Jeffrey Weeks. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 14, Issue 1-2, Jan-Apr 2005.
Forgetting Foucault?
Is it time to forget Michel Foucault? Over the past quarter of a century there have been a number of injunctions for us to do so. The first, which became notorious, was a sharp polemical intervention from Baudrillard in 1977. Foucault was already, it seemed, too powerful, so “to forget him was to do him a service; to adulate him was to do him a disservice.” This was not so much a forgetting as a Baudrillardian wishing away. Like the GulfWar, perhaps, Foucault did not really happen. A second essay, written by David Halperin and republished in his book How to Do the History of Homosexuality, is more reasoned and significant, if not yet better known. Here the point, forcefully made, is that in the rush to adulate, preserve in aspic, and see a Foucauldian orthodoxy we have forgotten what Foucault actually set out to do: “Foucault’s continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation of his name by academic practitioners of cultural theory, has had the effect of reducing the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make a more direct engagement with Foucault’s texts entirely dispensable.” Halperin’s essay is a form of rescue: a reclaiming of a radical figure and line of thought, a figure sainted not because of his holiness but, like Genet, because of his transgressiveness and profanity.
I want neither to engage in a polemical dismissal of Foucault and his legacy nor to find an original Foucault buried beneath a tonnage of over-reverence, ancestor worship, and system building. I don’t want to find the halo around his head, but neither do I wish to forget Foucault. I want to remember him, to remember why I found his work so important. At the same time I want to query/queery his legacy, not as an act of lese-majeste or intellectual betrayal nor as a rejection of my earlier self, which grabbed at every bit of Foucauldiana that was published, but as a tribute to the stimulus he provided. The best tribute we can pay to Foucault is not to forget but to remember his own refusals and to use him. As he said of Nietzsche’s work: “I prefer to utilize the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.” I am going to use Foucault’s work as I have always done, as a box of tools, as he said in reference to Deleuze, to take up and put down as necessary and in the process probably deform it, making it groan and protest, not seeking the truth of Foucault or even my own truth but trying to understand why we came to see certain ways of thinking as offering us some approximation to certain truths about sexuality in history and, more precisely, to use the understandings we got from reading Foucault to try to understand our present uncertainties.
To be more specific and to come clean, I want to do two things: first of all, to show why Foucault appealed to those of us who came to be labeled in the 1970s and 1980s as social contructionists, and then to argue that, while not forgetting Foucault, we need to go beyond him in three key areas: first, the matter of identity/subjectivity; second, the historic present, “after Foucault,” in which we are actors; and third, the issue of ethics and values. To do that, I suggest, we need to remember what we learned through our encounters with Foucault. So first, let’s look at Foucault’s contribution to “the social construction of sexuality.”
Reconstructing Social Constructionism
The harsh and mechanistic term “social construction” has become deeply unfashionable since the late 1980s, when the constructionist/essentialist debate collapsed of exhaustion and increasing inanition and as the cutting edge of queer theorists sought to transcend its dichotomies and categorizations even as they built on its major insights. Those of us doomed forevermore to be labeled as social constructionists, however, are bothered less with labels or fashions than with the same things as we have always been: how to understand sexuality in terms of its shifting history; how to explore what is universal and what is particular; how the erotic is invented and reinvented in lived histories. Social constructionists, of course, were never what some of our detractors portrayed us as. We were certainly not a conspiracy, nor were we attempting to impose Marxist categories on sexual history, as I was once absurdly accused of doing some years ago (an illustration of how an important academic debate became madly enslaved to irrelevant cold war categories). Indeed, some of us aligned ourselves with constructionists as a way of challenging the rigidities and naturalism of many Marxists. Social constructionism has no necessary political belonging, though of course most of us who were involved in its development were passionately involved in progressive politics generally and sexual politics in particular and saw the approach as intellectually liberating, allowing us to go beyond sterile essentialisms. Those of us who specifically wanted to explore the invention of homosexuality, which is where I began, were not (it should go without saying) out to deny the validity of gay experience by trying to delineate the historical specificity of lesbian and gay identities. We wanted to validate them, but not by reference to a false and impossible history or anthropology.
