5
True Discourses on Sexuality
Shortly after the appearance of Discipline and Punish Foucault initiated a new project, the study of the history of sexuality. A short prolegomenon to the project was published in 1976, tracing the methodological outlines and general themes of the larger effort. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, therefore, presented no research and contained no finished knowledge, although this did not deter critics from attacking the book as if its hypotheses were really final statements. The book is germane to this study for its development of the concept of discourse/practice and for its clarification of Foucault's antithetical relation to Western Marxists, in, this case in the form of Freudo-Marxism.
Since World War I sexuality has become a topic of increasing concern among social theorists. In the 1920s popular culture in Europe and the United States shifted away from the pre-war Victorian ethos of respectability and rushed toward a more uninhibited way of life, one that acknowledged openly the pleasures of the flesh. In the context of the Roaring Twenties, psychoanalysis was taken as a theoretical support for overturning constraints on sexuality. Freud appeared to demonstrate the validity of the new middle-class ethos: restrictions on sexual activity were harmful mentally and physically. Psychoanalytic theory provided an alibi for
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those who, rejecting Christian and bourgeois asceticism, heralded a great revolution in sexual behavior. Although isolated figures in the past, such as Charles Fourier in the nineteenth century, had advocated sexual liberation, Wilhelm Reich initiated a trend in the twentieth century which elevated sexuality to a primary place in social thought.1 Reich gave shape to a mode of thought that has grown in importance since his day. Combining ideas from Marx and Freud, he formulated a theory of sexual revolution that oriented most thinking on the topic. If Marx provided a radical critique of the organization of labor, Reich argued, so Freud invented a radical critique of the organization of love. Work and sex, he contended, needed to be freed from their capitalist and patriarchal prisons. The synthesis of Marx and Freud proposed by Reich was in his eyes a blissful union. Both thinkers were pronounced thoroughly dialectical. In addition, the history of the mode of production and mode of reproduction (or sexuality) were parallel and harmonious. Knowledge about one increased knowledge about the other. Changes in the economy and changes in sexual organization occurred simultaneously and in the same direction.
From Reich's formulation emerged a history of sex that has had great success among radical social theorists. The onset of capitalism, the story goes, marked an increase in the level of sexual repression. When the bourgeoisie took control of the social order, it instituted a regime of sexual denial never before experienced. The authoritarian bourgeois father, devoted obsessively to accumulating capital, hoarded his energies for the marketplace and factory. The preoccupation with saving extended from the realm of work to the realm of the bedroom. Financial economy was matched by spermatic economy. Freud's characterization of contemporary capitalist society as 'the high-water mark of sexual repression' was easily explained by Reich as the direct consequence of the rule of the bourgeoisie.
In the history of sexuality stemming from Reich's Freudo-
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Marxism, an assumption had crept into social theory which both Freudians and Marxists might find wanting. Reich had introduced naturalism into the theories. For Reich labor and sexuality could be reduced to bodily needs. Socialism could be understood as an improved dietary regimen, and psycho- analysis was a method of attaining more pleasureful orgasms. Marx and Freud were theorists of health - the former of nutrition, the latter of sex - and social criticism was rooted in the natural needs of the body. Since capitalism failed to provide good food for the working class and patriarchy failed to provide good sex for the working class, these social arrangements required basic transformation.
Recent Freudo-Marxists have not overcome the flaws in Reich's original positions. They have attempted, however, to update the history of sex by accounting for the loosening of sexual restrictions since World War II. Herbert Marcuse, Reimut Reiche, Michael Schneider, and others have offered explanations for the apparent collapse of bourgeois Victorianism. The severe prudishness of nineteenth-century capitalism has been converted into the frenetic sensualism of advanced capitalism. In the short space of a century sexual mores have completely altered, or so it seems. Wife swapping; swinging parties; sex therapies; pornographic or erotic films, books, and magazines; varieties of sexual aids; places like Plato's Retreat - these phenomena are evidence, in their wide proliferation, of an intense quest for sexual fulfillment and gratification.
