MICHEL FOUCAULT: A MARCUSEAN IN STRUCTURALIST CLOTHING

Joel Whitebook

ABSTRACT Foucaults rejection of the repressive hypothesis is generally taken as a critique of Freud. Its real target is, however, the left Freudian tradition, which received its paradigmatic articulation in the work of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse sought to show that the conict between the repressive demands of civilization and instinctual desires of the individual didnt represent a transhistorical state of affairs, as Freud maintained. He argues, rather, that it represents a particular historical constellation that can be transcended. Foucault purports to reject the entire structure in which the problem arises, that is, the conict between the demands of civilization and bodily based desire. The thesis of this article is, however, that he doesnt reject the conict, but simply displaces it. In his scheme, the displaced conict takes place between the apparatus of sexuality and bodies and pleasures. Furthermore, Foucault maintains that the emancipation of bodies and pleasures from their entrapment in the apparatus of sexuality constitutes the desirable political program. The diagnosis of the situation and the suggested political remedy are, in other words, exactly parallel to Marcuses. KEYWORDS civilization Foucault Freud Marcuse sexuality

I The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, represents Foucaults attempt to exorcise the specter of psychoanalysis. Characteristically, however, he doesnt try to accomplish this feat through a frontal encounter with the substance of the Freudian position. Rather, he attempts an end run around Freud by trying to trump psychoanalysis, as a theoretical and practical project, through an archaeological-genealogical reduction of its signicance. This reduction will
Thesis Eleven, Number 71, November 2002: 5270 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd [0725-5136(200211)71;5270;028124]

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pave the way for Foucault to formulate a counter-project, namely, the aesthetics of existence. In The Order of Things, Foucault had disingenuously praised psychoanalysis as an exemplary counter-science (Foucault, 1994: 3739). But in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, the pretense is dropped, and he assumes an overtly disparaging attitude towards Freud. Now, rather than being presented as a critical counter-science, which could guide the archaeological attack on humanism, psychoanalysis is seen as perhaps the most invidious form of humanism and becomes the object of archaeological scrutiny. However, if Foucaults opposition towards psychoanalysis is unmistakable, the attack itself is anything but direct. Indeed, it is the most tortuous of all Foucaults encounters with Freud, proceeding more through derision, innuendo and irony than through argument. It is peculiar that in a book purporting to be an archaeology of psychoanalysis (Foucault, 1978: 130), psychoanalytic texts are rarely discussed and Freud is hardly mentioned by name. Furthermore, in a move that strains the readers credulity, psychoanalysis isnt even presented as the major episode in what Foucault calls the deployment of sexuality itself part of the power/knowledge apparatus as one would expect. Instead, it is relegated to one minor episode in that entire history. This is strange. For whether one celebrates or deplores psychoanalysis, it seems hard to deny the sheer magnitude of Freuds impact. But it would grant too much power to Freud for Foucault even to let him play the devil. John Forrester rightly observes that the obliqueness of the attack on Freud and the minimizing subsumption of psychoanalysis under the deployment of sexuality give the book an odd, refracted and displaced character. He senses, moreover, these oddities represent tactical cunning devices on Foucaults part which require comment, if not explanation (Forrester, 1990: 289). Unfortunately, however, Forrester perhaps because of his idealization of Foucault isnt able to pursue his sound intuition further and examine the ends Foucaults tactical stratagems are meant to serve. Jacques-Alain Miller, on the other hand, can. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he has more reason to spot the aggression coming his way and is therefore better able to untangle what Foucault is up to. In a roundtable discussion that included Foucault, Miller states his thesis directly: Foucault is using a complex strategy that will enable him to erase the break that is located with Freud (Foucault, 1980a: 21112). And Foucault doesnt deny it. In a signicant exchange, Miller presses Foucault on the articiality of assimilating Freud to the deployment of sexuality:
MILLER: Its a matter of appearances, is that what you are telling us? FOUCAULT: Not a delusive appearance, but a fabrication. MILLER: Right, and so its motivated by what you want, or hope, youre . . . FOUCAULT: Correct, and thats where the polemical or political objective comes in. But as you know, I never go in for polemics, and Im a good distance away from politics. (Foucault, 1980a: 21112)