And we made sense. I refer you here to the work of the late Alan Bray. In his book on Homosexuality in Renaissance England Bray recounts how his initial work was stimulated by the desire to demonstrate that people like myself were wrong and how he changed his mind as his research progressed. Far from creating a new orthodoxy, we saw ourselves as challenging orthodoxy, as subverting traditional ways of presenting sexuality. And when you now see all around in popular texts and media an unthinking essentializing of sexuality and sexual identities, partly because of the geneticization of sexual theory, what amazes is not so much our successful capture of the battleground as our relative failure. We have not captured the popular imagination. It’s easier to believe in a gay brain or gay gene than to explore how we came to be where we are—which demands a sense of history living in the present, the present as history, rather than an evolutionary mysticism that traces our behavior today back to the African Savannah of 500,000 years ago.
But whatever our successes and failures, we owed little at the beginning to Michel Foucault. For example, my first book on homosexuality, Coming Out, published in 1977, which was an explicit statement of social constructionist arguments, has a passing reference to Madness and Civilization but nothing else by Foucault. The introductory volume of The History of Sexuality was published in France after I had sent off the final text. The intellectual development of social constructionism was already going on, and Foucault did not offer a social constructionist history. Here is, apparently, his most canonical statement on the issue: “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.” Except, of course, he did not actually write the last two pregnant words. The original dispositif suggests more a historical deployment—still an important insight but not an endorsement of social constructionism as it then stood. And that’s the important point: for what became known as social constructionism was in all essentials already there before the first volume of The History of Sexuality appeared. And what Foucault was attempting was somewhat different from what pioneering constructionists (before the name) were trying to do. What we found in Foucault was resonance rather than revelation.
Foucault’s History appeared in the midst of an intellectual ferment as young scholars, heavily influenced by feminism or lesbian and gay politics, sought to understand a complex history, a fluid present, and new possibilities for the future. And for many of us, the important task was not to generate a new historical or sociological approach to sexuality but to try to understand the changing nature of homosexuality. From Mary McIntosh’s essay on “The Homosexual Role,” originally published in 1968, we gained highly suggestive insights into the development of a historically specific categorization of homosexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—which we could relate to changing categorizations in the late twentieth. Trumbach and Katz’s historical work showed shifting definitions and emerging identities; Smith-Rosenberg’s work showed the strength of romantic friendships and the weakness of sexualized definitions among women; and Walkowitz’s exploration of the creation of “outcast groups” among women showed the emergence of modern concepts of prostitutes as a caste apart. From Gagnon and Simon we learned of the scripting of sexual behavior and of the need that might have existed at some stage in social evolution to “invent” an importance for sexuality. Plummer explored the creation of sexual stigma and the labeling and interactional processes through which identities were shaped and organized—precisely socially constructed. And from a range of feminist scholars we were learning about the historical shaping of the public and private spheres, the constitution of subjectivities in a range of social practices, and the gendering of sexualities.
The most important result of the broadly historical and sociological approach to sexuality we were then exploring is that it opened the whole field to critical analysis and assessment. It became possible to relate sexuality to other social phenomena. It is an absurdity to suggest, as some have done, that social constructionists were only interested in the construction of homosexuality. From the start, to understand homosexuality we had to understand heterosexuality. Three types of question then became critically important. First, how is sexuality shaped, how is it articulated with economic, social, and political structures, and how, in a phrase, has it been invented? Second, how has the domain of sexuality achieved such a critical organizing and symbolic significance in Western culture, and why do we think it is so important? Third, what role should we assign class divisions and patterns of male domination and racism, how is sex gendered and made hierarchical, and what is the relationship between sex and power? Coursing through each of these questions is a recurrent preoccupation: if sexuality is constructed by human agency, to what extent can it be changed?
The value of Foucault’s History when it appeared in 1976, and especially after its translation into English after 1978, is that it seemed to address many of these issues, not necessarily directly but in ways that allowed critical engagement and development. What the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality did was to offer a wider theoretical context for understanding the development of modern sexual discourses and to relate that development to broader considerations of power as a way of constituting a history of the present—”providing a topological and geological survey” of the sexual battlefield. That, in a way, was what we were trying to do in our historical and sociological work. Of course, in many ways Foucault challenged the easy ideology of early sex radicalism and especially the assumption that sexuality in and of itself could provide a challenge to the complex configurations of power. That, however, resonated for many of us with a growing awareness of the ambiguities of liberationist rhetoric. It was salutary, too, to be warned that by working within the confines of historically constituted categories we were in danger of being trapped within them. That warning resonated with the work we were already engaged in, deconstructing the identity categories that simultaneously enthralled and delimited us. The challenge to the expert discourses of sexology echoed the detailed researches into the ambivalent positions of pioneers like Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Freud (though of course Foucault’s critique of Freud was even more far-reaching) in both exploring and constituting a new continent of knowledge.