Freudo-Marxists have explained the overnight turnabout in sexual mores in a variety of ways. Marcuse argued that the so-called sexual revolution is not a threat to the established order but only another method this order employs to control the populace.2 Although traditional repressions have been lifted, a new kind of repression of sexuality - repressive desublimation - has been substituted for the older type. Unable to maintain the asceticism of the past, capitalist society has defused the potential threat posed by demands
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for sexual liberation by channeling them into acceptable outlets. Emotional needs have been desublimated or reduced from high aspirations for aesthetic experience and social freedom and then redefined in terms that support the established reality. Community, love, and friendship, which were the promises of a higher social order contradictory to capitalism, are associated with consumer products by advertisements and made available for easy purchase. One can obtain immediate gratification through consumerism instead of through a struggle to attain sublimated forms of enjoyment. By this argument Marcuse supports the claim that capitalism is sexually repressive even in the face of the sexual revolution.
The domestication of the sexual revolution is accomplished, Marcuse argues, through a profound change in the psychic pattern of the family. The traditional authority of the father in the family has been undermined by two interrelated processes: (1) a shift toward large corporations that destroy small businesses, wiping out the property basis of patriarchy; and (2) a sweeping shift of emphasis away from the family toward the mass media, the schools, and peer groups as the child's significant others. The consequences of these transformations on child development are dramatic: 'the ego', Marcuse laments, 'shrinks to such an extent that it seems no longer capable of sustaining itself, as a self, in distinction from id and superego.3 In Freudian terms, without the father as a focus of repression for the child's instincts, the developing individual bypasses the psychic drama of resistance to authority and therefore growth of individuality. As a personal agent of authority, the father, according to Marcuse, is in a unique relation to the child, a relation that cannot be replaced by peer groups or state agencies. The intense, intimate relation of father and child is the sole basis for later autonomy when the super-ego becomes solidified in the personality structure.
The 'fatherless society' so bemoaned by the Frankfurt School produces the conditions for fascism. Without a strong
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super-ego the individual is unable to resist external authority. An ambivalent relationship arises between the state and the individual, in which the latter both craves for and rebels against authority. A figure like Hitler., representing strong authority and rebellion against (other) authorities, perfectly matches the psychic needs of individuals socialized in the families of late capitalism.
But the other side of the story is more germane to the question of sexuality. Without patriarchy, the ego remains weak, ineffective in controlling libidinal impulses. Hence the sexual revolution. Hence also the role of advertising in channeling desires to the benefit of the corporations. Marcuse's thesis then is that the potentials for sexual liberation, which he propounded in Eros and Civilization, have not emerged and indeed cannot emerge in the conditions of capitalist society. Michael Schneider upholds the cause of Freudo-Marxism in a different way.4 The classic anal-compulsive personality associated with the work ethic still exists in advanced capitalism according to Schneider. The organization of labor maintains a need for people to work at rigid schedules in alienating and exploitative jobs. These people must repress their libido, deny pleasure, and save money and energy. Along with this personality type, however, advanced capitalism demands an opposite but concurrent emotional structure. Productive capacity today is so great that the economy requires continuous consumption so that capital may be reinvested in. greater and greater amounts. The result is the emergence of a new personality type characterized by oral impulsiveness. One must consume on the spur of the moment; one must let oneself go, reward oneself continuously; one must buy products now, products that will yield gratification. The sexual revolution is explained by Schneider as simply another example of the oral-impulsive personality. Commodity culture makes all sexual partners equal, just as all consumer products are subject to the same standard of monetary value.
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Sex is simply another impulsive act of consumption, and capitalism has tamed its radical implications. Like Marcuse, Schneider sustains the Freudo-Marxist position that the history of sexuality is made intelligible through the model of repression.
The arguments of the Freudo-Marxists raise questions that must be addressed even before considering Foucault's response to them. It must be pointed out that the position of the Freudo-Marxists, resting on the thesis of repression and its variants in the post-Victorian world, gives unwarranted support to patriarchy and undercuts the claims of feminism. The authoritarian father and his paradoxical role in fostering autonomy is the central figure of the Freudo-Marxist family romance. No doubt the position of the father in the family has been somewhat compromised due to the trends that Marcuse and Schneider indicate. But it is the middle-class father who is their reference point, even though they subscribe to a social position which, of course, relies on the agency of the working class. This confused class analysis is only the beginning of the problems with Freudo-Marxism.
