No More Learning

Moreover, in both approaches that expo- sure opens out on to limitations on one's freedom. What distinguishes them is the level of analysis on which these recognitions rest. Merleau- Ponty's situated freedom is a metaphysical freedom. He offers a general philosophical account of the human body in its intertwining with the world. That account shows how mind and body as well as body and world form a single whole. From that he derives the conclusion that, contra Sartre, all human freedom must be situated. There can be no radical freedom because there is no aspect of our being that can stand outside our encrustation into the world. All freedom is the freedom of an embodied consciousness embedded in the world and its history.
Foucault does not need to deny any of this. Neither, however, does he need to embrace it. His approach is constructed along a different register. His question is not the metaphysical one of what the nature of human freedom is. Rather, his question is the more political one of what freedom we might have under particular historical conditions, namely our historical conditions. The situated freedom he is interested in is not the freedom of one situated as a human body in the world; it is the freedom of our situation. In the citation above, Foucault empha- sizes that a diagnosis of the nature of the present must characterize that
? ? 82
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM
present in such a way as to show its fragility, its fractures. The fragility of the present is not due to humans' possession of metaphysical freedom, although, as we have seen, he does seem to assume some form of meta- physical freedom. It is due, rather, to the contingent structure of history.
History does not unfold according to a pre-given or transcendental framework. It is largely the product of dispersed practices that intersect with and influence one another in ways that cannot be predicted in advance and that conform to no transcendent pattern. (This does not mean that one cannot find patterns within history; it means that one can only see them after they have created themselves through the interac- tion of contingent practices. ) Situated freedom arises as a result of this contingency of history. The issue for one interested in one's freedom, then, is not the metaphysical question of who one is and where one's freedom lies, but rather the question of where one's particular history has deposited one, and how that history might be intervened upon. For Foucault, in short, situated freedom is a historical and political concept rather than a metaphysical one.
Foucault's approach to freedom, then, like the approach of many aspects of his work, is at once philosophical and historical. As a philo- sophically oriented concept, it takes history in a more sophisticated direction than most historians are capable of. As a historically inflected concept, it raises questions to traditional philosophical analyses. Foucault's writings ask to be read along both of these axes, each one in conversation with the other. If we allow ourselves to engage in this two-level conversation, we may become more aware not only of the particular philosophically inflected way in which we often view the world, but also of the historically contingent and malleable character of that way. In other words, we may come face to face with our freedom.
? ? 83
SIX
a
Johanna Oksala
The critical impact of Michel Foucault's philosophy is not based on the explicit theories or judgements he makes, but rather on the approach that he adopts to analysing our present. While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempts to find among the apparent necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turns out to be contingent, historical and cultur- ally variable. Everything, especially those things that we are convinced do not have a history, is scrutinized.
This method is also utilized regarding Foucault's conception of the body. He does not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles. Yet his philosophical approach to it is distinctive. The body is central for understanding the influence of history and the mechanisms of modern power. Its intertwinement with practices of power means that it has a central role in practices of resist- ance too: it is capable of displaying a dimension of freedom.
According to Foucault, we believe that the body obeys only the nec- essary and universal laws of physiology, and that history and culture have no influence on it. In reality, bodies are shaped by society: they are used and experienced in many different ways and their characteristics vary according to cultural practices. They are moulded by rhythms of work, eating habits and changing norms of beauty. They are concretely shaped by diet, exercise and medical interventions. In short, they too have a history.
? ? 85
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
In his most widely read books, Discipline andPunish (1975) and The History ofSexuality, Volume I (1976), Foucault aims to bring the body into the focus of history by studying its connections with techniques and deployments of power. His understanding of the body is further elaborated in numerous interviews and articles. I will focus here on the central texts in which he discusses it in order to present a coherent and cohesive account of Foucault's understanding of the body, paying particular attention to its relationship to both power and freedom. In order to illustrate the body's relationship to power, I will discuss his analyses of the prison, as articulated in Discipline and Punish, and of sexuality, as articulated in Volume I of The History ofSexuality. In order to illustrate how the body is implicated in resistance and the practices of freedom, I again draw upon The History of Sexuality, as well as Foucault's analysis of the life of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. I conclude the chapter by discussing the ways in which Foucault's work has influenced emancipatory efforts by queer and feminist theorists.
It should be kept in mind that Foucault never intended his views on the body to form a unified theory. His genealogies are best understood as a toolbox, a flexible and varied methodological approach that draws from a multiplicity of sources and is applicable to a variety of questions. However, one of the key ideas that unites them is that genealogies are always crucially "histories of the body": they typically question all purely biological explanations of such complex areas of human behav- iour as sexuality, insanity or criminality.