Foucault apparently offered a framework for understanding the issues I outlined above. Instead of Gagnon and Simon’s exciting but vague belief that the importance of sexuality had been “invented” at some unspecified time in the dim and distant past, we had a chronology: the continent of sexuality could be related to modernity, in all its complexity. It could be related to the productivity of power, the rise of biopower: “What occurred in the eighteenth century in some western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was … nothing less than the entry of life into history.” But despite the gesture toward linking sexuality and capitalism, which many of us had indeed been interested in exploring, biopower was not linked to a single strategy coursing through history. Foucault’s discussion of four strategic unities, linking together a host of practices and techniques, provided insights into the specific mechanics of knowledge and power centering on sex: hystericizing women’s bodies, pedagogizing children’s sex, socializing procreative behavior, psychiatrizing perverse pleasures. It has always surprised me when I read that Foucault ignored gender or racism; it seems to me that his account offers ways of thinking about the inextricable relationship of gender, race, sexuality, subjectivities—sketchy, of course, but designed to jerk us out of the taken-for-granted and to lay the groundwork for future work.
And that, I believe, was what, above all, we got from Foucault: a denaturalization of the history of sexuality; a challenge to linearity, to easy progressivism, to wanting sexuality to be a force against power; and, instead, a recognition of the significance of the social, a heterogeneous assemblage of practices where sexuality, as a human institution, had become increasingly the heart. In this complex field of force it wasn’t sexuality that was subversive. It was the practices of friendship and relationships as much as of the body and its pleasures that challenged the rule of King Sex. In the process of this developing analysis sexuality was problematized and opened to serious study.
So much for history—or at least one history. There are other histories, but they are for others to tell. In the rest of this article I shall look at identity and subjectivity after Foucault, explore some aspects of the historical present, and offer some thoughts about morality, ethics, and values (our current battlefield), neither forgetting nor romancing Michel Foucault but remembering what was important to me because our sense of the present is inevitably colored by which Foucault we appropriated, which histories we lived, what we remember.
Identity After Foucault
Let’s start with the question of identity. We live in an age of murderous identities across the globe, as ethnic cleansings, civil wars, and incessant cruelties constantly remind us. Yet identity politics has been a positive force in the terrain of sexuality, whether we see it as the effect of reverse discourses, the eruption of subjugated knowledges, or, as Ken Plummer has suggested, the proliferation of new sexual stories. Identities assert what we have in common and what differentiates us. They enable but can also cause trouble. Foucault, we know, ostensibly distanced himself from all this: “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation”—to refuse, in other words, the categories that are imposed upon us as truth. Many self-styled Foucauldians seized on some of his insights, for example, the shift from sodomy to homosexuality, the perverse implantation, the reversing of the discourse, to theorize the invention of the homosexual. And that work has been enormously influential. But identity as such was never Foucault’s preoccupation, although it has been the strongest current in post-1970s sexual politics, not least because dissident sexual identities have undermined certain received truths.
Identities not only cause trouble, they are troubling because, as I have argued elsewhere, they embody a number of paradoxes; indeed, no identities are more paradoxical than sexual identities. They act as relay points for a dense network of interconnected differences that involve gender, race, nationality, and age as well as sexuality. All sexual identities are provisional, but some derive their strength from this provisionality. They demonstrate the contingency and hazard-strewn path of identifications. Perverse sexual identities, in particular, breach boundaries, subvert good order, reveal the worm of transgression at the heart of the normal, and thereby warn us that even the strongest identities are figments of our imagination—which, of course, can make them more, not less, potent. So I observe four paradoxes:
Paradox 1: Sexual identity assumes fixity and uniformity while confirming the reality of unfixity, diversity, and difference.
Paradox 2: Identities are deeply personal but tell us about multiple social belongings.
Paradox 3: Sexual identities are simultaneously historical and contingent.
Paradox 4: Sexual identities are fictions—but necessary fictions.