More damaging is their complete denial of the progressive side of the changes in the father's position. The weakening of patriarchy leads not only to the prominence of peer groups and the media: it is the condition for the emergence of women from the constraints of the role of mother and wife. The feminism of the 1970s, which had its antecedents in the 1920s at the beginning of this process, must be seen by critical theorists and Western Marxists generally as a progressive step in the restructuring of the family and advanced, capitalism in general. In addition, the widespread, demands for sexual and emotional fulfillment, which Marcuse discredits, have a liberative aspect. What the Freudo-Marxists see as a weakened ego, and a proto-fascist super-ego, may also be interpreted as a new psychic formation in which traditional repressions are no longer valid. The relative collapse of the anal personality augurs the emergence of individuals who will not suffer
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silently the emotional scarcity of classical capitalism or its pseudo-fulfillment through the commodities of rich capitalism. The needs for love and community which were at the heart of the socialist dreams of the nineteenth century may become paramount political questions in the future, not on the placards of the proletariat but on those of feminists, gay liberationists and others not inured to the repressions of the nuclear family. At the very least, one can argue that the necessary data have not been tabulated or even investigated. There need to be studies of the precise nature of personality development through the first three stages of the child's life in. the context of 'fatherless' families. Until that is done, all talk of the collapse of the autonomous individual remains an empty jeremiad.
That is the way things stood on the question of a theory and history of sexuality until the publication of Foucault's The History of Sexuality.5 Foucault has attempted to redefine completely the question of sexuality by removing it from the paradigm of repression. Instead, sexuality for him must be considered in terms of concepts of knowledge and power. In this manner Foucault places sex in relation to the emergence of the administered society of the twentieth century. He challenges both Marx and Freud by shifting the grounds of the debate: the concepts of labor and repression no longer serve in the critical comprehension of history; the privileged places in social theory and social life are not longer the factory and the unconscious. Foucault suggests nothing less, than a basic reconceptualization of the logic of history, one that promises to revitalize critical theory. It must be pointed out, however, that Foucault and Marcuse are in agreement on one fundamental point: that the alleged sexual revolution of the 1960s was not a true liberation. While Marcuse dismisses the sexual revolution as mere repressive desublimation, Foucault treats it as an extension of the profusion of discourses on sexuality.
The History of Sexuality provides an arena in which my
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view of Foucault's work can be assessed. Foucault promised six volumes devoted to the topic. In 1976 the introductory first book appeared with the subtitle The Will to Knowledge, a transparent allusion to Nietzsche's The Will to Power that reveals Foucault's general theme: the relation of sex and self-knowledge to discourses on sexuality.6
The History of Sexuality opens with an attack on the Freudo-Marxist position. The concept of repression, Foucault charges, is a false guide to the problem of sexuality. It suggests that sex disappears in the nineteenth century, that sex was pushed out of consciousness and out of practice as the bourgeoisie came to power. Even a superficial reading of history, Foucault counters, demonstrates the opposite: that sexuality flourished as never before in the nineteenth century. This surprising assertion refers not to erotic fulfillment, but to the expansion of the discourse on sexuality. For Foucault sex cannot have been 'repressed' and at the same time talked about so much.
There is a possible confusion here on Foucault's part regarding the definition of repression in Freud. When, Freud writes that contemporary Europe experienced the 'high water mark of sexual repression', he was not referring to external prohibitions on sex. He was not merely arguing that people had coitus less often than in the past, though this might have been the case. Rather Freud's concept of repression denotes an intrapsychic phenomenon by which libidinous impulses are prevented from attaining consciousness in their direct forms. The impulses do not disappear but return under a different, often neurotic, guise. Hence, for Freud, sexuality never vanishes completely, as Foucault seems to suggest in his interpretation of the doctrine of repression. The claim that sex flourished in the nineteenth century as a form of discourse therefore does not necessarily contradict the findings of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, Freudo- Marxists like Reich do seem to argue that the quantity of
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sex was diminished by dint of repression in the Victorian age.
Foucault's main argument against the doctrine of repression is that it is a false model of the relation between power and sex. Following Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, Foucault contends that the law does not act as a negative obstacle to the positive, natural drive of sex, as the doctrine of repression implies. Things happen quite differently.7 For Foucault power is positive: it creates the form of sexuality. In his words, 'the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.'8 This important shift in the argument requires elaboration.