Docile bodies
In an early and definitive article on his genealogical method, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault follows Nietzsche in insisting that the task of genealogy is to focus on the body. Nietzsche had attacked phi- losophy for its denial of the materiality and vitality of the body, for its pretentious metaphysics that deals only with abstractions such as values, reason and the soul. Genealogy must be "a curative science", charting the long and winding history of metaphysical concepts in the material- ity of bodies (Foucault 1984b: 90). Rather than contemplating what is understood as high and noble, genealogy will focus on the things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies (ibid. : 89). Foucault writes polemically that the philosopher needs the genealogy of the body to "exorcise the shadow of his soul" (ibid. : 8 0) .
In this text Foucault also presents his most extreme formulations of the body as completely shaped by history and culture. He seems to
86
FREEDOM AND BODIES
deny that there is anything universal and ahistorical about it that could be understood as its stable and fixed core : "nothing in man - not even his body ? is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men" (ibid. : 8 7) .
Foucault's aim i n this discussion o f Nietzsche's conception o f the body as a historical construct is not to develop some kind of extreme social constructivist theory of the body, however. He does not con- sider the body here as an object of a theory, but rather as essential to his genealogy in two different ways. The first is political or ethical: Foucault wants to use genealogy to study the history of the very things we believe do not have a history. As Gary Gutting writes, "whereas much traditional history tries to show that where we are is inevitable, given the causes revealed by its account, Foucault's histories aim to show the contingency - and hence surpassability - of what history has given us"(1994: 10). Foucault'spointisthusnottoargueforanextremeview of the body as a cultural construction, but to place under suspicion and subject to further scrutiny all claims of its immutable being: essences, foundations and constants.
The second way in which the body is essential to Foucault's geneal- ogy is methodological: he wants to bring the body into the focus of history and study history through it. Foucault's genealogy is methodo- logically distinct in that it criticizes the idea of power operating by the ideological manipulation of minds: the idea that those in power are trying to brainwash people into believing things that are not true. Foucault's aim is to show the inadequacy of such a conception of power by revealing the material manipulation of bodies.
Foucault's illustration of how power operates through the manipu- lation of bodies is done in a powerful manner in his first major work of the genealogical period, Discipline and Punish. The book charts the genealogy of the modern prison institution and brings under scrutiny the connection between power and the body by analysing the ways in which the bodies of prisoners are consciously manipulated. It also demonstrates effectively Foucault's idea of the essential intertwinement of body and power: bodies are not given, natural objects, but assume their shape and characteristics in cultural practices of power, including punitive practices.
Discipline is a historically specific technology of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body both docile and useful. Bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were subjected to new kinds of discipline in order to make them more use- ful for mass production and at the same time easier to control. The
? ? 87
MI C H EL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
functions, movements and capabilities of these bodies were broken down into narrow segments, analysed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective way. The human body became a machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated and improved. Foucault argues that in the seventeenth century a soldier, for example, still learnt his profession for the most part in actual fighting in which he proved his natural strength and inherent courage. But by the eighteenth century a soldier had become a fighting machine, something that could be constructed through correct training. Foucault tells us:
The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it . . . It defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies. (1979: 138)
Hence, a novel aspect o f modern disciplinary power i s that i t i s not external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon. It differs from earlier forms of bodily manipulation, which were violent and often performative: public tortures, slavery and hanging, for instance. Disciplinary power does not subject the body to extreme violence, it is not external or spectacular. It does not mutilate or coerce its target, but through detailed training reconstructs the body to produce new kinds of gestures, habits and skills. It focuses on details, on single movements, on their timing and rapidity. It organizes bodies in space and schedules their every action for maximum effect. This is done in factories, schools, hospitals and prisons through fixed and minutely detailed rules, con- stant surveillance and frequent examinations and check-ups. Bodies are classified according to their best possible performance, their size, age and sex. Unlike older forms of bodily coercion, disciplinary power does not destroy the body, but reconstructs it. Individuals literally incorpo- rate the objectives of power, which become part of their own being: actions, aims and habits.
In prisons, for example, disciplinary technologies subject prisoners by manipulating and materially inscribing their bodies. Their bodies are separated from others in practices of classification and examination, but also concretely and spatially. They are manipulated through exer- cise regimes, diet and strict time schedules. These processes of power
88
FREEDOM AND BODIES
operate through the bodies of prisoners, but they are also essentially objectifying: through processes of classification and examination the individual is given a social and a personal identity. He or she becomes a delinquent, a person with a distinct identity. Disciplinary power thus constitutes delinquents through concrete bodily manipulation and dis- cursive objectification. These two dimensions strengthen each other. On the one hand, concrete bodily manipulation made discursive objec- tification possible, resulting in the birth of sciences such as criminology and criminal psychiatry. The development of these sciences, on the other hand, helped the development and rationalization of disciplinary technologies in prisons. The two dimensions furthermore link together effectively through normalization. Scientific discourses produce truths that function as the norm : they tell us what is the normal fat percentage, cholesterol count or number of sexual partners for a certain sex and age group, for example. Modern power operates through the internaliza- tion of these norms. We modify our behaviour in an endless attempt to approximate the normal, and in this process become certain kinds of subjects.
