981, p.194.

^{^[125]}Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1985), pp.17-18.

^{^[126]}See Thomas McCarthy's "Introduction" to The Theory of Communicative Action, Ibid. note 6, p. 403, and note 12, p. 405.

^{^[127]}Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Ibid. p. 314.

^{^[128]}The above is an abridgement of John B. Thompson fine reconstruction of Habermas's position; in, "Universal Pragmatics", Habermas: Critical Debates, John B. Thompson and David Held, eds. (London, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982), pp. 116-133.

^{^[129]}McCarthy, Ibid. note 12, pp. 405-406.

^{^[130]}Jürgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies", Philosophy and Social Criticism, 1986, p. 17.

^{^[131]}Jürgen Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics", in Habermas: Critical Debates, Thompson and Held, eds, Ibid. p. 262.

^{^[132]}Ibid.

^{^[133]}cf. David R. Hiley, "Foucault and the Analysis of Power: Political Engagement without Liberal Hope or Comfort", Praxis International, 4:2 July, pp. 192-207.

^{^[134]}Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987).

^{^[135]}Jürgen Habermas, "Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present", University Publishing, no. 13, Summer, 1984, p. 6.

^{^[136]}Ibid. 7.

^{^[137]}Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity, p. 274.

^{^[138]}Ibid. 274.

^{^[139]}Ibid.

^{^[140]}Ibid. 277.

^{^[141]}One can of course criticise without adhering to one's criticism. For example, I can criticise American imperialism without believing America to be imperialistic. In that case one could say I was insincere, or perhaps for pedagogic reasons, playing the devils advocate—in either case the effect of my discourse is unchanged.

^{^[142]}Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979).

^{^[143]}Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity, Ibid. 283-284.

^{^[144]}There is a great irony in this criticism. It acknowledges Foucault's insistence on historical scholarship, at the expense of mere theorising by making the issue decideable on the basis of historical fidelity. Further, Habermas's own work is so utterly devoid of history—like the older Frankfurt School—that his desire to engage Foucault empirically is surprising; in fact his empirical challenge is rather poor. Interestingly Paul Rabinow relates in a "Recollection" of Foucault that,

One of the few times I saw him truly angered was in response to a persistent line of questioning (arising from some remarks of Jürgen Habermas's) about his "irrationalism"...His historian's feathers were ruffled...he was angered by his opponents refusal to engage the historical specifics...(In "Recollections", University Publishing, 13, 1984, p. 16.)

^{^[145]}Habermas, Philosophical Discourse..., Ibid. 288.

^{^[146]}Ibid. 290.

^{^[147]}Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth", Political Theory, 1984, 152-153.

^{^[148]}Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", Ibid. 95.

^{^[149]}Jürgen Habermas, "Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present", University Publishing, vol. 13, Summer 1985, p. 5.

^{^[150]}Ibid. 29.

^{^[151]}Ibid. 9.

^{^[152]}Ibid. 13.

^{^[153]}Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983) p. 42.

^{^[154]}Foucault is of course no anarchist. He does after all call for popular justice. But he is wary of the traditional means of dispensing justice. He remarks that popular justice must not be vengeance and that it requires information (cf. PK 13, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35).

^{^[155]}David R. Hiley, Ibid.

^{^[156]}Taylor, Ibid. 178.

^{^[157]}0Interview with Foucault, quoted by Ian Hacking, Ibid, 6. Hacking gives no source.

^{^[158]}Elster, Ibid. 43.

^{^[159]}Ibid. 76.

^{^[160]}Ibid. 51.

^{^[161]}Foucault, Interview with Raulet, Telos, Ibid. p. 205.

^{^[162]}Foucault, "Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution", Ibid. 96.

^{^[163]}Jürgen Habermas, "Conservatism and Capitalist Crisis", in Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity, Peter Dews, ed, (London, Verso, 1986) p. 69.

^{^[164]}Ibid. 163.

^{^[165]}Michel Foucault, "Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity", interview with Bob Gallagher and Alex Wilson, The Advocate 400, 7 August, 1984, p. 27. Quoted in Tom Keenan, "The Paradox of Knowledge and Power", Political Theory, vol. 15, no. 1, 1985, p. 29.

^{^[166]}Ibid. 20-21.

^{^[167]}Ian Hacking, "Self-Improvement", University Publishing, no. 13, 1984, pp. 4-6.

^{^[168]}Ibid. 6. Indeed Foucault does refer to Kant; he identifies in the Critique of Practical Reason the imperative to create oneself in ethical action (see "On the Genealogy of Ethics...", MF252).

^{^[169]}In Peter Dews, ed, Ibid. 205.

^{^[170]}Nancy Fraser, "Foucault on Power: Empirical Insights, Normative Confusions", Praxis International, 1981-1982, pp. 272-287.

^{^[171]}Elster, Ibid. 53.

^{^[172]}5A double bind is a kind of dilemma of the sort "be spontaneous" or "be less obedient". One cannot fulfil the imperative without at the same time failing to fulfil it. Instrumental reason is no aid in a double bind. Again Elster is instructive and amusing.

On the double bind theory a person can be driven into schizophrenia by trying to satisfy impossible and contradictory demands, one important class of which are pragmatically contradictory commands. The practice of Zen employs similar means for the purpose of liberating the person from the obsession with instrumental rationality and the habit of relating to the self. The command to be spontaneous, when issued by a nagging spouse, will get you into a fix; when issued by a Zen master it could get you out of one (Elster, Ibid. 66).

^{^[173]}The genetic fallacy is the claim that because something was true, that it is true now. In Foucault's case the particular mode of the fallacy would be the claim that because something is true of our history (say, of sexuality), that it is true of it today.

^{^[174]}Philipe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1981).

^{^[175]}One recent handbook aimed at undergraduate students of philosophy is titled, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self, (Robert Solomon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988). Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a rather more sophisticated deconstruction of the self as "mind".

^{^[176]}Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, volume 1, "The Education of the Senses", Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.

^{^[177]}Wittgenstein, Tractatus, proposition 5.63.

^{^[178]}Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. (London, Duckworth, 1985), p. 51.

^{^[179]}Actually it is not obvious that myth is always so benevolent. Not every myth helps us to live in a threatening world. Nazism is an obvious example of the malevolence of myth. Marina Warner has argued too, for example, that the myth of the Virgin Mary has had many deleterious effects on the status of women. (Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. London, Picador, 1986). No doubt many other examples could be given.

^{^[180]}Richard Wolin, Ibid.

^{^[181]}Richard Wolin, Ibid. 86. Wolin is merely repeating Habermas of course.

^{^[182]}"Interview with Foucault", Bernard-Henri Levi, Ibid. 153.

^{^[183]}Ibid. 159.