Reviewed by
Wayne R. Dynes
First published in
the blog Dyneslines on September
30, 2004.
Reproduced here with special permission of the copyright owner Wayne R. Dynes
Foucault’s
Social Construction
It
was a front-page review in the Times Literary Supplement (July 2, 1970) that
first alerted me to the importance of Michel Foucault. Almost forty years ago!
(Ou sont les neiges d'antan? etc.) The anonymous piece makes much of
Foucault’s extravagant claim that “man is only a recent invention,” probably
soon to disappear. Nonetheless, I immediately asked a friend of mine in Paris
to get the book for me. After it arrived, I realized that the volume was a kind
of sequel to a celebrated predecessor, the 1966 “Les mots et les choses:
une archeologie des sciences humaines.” The two books need to be
read together.
In fact, Foucault began his literary career with a ponderous tome of almost 600
pages, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique
(1961), the printed version of his French doctoral thesis. For a long time
this work circulated in English in the guise of a poor abridgment. Finally, in
2006, Routledge issued a full English translation entitled The History
of Madness.
At first glance one may ask how can one write a history of madness? That
Foucault approached the topic of mental illness from this standpoint was an
early indication of his capacity to reformulate conventional ideas in ways that
are challenging. However, the theme was in the air; one need only think of the
contemporary work of R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz.
Foucault begins his account in the Middle Ages, with the social and physical
exclusion of lepers. He argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy,
madness came to occupy the empty niche, so to speak, that had been vacated. The
15th-century motif of the ship of fools is a literary version of one such
exclusionary practice, that of sending mad people away in boats. In
17th-century Europe, in a movement which Foucault famously describes as the
Great Confinement, "unreasonable" individuals were locked away and
institutionalized. Continuing the story, Foucault explains that in the 18th
century, madness came to be perceived as the reverse of Reason (that is, déraison)
and, finally, in the 19th century as mental illness.
Foucault also argues that madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to
signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth. He examines the
rise of scientific and "humanitarian" treatments of the insane,
notably at the hands of the alienists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, who he
suggests began the conceptualization of madness as “mental illness.” He
maintains that these interventions, ostensibly a humanistic mitigation of the
earlier harsh methods, were in fact no less controlling than previous
practices. Pinel's treatment of the mad amounted to an extended aversion
therapy, including such drastic treatments as freezing showers and use of a
straitjacket.
This account is probably the first surfacing of a recurrent stratagem on the
part of Foucault: things are not what you think, but rather the opposite. This
is the device known to historians as Revisionism.
Because of its length and seeming abstruseness, the doctoral tome attracted
little attention at the time. Five years later, though, matters took a dramatic
turn with Foucault’s next book, which created a sensation in France.
Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines,
just noticed, was published in 1966. It was translated into English and
published by Pantheon Books in 1970 under the title The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Somewhat startlingly, the book opens
with an extended analysis of Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas (Museo del
Prado) and its complex manipulation of sight-lines, hiddenness, and appearance.
This piece had originally been a separate study. However, Foucault’s editor
perceptively suggested that it could serve as an overture to the monograph. The
book’s central thesis proposes that all periods of history have possessed
specific underlying conditions of truth that demarcated the realm of what was
deemed acceptable, as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that
these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively
sudden shifts, from one period's "episteme" to another. It is evident
that the term episteme is simply a repackaging of Hegel’s concept of the
Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age. In recent centuries, according to Foucault, the
Renaissance episteme yielded to the Classic episteme, and that in turn to the
modern episteme. This terminology indicates a recurrent problem with
Foucault--his preference for provincial French concepts not readily
translatable into other languages. What he terms the “classical era” is what is
known in most European countries as the Baroque.
L’archéologie du savoir (1969) is essentially a sequel to Les
Mots et les choses. In this book Foucault makes reference to
Anglo-American analytical philosophy, particularly speech-act theory. Seeming
to address the criticism of Francophone parochialism, Foucault shows a certain
willingness to break out of the constraints of national boundaries.
In the new book, Foucault directs his analysis toward the "statement"
(énoncé), the basic unit of discourse. The iconic notion of “discourse,”
how we talk about things instead of the things themselves, was to become a
hallmark of Foucaultian research and speculation, and of structuralism in
general.