This process of normalization is illustrated in Discipline and Punish in which Foucault analyses the strategies used by disciplinary power for the subjection of criminals. Where prisoners are concerned, disci- plinary power does not aim at repressing their interests or desires, but rather at reconstructing these desires as normal. This is not done by the ideological manipulation of their minds, but on and through their bodies. The aim of disciplinary techniques is to inscribe the norms of the society in the bodies of criminals by subjecting them to recon- structed patterns of behaviour. The prisoners must subject themselves to power to the extent that its aims become their own inner meaning of normal. Foucault formulates this complete subjection poetically by turning around the old philosophical and religious idea that the body is the prison of the soul:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. ''A soul" inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (Ibid. : 30. )
The "soul" of the prisoner - that which is supposed to be the most authentic part of him and, therefore, a key to his emancipation - is in fact an effect of the subjection of his body.
? ? 89
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CO N CEPTS
Sexual bodies
Foucault's next major work, The History ofSexuality, Volume I, the- matizes the body through the question of sexuality. It puts forward his famous account of the discursive constitution of sexuality. Although the book is a historical study of the emergence of modern sexuality in the nineteenth century, Foucault's criticism targets contemporary conceptions of sexuality as well. The prevalent views in the West on sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s held that there was a natural and healthy sexuality that all human beings shared simply by virtue of being human, and this sexuality was presently repressed by cultural prohibitions and conventions such as bourgeois morality and capital- ist socioeconomic structures. Because it was essential to have an active and free sexuality, repressed sexuality was the cause of various neu- roses. The popular discourse on sexuality thus fervently argued for sexual liberation: we had to liberate our true sexuality from the repres- sive mechanisms of power.
Foucault challenges this view by showing how our conceptions and experiences of sexuality are in fact always the result of specific cultural conventions and mechanisms of power and could not exist independ- ently of them. Sexuality, like delinquency, only exists in a society. The mission to liberate our repressed sexuality is thus fundamentally mis- guided because there is no authentic or natural sexuality to liberate. To free oneself from one set of norms only meant adopting different norms in their stead, and that could turn out to be just as normalizing. Foucault wrote mockingly that the irony in the deployment of sexuality is "in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance" (1990a: 159).
In order to challenge the accepted relationship between sexuality and repressive power Foucault had to reconceive the nature of power. His major claim is that power is not essentially repressive; in fact, it is productive. It does not operate by repressing and prohibiting the true and authentic expressions of a natural sexuality. Instead it produces, through cultural normative practices and scientific discourses, the ways in which we experience and conceive of our sexuality.
The sexual body is an essential component of this process. In a much- quoted passage Foucault writes:
We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an auton- omous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 90
FREEDOM AND BODIES
by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures. (Ibid. : 155)
Foucault thus claims that sex is an essential element in the strategy through which power holds a grip on our bodies. But what exactly does Foucault mean by sex in this passage? The French word sexe is ambiguous because it can refer to the categories of male and female in the sense of sex organs ? anatomy and biology that differentiates males from females - or it can refer to a natural function, a biological founda- tion or principle in the body that belongs in common to both men and women, or to the activity of having sex. This ambiguity is essential for Foucault's argument, however, because he attempts to show that rather than being a natural entity, "sex" in fact refers to a completely arbitrary and illusory unity of disparate elements.
Foucault begins his discussion of sex in the end of The History of' Sexuality by anticipating an objection. He invents an imaginary oppo- nent who claims that his history of sexuality only manages to argue for the cultural construction of sexuality because he evades "the bio- logically established existence of sexual functions for the benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but secondary, and ultimately superficial" (ibid. : 15 0-5 1 ) . The imaginary critic thus raises a question about a natural and necessary foundation of sexuality in the body: even if the manifestations of sexuality are culturally constructed and vari- able, there must nevertheless be a biological foundation in the body, a pre-cultural, embodied givenness which cannot be bent at will. There must be something purely natural - biological organs, functions and instincts - that causes the culturally varied manifestations of sexuality.