Deleuze and Guattari contend that the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex inverts the truth.9 According to Freud, children have natural erotic drives for their parents which become repressed. Anti-Oedipus, however, argues that the sexual attachments of children for parents is a coding initiated by the parents which elicits the desire and then prohibits it. There are thus no natural sex drives. All sexuality is 'always already' coded by a law. The child's desire, falls into the law of Oedipus and becomes shaped by it. Without citing Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault takes this model as the essence of power. But if that is so, the project of a history of sexuality cannot proceed by searching for prohibitions against sex; it must look instead to power as the creator of sexuality. Foucault provides extensive examples of such a view of power taken from the history of medicine.
Rather than treat the history of sexuality as a documentation of acts of repression. Foucault directs his attention to the operations of power. At this point he introduces the notion of discourse. He provides the following definition of discourse:
Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations: there can exist different and even contradictory
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discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. We must not expect the discourses on sex to tell us, above all, what strategy they derive from, or what moral divisions they accompany, or what ideology - dominant or dominated - they represent: rather we must question them on the two levels of their tactical productivity (what reciprocal effects of power and knowledge they ensure) and their strategic integration (what conjunction and what force relationship make their utilization necessary in a given episode of the various confrontations that occur).10
In this passage Foucault defines discourse in relation to power. Discourse for him is not some idealist representation of ideas; it is, in. materialist fashion, part of the power structure of society. Power relations must be understood in the structuralist manner as decentered, as a multiplicity of local situations. Discourses are important because they reveal the play of power in a given situation. They are not 'ideological representations' of class positions but acts of power shaping actively the lives of the populace. The history of sexuality must study discourses on sexuality to uncover the shapes given. to it. Foucault rejects the distinction, which derives from the epistème, of representation, between ideas/discourses and action/sexuality.
But the privileged place he gives to discourse does not seem justified. Perhaps one can read in the discourses on sex of the Victorian bourgeoisie - if one reads well between the lines - the shape of sexuality in society. But can one do the same for the nineteenth-century working class or for the peasantry of the precapitalist period? Foucault, of course, thinks that one can. Yet his notion of discourse seems to capture unequally the various periods of European history. As discourses on sexuality increase in frequency from. the late eighteenth century onwards and reach an unprecedented deluge in our own day, discourse itself becomes more and
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more significant in the shaping of sexuality. In other words, Foucault's principle of selection (his focus on discourse) is better suited and gives more prominence to the recent period than the earlier one. He comes close to completing the circle by concluding that sexuality itself was more extensive in the recent period, if only because discourse on it increased. That will do fine to counter the Freudo-Marxists' argument about repression, but it will not serve as a proven fact.
Foucault would counter this argument by pointing out that he is not referring merely to printed discourse but to spoken discourse as well, and therefore the increased publication of books on sexuality is not an adequate index. This reply does not, however, dispel suspicions of bias toward the recent period, because the spoken discourse in a seventeenth-century village would still escape the historian's purview. I would contend that the focus on discourse derives its legitimacy from the broader intention of Foucault's thought - that is., from. his reflexive concern to comprehend our own time, the present-day information society. Because this intention underlies his project and because it is inevitable that historians employ a theory which necessarily gives prominence to one epoch over another, Foucault's focus on discourse is not only legitimate but also desirable.
Foucault is in search of 'true discourses'. His definition of truth is not the philosopher's. He is not after the best-argued, the most logically coherent text. The documents he is after are not those of Kant and Hegel. He does not read discourses literally in order to analyze their concepts. Discourses for him are loci of power. They must be read from the vantage point not of the author or the intended audience but from the perspective of how they constitute a power relation concerning sexuality. The discourses that are valuable are not those of the most penetrating thinker, those that contain the best concept of sexuality. The level he is after is much more mundane, much closer to the pulse of social life. His discourses are those of ordinary doctors; they are the files of
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clinics that treat sexual 'disorders'; they are the letters of local priests; they are the dossiers housed in bureaucracies; they are grant proposals, for the study of sexuality; they are the psychotherapist's file; they are the files of social welfare agencies. At these locations, in these discourses, the play of power and the question of sexuality reveal themselves. This is where 'the political economy of a will to knowledge' of sexuality is constituted.11
In the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault offers an outline of the history of sexuality that merits the attention of historians. The concept of discourse leads Foucault directly to the Christian confession as the locus of sexuality. Here he finds two phases. In the earlier period, before the seventeenth century, the priest was concerned with what people did. The faithful were asked in detail about their sexual activities. In that period sexuality concerned the body, which was allowed certain positions and denied others. The discourse of sexuality was rudimentary and crude; talk, in the society, was open and frank. Foucault mentions Erasmus, who encouraged advice to children on the selection of prostitutes. More evidence about the sensuality of the body in this period can be gleaned from Norbert Elias' study of civilizing manners.12
With the Reformation and Counter Reformation the discourse on sexuality takes another form. In the confession the priest begins to inquire not only about actions, but also about intentions. Sexuality begins to be defined in terms of the mind as well as the body. The scope of the sexual expands to include the least thoughts and fantasies. A loquaciousness about sexuality emerges. Everything must be pored over and examined in great detail. A similar pattern of change is discovered by Foucault in his history of crime and punishment13. Discourse intensifies from a concern with action and the body to a concern with the mind and its intentions. But the important change in the discourse of sexuality does not take place until later, during the capitalist period. At this
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time, although by no means because of the mode of production, the confession becomes scientific. Foucault offers as a hypothesis that the great alteration in sexuality occurred when the discourse on sex became a matter of science.14 Once that happened, sexuality became a major preoccupation and began to assume its current shape.