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Having dropped all aspirations of scientic disinterestedness, Foucaults history of the present is apparently free to adopt whatever standpoint it needs in this case the deployment of sexuality to fabricate an account that suits his political purposes. Because of this, it isnt entirely accurate for Foucault to claim that he doesnt participate in polemics. It would be more correct to say that he doesnt participate in polemics directly, but uses historical and theoretical discourse and a good deal of rhetoric to pursue and obscure his polemical intentions. This submerged polemical intent is one of the major contributors to the odd, refracted and displaced character of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, referred to by Forrester. In The Order of Things Foucault had, with the help of his particular version of psychoanalysis, tried to foresee the next epistemic break, entailing as it did the death of man; and despite his attempt to present himself as a neutral archaeologist, he obviously favored this impending epistemic break. In Volume One, as J.-A. Miller observes, it is the death of psychoanalysis that is being predicted and promoted by Foucaults archaeological criticisms. Like humanism, of which it may be the foremost expression, psychoanalysis is seen as belonging to a contingent historical structure whose time is (hopefully) passing (quoted in Foucault, 1980a: 211). The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, occupies a strange transitional, and transitory, position in Foucaults oeuvre, in which one of the central problematics in his thinking the question of limits and their transgression appears at last to have played itself out. The idea of writing such a history was not something that had only recently occurred to Foucault in 1975, resulting, as one might think, from his experience with the post-68 milieu in Paris or with the Gay Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. (They were no doubt the immediate causes that led him to take up the actual composition of the book at that point.) He told an interviewer that he had been thinking about such a project from the moment he began writing the History of Madness , and, indeed, that he considered the two books twin projects. This remark belies the claim that Madness and Civilization represents an anomalous early work that Foucault quickly moved beyond. What united these two projects was the question of how the normal and the pathological are divided (cited in Miller, 1993: 251), a variation on the theme of limits and transgression. In the 14 years separating Madness and Civilization and the beginning of what would be his nal project, Foucault had been doing continuous research on the history of sexuality and had collected copious material on such topics as masturbation, incest, hysteria, perversion and eugenics. Foucault, however, was apparently not satised with the various accounts he gave of the problem of limits and their transgression. Furthermore, in addition to the theoretical considerations, he also became disillusioned with the politics of transgression as they manifested themselves in Maoist terrorism and the Iranian Revolution. As a result, Foucault now adapted a new theoretical strategy: He tried to undercut the structure of

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thought within which the question of transgression arises in the rst place. What I am referring to is Foucaults claim, which lies at the center of the rst volume of The History of Sexuality, to have refuted the repressive hypothesis. But what is the repressive hypothesis, after all, if not another name for Freuds transhistorical thesis which received its canonical formulation in Civilization and its Discontents that the requirements of civilization are inevitably opposed to the demands of human sexuality (and aggression) and therefore must repress the latter (Freud, 1930)? In Madness and Civilization, Foucault had accepted the validity of the repressive hypothesis at least with respect to modernity and then tried to nd a radical solution from within it, namely, the valorization of madness. Now, he challenges the hypothesis itself. Were he successful in this approach, Foucault would have rid himself of the question of limits and transgression and the challenge of psychoanalysis at the same time. The refutation is, however, more apparent than real. II Foucault likes to begin his books with a stunning rhetorical gesture that grabs the readers attention. In the rst chapter of Madness and Civilization, we encountered the haunting image of the Ship of Fools gliding along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals (Foucault, 1988: vii) in what was a voyage of simultaneous expulsion and purication. Similarly, The Order of Things begins with a burst of philosophical laughter provoked by a reading from Borges fantastic Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault, 1994: xvii). The point of the passage is, to dramatize the sheer contingency of all categorical schemes especially our own. And what reader can forget the excruciating account of Damiens torture and execution, which provides the overture for Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1979)? It is meant to recall the real terror that has been masked by the rationalized world of the Panopticon. In this regard, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, is no exception. Foucault begins the book by ying in the face of the conventional claim that the Victorians were, as it were, not Victorian if by Victorian we mean puritanical and sexually repressed. In addition to challenging the received image of late 19th century culture and morality, this assertion was also meant to provoke the established Freudian left, the dsirants who dominated the French intellectual scene after 1968, and whose partisans included some of Foucaults closest friends. The claim about the Victorians is at the center of Foucaults larger rejection of the repressive hypothesis, which held that, from the 18th century onward, modern European history has involved the increasing repression of sexuality. Conservative and left Freudians took the hypothesis as an accurate description of the historical trajectory of the last several centuries. But whereas the conservatives have thought the state of affairs was unchangeable, the

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Freudian left believed that sexual repression could and, moreover, should be undone. For them, emancipation consists in the lifting of that repression and the liberation of sexuality from repressive power. Foucault, however, doesnt even believe the hypothesis is accurate as a description. Rather than experiencing a steady increase in repression which peaked in the Victorian age, modernity has, he argues, witnessed an institutional incitement to speak about sex and a multiplication of discourses concerning it. Moreover, he maintains this discursive explosion has occurred in the service of power. On this interpretation, Frank Harriss My Secret Life with its cataloguing, categorizing and dissecting of all the details of his sexual experience no longer appears as a courageous anomaly in Victorian society, but as an exemplary work. Furthermore, Harriss compulsion to articulate the minutiae of his sexual life wasnt something new, but the result of a force that had been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries (Foucault, 1978: 223) and which was essentially bound up with the creation of the modern subject. It may have become secularized, scientized, intensied in modernity, but the genealogy of this compulsion to put sex into words can be traced back to the early Christian era to what Foucault calls pastoral power. As he had done earlier with the asylum, the clinic and the prison, Foucault links the rise of a new form of institutional connement, namely, the monastery, with the emergence of new forms of power and discourse. Although he would later trace the deployment of sexualitys precursors even further back into the Greek and Roman period, the formation of the monastic life nevertheless constitutes a crucial episode in the crystallization of the hermeneutics of the self. For it instituted the demand for the constant and methodical scrutiny of ones inner world and desires. The connection between the new forms of subjection, subjectication and internalization can be seen, Foucault argues, in the battle for chastity, championed by Cassian, an early theorist of monastic life. Whereas the struggle against fornication was primarily concerned with ones outward behavior, the battle for chastity, introduced in the monasteries, directs itself at the purity of a persons thoughts even including involuntary nocturnal thoughts, that is, dreams. Indeed, Cassian goes so far as to make the absence of erotic dreams and nocturnal pollution a sign that one has reached the pinnacle of chastity (Foucault, 1997: 192). What is most important about the rise of monasticism is not merely that the number and intensity of prohibitions increases, but that the prohibited thoughts that is, the representations of desire now become a target for control. The most important moment of transgression shifted, as Foucault puts it, from the performance of the act to the stirrings so difcult to perceive and formulate of desire. What is signicantly new is a whole technique for analyzing and diagnosing thought, its origins, its qualities its dangers, its potential for temptation and all the dark forces that can lurk