Foucault responds to his opponent by, first, denying that his analysis of sexuality implies "the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional" (ibid. : 151). On the contrary, what is needed is an analysis, which would overcome the biology/culture distinction (ibid. : 152). The aim of his genealogical histories is precisely to show how history and bodies are bound together in complex ways in the development of modern forms of power such as disciplinary power. He explicitly argues that his analysis of sexuality as a discursive construct does not deny the materiality of the body and the biologically established exist- ence of sexual functions (ibid. : 150-5 1). The purpose of his study is, in fact, to show:
how deployments of power are directly connected to the body - to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleas- ures; . . . what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis
? 91
? MICHE L FOUCAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another . . . but are bound together in an increasingly com- plex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envisage a "history of mentalities" that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been per- ceived and given meaning and value; but a "history of the bodies" and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (Ibid. : 15 1-2)
Foucault thus accepts that ontologically there is some kind of mate- riality: there are such things in the world as bodies, organs, somatic locations, functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations and pleasures. What he does deny, however, is that this materiality corre- sponds to the idea of sex in an unproblematic way. In other words, there is no natural or necessary referent for the notion of sex. In scientific discourses on sexuality the notion of sex came to refer to something that in reality did not exist as a natural unity at all. It was a pseudo-scientific object like hysteria or monomania, which we now think refer to purely fictitious unities of disparate symptoms. The term sex is then placed inside inverted commas in Foucault's text because it becomes suspect. He brackets the accepted meaning of the notion in order to be able to study its genealogy: how the idea of "sex" took form in the different strategies of power, and what role it played in them.
Foucault notes three theoretical benefits that the idea of sex pro- duced: it made it possible to group together different kinds of elements - anatomical features, behavioural patterns and fantasies, for example - and make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle of explanation for different forms of sexuality. Second, the idea of sex gave the sciences of sexuality a proximity to biological sciences of reproduction, which functioned as a guarantee of their quasi-scientificity. Third, because sex was something biological and natural, power could only appear as something external to it.
Foucault, in contrast, refutes the idea that sex is a given, biological foundation and as such the "other" with respect to power. For him, the idea of a natural and foundational sex is a normative, historical construct that functions as an important anchorage point for power. Foucault's aim in analysing the sexual body is to study how the scien- tific idea of "sex" took form in the different strategies of power, and what role it played in them.
The idea that "sex" is the scientific foun- dation, the true, causal origin of one's gender identity, sexual identity and sexual desire makes it possible to effectively normalize sexual and
92
FREEDOM AND BODIES
gendered behaviour. Through scientific knowledge about one's true sex it is possible to evaluate, pathologize and correct one's sexual and gendered behaviour by viewing it as either "normal" or "abnormal".
Bodies, pleasures and freedom
Foucault's analysis of power attempts to describe the historical limits that are imposed on us, but it is also an experiment with the possibility of modifying and crossing them: relations of power always incorpo- rate relations of resistance and points of recalcitrance. We cannot step outside the networks of power that circumscribe our experience, but there is always a possibility for thinking and being otherwise within them. To be free does not mean that everything is possible, but neither is the present way of thinking and being a necessity. Freedom refers to the contingency of structures and limits - including the limits of our present field of experience.
This is also true about sexual experiences. Foucault does not view the sexual body only as a docile and passive object of dominant discourses and techniques of power. It also represents the possibility of resistance against such discourses and techniques. In an important passage of The History ofSexuality, Foucault writes:
We m u s t n o t t h i n k t h a t b y s a y i n g y e s t o s e x , o n e s a y s n o t o p o w e r ; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim - through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality - to counter the grip of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplic- ity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (1990a: 157)
What Foucault suggests in this paragraph is that it is in the body that the seeds for subverting the normalizing aims of power are sown. The body is a locus of resistance and freedom (see also Foucault 1980a: 56). The body is never completely docile and its experiences can never be wholly reduced to normative, discursive determinants. The sexual body is always discursive in the sense that it is an object of scientific discourses and disciplinary technologies. Nevertheless, it is also a body acting in the world and experiencing pleasure. And a distinction must be drawn between discourse and experience, even if we accept that language
? 93
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
forms the necessary limits of our experience and thought. Even if we believe that it is only possible to experience something that we have words for and that language makes intelligible for us, the experience itself is still not reducible to language.
The ontological distinction between experience and discourse - the experience of something and the linguistic description or explanation of this experience ? is crucial for understanding the resistance of the body. The body represents a dimension of freedom in the sense that its expe- riences are never wholly reducible to the discursive order: embodied experiences and language are imperfectly aligned because experience sometimes exceeds language and sometimes it is completely inarticulate. Bodies are capable of multiplying, distorting and overflowing their dis- cursive determinants and of opening up new and surprising possibilities that can be articulated in new ways.