To say that something is a fiction is not to deride it. On the contrary, it is simply to recognize the power of the narratives that enwrap us and to say that we cannot escape our histories and that we need to challenge their iron laws and determinisms by constructing narratives of the past—individual and collective—in order to grasp hold of the present and imagine the future. Identities offer a sense of agency at the same time as they show their arbitrariness. They are about becoming rather than being. They are a means of realizing human diversity and of achieving a progressive individualism, “our potential for individuation.” Through a sense of collective belonging we can achieve a sense of self, of individuality.
This is, on the surface at least, a radically different emphasis from Foucault’s. While it recognizes the coils of power that identities embrace and seeks to denaturalize identities, it also sees them as empowering. That seems to me the actual history of the past few decades. The existence of strong lesbian and gay identities in most Western countries and metropolitan areas across the globe has been a precondition for social advance and for the development of a progressive agenda: removal of antigay legislation, equal ages of consent, antidiscrimination measures, adoption legislation, same-sex partnerships and marriage, HIV community-based activities, a vast range of gay services, gay bishops … There has been a grassroots revolution, a revolution in everyday life for millions of LGBT(Q) people across the world.
We know, of course, that this is an unfinished revolution. At every stage there has been fierce contestation. In the United States, especially, homosexuality has been a central element in the culture wars. For every two steps forward there has often been a step backward. The inauguration of a gay bishop is followed by Evangelical mobilization. The surge toward same-sex marriages leads to efforts to pass a new amendment to the U.S. constitution. The very success of the gay revolution is itself a stimulus to opposition. On a global scale we also know that fundamentalisms of various types (Islamic, Christian, Hindu), seeking liberation through purity, find in homosexuality a focus for anathemas because it violates the rules of nature and of true religion. If fundamentalism is the refusal of dialogue, then the continuation of homophobia and the heterosexual assumption demonstrates that there are still basic divides that prevent the fundamentalist from listening to the sound of history marching on. Yet, despite the opposition, the scale of the change in attitudes over the past generation, which gathers pace all the time, is truly dramatic.
It has given rise to paradoxical results. The very success of identity politics has produced a double reaction: on the one hand, a naturalization of identities (as in the desire to find a rationale for gay existence in a special type of brain or an elusive gene), and, on the other, a queer revolt against the tyranny of identities, ironically by creating new labels, potentially new identities. (We now have postgay, post-AIDS, postfeminist identities, with an anti-identity supraidentity in queer.) But what we have not seen is an end to identity, the return to the “happy limbo of a nonidentity” that poor Herculine Barbin dwelt in; instead, we’ve witnessed an explosion and proliferation of identities.
Surveying the Contemporary Battlefield
What does this tell us about the contemporary sexual battlefield and its configurations of power? We can relate the proliferation of identity claims, I suggest, to a dual process that is transforming sexual and intimate life as well as so much else: the processes of detraditionalization and of individualization. Traditional patterns of life are being swept away by what Anthony Giddens has called the juggernaut of modernity, and with them are going many of the institutions that sustained a traditional sexual morality. The family seems to be in perpetual crisis if you listen to the more conservative commentators. Traditional forms of civility are undermined. Class identities that locked work and gender and sexual subjectivities in place have been weakened by relentless economic, social, and cultural change, even if material inequalities still sustain gross differences. Globalized media and communications have broken down the barriers between different ways of life, and secularization has undermined the link between faith and morality for vast sections of the population, especially in Europe. When Italy, home of the Vatican, barely reproduces its population, meaning that the vast majority of Italian couples use artificial birth control while the pope remains adamantly opposed to it, something is afoot. Individuals are making decisions on sexual morality that are relevant to them alone. As Bauman put it, morals used to be regarded as too important to be left to mere human beings. Now they can be left to no one else. Faith and morality are becoming separated as moral decision making is becoming individualized. We are all faced with the loneliness of moral choice. We are all increasingly being forced to indulge in what Giddens, after J. S. Mill, calls “life experiments.”
A word of caution may seem necessary here. I have already mentioned the rise of fundamentalism, which is very much about the affirmation of the link between faith and morality. Fundamentalism affirms absolutism against relativism, certainty against chronic uncertainty. It offers security and a sense of home and soothes the anguish of individual choice. Its attractions are manifest as much in the United States as in the Middle East. But it is also a reaction to the anxieties evoked by the rise of modern individualism.