The major example of a modem discourse on sexuality, a new scientific confessional, is of course psychoanalysis. Perhaps Foucault's major accomplishment in The History of Sexuality is to treat Freud as part of history, rather than to study the history of sex from a Freudian vantage point. The conceptual point d'honneur of the Freudo-Marxists - that Freud treats the instincts as outside society and therefore as a source of social criticism - is shorn of its scientific power. Freud's concept of the instincts becomes, in. Foucault's hands, just another device to control and shape sexuality. The concept of the instincts is a power strategy by the new medical profession which allows them. to inquire into sex, to explore it by the method of the 'talking cure', to examine dreams and fantasies, the recesses of the mind, in a way never before contemplated. The Freudian view of the instincts does not provide a reservoir of resistance against the ruling class. It does not promise a sexual revolution. For sexuality, to Foucault,, is not something outside society waiting to burst through the layers of repression. On the contrary, by positing a sexual instinct Freud opened up a new realm for the domination of science over sexuality.
The heart of the matter for Foucault is that the history of sexuality amounts to a continuous increase, beginning in the seventeenth century, in the 'mechanisms' and 'technologies' of power. During the course of this history the locus of power shifts from the confessional to the research laboratories and clinics where sexuality is the subject of scientific investigation. Historians are directed by Foucault to explore in detail the 'true discourses' on sex generated under the sign of science. In particular he calls attention to four 'mechanisms of knowledge
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and power' on sex. These are: 'the hysterization of women s bodies', 'the pedagogization of children's sex', 'the socialization of procreative behavior', and 'the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure'. These mechanisms are directed at four 'figures': hysterical women, masturbating children, Malthusian couples, and perverse adults. Taken together, these 'mechanisms' constitute the 'production of sexuality' in the modern period,
Anyone familiar with the history of the nineteenth century will be impressed by Foucault's choice of subjects. The literature on sexuality is indeed concerned with these four figures to a very great extent. Perhaps Malthusian couples were more prominent in France, where population growth stagnated in the nineteenth century, than in England or Germany, where demographic statistics were more favorable. One might question as well Foucault's exclusion of the sexually diseased male, since some historians think that syphilis, was epidemic in the nineteenth century. The aggressive female was another major concern of doctors and parents. Assertive women were thought to be driven by excessive sexual impulses, and sexual surgery, such as infibulations and clitoridectomies, were often recommended and performed. These topics would serve as well as those chosen by Foucault to examine discourses on sexuality, and Foucault's selection must therefore be regarded as somewhat arbitrary.
A thorough history of the discourses on the four figures would not doubt produce an impressive confirmation of Foucault's thesis on the relation of knowledge and power to sex. The figure of the masturbating child, for example, was the subject of an extensive quasi-military campaign by doctors and parents. Devices were designed, produced and sold to prevent erection. Some favorites were metal rings with sharp teeth that fitted around the penis and alarm systems that warned parents of their child's sexual excitement.15 In addition to these advances in antimasturbatory technology, medical science offered countless treatises on the dangers of onanism. These
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sober men of learning foresaw the worst. They attributed to masturbation everything from acne and headaches to cancer and death.16 Beyond doubt an impressive apparatus of knowledge and power was constructed with the misguided aim of preventing childhood masturbation.