While The History of Sexuality, Volume I already suggests the possibility of understanding bodies and pleasures as a locus of resist- ance, the book that followed it in 1977, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs o{ a Nineteenth-Century French Her- maphrodite, is equally important for understanding Foucault's view of the resistance of the body. Herculine Barbin was a hermaphrodite who lived at the end of the nineteenth century, at the time when scientific theories about sex and sexuality were gaining prominence. She was designated as female at birth, but grew up with an ambiguous aware- ness of her bodily uniqueness. As an adult she decided to confess her anatomical particularity to a priest and as a consequence was scientifi- cally reclassified as a man by doctors. She/he was incapable of adapting her/himself to the new identity, however, and committed suicide at the age of thirty. She/he left behind memoirs recounting his/her tragic story, which Foucault discovered in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene. He edited them and they were published together with the medical and legal documents related to the case as well as an introduction written by him.
The way the book is compiled is significant. It effectively juxtaposes Herculine's memoirs and thus the first-person, lived account of the hermaphrodite body with the third-person, legal and medical accounts of it. It is clear that Herculine's own account cannot be understood as the authentic or authoritative description of her embodiment as it is clearly shaped by the narrative conventions as well as the cultural conceptions of hermaphrodites of her time. But neither can the third- person legal accounts and medical diagnosis be accepted as the "true" account. The tragedy of Herculine's experience is exactly the result of the fissures and disjunctures - as well as the necessary correspondence
94
FREEDOM AND BODIES
and overlapping - between the subject's experience of his or her body and the dominant scientific and legal discourses on its true sex.
The form of the book, not just its content, is thus highly significant for Foucault's attempts to show that while our embodiment is never independent of dominant discourses and practices of power, it is not reducible to them either. Bodies always assume meaning through a complex process in which competing discourses, conceptualizations and practices intertwine with private sensations, pleasures and pains.
How to use Foucauldian bodies?
As noted earlier, Foucault conceived of his books as toolboxes that readers could rummage through to find a tool they needed to think and act with. It is therefore pertinent to conclude by asking how his conception of the body has been and can be appropriated by contem- porary thinkers attempting to understand and change current ways of living our sexuality.
Foucault's understanding of the historical constitution of the body through the mechanisms of power has influenced feminist theory pro- foundly: it has provided a way to theorize the body in its materiality while avoiding all naturalist formulations. 1 It has also given tools for understanding the disciplinary production of the female body. Feminists have appropriated Foucault's ideas about power and the body to study the different ways that women shape their bodies - from cosmetic surgery to dieting and eating disorders -- and analysed these everyday practices as disciplinary technologies in the service of patriarchal, nor- malizing power. These normative feminine practices train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands, while at the same time they are paradoxically experienced in terms of "power" and "con- trol'' by the women themselves (see e. g. Bartky 1988; Bordo 1989).
Foucault's historicization o f sex has also profoundly influenced femi- nist theory. Judith Butler (1990) has effectively appropriated Foucault's thinking on the relationship between subject, power and sex for the question of gendered subjects. She has followed Foucault in arguing that there is no true sex behind gender identity that would be its objec- tive cause and biological foundation. Instead, gender identity is con- structed as a normative and regulatory ideal in the networks of power and knowledge. Individuals perform gender by repeating behaviour that approximates this ideal. While their behaviour is understood to be the inevitable and natural consequence of their sex, Butler argues that it is actually a performance without any natural and foundational
? 95
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
cause. Feminine behaviour, for example, is not the result of a true and foundational female sex, but the reverse is true: the idea of a true and foundational female sex is the result of feminine behaviour. The idea of a stable gender core is a fiction that is upheld by a constantly ongo- ing performance.
Not only did Foucault influence feminist thinkers, his views on the sexual body have also influenced gay and lesbian studies. His con- ception of sexuality has, to a large extent, founded a new theoretical approach to sexuality called queer theory.
The main idea behind the queer conception of sexuality is that the identities of gay and lesbian ? as well as of heterosexual ? are not natural, essential identities, but are culturally constructed through normative discourses and power relations regulating the "healthy" and "normal" expressions of sexuality. This does not mean that homosexuality does not "really" exist. As in the case of woman, just because something is constructed does not mean that it is not real. People are defined and they must think and live according to such constructions. The aim of sexual politics, however, cannot be simply to find one's true identity through a scientific study of the various aspects of the sexual body. Sexual bodies as well as the sexual identities they are supposed to cause and found are constructed through the oppressive power relations that our politics must attempt to challenge and to resist. 2
The goal of queer and feminist politics therefore has to be more complicated than simple liberation from power and the affirmation of one's homosexuality or gender identity: practising freedom entails questioning and even denying the identities that are imposed on us as natural and essential by making visible their cultural construction and dependence on the power relations that are operative in society. Rather than thinking in terms of stable binary categories such as man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, we should study their constitu- tion and the ways in which sexuality emerges as a complex construction only in relation to them.