Foucault famously linked the idea of the subject to subjection, and it is true that we are frequently never so unfree as when we live the illusion of personal choice in the glittering hypermarket that is late modernity. Individualism is as much a social relationship as the feudal, hierarchical, and patriarchal orders of the past (and, in many parts of the world, the living present). The idea of the unencumbered self is an illusion. We realize our sense of self, our personal autonomy, only in and through others.
Yet we do need to affirm that in many parts of the world the sexual changes of the past generation have increased the space for individual choice, have increased autonomy and the ability to take hold of the present in order to colonize the future. Part of this is the result of the economic transformations of the past decades. As people have been freed to become possessive individuals in the economic sphere, it has been increasingly difficult to deny them freedom in the sphere of the intimate. But there is plentiful evidence that a transformation of intimacy is afoot, a grassroots revolution. People want to have greater control over their lives. They want to be able to make their own decisions about sexuality and relationships. They want those relationships to be intimate and disclosive. As many of the traditional institutional supports weaken, intimacy probably has to bear more weight than ever before. But for millions the gains are real in terms of individual freedom. There has been a flourishing of new subjectivities that go beyond the sterile fixities of traditional identities but owe a great deal to post-1960s sexual identities.
Where does that leave the carceral society that Foucault theorized? Has power disappeared? Has the erotic somehow escaped the grid of discourse and the modalities of regulation? Of course not! It is through discourse and regulation that sexualities are produced and reproduced and acquire social meaning. But it is important to observe shifts, to understand changing modalities, to measure gains against losses. Power may be everywhere, and recognition of that has shifted perceptions on a range of sexual activities over recent years—often, one suspects, in directions that Foucault would have deplored. But until we understand the changing patterns of the battlefield, we cannot assess where we are and how we can proceed safely.
The central fact we have to start with is that we live in a world of increasing sexual diversity. To understand sexuality today we must understand the varied contexts in which meanings are attributed to intimacy and eroticism and the complex social interactions that shape the erotic cultures of different societies. Sexualities remain hierarchically organized and are still shaped by complex relations of power, with some forms dominant and others subordinate and marginalized. The most familiar of these forms are related to gender, class, age, race, and ethnicity. Increasing awareness in the West, at least, of the dominance of institutionalized forms of heterosexuality has prompted critiques of compulsory heterosexuality, heterosexism, the heterosexual panorama, heteronormativity—the phrases vary, but the effort put into these concepts underlines the importance given to interrogating formerly unquestioned assumptions.
Foucault, despite the proviso I made earlier, was relatively indifferent to gender, but few today can doubt that gender remains critical to the organization of sexualities and sexual cultures. It is also increasingly clear that whatever steps societies take toward formal equality and whatever local economic and social shifts and ideological transformations occur, inherited assumptions about the social meanings of masculinity and femininity have considerable resilience. This is the basis for understanding heterosexuality to be institutionalized not only in formal structures but in our minds—what Holland and colleagues call “the male in the head.”
The complexity of the relationship between the development of Western norms and the experience of colonialism has also given rise to a more sophisticated postcolonial theorization of sexual identities than Foucault himself ventured. The export of sexual identities from the developed to the developing world must now be assessed in the context of neocolonial power relations, though without seeking to idealize identities associated with precolonial traditions and indigenous cultures.
A postcolonial perspective is closely related to recognizing the growing importance of globalization on the organization of sexualities. A globalized world is one in which Western categories of sexuality increasingly interact with and interpenetrate those operating in other sexual cultures and in which new categories emerging worldwide—whether universalized or asserted in opposition to one another—are increasingly interconnected across cultures. A globalized world is also one in which the nature and experience of risk has changed. The transformation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s into a global pandemic is a vivid and tragic illustration of this. Globalization has introduced new forms of conflict over sexual health, sexual tourism, the rights and roles of women in nonindustrialized societies, the control of population—the list can be vastly extended. These sexual conflicts have become central to many global political differences, such as the much-heralded conflict between Western and Islamic values. And yet the processes of engagement between cultures and movements on an international scale have, in turn, given rise to new discourses on human rights that are already having a significant impact on sexual politics within specific countries.