A few years later Foucault’s interest took a new turn, one which was in keeping
with the sexual revolution and also a new wave of books on the subject, such as
Jonathan Ned Katz’s “Gay American History” (1976), a massive collection
of documents; and Sir Kenneth Dover’s “Greek Homosexuality” (1978). At
the same time Foucault’s own homosexual orientation became generally known.
La volonté de savoir (1976) bears the supertitle “Histoire
de la sexualité.” This introductory volume, a kind of big pamphlet, was
to inaugurate a series of six, to be entitled: 2) La chair et le corps;
3) La croisade des enfants; 4) La femme, la mère et l’hysterique;
5) Les pervers; 6) Population et races. Even though some of these
themes recur in Foucault’s later work, as far as I can see none of the five
promised sequelae ever appeared.
What we have instead is a different set that conscripts the 1976 volume to
serve as the prologue to something quite different. The volumes are
individually titled The Will to Knowledge (Histoire de la
sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir--which we have already
noted), The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualité, II: l'usage des
plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité,
III: le souci de soi). The last two appeared as a pair in 1984,
the year of Foucault’s death.
Ignoring the two major contributions of 1984, most readers restrict their
attention to the first, programmatic volume, which focuses primarily on the
last two centuries. In this rapidly sketched account, the functioning of
sexuality as an analytics of power is traced in terms of the rise of a science
of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of “biopower” in the West.
In this volume he questions the repressive hypothesis, the now-conventional
belief that we have, particularly since the 19th century, "repressed"
our natural sexual drives. This repression meme was of course widely held at
the height of the Sexual Revolution. Foucault seeks to show that in its heyday
what we think of as sexual "repression" did not function as a way to
dismiss the subject. Instead, the accompanying discourse, the incessant chatter
if you will, actually elevated sexuality to a new status. It became recognized
as a core element--perhaps THE core element--of our identity.
In Volume One, Foucault posits a watershed in human history, between the
Counter-Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, when the Catholic church and
the state sought to control people's sexuality for the stability of the church
and the benefit of the economy, respectively. He points to a realignment of the
Vatican's views on sexuality during this period as an attempt to make people
feel the need to attend confession more often, thus increasing the church's
dominion.
Characteristically, Foucault shows little interest in contemporary Protestant
Europe. He detects a shift in focus by the French government from viewing
citizens as "subjects" to "a population,” a quasiscientific
concept that could be manipulated according to the needs of the economy. He
claims that his francocentric analysis was emblematic of a process that spread
across Europe in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. However, since the
Industrial Revolution began in England, would it not be better to start with
that country?
As I have noted, the original plan for completing the series effectively
vanished. The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la
sexualité, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire
de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) deal with attitudes towards
sexual behavior in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both appeared in 1984, the second
volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986.
After the first volume came out in 1976, Foucault's thinking had indeed
shifted. He extended his analysis of government to its "wider sense of
techniques and procedures designed to direct the behavior of men," which
involved a new consideration of the "examination of conscience" and
confession in early Christian literature. These themes of early Christian
literature began to loom large in Foucault's work alongside his study of Greek
and Roman literature, perhaps not unreasonably because Christian moralism
stands athwart us and the ancient Greco-Roman world. Secularists, who idolize
Greece and Rome, wish that matters were otherwise; but this is the way things
are.
Foucault's death from AIDS left his undertaking incomplete, and the planned
fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, the one on Christianity, was never
published. That fourth volume was to be entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les
aveux de la chair). In fact the text was almost complete before
Foucault's death intervened. The manuscript lingers in the limbo of the
Foucault archive; under restrictions established in Foucault’s will, it cannot
be published.
We must now return to the first volume of Foucault’s sexuality series. A
particular passage in this work turned out to have an amazing career in the
field of gay scholarship. Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s a kind of
prairie fire swept the field, which was attracting many adherents, some academic,
others not. This was the Social Construction (SC) approach, about which I have
written elsewhere. Few could object to its moderate form, namely that
individual human behavior is strongly conditioned by the social context, and
that scholars must avoid the temptation of anachronism.
However, many SC scholars embraced a more controversial notion. In a nutshell
they held there was no homosexuality prior to its “invention” in Western Europe
about 1870. Of course these savants did not deny that same-sex behavior had
been occurring since time immemorial: how could they? Yet they maintained that
only in the second half of the 19th century did a sense of homosexual identity
emerge, THE HOMOSEXUAL in short. Thus was born the thesis of the “modern
homosexual,” a somewhat redundant expression, because adepts insisted that
there was no other. A few scholars, especially those involved with data from
Britain, pushed the origins of the complex further back, to about 1700. Common
to both schools, however, was the notion that at some specific point in time,
“the homosexual” was i n v e n t e d.