While a shared focus on bodies has opened up important connec- tions between feminist theory, queer theory and Foucault's thought, it has been argued that Foucault understands the body as too docile and culturally malleable, and that his conception of it is thus one-sided and limited for feminist purposes (see e. g. Bordo 1989, 1993; Bigwood 1991; McNay 1991; Soper 1993). The opposite charge has also been made. Judith Butler, for example, criticizes Foucault's understanding of the body in The History ofSexuality for a return to "a non-normalizable wildness" (1997: 92). She claims that while Foucault advocates the critical historicization of sexuality and sex in The History ofSexuality,
96
FREEDOM AND BODIES
he does not extend it to the sexed body, but naively presents bodies and pleasures as the site of resistance against power.
I have attempted to show, however, that Foucault's conception of the body provides fruitful tools for theorizing the body both as an effect of power and as a locus of resistance and freedom. Bodies are both docile and anarchic. They are not reducible to a collection of biological facts, but provide possibilities for experimentation and a variety of pleasures. They are always inevitably intertwined with mechanisms of power, but they also open up the realm of creative politics and personal experi- mentation. They open up a realm of freedom in the sense that they break and disturb every totality, but this ream of freedom must not be understood as some absolute and mystical outside to power. Foucault emphasizes that the "virtual fractures" for thinking and being otherwise "which open up a space of freedom" must be understood in terms of concrete practices capable oftransforming our present (1990c: 36). We must try to rearticulate the possibilities opened up by the indeterminacy and ontological contingency of our bodies in ways that are conducive to concrete political transformation of our present. Foucault's message to us is that sexuality should be understood as a practice or a way of being that provides possibilities for being otherwise, rather than as a psychological or biological condition that we must reveal the truth about. It should be transferred from the realm of biological necessity to the realm of practices of freedom.
Notes
1. For feminist appropriations ofFoucault, see, forexample, Butler (1990), Braid- otti (1991), Sawicki (1991), McNay (1992), McWhorter (1999), Oksala (2005).
2. On Foucault and queer theory, see, for example, Halperin (1995).
? 97
SEVEN
Freedom and spirituality
Karen Vintges
Spirituality is an idiosyncratic concept in the work of Foucault, which might best be characterized as an "intensity without a 'spirit"'. 1 To understand Foucault's specific concept of spirituality, we have to take into account some basic themes of his oeuvre, especially of his later work, that is, his books, interviews and lectures since 1976. In this chapter I will first analyse the way in which Foucault uses the concept of spirituality in his early work, a utilization that is inspired by surrealist writers. For this analysis I rely heavily on the work ofJeremy Carrette, who in his book Foucault and Religion (2000) devotes a chapter to this topic. In the second section of the chapter I briefly discuss Foucault's analysis, as found in his "middle" (1970-76) works, ofdominantforms of subjectivity in the modern West. This discussion lays the ground for the chapter's third section, which analyses the "exit" status of the concept of spirituality in Foucault's final works. Here I show that spir- ituality constitutes an ethical self-transformation as conscious practice of freedom. In a fourth section, I discuss Foucault's epistemological claims regarding the relation between spirituality and truth. In the next two sections I analyse his concept of "political spirituality" and argue that this concept offers us a new normative perspective for cross- cultural politics. In a concluding section I illustrate Foucault's idea of spirituality as freedom practice by going into the emerging discourse of Islamic feminism.
? 99
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Beyond the body/soul dualism
As Carrette shows, Foucault in his early (pre-1970) work only once talks about spirituality. In a debate on the "new novel" and surreal- ism, Foucault comments on certain surrealist experiments which he witnessed in which people tried to let the body speak. "(R)eference is constantly made", Foucault states,
to a certain number of experiences - experiences, if you like, that I will call, in quotation marks, "spiritual experiences" (although "spiritual" is not quite the right word) - such as dreams, madness, folly, repetition, the double, the disruption of time, the return, etc. These experiences form a constellation that is doubtless quite coherent. I was also struck by the fact this constellation was already mapped out in surrealism. (Foucault 1999b: 72)
Foucault shared with the surrealists an interest in "a new space of thought created by a radical critique of rationality and certainty", with- out, however, taking on board the wider surrealist fascination with religious ideas (Carrette 2000: 56). Through the work of semi-surrealist authors such as Artaud and Klossowski, Foucault tries to think beyond the body/soul dualism of Western, Christian and Cartesian traditions, and to conceive of what Carrette calls a "spiritual corporality", and a "reordering of spiritual concepts into the body" (ibid. : 54).