Because there is a high degree of uncertainty surrounding the erotic across the globe, it is not surprising that much contemporary debate focuses on the family and intimate relationships, those between men and women, men and men, women and women, adults and children. Despite the explosive impact of the internet and of cybersex, sexuality is ultimately about interaction with others. It is through that interaction that sexual meanings are shaped and sexual knowledge produced. It is perhaps not so startling, in this context, that same-sex civic unions and marriage have in the new millennium become the symbolic focus of political controversy, especially in the United States. Such issues condense a wide range of changes that have occurred over the past generation, with incalculable results for the traditional sexual order.
The sexual provides a focus for political and cultural confrontations, and the discursive explosion that Foucault observed in the nineteenth century is continuing at an exponential pace. Traditionalists aspire (largely in vain, despite local victories) to the restoration of stability, while new voices call for the recognition of new identities and new ways of being. A cacophany of sexual narratives, of old and new “sexual stories,” compete to be heard. While even Foucault might have raised a skeptical eyebrow at the Oprahization or Springerization of our culture, he would not have been surprised by the inextricable linkage of speaking and thinking about sex with its feverish production in myriad forms.
The sexual stories we tell, as Plummer has argued, are deeply implicated in moral and political change, and shifting stories of self carry the potential for radical transformations of the social order. Late modern stories reveal and create a multiplicity of new projects, new constituencies, new possibilities for the future. At their best these are stories of human life changes, of emotional and sexual democracy, of pluralistic forms of sexuality that open the way for a new culture of intimacy—what Plummer describes as “intimate citizenship.” But there are, of course, counter-stories, counter-possibilities, counteractions. We are in the midst of a profound conflict of values.
Values and Ethics
In a world that is simultaneously globalized and challenged by emerging differences and new fundamentalisms, questions about values and ethics inevitably come to the fore. Sexuality has always been an arena for moral and cultural conflict, but increasingly in contemporary societies it is a central issue in mainstream debates on civic values and citizenship. Questions about who we are, what we need and desire, and how we should live are, to a striking degree, also debates about sexuality. In a world where traditional sources of authority, such as religion and the patriarchal family, are under intense pressure and where heightened individualism is increasingly the norm, it is difficult to see whether there will ever be a fixed set of values to which everyone would adhere. This is not, of course, what fundamentalists of various hues hope or expect. But for those alive to the pleasures as well as the hazards of diversity, the ultimate challenge is to find ways of balancing the recognition of individual needs, desires, and sensitivities with mutual responsibilities in order to establish some agreement on common human standards. And that is not easy.
Advances in science still hold the key for many people who seek a new security in the genetic revolution, asserting that differences of gender or sexuality are a result of patterns laid down in the course of human evolution. Foucault made clear his reluctance to surrender sex to scientism when he rejected what he called the “so called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is.” Developments since his death have created more rather than less danger. For example, the promise offered by the genetic revolution and its spin-off, evolutionary psychology, seems to me a hopeless and dangerous delusion, as I indicated above. At the same time, however, the social and historical perspective on the making of sexualities that I have outlined does not in itself carry any set moral or political values. The usefulness of seeing sexuality as shaped in culture is that it allows us to recognize the contingency and arbitrariness of our own social arrangements. However, it does not tell us how we should live today.
If sexuality does not speak its own truth, then clarifying what we want does matter. If, like Foucault, we reject the idea that morality is external to us, then, individually and collectively, we must develop ethical guidelines to help us negotiate the challenges of everyday life. “Values” has often been seen as a code word for conservative moral politics, but in a post-traditionalist order that embraces diversity, clarification of values is as necessary for the Left as it is for the Right. I have always been taken with something Foucault said in an interview with Michael Bess at Berkeley in 1980: “What is good is something that comes through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favourable nature of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work.” This idea puts responsibility fairly and squarely where it should be—on us. That requires a shift in our thinking about morality—a shift from a morality of acts, which locates truth and rightness or wrongdoing in particular practices and in the expression of certain desires, toward an ethics of relationships. This is where the last two volumes of Foucault’s History seem particularly relevant to his project and ours. In these works Foucault problematized our preoccupations with the truth of sexuality and desire by exploring how Western man had become the subject of desire in the first place. Like us post-Christians, the ancients were faced with the task of elaborating an ethic that was not founded in religion or any a priori justification. Unlike us, however, they did not attempt to codify acts, thereby making sex itself the bearer of values and moral anxieties, nor did they attempt to submit individuals to external laws. They attempted, instead, to create an aesthetics of existence, an art of life through which excess was balanced by temperance, pleasure by self-discipline. Foucault did not, of course, see the ethics of the ancients as a guide for our own discontents, but his study points to the real task: not to seek a new morality but to invent “practices of freedom” that eschew the models of domination and subordination, sin and confession, natural and perverse. For Foucault the problem was “to try to decide the practices of freedom through which we could determine what is sexual pleasure and what are our erotic, loving, passionate relationships with others.” Freedom is a process, not a given; a practice, not a goal. “The practices of freedom are what people try to make of themselves when they experience the existence of freedom in the history that has formed them.”