Attention to these 'true discourses' on sexuality does not necessarily constitute a history of sexuality. It is doubtful that these figures could be generalized to serve as conceptual guides for a history of sexuality at any time other than the nineteenth century. Worse still, these figures and their attendant discourses only apply to one segment of the population in Europe and the United States. The bourgeoisie fits well into Foucault's categories, but the working class in the cities and perhaps the peasantry in the countryside do not. These latter groups were not subject to the knowledge/power of the medical and psychiatric professions; nor were they avid readers of discourses on hysterical women and perversions. Foucault might respond to the objection that his analysis does not account for class differences by pointing out that the spread of the discourse on sex through society took time to unfold. Yet the question remains how to account for class differences in the first place.
Foucault is cognizant of the importance of social class in the history of sexuality. He presents a fascinating discussion of the differences between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie on the topic of the body.17 For the aristocracy the body meant blood. Lineage was the all-important consideration for them. For the bourgeoisie, however, the body was instead a question of life and health. The capitalist class initiated a concern for the condition of the body, for its optimal functioning and its durability. Like the joggers; and vegetarians of today, the classic bourgeoisie was obsessed with hygiene and longevity. The reckless hunting, whoring, and drinking of the aristocracy lost favor in the dismal world of industry.
For Foucault, the distinction between the aristocratic and bourgeois discourse on the body serves to strengthen his
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critique of the Freudo-Marxists. Far from repressing the body, he contends, the bourgeoisie devoted a great deal of attention to it. Nevertheless, while his argument is well taken, it does not really address the issue of sexuality. The bourgeois, concern with the body was not an erotic one; good diet and hygiene are not the same as sensuality. The bourgeois body may have been cared for and tended better than that of the aristocracy, but it was far less a vessel of sexuality. One suspects in fact that the bourgeois attention to health was a utilitarian and economic, quest. Energy for this social class was marshaled for the great battles of the market and the factory, not for the gentlemanly pursuit of a woman's favors. Although Foucault addresses the question of class and sex, he has not reached the heart of the problem.
Without an adequate theory of class sexuality, the emphasis on knowledge/power leads Foucault against himself to a totalizing view of the history of sexuality. Although he asserts that there is no 'unitary sexual politics', he does not offer a basis on which to comprehend sexuality in a given society in. any way other than collectively. Discourses on sex may differ in a particular epoch, but they are the discourses of the society as a whole. Yet the history of sexuality cannot be pursued at the level of the total society. Social groups and regions differ too markedly in their sexuality to be considered together in one general framework. In the course of the last three centuries, the sexual practices of the aristocracy, peasantry, bourgeoisie, and working class differ more than they are alike. These differences simply cannot be explained on the basis of discourse.
Jacques Donzelot's The Policing of Families, a book that is much indebted to Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, treats the problem of class in a most satisfactory manner. Donzelot focuses on the family rather than on sex, but like Foucault he traces the complex interplay of the discourses of the human sciences and the actions of coercive institutions in shaping the practices he is concerned with. Donzelot convincingly
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demonstrates the differential impact of these technologies of power on each social class. The emergence of the urban industrial working class in nineteenth-century France presented the newly empowered bourgeoisie with a set of family practices that they found intolerable. Working class couples seemed to them incapable of conducting morally and hygienically sound family lives. The bourgeoisie responded to the conditions of proletarian families through a cluster of institutional and discursive means. Semi-public philanthropic institutions were established, wealthy women engaged in individual forms of assistance to the poor, rudimentary forms of sociological disciplines appeared, and fin- ally, the state itself inaugurated public policies to deal with the problem. Donzelot sums up these activities with the term 'the tutelary complex'.
By this phrase he means to underscore the great irony of the situation. The bourgeoisie believed deeply in the private nuclear family, of the autonomy of the married couple in relation to the state. The working class did not establish families that conformed to the pattern of nuclearity. The bourgeoisie sought to help them to do so, but increasingly they were led to force them to do so, eventually by the direct intervention of the state. The state initiated welfare policies that were intended set in motion a change in working class families that would result in their autonomy. But the very fact of the state's intervention undermined the intended result: dependency not autonomy was the fate of the lower class family.