This ploy drew upon several models. In another much contested view, Denis de
Rougemont and other historians had asserted that there was no such thing as
romantic love until the 12th century. For his part, Philippe Ariès claimed that
childhood was invented only after the close of the Middle Ages. At this point I
am not concerned with the historical accuracy (or not) of these proposals, but
simply with their (generally unacknowledged) role as precedents.
The Social Constructionist students of same-sex behavior found their charter in
a short section of the first volume of Foucault’s series. Since few of these
scholars, who tend to be anglophone monoglots, read French easily, their
interpretation relies on the faulty 1978 English-language translation. In order
to show the distortions that have crept in as a result of this second-hand
sourcing, it is necessary first to turn to the French text.
“La sodomie - celle des anciens droits civil ou canonique - était un type
d’actes interdits; leur auteur n’en était que le sujet juridique. L’homosexuel
du XIXe siècle est devenu un personnage: un passé, une histoire et une enfance,
un caractère, une forme de vie; une morpholgie aussi avec une anatomie
indiscrète et peut-être une physiologie mystérieuse” (top of page 59).
Shorn of its rhetorical flights, the import of the passage is clear. Foucault
contrasts two historical types. Under the first regime, same-sex behavior is
understood in terms of acts; under the second--when the homosexual person
appears--it is understood in terms of actors.
Subsequently, some observers have pointed out that the contrast is not so
stark, because after all the “sodomite” was a person too. At all events, except
for the literal rendering “personage” (when “person” would be better) Robert
Hurley’s translation of this first passage is acceptable and need not detain us
further.
Not so the conclusion of the same paragraph, at the bottom of page 59 of the French
edition, where we read the now-famous words: “Le sodomite était un relaps,
l’homosexuel est maintenant une espèce.” Hurley: “The sodomite had been a
temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” This rendering is not
acceptable. The sodomite was not an “aberration.” a term that belongs to a much
later context, but a “backslider.” Worse is the choice of the word “species”
for espèce. In ordinary French the latter word is generally used to
signify sort or kind, as in common expressions such as “espèce de snob.”
It is true that in certain contexts the term can mean species. Yet the fact
that Foucault is not using it in this sense is shown by the extraordinary
catalogue of “espèces” amassed in the following paragraph, which
includes zoophiles, auto-monosexualists, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts,
presbyophles sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These terms are
outlandish, and that is the effect that is intended. Still,they are
subcategories that can be named, or were once thought to have this quality. At
best they qualify as sorts or kinds, not separate species.
Let us proceed a bit further. If we were to grant, for the purposes of
argument, that these oddities are in fact separate species, why have the Social
Constructionists not turned their attention dutifully to writing the history of
each one? As constituents of the reorganization of knowledge that took place
around 1870 surely it would be important to do so instead of ignoring them.
In fact, these latter “espèces” are but remnants from the Old Curiosity
Shoppe of sex research. That is decidedly not true of homosexuals, who have
always existed in some sense or another. As we have noted, the sodomite,
supposedly so radically different, was a “personnage” also. During the
European Middle Ages, and at other times and places, there were more than just
same-sex acts, there were actors as well.
In fact changes in ways of thinking about human behavior rarely take place with
the suddenness that SC advocates claim. Establishing such neat and clean
caesurae may be an effective classroom technique, but it does not meet the
challenge of the reality principle. That this is so is shown by the fact that
there are two SC schools: the majority, the Bolsheviks if you will, accept a
date of about 1870 (the term “homosexual” itself was introduced in 1869), while
the Mensheviks, the minority, propose 1700. This divergence in chronology
signals that something must be wrong.
In fact the great sea change in attitudes to sexuality in the Western world
took place much earlier, during late antiquity. At that point, Christianity,
taking its cue in part from certain pagan ascetic thinkers, forced society into
its torture chamber of sexual tabooing, a dungeon from which we have only
recently begun to emerge.
Foucault refrained from taking an explicit stand on the Social Construction
question. However, he chose to ally himself with John Boswell, SC’s most
prominent opponent. So the appeal to Foucault as the “godfather” of SC seems to
be mistaken.