At the heart of Foucault’s critique of Sartre is his belief that the task is not to realize the self but to create the self. In opposition to what he saw as the essentialism of Sartrean notions of authenticity Foucault offered his idea of creativity. “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.” Erotic experimentation and the forging of new patterns of relationships were a key area for the elaboration of ethical values.
Critics have pointed out various problems with Foucault’s position. Feminists have criticised him for ignoring the social determinants that limit autonomy, especially for women. Others have advanced a broader criticism: that the worst excesses of contemporary individualism would not be challenged but exalted. The artist of life may be unable to feel for others’ needs and will pursue a life of meaning for himself or herself alone without asking whether the same is possible for others. Foucault argued that “care of the self” must involve care of others, but without elaborating other principles there is a danger that the creative self will be self-centered. Agnes Heller made a helpful point in counterposing what she sees as the essentially aristocratic style of the aesthete to the democratic search for a meaningful life. Meaningfulness involves recognizing that the self is indeed creative, but that creativity can be fully realized only through acknowledging our responsibilities to others.
Social developments, it has been argued, have given rise to an age of responsibility. My own gloss on this is that as we can no longer rely on the force of duty, our involvement with others must be based on a sense of mutual responsibility, freely agreed to by autonomous subjects. The free development of others is the key to our own self-development, our self-creation, and the most potent source of mutual responsibility. A society based on the recognition of diversity and pluralism requires this. Justice demands not only avoiding unnecessary pain to the other but fostering care and responsibility for the other. Responsibility to oneself, to others, and for otherness involves an avoidance of excessive control. It requires respect for individual choices and for the dignity and autonomy of each individual. But responsibility becomes a strong and resilient part of a relationship only when it is freely chosen; then, perhaps, it may be stronger than the enforced and external obligations that kept us trapped within traditional values.
This seems to be fully in line with Foucault’s late ethics. He observed at one point that “imagining a sexual act that does not conform to the law or to nature, that’s not what upsets people. But that individuals might begin to love each other, that’s the problem.” Clearly, given the furor that same-sex marriage continues to evoke, especially in the United States, the fact that people love each other still causes problems. But in an age when same-sex partnerships have been given civil recognition or even been accepted as same-sex marriage across Europe, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and parts of the global South, and, despite everything, remain the subject of serious contestation in the United States, we are clearly moving onto a new terrain. We are moving away from a concern with identity and its associated sexual rights to a concern with the complexities of intimate citizenship. Within the nonheterosexual world there is a division about the implications of this: are families of choice and same-sex marriage subversive of traditional families and couples or a queering of them? Do the new forms of love represent a recuperation of existing structures or a transformation of them? How you answer these questions depends, I suppose, on where you start. The fact that these issues are on the agenda everywhere says something about how far we have come in the years since Foucault’s death in 1984 and in what completely unanticipated ways. Some would see them as triumphs of grassroots mobilization and of the creativity that everyone, but especially the marginalized, must demonstrate in late modern societies. I would take them as examples of that self-invention that Foucault saw as so important for the development of practices of freedom.
Having said that, I must also observe that if we have learned anything from Foucault it is to be alert to new modalities of regulation. While the categorical divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality may be crumbling in many parts of the world, it is being reaffirmed in others. We can be sure that patterns of resistance are forming and new ruses of power are at work. But I do wonder whether in the shift that I believe is taking place, from sex and desire toward intimacy and relationships, we are seeing the beginning of the end of the regime of sexuality. If so, Foucault may one day be seen not as the philosopher of the end of man but as the prophet of the end of sexuality. There will be no forgetting him then.