Remembering Michel Foucault
A Review by Stephen Murray
09/25/2002
Beginning even before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault was buried under the dogmatism and simplification of his would-be successors and miscellaneous devotees. Foucaultian "experts" on this or that are as eager to lecture as Michel Foucault himself was reluctant. Edmund White's characterization of Foucault as an "Emperor of the Mind" is inapt and particularly unfortunate, insofar as it suggests an imperviousness of manner that was quite alien to Foucault.
Foucault would have stayed in Paris if he had wanted an acquiescent audience nodding, "Oui, Maistre" to his every pronouncement. However, his discomfort with the role of pontifex maximus of Parisian intellectual life during the late-1970s and early-80s propelled him away from the Collège de France, where there are no students, to the University of California at Berkeley, where there were students who would question his utterances and struggle to formulate their own positions. Not that his Berkeley classes lacked "groupies"; perhaps most of those in what turned out to be his final Berkeley seminar (on parrhesia) were more interested in Foucault than in Euripides. I would have to include myself in this category, even though my education is firmly rooted in contemplation of classical Greek political theory. I was less interested in what interpretations Foucault made of "Ion" than in how he want about analyzing a particular text and how he defended his analysis when confronted with different interpretations.
I distrusted the selectivity of evidence in his writings and in his classroom presentations, and I thought he evaded questions about selectivity when they were asked. Rather than answer questions about how he chose particular snippets of particular texts, he affirmed that, for him, there was only one interpretation. (In the instance of "Ion," I think that it can be read as encouraging surrender to faith rather than as promoting skeptical discourse, and his reading of "the silence of the gods" seemed wildly anachronistic, failing to consider what the ancient Greeks considered the danger of sacrilege, and so on.)
This affirmation of only a single interpretation being possible for him might seem to prefigure or to justify the dogmatism of his followers attempting to block consideration of views contrary to theirs. It's not so, however; Michel Foucault himself actively sought interpretations divergent from his own. He sought to listen rather than to lecture, resisting the desire of most of those present to hear him rather than listen to each other. He seemed determined to combat the dangers of solipsism in his own analytic facility. Because he formed one interpretation, he seemed eager to be confronted with other ones.
Another of his tactics in this combat was to take the attitude that his writings did not constitute a unified oeuvre. In one of his many interviews, he proclaimed: "I would like my books to be like surgeon's knives, Molotov cocktails, or galleries in a mine, and, like fireworks, to be carbonized." None of his books has actually carbonized, and they are still being used in various ways: Social history, especially in regard to the "modernization" of "homosexuality" is still smoldering from the Molotov cocktail of his introductory volume to the barely begun History of Sexuality, for instance, and the notions of surveillance from Discipline and Punish continue to reverberate.
In expressing the wish for his writings to be used and then discarded, I think Foucault sought to avoid responsibility for the uses to which his work was (and continues to be) put, even while recognizing that no one has much real control over how a text is interpreted once it is published. Indeed, the belief that the author's self-interpretation (especially of his/her intentions) is not privileged or definitive is one Foucault's work encouraged.
In my one tête-à-tête with Foucault I got off to a bad start precisely by treating his work as an oeuvre, though this provided an opportunity for him to demonstrate that he cared how his work was appropriated. I wanted to talk about "sodomites," but made a nearly disastrous tactical mistake of producing a preamble that tried to extend the distinction between acts and kinds of persons (those defined by their acts) in The History of Sexuality back through Discipline and Punish to Madness and Civilization (though my memory—even then—of that first Foucault book I read as an undergraduate in the early 1970s—was shaky). He immediately slapped me down—not for my characterization of the acts of sodomy/ homosexual personnage contrast ("As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them...The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species") but for extending backward through his publications a distinction between mad acts and insane persons. I might have fared better with an overarching shift in the goal of social control from bodies to minds, but would have begun better without reaching for any grand theme across his historical interpretations of different domains of power.
He bemoaned the willful misinterpretation of his books by journalists, specifically a piece by Lawrence Stone in The New York Review of Books. I tried to parry that simplification and misinterpretation are prices of celebrity and suggested, instancing Voltaire and Gide, that literary "stars" suffered the same kind of reduction to pat formulae in earlier epochs. Foucault interpreted Stone's reply to Foucault's outraged letter to NYR as Stone admitting he had lied about what Foucault wrote. I suggested that this surely read more into Stone's text than I had read into Madness and Civilization, though I freely admitted I had not read that book at all recently.
Somehow I managed not to be thrown out of his borrowed office (that I was a leather-jacketed male may have contributed to his patience) and was able to shift the topic away from Stone and classifications of madness in the European Middle Ages to ask about his blurb for John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. My point of entry for the shift to my keener interests was something he said about ahistorical heritage-making of "gay people." I suggested that one of the most egregious examples, where even rabbits are "gay," came in a book bearing a blurb from him.