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behind the mask it may assume through endless self-questioning (Foucault, 1997: 1945). When the Lateran Council prescribed a yearly confession for all members of the Church in 1215, these techniques of self-scrutiny were exported from the monastery to the larger Christian population. Since then, Foucault claims, the West has been a singularly confessing society (Foucault, 1978: 59). Foucault attempts to insinuate guilt by association by assimilating psychoanalysis to the confession. Already in his description of the Churchs practice of confession, Foucault continually alludes to Freud indeed, he uses almost exact Freudian terms without mentioning psychoanalysis by name. Not so subtly, he tries to convey the impression that psychoanalysis merely represents a variation and a relatively minor one at that of the techniques developed in the monastery. Thus, for example, he describes the evolution of confessional techniques as a movement from the investigation of explicit behavior sexual acts, positions, climaxes and so on to the interrogation of what an analyst would call fantasy life, that is, thoughts, desires [and] voluptuous imaginings, and, naturally, dreams. Like Freuds requirement that nothing must escape examination, no matter how trivial it may appear, Foucault observes that these interrogations must be pursued down to their slenderest ramications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the bodys mechanics and the minds complacency (Foucault, 1978: 19). And in an unmistakable allusion to the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis and the injunction to put it into words, Foucault writes, The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty, the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech (Foucault, 1978: 21). The confessional interrogations were not, of course, pursued gratuitously, but with a particular goal in mind: to transform and control desire itself. Foucault observes that the ultimate aim was to redirect it away from the temptations of the esh and re-channel it towards a spiritual object, namely, God processes that invite comparison with displacement and sublimation. The terminology of current psychoanalytic controversies partly because they derive, in no small part, from Foucaults enormous inuence on the zeitgeist can be used to clarify the exact nature of Foucaults claims. He is arguing that the desires examined in the confession are not simply found in the penitents soul, but, are, in a strong sense, created by the confessional process itself. It would be one thing to say that certain pre-existing desires in the penitent are uncovered and then elaborated and even multiplied by the process itself. (This could be taken as an accurate description of the psychoanalytic process.) But Foucault is saying something more, namely, that they are implanted, to use his important term, in the believers soul by the confessor. Let us be clear about Foucaults thesis, for he will repeat it with respect

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to the distinction of sex and sexuality. Through suggestiveness and stimulation of the confessional process, pastoral power implants particular desires in the penitents soul so that it can later take hold of and manipulate them. In the 18th century, there arose a new form of power, bio-power, which adopted and transformed confessional techniques for its own purposes. Foucault argues that because it required a steady source of workers for its factories and consumers for its economy, the emerging capitalist order had to assert control over the growth and maintenance of the population. Science and technology had signicantly reduced famine and disease, and now it became necessary to intervene at the level of the human body in order to regulate reproduction. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault had analyzed how the body was mechanized and disciplined by the new institutions of modernity that is, secondary schools, military barracks and workshops. Now, in The History of Sexuality, he describes how it will be regulated through the establishment of a number of medical, administrative and social welfare agencies, all concerned with the maintenance of health and the reproduction of the population. Most importantly, bio-power seeks to create a population whose sexual and familial life is organized in such a way it will reliably reproduce itself and socialize the young in a way which will provide workers and consumers for the economy. Through the interventions of its regulatory agencies, it seeks to bring about changes that will steer the population into conformity with its statistically determined requirements. This means that it must employ techniques to move the statistically deviant in the direction of the norm that is, to normalize them. The techniques bio-power employs to accomplish its ends, however, are, according to Foucault, not necessarily negative. In one of his most famous claims, Foucault argues that power isnt basically a form of antienergy, but is in fact productive (Foucault, 1978: 85). Rather than using repression or coercion to achieve its goals, bio-power constantly generates and stimulates new forces and desires with the aim of appropriating and steering them in the required direction.1 The Scientia Sexualis, encompassing sexology, demography, psychiatry, psychology, and, later, psychoanalysis which came into its own in the 19th century constituted the form of knowledge that corresponded to the emergence of bio-power. This new science took over the techniques of pastoral power and adapted them for the requirements of a different form of power. The moral theology of concupiscence was transformed into the theoretical discourse on sex; the preoccupation with sin and transgression into the new categorization of the normal and the pathological; and the process of confession into the clinical interview. And while sex remained a privileged theme of confession . . . from the Christian penance to the present day, there was an important change. Until the 19th century, the sexual material generated by confessional practices was never recorded, but dematerialized as soon as it was spoken. And this suited the purposes of the Christian pastor adequately, for confession was a ritual in