Whereas surrealism incorporated occult and gnostic influences in its fascination for transgression and its attempt to overcome "all control exercised by reason" (ibid. : 50), Foucault's interest in "spirituality" concerns modes of experience that are rooted in the body and that transgress rational or conscious thought. As we will see, Foucault will retain this element of "spiritual corporality" in his later works but will also add something else to it, since he then is no longer satisfied with the idea of resistance against the rationalist or logo-centric order as primarily a bodily expression (Thompson 2003).
Critique of normality
In his middle work, Foucault at length discusses and criticizes dominant forms of subjectivity in modern Western society. His works of the 1 970s unmask the claim of Western Enlightenment that it brought progress for humanity and society through reason. "'The Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines" (Foucault 1 979 :
? ? ? ? 100
FREEDOM AND SPIRITUALITY
222). Originating in the nineteenth century, these disciplines - pan- optic, controlling, discursive institutions such as prisons, schools and medical and welfare institutions ? - applied power techniques, such as surveillance, training and examination, to individual bodies in order to generate rational self-control. The idea that reason makes self-control possible leads to the application of disciplinary techniques not only by institutions, but also by individuals themselves, as a means of gaining such control. In this way, an internal "core self " is established and the autonomous subject is born.
The human sciences play a major role in the disciplines, classifying and categorizing people, surveilling their behaviour, and treating them where their behaviour is deemed abnormal. Sciences like psychiatry, biology, medicine and economics and, later, psychoanalysis, psychol- ogy, sociology, ethnology, pedagogy, criminology, in all their practi- cal dimensions - such as buildings, therapy rooms, intake procedures, exams - codify what is rational and what is not, what is normal and what is not, and what is human and inhuman. Through this regime of political rationality, the subject form of the rational autonomous indi- vidual has since the Enlightenment become the norm in Western culture.
However, to Foucault, the political rationality that characterizes Western societies creates not only a prison for so-called abnormal peo- ple (criminals, sexual perverts, madmen, etc. ) but for the "normal" ones too, and his compassion clearly lies with both (White 1996). 2 Whereas in Discipline and Punish Foucault analyses at length the surveilling power techniques that are applied to the body and that generate rational self-control, in the first volume of The History ofSexuality (1990a) he discusses an inner subjectification at an even deeper level. Discourses such as psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy and medicine force people, on behalf of an inner Truth that has to be revealed, to talk about their supposedly hidden sexual feelings, thus allocating a sexual identity to each of them. To know oneself has become an endless task of turning inward at yet deeper levels. The psy-sciences in general and Freudian psychoanalysis in particular are Foucault's betes noires in his middle work. Through them the modern Western subject has become a suppos- edly authentic, deep self which is compelled time and again to confess its inner feelings. The deep self to Foucault is a prison house a fortiori.
Spiritual practices
Foucault's historicizing of the Western subject leads him to ancient Greek and Hellenist forms of subjectivity in his final works. In his
? ? 101
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
1981-82 College de France course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005a), he clearly points out that the ancient saying "you have to know yourself" (gnothi seauton) was grounded in something other than the search for one's inner truth. It was interwoven with the "care of the self " (epimeleia heautou), a tradition which we seem to have forgotten since modernity.
The label "care ofthe self" is, from 1976 onwards, used by Foucault to articulate ancient practices which aim for self-improvement in rela- tion to an ethical way of life. Ethics in antiquity was a strong structure in itself, relatively autonomous in regard to other structures. It con- sisted of vocabularies that were intended as guides for the concrete shaping of oneself as ethical subject. The striving for self-knowledge concerned one's position and one's behaviour, so as to be able to trans- form oneself "in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (Foucault 1997d: 225). Here we have a subject that is not the deep self of the disciplines but rather a more superficial self, which strives for the ethical coherence of its acting. Through constant practising or "ascesis", by way of "technolo- gies of the self" such as writing exercises, meditation and dialogue with oneself, one tries to create an "ethos". This personal ethics (the word ethos meaning literally "character" in Greek, referring to one's personality) is not only a matter of thought; instead, it is "a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others" (1997e: 286). It is in this context that Foucault again uses the concept of spirituality.