The bourgeois, family set in play a very different complex of forces. If the bond that held together the working class was forged in a contest with juvenile court and other similar state agencies, the rope that held together the bourgeois family was tied to the schooling system. In schools teachers, parents and medical advisors blended a mixture of discourse/ practice that was the ideal tonic for the bourgeois family. Its chief ingredient was psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis of a
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particular variety, one that holds tightly a certain image of family functioning and employs that image strategically to mollify family conflicts. Donzelot's term for this discourse/ practice is 'the regulation of images'. The bourgeois family in crisis readjusted its internal relations by the guidelines of psychoanalysis, parent-teacher organizations, family planning agencies and psychotherapists. The all-important difference between the bourgeois and working class families with respect to the constellation of intervening discourse/practices is that only for the bourgeoisie was the intervention initiated by the family. The bourgeois family employed the regulation of images to reinforce its autonomy and privacy while the working class family was exposed to control by the state. In both cases technologies of power were set in. play, but with very different results. The attention of Donzelot to class differences demonstrates the interpretive force of Foucault's categories without reducing the analysis to a Marxist totalization. The mode of production may have generated the two classes, but it cannot explain the differential discourse/ practices of the family structures. The danger in Foucault's project is that it treats discourses on sexuality only in relation to society as a whole.
Foucault's account of the history of sexuality also goes astray in overlooking the importance of the family. If the emotional structure of the family is taken into account, differences between classes regarding sexuality become intelligible. In the stifling air of the private bourgeois family of the nineteenth century, where the feelings of each family member have no outlet other than the family, the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the pervert, and the Malthusian couple emerge with clarity. Although sexuality in the bourgeois family was open to the influences of medical discourses, the structure of everyday life in the family itself is of at least equal importance in the task of explanation. If it can be shown, as I am convinced it can, that sexual patterns are illuminated by family structure, then reliance on the
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priest, the doctor, and the psychiatrist can be given a less influential but still considerable role. Foucault's program for the history of sexuality deflects too much attention away from the family in favor of more distant agencies of power. Like Christopher Lasch's Haven in a Heartless World, Foucault's book draws attention to the great politics of 'true discourses' when it should focus more on the little politics of family romances.
Commentaries on Foucault's earlier works have pointed out that his concept of power is vague and ambiguous. The power embodied in discourses on sex is not the clearly defined power of the state or even the discernible power of the 'helping professions'. Power, Foucault proclaims, is everywhere.19 In all the relations of society, power - especially the power of discourse -is exercised. Foucault is sensitive to the force of opinion on people's action. He sees clearly the way all practice is subject to the pressure of what he calls discourse. In. everyday life no action is innocent; no project is carried out from the pure intention of the actor. Individual reason is not the power that determines what happens. Especially people who do not conform to dominant social values - the handicapped, racial minorities, those with unusual sexual preferences, the physically deformed - can feel the influence of what Foucault calls 'force relations' or 'technologies of power.
The irony of Foucault's position is that although he is acutely aware of 'power relations' in society, he pays little heed to the 'power' of his own discourse. He does not pose the fundamental question, What is the role of his own discourse in the history of discourse on sexuality? If discourse is a mode of power that elicits sexuality and shapes it, will not the same fate befall Foucault's discourse? Foucault seeks to liberate society from the power of 'true discourse' on sex and thereby to contribute to the 'counterattack' of free 'bodies and pleasures'. But nothing prevents Foucault's project from becoming yet another 'true discourse'.
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Three more volumes of Foucault's The History of Sexuality have recently appeared and the degree to which the project can attain the success of Discipline and Punish will depend on the response to these books.20 In the years since the first installment of The History of Sexuality Foucault has presented to the public, in the form of addresses and articles, indications of the line of research they pursue.21 In these pieces one theme emerges clearly: Foucault has shifted the focus of the project. The first volume centers on sexuality as it is constituted through discourse/practice. The recent work places the subject at the center of the analysis, subordinating sexuality to the role of the theme through which the subject can be grasped. In the West, Foucault maintains, subjects have come to recognize themselves, to find their 'truth', in their sexuality. Foucault gives several alternative formulations of his new direction. He speaks of his field of interest as 'the politics of the true' or as 'a genealogy of ethics.' The phrase that probably indicates best his current project is 'techniques of the self'. He is studying those discourse/practices by which the individual gives shape to his or her own subjectivity.