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which the expression alone produces intrinsic modications in the person who articulates it (Foucault, 1978: 612). But with the rise of the modern sexologists, pedagogues and especially the psychiatrists the whole pitiful, lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic produced by confessional techniques was released from its old juridico-religious (Foucault, 1978: 64) function and registered, codied and systematized that is, turned into the putative science of sexuality. The scientic status of these practices is what Foucault contests. In a comparison he later acted as naive, Foucault contrasts the Scienta Sexualis, as he calls them, with the more exotic forms of sexuality he thought were practiced in traditional cultures. The ars erotica supposedly employed erotic techniques to intensify pleasure and gain access to esoteric truth, that is, wisdom. Diotima would count as a prime example here. The Scientia Sexualis, in contrast, is allied with power and generates the sort of objectiable truth that can be used for social engineering. Like its precursor, the confessional, the clinical interview does not gather objective data about the interviewees pre-existing sexual desires. Once again, it implants those desires in the subject. The interview actually arouses those polymorphous desires in the individual so that they can later be extracted from peoples bodies, catalogued in administrative dossiers and case studies, and exploited by power/knowledge. Power, as Judith Butler observes, requires the eld of bodily impulse to expand and proliferate . . . such that it will continually have fresh material through which to articulate itself. Hence, repression produces a eld of innitely moralizable bodily phenomena in order to facilitate and rationalize its own proliferation (Butler, 1997: 58). Foucault therefore doesnt only reject the idea that nineteenth-century bourgeois society was repressive. He also claims even more audaciously that it was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion (Foucault, 1978: 47). Putting sex into discourse the effect of Scientia Sexualis led to an increasing incitement . . . dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities and has initiated sexual heterogeneities (Foucault, 1978: 37). It has amounted, in short, to a virtual sexualization of the culture. This is what he means by the perverse implantation. The distinction between sex and sexuality or the deployment of sexuality is another key element of Foucaults position. It is important to distinguish his view of this distinction from a more conventional psychoanalytic way of parsing it. What Foucault is calling sex is generally taken to refer to the naturally given (Foucault, 1978: 106) dimension of our sexual life that is rooted in ones biological make-up and therefore transhistorical. And sexuality is usually understood as the part that is socially and historically constructed on it. As Foucault himself describes this conventional view, sex would be seen as the anchorage point that supports the [constructions] of sexuality (Foucault, 1978: 152). Psychoanalytically oriented social theorists have argued for decades, and continue to argue, about the precise relation

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between the naturally given and the constructed parts of our sexual lives, with conservative theorists tending to assign more weight to the former, and progressives to the latter. We must appreciate how thoroughgoing Foucaults constructivism is. He is not simply arguing, like many left-wing Freudians, that the largest portion of our sexual life is socially constructed and therefore historically contingent and mutable. He is claiming rather that the existence of a biological substratum is virtually an illusion.2 It is a construction of the deployment of sexuality. The new Scientia Sexualis, motivated by power, must posit the existence of sex, which exists by nature, to legitimate itself. Sex, in other words, is the pseudo-object of the pseudo-science of sexuality. It is, in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality (Foucault, 1978: 106). Sexuality, in contrast,
is the name given to a historical construct, not a furtive reality that is difcult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensication of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge power. (Foucault, 1978: 1056)

Sexuality, in short, comes completely from the outside. If psychoanalysis embodies an ethic of avowal, then Foucaults thesis of the perverse implantation represents a reversal of the psychoanalytic position. As Hans Loewald has argued, a psychoanalytic ethos enjoins us to accept responsibility for that is, to own, to the greatest possible extent our inner world of impulses and fantasies, our destructive and sadistic as well as our sexual wishes (however injurious they are to our self-esteem) and not to deny them through externalization onto the outside world (Loewald, 1978: 25ff). Insofar as it pictures heterodox sexuality as coming from the outside, then, the perverse implantation constitutes an instance of disavowal, of disowning, in the strict psychoanalytic sense. Given Loewalds claim of which Foucault was presumably unaware it is signicant that Foucault interprets the development of confessional techniques in terms of progressive expansion of the process of avowal. He argues that the evolution of the word avowal . . . and of the legal function it designated is itself emblematic of the development of the confession as a major vehicle for individualization by power. In pre-modern societies, where the group tends to take precedence over the individual, avowal refers to its responsibility for the status, identity and value of its members. For example, if a member of a tribe kills someone, the tribe is responsible. But with the advance of modernization and the disembedding of the individual from the collective from the social substance, to use Marxs phrase the term increasingly came to signify someones acknowledgment of his own actions and thoughts. Through confessional methods of interrogation and inquest, religious as well as civil, individuals