The work of Pierre Hadot, classicist and colleague of Foucault at the College de France, is of importance here. Hadot, in his approach to classical philosophy, emphasizes the fact that philosophy in antiquity for a large part consisted in "spiritual exercises". To indicate that ancient philosophy was a way of life that engaged the whole of existence, Hadot considers the term "spiritual" the most appropriate:
It is . . . necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use - "psychic," "moral," "ethical," "intellectual," "of thought," "of the soul" - covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe . . . the word "thought" does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises. (1995: 81-2)
In his later work Foucault, clearly inspired by Hadot's approach, uses the concept of "spirituality" in a similar vein, namely to indicate the transforming of one's mode of being, not just of one's thinking:
102
FREEDOM AND SPIRITUALITY
By spirituality I mean - but I'm not sure this definition can hold for very long ? the subject's attainment of a certain mode of being and the transformations that the subject must carry out on itself to attain this mode of being. I believe that spirituality and philosophy were identical or nearly identical in ancient spiritu- ality. (1997e: 294)
Whereas Foucault here equates spirituality and ancient philosophy as such, in his 1 9 8 2 lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject the concept of spirituality is linked to the concept of care of the self: "going through the . . . different forms of philosophy and the different forms of exercises and philosophical or spiritual practices, we see the principle of care of the self expressed in a variety of phrases" (2005 a: 12). Carrette rightly identifies in the later Foucault an overlapping and merging of ethics and spirituality as each pertains to a "mode of self-formation" or a "mode of being" (Carrette 2000: 136, 138). Spirituality in the later Foucault parallels his definition of ethical self-transformation through ascesis which involves one's whole way of life. It is in this sense that we find a spirituality without a spirit, without an incorporeal supernatural being or immortal soul, in Foucault's work.
As with his early surrealist-inspired notion, the concept of spiritual- ity opposes the Cartesian body/soul dualism. It explicitly involves the bodily dimension, be it this time in a normative context, that is, in the form of an ethos which is a lived ethics and as such involves bodily ele- ments, acts and behaviour.
The winning of an ethos, through a care of the self, clearly is some- thing Foucault puts forward as an exit from the impoverished self- techniques of modern man, which are over-determined by surveilling and scrutinizing disciplines and governing practices. "In the Greek and Roman civilizations, such practices of the self were much more important and especially more autonomous than they were later, after they were taken over to a certain extent by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric institutions" (Foucault 1997e: 282, emphasis added). Care of the self in antiquity used to be the framework for the knowledge of oneself instead of the other way around, as it is in Western modernity where a care of the self only occurs through the concern for truth (ibid. : 295). We can conclude that the concept of spirituality in Foucault's final works points to this tradition of ethical self-transformation through ascesis, as an autonomous dimension of life. We then deal with practices of ethical self-transformation which are not dictated by moral rules or codes, but which come down to "prac- tices of freedom", since people can freely create themselves as ethical
? 103
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
subjects. These ethical self-practices are "not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group" (ibid,: 291). However, through these models, tools and techniques one can acquire and freely create a personal ethos, visible in one's acts and way of life.
When asked whether the care of the self in the classical sense should be updated, Foucault answers: "absolutely", but adds that in mod- ern times this of course will lead to something new (ibid. : 294). The "growth of capabilities" of modern man should be disentangled from the dominant power regime (1997g: 317). Whereas in antiquity the care of the self was linked "to a virile society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other" ("all that is quite disgusting! "), "couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? " (1997e: 258, 261). Foucault's normative hori- zon is that freedom practices should be developed as much as possible by as many persons as possible.
Foucault emphasizes that acquiring an ethos in antiquity always took place in different philosophical schools and groups, in which people through spiritual practices trained themselves in acquiring an ethos (2005a: 1 13 ). Occasionally he talks about religious groups as well, for instance when he discusses the Therapeutae group in The Hermeneutics ofthe Subject (ibid. : 116). He also refers to the autonomous ethical spiritual dimension in a religious context, discussing certain strands of Christianity, for instance when he states :
during the Renaissance you s e e a whole series o f religious groups . . . that resist this pastoral power and claim the right to make their own statuses for themselves. According to these groups, the individual should take care of his own salvation independently of the ecclesiastical institution and of the ecclesiastical pastorate. We can see, therefore, a reappearance, up to a certain point, not of the culture of the self, which had never disappeared, but a reaffirmation of its autonomy. (1997f: 278, emphasis added)
Note that once again Foucault emphasizes the relatively autonomous realm of ethical spiritual self-formation. Also, more importantly, note that according to him this realm can exist in religious contexts as well (Vintges 2004). The concept of spirituality does not refer to religion as such, as Carrette (2000) implies in several places, but to practices of free ethical self-transformation, which can be found inside as well as outside religious frameworks.
104
FREEDOM AND SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality and truth
In addition to taking the form of free ethical self-transformation through self-techniques, the issue of spirituality also appears in Foucault's later work in relation to truth.