He recommended ignoring Boswell's first chapter and said that he had been more struck by his initial reading of Boswell's book than he was later, working through some of the same materials himself. The resolution he proposed was not to regard Boswell's writings as a sound history of "gay people" but as valuable for understanding the particular problematic of intolerance for sexual diversity. (I rejected that, saying that I read the book as a very tendentious aplogia for the moral responsibilities of the Holy Mother Church specifically for persecution of those diverging from its prescriptions for sex. He neither endorsed or rejected this characterization.)
Moving the discussion forward to the time between the end of Boswell's book and the late-19th-century medicalization of "homosexuality," he told me that he had never heard of Alan Bray or Jeffrey Weeks; obviously he could not be held responsible for their interpretations, regardless of whether they claimed inspiration by his work. In calling into question the eternal fixity of the category "homosexual," he said that he had certainly not intended a rationalization of evading the risk of gay political organization on the grounds that everyone is inherently sexual and "homosexual" is a reification of the continuum of sexual expression. For him, all categories are (1) motivated and (2) not inherent "in nature."
In regard to "the self," an earlier inhabitant of the College de France, Marcel Mauss, noted (in 1938), "Far from being a primordial, innate idea clearly inscribed since Adam in the deepest part of our being, we find the category of the self still being slowly erected, clarified, specified, and identified with self-knowledge, with the psychological consciousness into our own times." I cannot claim that Foucault endorsed this particular formulation by one of his predecessors, but he evidenced surprise that anyone would use his work to question only one type of person ("the homosexual") in isolation from a general analysis of social typification. After all, as he pointed out with a smile, a moment before I had faulted him for giving comfort to the opposite extreme (Boswell's overextension of "gay").
Rather than interpret British deconstructivists he professed never to heard of, I asked what terms such as "sodomite," "catamite," "ganymede, "bugger," "moll," and other lexemes might mean if they are not categories of kinds of persons defined by homosexual acts (i.e., "actors"). I had been warned by my coauthor of "Renaissance sodomite subcultures?", Kent Gerard, who had audited earlier Foucault seminars at Berkeley, to expect an appeal to general libertinage as the basic typification. He made a perfunctory appeal to that, but fairly readily granted that folk conceptions of effeminacy and/or recurrent same-sex sexual conduct were lexicalized long before the medicalization of homosexuality (whether that occurred in the late-19th century or during World War II, a dating we did not discuss). However, he insisted that juridical practice focused on acts. Hence trials hinged on proving penetration and emission, not on whether accused was a "sodomite," still less on the etiology of his personality. Because he was not doing the history of ideas (which would surprise some), he explained, the categorizations/typifications that may have existed were not relevant to his particular project in the history of (social) practices.
The rain-drenched mid-November twilight was fading away in the dark, undecorated, semi-subterranean office he was using in Dwinelle Hall for the 1983 fall term, and did not press the point that juridical focus on penetration and emission showed that sodomy was not so "utterly confused" a category as his introduction to the history of sexuality claimed or raise the point that after the supposedly epochal change from acts to personnages juridical proceedings still addressed acts (the more elastic "public indecency" along with laws criminalizing sodomy) rather than making it illegal to be a "homosexual."
I was content with his acceptance that homosexual persons were widely recognized in early modern Europe. I did not realize that he would be dead seven months later and thought that we could discuss the juridical attempts to elicit the names of networks of fellow "sodomites" and the awareness of cruising grounds by the Paris police when he returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1984. I did not recognize the cold he could not seem to shake during his visit as the herald of death, and I am fairly certain he did not, either.
Had I known he was dying, I would have felt guiltier about monopolizing him that day. Even with no indications that he was impatient with me or with a topic everyone said he was not interested in discussing, I felt that I should give others who were not doubt waiting in the hall for a turn at talking with him their chance.
It would be rash to claim that Foucault would have abandoned his position about the juridical focus on acts had he lived to see further research on attempts to identify and extirpate sodomites in various early modern European jurisdictions. However, I believe that he might have decided to carbonize the rupture he proclaimed between "forbidden acts" and "personnages" if he had lived to examine the historical record of policing (and attempting to police) sodomy before the appearance of the psychiatric discourse that had caught his attention and led to formulating the glib contrast in the introductory volume of his planned history of sexuality that have mesmerized many laborers in the vineyard of social history of homosexuality.
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Stephen O. Murray has been publishing on homosexualities since 1979 and criticizing discourse creationism of homosexuality in print since 1980. His most recent books are Heterogender Homosexuality in Honduras (with Manuel Fernández) and Pacific Homosexualities. This essay appeared in substantially the same form as an obituary of Michel Foucault in the Sociologists' Gay Caucus Newsletter 43 in 1985.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 09/25/2002