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were, Foucault argues, increasingly compelled to assume responsibility for their inner worlds and the actions that ensued from them (Foucault, 1978: 579). Unlike Kant, Weber and Freud, Foucault does not applaud this development as an advance from heteronomy to autonomy. Rather, he believes it represents a new and more insidious form of heteronomous determination from the outside now implanted in the inside. Foucaults argument hearkens back to his analysis of conscience in Madness and Civilization, where he criticized the modern asylum for its interiorization, or to put it more paradoxically, its psychologization of madness. What Foucault objected to about the humanist reforms in 19th century psychiatry was that madness ceased to pertain to both body and soul, and was now inscribed within the dimension of interiority. While the older madhouse may have practiced overt physical brutality, the supposedly progressive asylum did something perhaps even more pernicious: it organized the madmans guilt as a consciousness of himself, thereby replacing the free terror of madness [with] the stiing anguish of responsibility (Foucault, 1988: 247). It is odd that Foucault, the former champion of transgression, takes such a position. In externalizing heterodox sexuality (and madness), as if there were something unacceptable about it, he seems to tacitly accept its conventional stigmatization. For Freud, sexual perversion which for the present purposes can be taken as non-canonical heterosexual activity is the outgrowth of infantile sexuality. And insofar as we were all infants and our early experience remains inscripted within us, we are all, to one extent or another, perverse. To be sure, a number of normalizing analysts have taken a moralizing and condemnatory attitude towards perversion. Psychoanalysis scientic or naturalistic heritage, however, ought not only to promote an attitude of tolerance, but, more importantly, of avowal of ownership as well. Psychoanalysis radicalism rejects the conventional societys moralism and disavowal of infantile sexuality. It strives, rather, to acknowledge and integrate the unconscious-instinctual to the fullest possible extent. Foucault cant make up his mind. Is heterodox sexuality something internal, which is opposed to the normalizing forces of society? This claim would reinstate the repressive hypothesis. Or is it something bad, which society implants in us and that we have to repudiate? III Foucault pursues a two-fold strategy in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. He presents himself as an anti-psychoanalytic anti-utopian thinker who is offering a new post-liberationist form of politics. But at the same time as he tries to repudiate the Freudian left by attacking the relatively crude position of Wilhelm Reich, he borrows the arguments of one of its other major gures, Herbert Marcuse, without acknowledging the debt. Foucault, at this stage of

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his career, is in fact a Marcusean in structuralist clothing with, I should add, a sado-masochistic twist. The logic of Eros and Civilization provides the structure for Foucaults argument in Vol. I (Marcuse, 1966). As we have seen, the repressive hypothesis envisions an inevitable conict between two elements: the repressing forces of organized social life the reality principle, the symbolic, power, the law of the father and so on, and a repressed quasi-natural substratum the pleasure principle, as desire, the drives, the feminine, etc. At this point, the details of the various formulations of the repressive hypothesis need not concern us. What is important is its general logic. Freud and the Freudian right (including Lacan) accept the repressive hypothesis as accurately describing the deep structure of civilized social life and therefore see it as transhistorical and inescapable. The Freudian left, on the other hand, while it agrees that the hypothesis is an accurate description of patriarchal civilization to date, maintains that it only applies to one contingent phase of history. In other words, it is mutable. From the 1930s through the 1970s, the Freudian left generally argued that repression is the result of modern capitalist society, which could and should be overthrown. When he argued in Madness and Civilization that modern power and rationality necessarily repressed or excluded madness, Foucault himself subscribed to a form of the repressive hypothesis. The Freudian tradition, across the entire political spectrum, has been marked by a certain epistemic heroism. And one of the aims of Foucaults critique of the repressive hypothesis is to debunk that heroic image. Viewed positively, psychoanalysis has been seen as waging a difcult struggle against our most fundamental (and consoling) self-deceptions. All our attempts to gain knowledge of the repressed are dynamically opposed and necessarily encounter formidable resistance, which is to say, they are dynamically opposed. Their uncovering demands exceptional effort and the endurance of considerable discomfort by both parties. The fact of this resistance does indeed make the subject matter of psychoanalysis that which is most difcult to tell. And although Foucault intends it sarcastically, it is not entirely an exaggeration when he describes the insights pursued by psychoanalysis as, if not unbearable, at least hazardous (Foucault, 1978: 53). The Freudian right and the Freudian left more or less agree on the nature of resistance and the arduousness of the psychoanalytic pursuit of insight. But they disagree on the fate of those repressed truths once they are uncovered. Freud and conservative Freudians believe the best one can hope for is the relative reduction of repression and the sublimation and integration of the formerly repressed material into a richer and more exible form of ego organization. The Freudian left, in contrast, holds out for a more radical solution: an end to repression and the release of the repressed directly into daily life. For them, this constitutes emancipation. This is the position Foucault holds up for ridicule.

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While Reich and Marcuse pursue the same basic left Freudian strategy, there is a crucial difference between them. Reich accepts a conventional Freudian view, which sees genitality as the culmination of ideal psychosexual development. In a rather simplistic hydraulic conception, he views orgasmic potency as the main sign of psychic well-being. His diagnosis and his solution are straightforward, to say the least: Capitalism necessarily represses orgasmic potency and a socialist society would free it. Marcuse, in contrast, rejects the Freudian scheme of development, and views genitality as a repressive form of sexual organization. It requires the sacrices of polymorphous perversity and the pre-genital stages of development to genital supremacy. Polymorphous perversity is a concept the early Freud used to refer to the unformed sexuality of the child before the component drives are integrated into genitality and brought under the dominance of the reality principle (and the ego). The childs entire body is, at this stage, presumably eroticized. Whereas genitality operates under the sign of the reality principle, polymorphous perversity somehow eludes its reach and, with it, the reach of socialization. For Marcuse, polymorphous perversity constitutes a pre-social unformed yet formable material that has not yet been shaped and determined by the unifying forces of the reality principle. Marcuse pursues his strategy by attempting to de-ontologize, which is to say historicize the reality principle. To this end, he introduces two correlated sets of distinctions: between the basic reality principle and the performance principle, on the one hand, and between necessary repression and surplus repression, on the other. The basic reality principle is by nature and refers to the renunciation, however minimal, that will always be required to negotiate the metabolism between humanity and the external world, regardless of how thoroughly outer nature may have been mastered. The performance principle, in contrast, is by convention, which is to say, is historically constructed. It is a term Marcuse introduces to designate the prevailing historical form of the reality principle (Marcuse, 1966: 35) that operates in advanced societies. He argues that, in such societies, where modern science and technology have the potential to create unprecedented abundance, shorten the working day and ameliorate the struggle for existence, the extensiveness of actual repression and renunciation is not the result of natural necessity. Rather, it results from the maintenance of a system of political and economic domination. The distinction between necessary repression and surplus repression is meant to designate the difference between the biological and the historical sources of human suffering (Marcuse, 1966: 88). Necessary repression, which pertains to the phylogenetic dimension of human existence, refers to the degree of repression and renunciation necessitated by the basic reality principle. This is precisely the natural and non-constructed component of human sexuality that Foucault wants to deny. And surplus repression obviously modeled on Marxs notion of surplus labor refers to the superuous