With this change Foucault occupies a territory that he had earlier placed off limits: the subject. He is studying the interiority of the individual, the terrain of existentialists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts - all those philosophies of consciousness that he earlier rejected for their humanist illusions. The difference between Foucault and Sartre is seemingly narrowed. Foucault applauds Sartre for avoiding 'the idea of the self as something which is given to us.'22 Sartre, Foucault writes, has a 'theoretical insight to the practice of creativity.' Foucault too will study the self-constitution of the subject. But Sartre went astray with the criterion of authenticity which dictates too much about the relation one has with oneself. Instead, Foucault prefers a more open approach, one that will 'relate the kind of relation he has to himself to a creative activity'.23
Foucault's analysis of the subject takes on the question of
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the centered subject more directly than ever before. The History of Sexuality undercuts the attempt to ontologize any view of the subject (the cogito, authenticity, libido) by demonstrating the historicity of the forms of subjectivity as well as the means through which subjectivity is constituted. In a sense Foucault's project is more radical than those that would deny intelligibility to the subject. He carries the Nietzschean critique of 'truth' probably as far as it can go. Truth is studied as a constituted, historical multiplicity, not at the level of philosophical doctrine but at the level of subjective self-constitution. The truth about oneself emerges as the result of a complexity of discourses and practices, one that varies in fundamental ways at different times and among different social groups. The History of Sexuality abandons the safe terrain of modern history and goes back to the period between the 4th Century BC and the early Middle Ages. Foucault notes that during this period the sexual code did not vary greatly: the same basic prohibitions were in place. Laws restricted sexual activity to the married couple and in general discouraged excess because of its alleged danger to health. The techniques of the self., however, altered drastically. Among the male ruling class in the Ancient period, sexual practice related to an art of living. Sex was separate from religious matters, and from social institutions in general. The issue of which sexual acts to practice was decided on the basis of personal ethics. Sex was an active experience through which the beautiful life was sought. Homosexual love between a man and boy presented a difficulty for the man, since the boy was not able to provide full reciprocity in the relationship, a reciprocity necessary for the best possible life.
With Christianity the relationship of sex to techniques of the self changed in character. Sexual practice was connected directly with religious experience. Sex was a matter of the passive flesh not the active body as it was for the Ancients. The male erection was an involuntary incursion by the flesh
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on the soul. Sex was a unique vice for Christians like Joannes Cassianus (ca. 370- ca. 435). It was the only sin of the flesh that resembled sins of the soul like pride. The struggle against it was unremitting and deep. 'It is a question of destroying completely an impulse whose suppression does not lead to the death of the body. Among the eight vices, fornication alone is at once innate, natural and corporal in its origin.'24 The Christian subject had to constitute itself through techniques that would eradicate completely all sexual impulses. Sex was the great testing ground of the Christian soul. The ultimate standard of faith was the absence of 'erotic dreams, and nocturnal pollution'. When that was attained, the subject was free of heteronomous influences.
Christian faith elicited techniques of the self that constituted the truth of the subject at a more interior level than the Ancients. Christian sexual practices set in motion a movement toward 'subjectivization' in relation to 'a process of knowledge that obliged one to look for and to tell the truth about oneself.'25 In the monk's vow of chastity and in the confessional, Christianity established two sets of practices directed toward the constitution of the truth of the subject in relation to sex. Restrictive sexual codes were only the remote horizon of Christian practices; at the center was the interminable examination of one's conscience for indications of danger.
The parallel is striking between Foucault's depiction of the contrast between the Ancients and the Christians and Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, the master morality of the Ancients with its distinction between good and bad was a direct, simple expression of the will to power. The slave morality of the Christians with its distinction between good and evil was a complex, indirect expression mediated through the poison of resentment. The deeper, more interiorized morality of the Christians was a consequence in part of its connection with the religious issues of death and of God. Similarly Foucault discovers the key to the Christian technique of the self in the
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raising of the stakes over sex by relating it to religious issues. For both Nietzsche and Foucault, the question of the truth about oneself becomes a more rigorous and urgent issue in the Christian period. Differences between the two genealogists are also important: Foucault's focus on the techniques of the self through discourse/practice is more amenable to concrete historical analysis than Nietzsche's philological method and concept of the will to power.
The implications of Foucault's project for the modern period are arresting. During the Enlightenment the religious dimension of the techniques of the self dissipate. A medico-scientific framework takes over the same set of discourse/ practices, developing them further and culminating perhaps in psychoanalysis.26 The scientific method of constituting the truth of the self in sex uncomfortably resembles the Christian counterpart. But the full statement of this position requires a full analysis of the recently published volumes which is inappropriate here.
NOTES
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