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renunciation imposed by the performance principle. Marcuses claim is that the vast preponderance of renunciation and suffering experienced today is the result of surplus, that is to say, unnecessary repression and the institutionalization of the performance principle. It is therefore historically contingent and eliminable. To complete his case, Marcuse must also show that the human drives can be formed or constructed in a radically different way. In order to do this, he takes over a concept from Freud, but assigns it much greater weight than it had in the Freudian theory. The mutability of the instincts refers to the fact that one component of the drive is, if not promiscuous, at least polyvalent. In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Freud identied the various components of the drive. Its source and pressure are rooted in the body, that is, in biology, and are therefore the least constructable component of the drive. The object, however, is the most variable component and therefore the most constructable.3 If one is interested in combating the biological determinist and emphasizing the constructivist tendencies in Freud from within his own theory, this along with the theory of polymorphous perversity is certainly one place to look. Marcuse radically de-emphasizes the signicance of the source and pressure and elevates the object into the almost exclusive component of the drive. The main difference between Marcuse and Foucault on this point is not one of principle but of degree. Foucault wants to eliminate the natural, unconstructed dimension of sex completely. Marcuse wants to reduce it to a relatively negligible minimum. Both, however, insist on the overwhelming weight of the constructed factor in determining the nature of our sexual lives. The political program, which Marcuse made explicit in the 1960s and which provided the prototype for the psychoanalytically informed movements of the day was, if not eschatological, at least radically utopian.4 Because the forces of production had developed immeasurably further under capitalism than Marx had ever imagined, the long transitional phase of socialist accumulation he had envisioned would not be necessary. It was possible, Marcuse argued, to move directly to a communist society, where the amount of time and energy necessary to negotiate the basic reality principle would be reduced to a minimum. This would, in turn, make it possible to eliminate surplus repression and emancipate the polymorphous perverse dimension of human sexuality that had remained loyal to the pleasure principle. For Marcuse, then, the realm of freedom doesnt just lie beyond onerous toil, as it had for Marx, but beyond sexual repression as well. Moreover, because of its polymorphous, which is to say, unformed and malleable nature, this liberated sexuality could be socially constructed in a radically new way. The germ of a different reality principle (Marcuse, 1966: 169) intimated in perversions, symptoms, fantasies and myths could then be translated into social practice and become the basis for a qualitatively new form of life. Given Foucaults later concept of the aesthetics of existence, it is noteworthy that

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Marcuse turned to the aesthetic dimension to explicate this new ethos. Finally, we should point out that, for Marcuse, this sort of utopianism wasnt just utopian, in the sense of being unrealistic. Only a critique that penetrated the depths of the psyche, where the reign of the reality principle was not secure, would be adequate for undermining the one-dimensional world of advanced capitalist societies a world bearing a strong resemblance to the one described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Anything less radical, Marcuse believed, would only serve to strengthen that systematically self-reinforcing totality. Only a Great Refusal, as he called it which holistically challenged the existing system would be commensurate with the totalizing nature of one-dimensional society. IV This, then, was exactly the sort of theoretical and political program that Foucault ostensibly sets out to repudiate as a tough-minded genealogist, freed from romantic illusions that is, as an arch anti-utopian. He argues that the historico-political critique of sexual repression that developed around Reich . . . between the two world wars, and continued into the 1970s, was fundamentally misguided (Foucault, 1978: 131). By assuming that power always requires the repression of sex, the Freudian left could convince itself that, in its personal struggles for sexual freedom, it was ipso facto struggling against power. Mocking their navet, John Forrester observes that the left-wing psychoanalysts believed that truth is a means of liberation, that truth is always on the side of the repressed, of the oppressed, of the dominated a nal consolation for Gods always being on the side of the big battalions (Forrester, 1990: 3067). We should be clear about the extent of Foucaults criticisms. He isnt just rejecting the proposition that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power a proposition that conates sexual repression and political repression as mistaken. He goes further and claims that the antirepressive struggle is itself actually a ruse of power. It not only misses the fundamental point and remains within the deployment of sexuality instead of operating outside or against it, but also, by putting sex into discourse, the struggle against repression in fact advances the stratagem of power. It is one more incitement to speak about sex (Foucault, 1978: 131, 12).5 The Freudian lefts position, according to Foucault, rested on an anachronistic and therefore inaccurate model that pictured power as essentially negative as an anti-energy, as the power to say no (Foucault, 1978: 85). Because they failed to appreciate the emergence of bio-power, which, as we have seen, is essentially productive, the left Freudians continued to operate with a juridico-discursive conception that belongs to an earlier phase of historical development. According to the law of the father-sovereign, the same monotonous repressive scheme functions throughout the whole hierarchical organization of society, in the state, the family and the individual,

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prohibiting the sex-desire of his subordinates, inaugurating continuous cycles of transgression and punishment. This conception gives rise to the notion that desire is outside power and is its Other. It leads to a liberationist politics that valorizes transgressive desire and attempts to use it as an external fulcrum in the struggle against power. Foucault insists that we must free ourselves from the image of a monolithic opposition between the law and desire of a clearly delimited inside and an outside that is opposed to it if we are to understand how power actually functions in the microcosmically and the macrocosmically. With the rise of a normalizing society, sex can no longer be viewed as an external and intractable impediment to the functioning of power. Rather, as we have seen, the deployment of sexuality has become one of the major vehicles for the proliferation of bio-power and because the incitements to sexuality are so multifarious and diffuse polymorphous there is no headquarters that presides over (Foucault, 1978: 95) power that could be stormed. It doesnt make sense, to seek a counter-discourse, outside the reach of power, which might lead to a Great Refusal. Instead, Foucault claims that power has to be tracked through the diverse, anonymous and variegated capillaries through which it ows and confronted on a local level. The fundamental aw of the Freudian left should now be apparent: by focusing on the struggle against sexual repression, it made a mere tactical shift within the deployment of sexuality and did not challenge that apparatus as such. The truly radical program would seek to dismantle the deployment of sexuality itself (Foucault, 1978: 131). And in the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality . . . the rallying point for politics ought not to be sex-desire, as it had been for the Freudian left, but bodies and pleasures. The difculty is, however, that he is very unclear about what he means by the slogan of bodies and pleasures (Foucault, 1978: 157). His most extensive remarks on the topic and they are scant appear in his Introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century French hermaphrodite. Foucault begins with the question Do we truly need a true sex? by which he means do we really need determinate sex that can be unambiguously assigned to distinct scientic, medical or legal categories? Against modern Western society, which has consistently answered this question in the afrmative, Foucault answers that one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures (Foucault, 1980b: vii). Thus, whatever else it might mean, bodies and pleasures appears to denote the opposite of categorically determinate sex. The case of Herculine Barbin occurred between 1860 and 1870, precisely the time when the new Scientia Sexualis was carrying out its investigations of sexual identity . . . with the most intensity. The attempt was being made not only to establish the true sex of hermaphrodites, but also to identify, classify, and characterize the different (Foucault, 1980b: xixii)

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varieties of human sexuality. Foucault claims that in the Middle Ages, both canon and civil law treated hermaphroditism with surprising exibility. At the time of baptism the father or the godfather that is, the person who locates the child in a categorical scheme by naming it assigns the hermaphroditic infant to one sex or another. They were advised to do this according to which sex appeared to be the warmest or the most vigorous. However, at the threshold of adulthood, the hermaphrodite was legally free a fact that Foucault emphasizes to choose whichever sex s/he wanted to belong to, with the strict proviso that the decision could not be reversed. The administrative requirements of modern nations, however, could no longer tolerate this degree of ambiguity and assigned everybody a location in its classicatory grid. Thereafter, everybody was to have one and only one sex. Medically, it was now up to the doctors to determine the true sex that lay behind the anatomical deceptions of hermaphroditism and to say which sex nature had chosen for [an individual] and to which society must consequently ask him to adhere (Foucault, 1980b: viiix). Foucault acknowledges that contemporary medicine has, to a degree, corrected many things in this reductive oversimplication and that we are much more tolerant of individuals that do not conform to the conventional sexual categories. But we still suspect, Foucault maintains, that the idea that one must indeed nally have a true sex is far from being completely dispelled (Foucault, 1980b: ixx). Foucault locates the Memoirs in this context. Herculine Barbin was a poor child who grew up in a convent, where she was taken to be a girl and called by the female name Alexina. But when undeniable maturational changes began to transform her appearance in a way that set her apart from the other girls, a priest and a physician took it upon themselves to determine her true sexual identity. After a medical examination, the difcult game of truth was nally imposed on the childs indeterminate anatomy (Foucault, 1980b: xixii). As a result, Alexinas civil status was modied, and she was legally compelled to change her sex. That Herculine committed suicide not long after its imposition testies to the violence that is involved when an individual is forced to assume an identity. In the Memoirs, written shortly before the suicide, Herculine seeks to record life in the convent when s/he had retained her hermaphroditic indeterminacy. Foucault stresses that the erotic fascination with Herculines sexual ambiguity caused a pseudo-imbecility in the other members of the convent so that they denied what they saw in front of them. He argues, moreover, that her ambiguous sexuality contributed, in no small part, to the heightened pleasure of the sexual contacts that are typical of such institutions. For Foucault, Herculine represents the happy limbo of non-identity (Foucault, 1980b: xiii) that exists prior to the imposition of sexual determinacy. The upshot of his Introduction is the valorization of pre-categorical and indeterminate sexuality and its assertion against the true sex that is imposed on the individual by the normalizing grid of power/knowledge.

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Foucault tries to indict psychoanalysis as a co-conspirator in this game of truth. He argues with some reason that psychoanalysis has rightfully rooted its cultural vigor in the idea that our sex harbors what is most true in ourselves and that we must not deceive ourselves concerning it. But he then goes on to imply that discovering the truth about our sexuality really means discovering that we have one true sex. Thus the analysts are lumped together with the normalizers. And it is probably true that most psychoanalysts agree that a desirable outcome of an analysis is the appropriation of an individuals sexual identity through the deep exploration of his or her unconscious and past. However, a true identity, in this sense, is not a uniform or univocal thing; the notions of constitutional bisexuality and the component instincts make that impossible. Rather, it is something that must be synthesized out of myriad identications with both sexes and elements from all the stages of psychosexual development. Successful identities must, in other words, be highly differentiated unities that individuals synthesize for themselves. More generally, while Foucault wants to hoist Freud on the petard of naturalism and essentialism, he misses the decisive feature of the latters position. In her excellent introduction to The Gender Conundrum, Dana Breen has argued that Freuds theory dees the binary choice between biological naturalism and essentialism versus historical constructivism:
It is part of the complexity of Freuds work that his theory has been seen by some as ascribing an inescapable biological destiny to man and woman, while others have understood him to uphold the revolutionary belief that, psychologically speaking, we are not born man or woman, and that masculinity and femininity are constructed over a period of time and are relatively independent of biological sex. (Breen, 1983: 1)

Breen goes on to argue that this duality is not the result of confusion or indecision on Freuds part but of an inherent tension existing at the heart of the matter. This is the reason, moreover, why this opposition is not going away and why the debate is still alive half a century after [Freuds] death (Breen, 1993: 1). To use Foucauldian language, human beings are in fact biological-symbolic doublets. While Foucaults position has the appearance of being as anti-utopian as Freuds, it is in fact even more utopian than the Freudian lefts. As Peter Dews argues, Foucaults rejection of the repressive hypothesis conceived of as the opposition between power and its repressed or excluded other is more apparent than real, not abolished, but simply displaced (Dews, 1987: 168). By placing bodies and pleasures in the position of the repressed other of the apparatus of sexuality but not thematizing it directly Foucault attempts to nesse his central dilemma. On the one hand, he still retains an extra-discursive, counter-norm to power which, as Dews argues, the critique of power logically requires. And, to his credit, Foucault still wants to criticize power. On the other hand, by leaving the notion of bodies and pleasures so

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utterly indeterminate, he believes he has avoided the twin dangers of naturalism and essentialism. If sexual drives, desire and madness were already rather indeterminate concepts, bodies and pleasures are even more so. It assumes the character of pure, unformed matter which can be shaped and reshaped without constraint. It provides Foucault with the requisite material for the aesthetic fashioning of the self independently of historically instituted codes. Whereas Marcuses scheme envisioned the repression of polymorphous perversity by the reality principle, Foucaults pictures the exclusion it is difcult to know what word to use of bodies and pleasures by the apparatus of sexuality. And though Foucault claims to reject utopianism, that is, the omnipotent denial of our nitude, what could be more utopian than the innite malleability of the body and sexuality? As Jacques-Alain Miller asks, what could be more utopian than this body outside sex (Miller, 1992: 63), which is to say, outside desire and prohibition, that can be endlessly refashioned at will?

Joel Whitebook, who has written extensively on critical theory, is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. The author of Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Whitebook is currently completing a work entitled Fighting Freud: Michel Foucaults Struggle Against Psychoanalysis.

Notes
1. The claim that power is productive is often offered as a response to the charge that, according to Foucaults analysis, power is totalized. We should point out, however, that, for Foucault, the term productive is purely descriptive. It simply refers to the fact that power generates effects and doesnt say anything about the value of those effects whether or not they are praiseworthy. Indeed, because he suspects that all forms of normativity are masked forms of normalization, Foucault cannot and will not address the question of how they might be evaluated. Given, therefore, that the effects of power are intentionally generated for purposes of social engineering and that Foucault wont allow himself to evaluate them, I dont see how the thesis of the productivity of power provides an answer to Foucaults critics. 2. Thomas Laqueur (1990: 12) observes that under the inuence of Foucault, various versions of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism generally, the biological body threatens to disappear entirely. 3. See Sigmund Freud, 1915: 1223. 4. See Herbert Marcuse, 1970. 5. Consider also his statement that the discourse about repression is in fact a formidable tool of control and power. As always, it uses what people say, feel and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it sufces to cross the threshold of discourse and remove a few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controlling movements of revolt and liberation. (Foucault, 1989: 142)

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References
Breen, Dana (1993) General Introduction, in Dana Breen (ed.) The Gender Conundrum. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997) Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection, in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dews, Peter (1987) The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. New York: Verso. Forrester, John (1990) Michel Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, in John Forrester (ed.) The Seducements of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1980a) The Confession of the Flesh, in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel (1980b) Introduction, in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1988) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel (1989) End of the Monarchy of Sex, in Sylvre Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel (1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1997) The Battle for Chastity, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York: The New Press. Freud, Sigmund (1915) Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, S.E. 14: 1223. Freud, Sigmund (1930) Civilization and its Discontents, S.E. 11: 59148. Laqueur, Thomas (1990) Making Sex: Body Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loewald, Hans (1978) Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1966) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1969) An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1970) Five Lectures. Boston: Beacon Press. Miller, Jacques-Alain (1992) Michel Foucault and Psychoanalysis, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong. New York: Routledge. Miller, James (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster.