foucault feminism

Foucault and FeminismAuthor(s): Shane PhelanSource: American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 421-440Published by: Midwest Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2111456 .

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Foucault and Feminism

Shane Phelan, University of New Mexico

Foucault's approach challenges many of the frameworks and concepts of both liberal and com- munitarian political thought. By documenting the links between power and knowledge at a variety of levels, he makes us suspect theories that pinpoint a single source of oppressions and problems. He also calls into question the familiar belief that truth and power are opposed, a belief that leads to a particular sort of "liberatory" action that may in fact be a simple denial of the fact of power in our lives. I shall argue that this has strong implications for the evaluation and development of feminist theory and other political theory.

Foucault's work has been challenged on the ground of incoherence and nihilism. This challenge has been made by both feminists and nonfeminists. The later sections of the paper address these charges and argue that he is neither incoherent nor nihilistic but is searching for a new ground for political theory that will overcome many of the defects of modem "humanist" theory. In this, he is an ally of feminists who seek to demonstrate and challenge the false inclusion and equality of humanist discourse.

Michel Foucault was one of the most controversial and provocative thinkers of this century. Though he died much too early, he left us an approach to social thought that pulled together many of the threads left dangling between Marx and Nietzsche. His work on sexuality, especially that in the first volume of The His- tory of Sexuality, has been of interest to feminist theorists, for he reconceived the terrain of the battle over sexuality that is so central to modern Western society.

Nonetheless, many feminists have rejected Foucault's work. Some have done so because he himself failed to understand or support some feminist per- spectives and struggles. Others have suggested that the very foundation of his work is defective for feminists, as it is for all political struggle. This view does not separate feminist objectives from other ones; it asserts that Foucault's ideas are equally inadequate for any real struggle.

This study will argue that Foucault's work is indeed vital for the development of feminist theory, if not for every feminist issue. This does not mean that we must accept his authority on everything, nor dismiss him completely when he fails us; the impulse behind such reactions is one that he himself enables us to see and critique. We must see him as an ally because he ultimately provides the seeds of a democratic theory and a reconception of the values of freedom and individuality that have such a fundamental role in feminist theory and activity.

The first section will briefly outline Foucault's major concepts as they emerge in his later work. This will lead to a discussion of the ways in which his work on sexuality converges with the concerns of feminists. I shall then address the claims of his critics, both feminist and nonfeminist, that Foucault leaves us

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, May 1990, Pp. 421-40 C) 1990 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713



422 Shane Phelan

with no ground for resistance or social change, that he deprives us of the basis for making any evaluations and comparisons between practices and regimes, and that the challenge to the status of the subject brings with it the rejection of the possibility of freedom and dignity. I shall argue that Foucault's responses to these charges and his political activity make clear that in fact he is crucially concerned with these issues but provides a new analysis of them that may enable us to address the problems posed by humanist definitions and solutions.

1

The most obvious place in which Foucault's work has intersected with feminist concerns is in the area of sexuality. His radical rejection of the assumptions governing discourse concerning sexuality opened up a new terrain for analysis and action. His stance here, however, is in turn related to a number of method- ological and philosophical concerns that are central to feminist inquiry.

The first volume of Foucault's projected History of Sexuality, entitled La volonte de savoir (The Will to Know), described the framework for his inquiries into sexuality. This framework begins with the rejection of what he labels "the repressive hypothesis," the belief that the relation of society and sexuality is fundamentally one of repression, of censorship. He asserts that

rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse.

What was involved was, not censorship, but instead "a regulated and polymor- phous incitement to discourse" (1980a, 34).

By saying this, Foucault does not wish to deny that there were and are prohibitions and limitations on sexuality. What he hopes to suggest is that these prohibitions function within the larger "apparatus" of sexuality, that they are not "the problem," but are simply what modern sexual discourse identifies as the issue.

To understand his point, we must be familiar, with his terms. By "discourse" Foucault refers to "a system of possibility for knowledge" (Philp 1985, 69). It is the body of rules which define and limit the sorts of statements that we can make; it is the sum of "the sets of discursive rules which allow the formation of groups of statements" that have a meaning for us. However, the rules of the discourse are not the rules of grammar that we learn. They are not a method that we consciously learn within a system or language, but rather form "the necessary preconditions for the formation of statements." Thus "the place, function, and character of the 'knowers,' authors and audiences of a discourse are also a function of these discursive rules."

These discursive formations are what Foucault earlier referred to as "epi-



FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM 423

stemes." As he describes it, the episteme is "the strategic apparatus which per- mits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within. . . . The episteme is the 'apparatus' which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific" (1980b, 197).

Thus the episteme is a particular sort of apparatus. What, then, is an apparatus? It is "a much more general case of the episteme"; the apparatus "is both discursive and non-discursive, its elements being much more heterogeneous" than those of the episteme. The apparatus is "strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge" (1980b, 196). He includes in this both such linguistic formations as laws and regulations, scientific and philosophical pronouncements, and nondiscursive structures such as architec- tural designs and economies. These elements are bound together by their effect, by their role in a larger strategy that coordinates and structures social relations at a given point.

The reference to strategy brings us to another major point. Foucault's work in the 1970s shifted increasingly toward an analysis of the relation of power to knowledge. His histories suggested that knowledge, which was formed within particular discursive fields, was somehow bound to the rise and decline of particular power foci. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, he turned toward study of the apparatus, that formation which included, but was not limited to, the episteme and its rules. Speaking of his writing prior to 1968, he said that "what was lacking here was this problem of the 'discursive regime,' of the effects of power peculiar to the play of statements" (1980b, 113). In addition to archaeology, the method by which we study "the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in a discourse," we must now focus on genealogy, which examines the constitution of domains that we may also study archaeologically. The two methods are not opposed, not mutually exclusive. While archaeology examines a system as a system, as an entity, genealogy exposes the play of power in the development of systems.

In 1977 Foucault best explained genealogy in an article entitled "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The purpose of genealogy, he tells us, is not to trace origins, not to find continuities and provide pedigrees, but is rather "to maintain events in their proper dispersion; it-is to identify the accidents, the minute devia- tions-or conversely, the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us" (1977, 146). Rather than establish and stabilize, genealogy "disturbs what was previously considered immobile" (1947), depriving it of its majesty and authority. Using the model of Nietzsche's (1956) Genealogy of Morals, Foucault looks for the explanations for and development of those things that seem most obvious, most "natural," to us. This amounts to a sus- tained challenge to our subjectivity. This challenge is not mounted in the name



424 Shane Phelan

of "objective truth," however, but is rather bound to the questioning of that truth that seems objective but in fact rests inescapably on language and its structures of understanding.

Two things become clear in this presentation of genealogy. First is the idea that truth is not universal and timeless, beyond discourse (and therefore beyond social formations); citing Nietzsche's (1974) pronouncement in The Gay Sci- ence, Foucault says that "truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it has hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history" (144). Truth is a concept that the genealogist rejects as a "truth," an essence; the genealogist looks at the formation of truths and of the systems of meaning which they presuppose.

The second point concerns power. Without the veil of truth as a simple presence, a thing prior to and independent of social systems, we see revealed the play of power. Here, we see the full development of the theme, found in his earlier work, of the dual nature of the modern subject. The modern subject is the subject rather than object of knowledge, it is the knower rather than the known. However, with the advent of the human sciences, we also become the known, the subject we (subjects) study. Subjects are also the product of subjection, of a particular domination. This domination operates through language to structure all our other institutions and relations. Power, then, is not opposed to knowledge or truth, but functions through it and the systems of meaning upon which it rests. Power operates through discourses that define and legitimate its operation.

Modern power is bound to knowledge in a special way. The modern age is the age of the free subject, and as such it cannot admit of or legitimate a power that overtly dominates and controls. Thus modern power must operate in such a way as to prevent us from seeing it for what it is. It plays on the assumed opposition between truth and power by "producing a discourse, seemingly opposed to it but really a part of a larger deployment of modern power" (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 130).

In contemporary society, Foucault argues, power is not "juridical," not a creature of prohibition and negativity. It is instead a positive element, one which produces our discourses and structures, which constructs our selves and self- understandings. To focus on the law, its problems and its guarantees, is to remain mired in an analysis fit for a world that has died. It is to miss all the new, crucial avenues of power, avenues that function partly through the networks of the law, partly around them. It is for this reason that he says that "we need to cut off the King's head" (Foucault 1980b, 121); we need to build a political theory that is not centered around law and sovereignty. This is why he studies "carceral institutions": hospitals, asylums, prisons.I The forms of power generated in these

'Those who find Foucault's claims to be too generalized to be useful are urged to read Disci- pline and Punish as a case study of the operations of power. Other attempts to develop a "Foucaul- tian" analysis of contemporary events are Dumm 1987; Phelan 1989.




settings have spread to other locations, bypassing the law with its simple formula of prohibition and punishment. The main theme of Discipline and Punish is the way the shift from punishment to discipline that took place in penal institutions, the humanist drive to rehabilitate the criminal, moved into pedagogy (as it moved into asylums).2 Such rehabilitation, such education, amounts to the production and normalization of subjects, and as such should be very suspicious to us. The discourses generated in these institutions move into all our relations. As he puts it:

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather than an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 219)

It is crucial to power as conceived by Foucault that it is a relation that can only adhere to free subjects. Power is not force or violence; "what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions." Power relations require that "'the other' (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts" (220). The exercise of power consists, not in overt control or prohibition, but "in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome" (221). Power is a matter of "government," in the sense that government is a matter of structuring fields of action for others. Power relies on freedom; they are not mutually exclusive, as most modern theory suggests.

Sexuality is a major vehicle for this shift. "Before it took sex as a key target," Dreyfus and Rabinow argue, "power in fact operated through prohibition and restraint" (1983, 60). Medieval relations were straightforwardly hierarchical, obviously power laden. Their main vehicle was law. Whether in defense of a ruler or in opposition, the language of the law predominated in describing relations. This predominance has continued into modernity; we can see it in liberalism's reliance on legal form and method as well as in Marxism's rejection of the bourgeois state. The Marxist does not so much reject legal forms as expose the state for its mystification of power relations through law; an abuse of the law, not the law itself, is at stake.

Sexuality is a vehicle for modern power in that it is through discourse about sex (though not solely through that discourse) that we are controlled and normalized. Sex comes to be at the center of our being; our truth is in sex. The "will to truth" becomes a "will to sex" in the sense that we are encouraged to

2For a clearer description of the connections among these institutions and apparatuses, see "The History of Sexuality" in Foucault 1980b, esp. 184-85.



426 Shane Phelan

get to the root of our sex, to find the sex at our root. In Foucault's analysis, "sex" is a production of the apparatus of sexuality. Rather than being natural, a "pre-given datum" which was distorted or described through the apparatus of sexuality, sex is a product, the sign of a particular organization of the (personal and political) body.

As a discourse, sexuality built upon the earlier pastoral institution of confession, which was gradually expanding. Foucault argues that the confession became a major vehicle of power in Western societies, evolving from a particular tool of the Church into a basic feature of everyday life. Psychoanalysis is treated as one more type of confessional therapy in a society that increasingly mandates exposure. This need to confess is no longer seen as the mark of power. Rather, the confession comes to seem the liberation that truth demands. Truth now feels secret, hidden in us, but trying to escape. And if it does not, "this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation" (Foucault 1980a, 60). We do not see that the desire for revelation is not natural, but is induced; as if by legerdemain, our attention is redirected from the cause, the imposition. We come to believe that if we feel a need to confess, then something must be re- straining us when we keep silence. It is for this reason that our sexual discourse is so obsessed with repression. We sense repression not because we are forbidden our sex but because we feel compelled to confess.3

This apparatus of sexuality is a major focus of what Foucault labels "bio- power," the ensemble of techniques that allowed "the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life" (1980a, 140). Such management requires that power not simply kill or remove transgressors (though this is done at a certain point), but that they be made useful, docile, normal. It requires that a population be not simply passive, but productive and reproductive. It is this that makes sex central. Modern economies required, on the one hand, increasing discipline of bodies and, on the other, the regulation and management of populations so that they might be properly productive. Sex became the locus of the production of subjects in the dual senses of this term.4 Thus sex became a political issue: "It was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life. On the one hand, it was tied to the disciplines of the body.... On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of populations" (1980a, 145).

3For a more detailed discussion of this process in lesbian-feminist communities, see Phelan 1989, chap. 6.

4Foucault has in mind here such programs as eugenics, public health, enforced sterilization, sex education, censorship, "home economics," and so on. All of these function to make/help us to fit in, to be productive if possible, and neutralized if not. They make us good citizens/parents/ spouses/workers.




2

This view has strong implications for feminist theory. Biddy Martin has argued that Foucault's work provides an avenue for the development of a feminist materialism that improves upon both traditional Marxism and radical feminism. She states that

the development of materialism necessitates approaches to sexuality, subjectivity and power which go beyond both traditional Marxist and radical feminist analyses and can provide a way out of a theoretical impasse in all attempts to relate the abstractions patriarchy and capitalism. It requires that we suspend our commitment to universal, explanatory categories at least long enough to get at the operations of power at their most material and con- crete. (Martin 1982, 4)

Thus our central concern must not be simply whether sexism is an independent focus of oppressions in an interlocking system, is the result of some other more basic structure such as class or race oppression, or is the single source of all others. Rather, our larger problem may be the whole systemic approach. In such a theory, "all local and specific manifestations of power become the reflection of the prohibitive power of a system exterior to us, or interior only in the negative sense of our "socialization." The consequence of this is that described by Foucault: "Liberation, then, is articulated in terms of the demand for transgression of or end to external prohibitions-an essentially liberal line of thinking" (Martin 1982, 5). As seen before, such thinking is bound up with what it op- poses. It allows us to continue the quest for "enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures," to feel the thrill of transgression, but it does not, in the end, free us from our constitution as modern normalized subjects. Foucault helps us to see that the obsession with sex is part of the operations of power in contemporary Western societies, through which we are controlled at the most intimate level. In this reading, to demand simply more and freer sex is "to misunderstand 'sexuality' in ways that allow for a systematization and regulation of desire toward particular social and political ends" (Martin 1982, 8). In this case we must not "search for the truth about sex" but instead must "ask what is at stake in the historical question, in the compulsion to speak about the unspeakable" (9).

The effect of the Foucauldian analysis of discourses is to call into question the usual picture of oppression as an opposition between a hegemonic, repressive force and an underclass possessing an unspoken truth. If power flows not simply top down, but from the bottom up, in capillary fashion, if it is not centralized but local and diffuse, then we cannot expect to capture it by means of a centralized, systemic theory such as Marxism or liberalism.

By this time many if not most feminists have become disenchanted with the major political theories offered to them for explanation of the position(s) of women. In so doing they have often begun to make moves that Foucault would



428 Shane Phelan

endorse. And indeed, Foucault applauds feminists for going beyond "sexual liberation," so easily manipulated, to "desexualization of the question." In an interview he says that "the real strength of the women's liberation movements is not that of having laid claim to the specificity of their sexuality and the rights pertaining to it, but that they have actually departed from the discourse con- ducted within the apparatuses of sexuality," focusing not simply on "sex" but on "the demand for forms of culture, discourse, language and so on which are no longer part of that rigid assignation and pin-down to their sex which they had initially in some sense been politically obliged to accept in order to make themselves heard" (Foucault 1980b, 220).

These feminist projects do not always match Foucault's, however. In Adri- enne Rich's (1980) groundbreaking article, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," she made clear that heterosexuality is not simply a personal choice, not just a biological or even psychological condition, but is a crystalli- zation of male power "at the level of discourse and social practice" (Martin 1982, 11), what Foucault would refer to as apparatus. However, Rich parts com- pany with Foucault when she treats this apparatus as unified even in its diverse manifestations and the "other side"-the lesbian continuum-as some sort of continuous opposition to that unity. Rich, who is perhaps more attuned to the difficulties and differences between us than any other white feminist writer, here tries to pull many diverse women and movements under one umbrella. The Fou- cauldian must ask, Why? What is to be gained by this? What is its effect for power?

In fact, Rich's project betrays the desire for a single source of oppression, on the one side, and resistance, on the other. While her documentation and analysis of the mechanisms of compulsory heterosexuality are revealing, it becomes dangerous at the point where it is hinted that these all work together. Foucault's work should lead us to suspect that these various sites of oppression are indeed various, that we must examine each of them not simply as part of a larger whole but in their particularity, as operations that may oppose and challenge one another even as they tend toward a common end for women. Similarly, the resistances of women are varied and sometimes opposed to one another, and this is not simply the result of deception of false consciousness, but of the plu- rality of locations within the crisscrossing apparatuses of a society. As such, they are not to be disposed of by simply finding the unity "beneath" the difference; unity is a production, shifting and unstable, as are divisions.

What is only a danger for Rich is a full-fledged disaster for Mary Daly. In Gyn/Ecology (Daly 1978), she described the tortures of women around the world, across time. She told us what was done to the bodies of women, and it was horrible. Refusing the discourse that has rationalized and justified such activities, that makes us see civilization or culture where there is violence, we begin to find some things intolerable. As Daly's work before and after Gynl




Ecology has shown, she is intensely aware of the power of words to shape reality. Her work, in Gyn/Ecology and since, has focused on rebuilding language, changing the meanings of words to empower women. As Jean Grimshaw (1986) and others have noted, Daly's work is profoundly Nietzschean at times. This emerges clearly in her "genealogy" of practices such as footbinding, witchburn- ing, suttee, and gynecology.

In the end, however, Daly is confident that there is a truth, the truth of women, which has been denied and repressed. She does not abandon the repressive hypothesis. Indeed, it seems that the idea of a universal, ultimate truth requires something like a repressive hypothesis to explain its simultaneous existence and nonrealization. In this case the ultimate truth is found in the lives of women, as beings who escape representation and power except insofar as it is imposed on them by men. As Martin says, Daly's work "ultimately ontologizes woman in terms of an essential superiority and a privileged relationship to nature and truth. While she is acute about male representations of reality, she can only think of them as 'distortions' which violate 'the authentic experience which can be read out of women's texts and lives'" (Martin 1982, 14). Thus Daly's gene- alogies halt at the doors to the women's room. Martin argues that Foucault's work warns us against such reification and unification of woman. "To totalize or uni- versalize Otherness as an answer to the question of woman is to leave ourselves with no possibility for understanding or intervening in the processes through which meaning is produced, distributed and transformed in relation to the shifting articulation of power in our world" (15). Daly's refusal to genealogize feminism and women's worlds leaves her blind to the work of power among women, as was noted most acutely in the case of race by Audre Lorde (1984, 66-71).

This, then, is the heart of the Foucauldian challenge. Can we recognize and trace the effects of power, both as something used upon us and as something that we participate in? Foucault's analysis leaves none of us with the simple status of victim, nor does the category of oppressor remain quite the same as before. While this may seem like ground for despair, in fact it is this recognition that enables us to begin to see how we might change the world. The attempt to leave women pure can only result in the abandonment of the world to (the worst) men. Recognition of our common implication, however, leads to recognition of our capacity to act.

3

The analysis described above has not gone unchallenged. Perhaps the aspect that has been seized on most prominently by both advocates for and opponents of Foucault's work is the Nietzchean theme that truth is simply an effect of the rules of a discourse. If discourses define the possibility of statements, they nec- essarily structure and limit the "truth" available to us. This has obviously prob- lematic consequences. If what he says is so, there can be no transcendental truth.



430 Shane Phelan

How, then, are we to evaluate what he himself says? More politically relevant is the question: How are we to justify our own positions if not by an appeal to truth?

Two of the most prominent critics of this feature of Foucault's thought are Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. Taylor notes that the effect of the "regime- relativity of truth" is that "we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime. . . . liberation in the name of 'truth' could only be the substitution of another system of power for this one." As he suggests, this position is "easy enough to state," but very likely impossible "to integrate into the logic of one's analytical discourse" (Taylor 1985, 178). The consequence of this is the widely held position that Foucault's work "can only be the basis for a kind of local resistance within the regime" (179), not a coherent, positive strategy.

Indeed, the problem is deeper than this. Nancy Fraser (1981) argues that Foucault is caught between the statements and the tone of his work. His words disavow any normative position; he tells us that his stories are simply that; he does not mean to imply or suggest any normative element to them. At the same time, however, "his rhetoric betrays the conviction that modernity is utterly without redeeming features" (Fraser 1981, 286). She notes the use of phrases such as "the disciplinary society" and "the carceral archipelago" that are not- cannot be seriously held to be-normatively neutral. He is in fact offering a truth to us.

Feminists, however, have generally feared that Foucault's truth is not firm enough for their purposes. The heart of feminist opposition to Foucault's work has been the fear that his suspicion of thought based on stable entities and un- ambiguous power relations eliminates the possibility of appeals based on justice or truth, and thus deprives women of the basis for making any claims against a sexist society. Linda Alcoff (1988) argues that such views as Foucault's result in a position that argues that "the category 'woman' is a fiction and that feminist efforts must be directed toward dismantling this fiction" (417). Alcoff argues that such a feminism "could only be a negative feminism, deconstructing everything and refusing to construct anything" (418).

We do see this position in many contemporary thinkers, both feminist and non- or antifeminist. Some French feminists (in American terms) reject the label "feminist" because they see feminism as another humanism, a freezing of identity that will not really liberate. For American feminists this rejection points to the underlying weakness of a program of struggle that rejects foundations in humanism; those who do so find themselves unable to argue against the use of power, unable to make reference to "rights," "dignity," or "membership" to justify their resistance.

Martin herself cautions that we cannot simply abandon the category of woman. Hasty abandonment of this category does not acknowledge that the




claims of those persons identified as female have political force only insofar as they can appeal to American notions of "humanity." Whatever their philosophical status, categories of gender, as of truth and value, have political force. The political situation is such that women cannot simply abandon the major basis of political claims that has developed in our tradition. Thus feminists who wish to question such categories as man or woman must retain enough stability in them that they may be used for political struggle. For strategic purposes women must continue to use the idea of woman. We cannot afford simply to say that woman is a fiction or a location created by a discourse, for it is a central, powerful one, still capable of working against us by our disavowal. As Martin notes, "If we fail now to assert the category woman from our own shifting and open-ended points of view, our oppression may easily be lost among the pluralities of new theories of ideologies and power. There is the danger that Foucault's challenges to traditional categories, if taken to a 'logical' conclusion . . . could make the question of women's oppression obsolete" (1982, 17). That this is not Foucault's intention, nor the inevitable effect of his line of thought, will become clearer when we examine the concept of rights.

Christine Di Stefano has written of some feminists' deep suspicion of the challenge to the priority of the subject and of liberatory truth. She notes Nancy Hartsock's (1987) question: "Why is it, just at the moment in western history when previously silenced populations have begun to speak for themselves and on behalf of their subjectivities, that the concept of the subject and the possibility of discovering/creating a liberating 'truth' become suspect?" (Di Stefano 1988, 17). She suggests that there is a "feminist case against postmodernism" consist- ing of several claims. First, she says, "postmodernism expresses the claims and needs of a constituency (white, privileged men of the industrialized west) that has already had an Enlightenment for itself and that is now ready and willing to subject that legacy to critical scrutiny" (17). She contrasts this constituency with that composed of women, nonwhite, nonbourgeois peoples, which has yet to be liberated and so continues to need the vocabulary of freedom and dignity for- mulated by the Enlightenment. Internal critique is fine for hegemonic groups, but here it may play the role of disarming those groups that have not yet won the right to critique themselves.

Second, postmodern projects have centered on "deconstructing" the En- lightenment legacy, and to that extent they remain phallocentric, Eurocentric enterprises. The postmodern projects are inseparably bound to the conditions of advanced patriarchal capitalism and, as such, are either irrelevant to nonhegemonic groups or are part of the continuing hegemony of white bourgeois men.

Third, she notes the rampant insensitivity to gender issues in "purportedly politicized rereadings of history, politics and culture" (17). This has certainly been the case for many, if not all, male postmodern thinkers. We may see this in



432 Shane Phelan

Foucault's neglect of gender other than as the subject of occasional references, as well as in the work of many others.

Most fundamental, however, is the charge that "the postmodernist project, if seriously adopted by feminists, would make any semblance of a feminist politics impossible" (17). This is no idle charge. We see here the convergence of feminist and nonfeminist attacks upon Foucault's project; Di Stefano joins Taylor and Habermas in her belief that respect and freedom are securely rooted only in claims made by subjects as subjects.

This is a legitimate but ultimately not insuperable problem. First, we must separate the thinkers grouped together as "postmodernist" (Di Stefano mentions Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault). Some of these thinkers are more susceptible to these charges than others; it has been argued (Weedon 1987) that Fou- cault's concern for history and the exercise of social power makes his work more useful for feminists than other sorts of postmodern or poststructuralist thought.

So let us return to Foucault. Is he guilty of these charges: of phallocentrism, of Eurocentrism, of insensitivity? A strong case can be made that he is. But this is not the main problem. "If Foucault's theory of discourse and power can pro- duce in feminist hands an analysis of patriarchal power relations which enables the development of active strategies for change, then it is of little importance whether his own historical analyses fall short of this" (Weedon 1987, 13). The worse possibility is that he indeed leaves us no ground for action other than individual resistance, based solely on our will. If this problem can be overcome, then we may be optimistic that his other shortcomings may be remedied by feminist thinkers, rather than remaining the basis for rejection. His position would be analogous to that of Freud; useful, even if personally bound to sexism. We must, then, take a moment to consider whether Foucault is the nihilist that he has been painted.

Foucault can and has answered this charge, though never to the satisfaction of his critics. In an interview given in 1977, he states that "I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent" (Foucault 1980b, 1983). This is consistent with his position that truth is manufactured rather than discovered. Mark Philp explains that Foucault's stories "are fictions which seek to forge connections, establish relationships and transgress the established order and unity of discourse" (Philp 1985, 79). He has no intention of "integrating" what he says "into the logic of one's analytical discourse"; it is that logic, that discourse, that participates in normalization even as it claims to challenge it. His is a visceral appeal, designed to reach around our constructed subjectivity to our subjected body. If we understand him on some level, if we are "disturbed by what he says," the reason can only be that "his fictions are recognized as familiar" (80). They shake us loose from the discourses that legitimate modern power. To be sufficiently coherent




and logical for critics such as Taylor, they would have to participate in that legitimation.5

This charge should be of central concern to feminists. Women have for centuries been challenged to qualify themselves for membership in the adult population by demonstrating their competence in "masculine" fields, while they have simultaneously been excluded from the institutions in which this competence is produced. The circle of exclusion has now led feminists to question the apparently self-evident nature of these competences, to argue that women have competences and knowledges that men do not and that these can found membership in human communities that in fact are superior to those grounded in masculine practices and understandings. This is an example of what Foucault has labeled "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges," of the refusal of these other knowledges to concede "the" ground of knowledge (and consequently of membership) to the hegemonic discourse, but it is also an example of the do- mestication of insurrection. Foucault would argue that the adoption by these subjugated knowledges of the claims and criteria of the dominant knowledge amounts to self-destruction rather than liberation. In claiming superiority and special knowledge, such simple feminism in fact reverses the claims of masculine culture without questioning the hierarchical opposition of men and women. A truly new, nonhegemonic discourse must speak its truth without simply re- versing the valuations of its opponent. The difficulty with conceptualizing this shift accounts for much of the hostility evoked by Foucault's work.6

Thus Foucault is not arguing that all knowledge has the same status vis-a- vis power, and he is especially clear that knowledge is not simply the same as power: "if I had said, or meant to say, that knowledge was power, I would have said it, and having said it, I would have had nothing more to say-once they were identified, why should I work so hard at showing their different relations?"

5I do not mean here to suggest that Foucault simply rejects reason; the perception that this is the case is the result of the opposition between reason and body/emotion that is basic to Western thought. Rather, he wants to suggest that our bodies have reason, that we are not simply unified beings who use language to talk to one another's reason, but that language and apparatuses talk to our bodies as well. One way of describing this is to suggest that we have an "intuition" that he is right; another that has been suggested to me is that Foucault, as many other postmodernists, is addressing us through our "right brain" rather than our "left brain," so that we may recognize what he is saying without yet being able to verbalize it at a level that is acceptable to scientific discourse. If this is the case, then the insistence that anything important be said logically amounts to a rejection of new, presently inchoate ideas; this seems especially dangerous when the old ones seem so well articulated and so unable to address or relieve the problems facing us.

6Note that I am not abandoning here the notions of truth or freedom. Foucault is quite clear that such notions are essential for us, even as we bracket them and call them into question. The question for Foucault is not, how do we eliminate truth or the need for it, how do we problematize the category of freedom out of existence, but simply, how do we make ourselves? This includes asking, how do we make what we understand as truth and freedom?



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(Foucault 1984, 22). The difficult work lies in elucidating the exact nature of the relation. I shall argue that Foucault's criterion for distinguishing among discourses has to do with their relation to power and, specifically, to their openness to change and the possibilities for agency within them. Because they operate through the medium of language, which is always more ambiguous than we may wish, there exists a gap between power and knowledge(s). It is this gap that allows for politics at all.

Politics, then, is at the heart of Foucault's work. Politics in this view is not simply free individuals speaking to one another, nor is it the epiphenomenal trace of other, determining, forces. Politics, as an activity of human agents, is fragile and yet crucial. Theories that deny this are of less use to us in our activity than are those that refuse to close every hole, to be "consistent" beyond the consis- tency of the world they describe. If we cannot live with paradox, with that which defies "common sense," we cannot ever be open to new thought, new ground for thought. Those who choose paradox may find themselves accused of contra- diction by those who cannot understand or appreciate the experience of groping about in the spaces that do not quite have proper names yet. This is the point of simultaneously questioning and using the category "woman." Common sense tells us that it is a real category, so much so that our political agenda must be shaped by it, and yet we may question its history and use. We may want to question and challenge, but we cannot completely escape the strictures of the world as it is presently constituted. To attempt to do so is to fool oneself.

In 1981 Foucault joined with others to aid the Vietnamese boat people. The action was nongovernmental, a matter of sending private ships to protect the boat people from pirates. He wrote about this action, though the statement was not published at the time.7 In the statement Foucault writes that "no one" has com- missioned the activists and that it is this which "established our right." He suggests that "there exists an international citizenry, which has its rights, which has its duties, and which promises to raise itself up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author or the victims. After all, we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity." As members of this citizenry, we must always protest the actions of governments which "calculate the profits and losses" of "human misfortune provoked by their decisions or tolerated by their negligence." People's misfortune "founds an absolute right to rise up and to address those who hold power." However, we may not only speak; we can and must "intervene in the order of politics and international strategies. The will of individuals must in- scribe itself in a reality over which governments have wanted to reserve a mo- nopoly for themselves."

Does this not sound like a humanist turn for the antihumanist Foucault? Not entirely, but in many ways. It is consistent with Foucault's suggestion that we

7The text of the statement is reproduced in Keenan 1987, 20-21.




cannot simply dispose of right and rights-talk, that "against the disciplines, the only recourse is a return to the very code of right that the analysis of those disciplines has discredited" (Keenan 1987, 27). What is needed is, not the end of right, but "a new right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinary, but at the same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty" (Foucault 1980b, 108). Right must be eliminated, and yet cannot be dispensed with. The lesson to be learned is that we must always negotiate. The attempt to find the position beyond politics, beyond negotiation, is doomed; and within politics, we can never hope for total thought, for neatness, for completion. And yet, negotiation is not simply "done." It is a continual struggle, a continuing pressure which we put upon ourselves and others. Theories that deny this do us an injustice by leading us to look for "the" obstruction to "our" secure freedom and by forcing us to discipline ourselves so as to qualify for that freedom.8

This is the problem that feminists must address. The history of humanism has been a history that justifies the colonization and extermination of nonwhite, non-European, submiddle class, nonmale people. That justification has been bound to the disciplining of these people, to the production of orderly subjects. Foucault challenges this by insisting that there is a ground more basic than humanist rights by which to justify protest and participation; that, in fact, the question of the need for such a ground is a symptom of the failure of modern society truly to respect its members. We must claim right(s) not on the basis of confor- mity to standards promulgated by a certain group of men, but on the basis of our existence as actual people who have troubles.

This stance, however, forces us to listen to others. It forces us into politics by removing the privileged ground by which we might rightfully ignore some people. The fact of our common existence provides us with both claims and responsibilities. The exact shape of these is not clear, but the necessity of working on their elucidation is. This elucidation begins with the acknowledgment that humanism to date has not sufficiently dealt with these issues.

Thus opponents are mistaken when they suggest that Foucault contradicts himself when he values freedom and individuality. Their charge rests on the belief that humanism provides the only sure ground for such values. If we challenge this assumption, then we may have a lever of critique against social forms that does not reinsert us within the disciplinary structures of humanist "sciences of man."

8It must be said that the word "discipline" is being used here in a specialized way and that we must allow for irony even here. The argument is not that we should each simply "do our own thing" but that we must always be suspicious of arguments that compel us to "be" a certain sort of person (male, white, heterosexual, etc.) to qualify for rights and inclusion. Some sort of ordering of the self is of course necessary to any social order; what Foucault challenges is the peculiar modem organization that internalizes that ordering and then covers it up so that we are not aware that we were, are, or could be anything other than what we are.



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4

Foucault's fundamental problem with disciplines is the lack of reciprocity that they allow. Disciplines, according to Foucault, "have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities" (1979, 222). Individuals who are subject to these disciplines are less able to "understand what is happening to them" or to choose their response than they would otherwise be, and this lack "is not an accidental but an essential factor in the efficiency of the power the individual encounters" (Hooke 1987, 41).

The ideal of reciprocity that is betrayed by the disciplines is not simply a humanist ideal for Foucault; it emerges in many times and places, with various supports and interpretations. In fact, Alexander Hooke argues, Foucault saw humanism as "participating in the rupture of possible reciprocal relations among humans" (42), not merely providing one possible expression. Humanism's con- nection to the idea of the social contract is essential and formative. "Man" participates in the contract; those who do not participate (among others, women) are sub- or quasi-human.9 Those who "break the contract" do not transgress against the sovereign ruler, the king, but against "society." "For Foucault," Hooke states, "the social contract and a disciplinary society are complementary" (1987, 42).

The center of the disciplines is the power-knowledge that asserts that we can be known in our entirety and that this knowing will make us free. We will be free, not by taking power, but by knowing all. However, humans are not knowable in their entirety. Because of this fact, the project is doomed to failure, and so we always feel the danger of the "outside" in a particularly urgent way. The response to the danger is to increase the scope and depth of the disciplinary force.

Thus we enslave ourselves in the attempt to become simultaneously free and safe. Foucault makes us question whether these two goals can be compatible and highlights the risks of striving for security. This is directly relevant to the struggles of feminists, for one of our major goals has been the creation of a world safe for women. However, too often we have done this by enclosing a new space, encircling and disciplining ourselves, making ourselves politically correct in the fear that without these standards we shall have no community. 10

The antidote Foucault offers is anonymity. Anonymity is resistance because it preserves our individuality "by withholding or restricting knowledge of oneself, particularly knowledge that can serve the disciplines and opposing pow- ers" (Hooke 1987, 42) and also by "enabling the self to increase the scope of actions and relations not susceptible to official observations, records, or interpre-

9The literature documenting this exclusion is too voluminous to list; I suggest that the reader begin with Lloyd 1984.

'?For further discussions of this point, see Phelan 1989; Sawicki 1988.




tation" (57). The ideal is not anarchy as such, not faceless, nameless relations, but evasion of the complex of power-knowledge in the attempt to build relations of reciprocity and freedom. For Foucault the problem is not restraint but domination: the situation in which those who are subject to the constraints of a system are unable to change that system.

Thus we see that at heart Foucault addresses some of the central problems of democratic theory. What is freedom? Perhaps it lies in the possibility of living a life we freely endorse, or at least can argue about. Perhaps individuality is not simple isolation or particularity, but requires respect for our self-understanding even as that may be challenged by others. The power-knowledge complexes re- strict these by their particular manner of imposition of identity upon us. This imposition resists dialogue or conflict about selves and their locations by refusing to recognize its own status as part of that struggle, seeking instead the mantle of "truth" upon its discourse.

We must question the necessary social supports to human relations and in- teractions. How much and what sort of structure is required for our politics? What sorts of institutions do we need, and is it conceivable that some areas of our life need none at all? The answers to these questions are not clear. What does seem clear is that feminists urgently need to explore this. The disciplines have consistently operated to deprive women of knowledge of themselves while making them objects of male knowledge, thus maintaining them in asymmetrical relations. The flip side, the social contract, similarly excluded women: attempts to include them have often failed by making "humans" so abstract that real lives cannot be lived as both women and "humans."

We may then understand Foucault's work as an attractive alternative to both liberalism and antiliberal humanist theories such as Marxism. In this reading Foucault emerges not as a nihilistic opponent of all values but as one actively searching for a political language that will enable humans to make claims without resorting to (and thus conforming to) Enlightenment (white male) standards of rationality and membership. Foucault is not suggesting, in his analysis of power- knowledge, that knowledge is simply a tool of power; rather, he is cautioning us against the comforting humanist (and feminist) belief that power and knowledge are mutually exclusive, that power is bad and knowledge (or "truth") is good.11 As long as we hold on to this belief, we shall be unable to see the real systems of constraint in our lives and our own responsibility for their maintenance. Fur- ther, we shall be unable to resist the "cultural imperialism" that we not only suffer but perpetrate on others.12 If it is true that Foucault values freedom and individuality, then our abandonment of humanism may not entail the abandonment of these values. It does not need to involve us in the question of founda-

IIIn a recent article, Brown (1988) has described this opposition in Plato's work and has suggested that this opposition persists throughout Western theory, including feminist theory.

12J adopt the phrase "cultural imperialism" from Lugones and Spelman 1983.



438 Shane Phelan

tions, for the very need for foundations for these thiings bespeaks the limited, exclusive quality of Enlightenment ideals. The social contract emerges as an explanation for human relations among a people who cannot or will not see the many ways in which we are bound together; it is a synthetic bond. Women have fought to be included in this contract, have judged contract thinking as faulty, but have not recognized that the demand for "foundations" (metaphysical or epistemological) is of a piece with that thought.

Many feminists may fear that women will be deprived of their Enlighten- ment just as it approaches. Foucault has taught us the tremendous cost of the Enlightenment, not simply to the colonized Others, but to (European) "man" himself. We do not need to repeat such colonization in order to have values. We may no longer have the comfort of "universal values," transcendentally guar- anteed and historically unchanging, but this may be a great improvement. Fou- cault's example suggests that we can still have and act on some human values. What is at stake is not really (or not simply) the values, but the authority of some versions of those values and of those who would describe them to us.

Underneath the suspicion of postmodern claims, there lies the belief that women have two choices: recognition of women as distinct beings, opposed to men, and submergence of women into a generic "human" that in fact eliminates women from view. Foucault argues across this line, suggesting that the very tools used by modern men to dominate and exclude women have turned on the men, and thus should be dispensed with. No, he was not deeply personally concerned with the situation of women, but if his analysis of the plight of men is correct, then women should be very wary of adopting the tools that men used earlier. In a Foucauldian world, women are not generic men, nor are they simply different. The task of Foucauldian intellectuals is to trace specific differences and their implication in power relations, not with the aim of elimination of all power, but with the aim of a more porous and flexible system of power.

Is there a possibility that underneath all this is a simple return to pluralism? No. Pluralism as we have practiced it in the modern West has been a matter of containing difference by describing it, investing certain approved categories with the capacity for defining relevant difference, while leaving intact the basic social contract form. Pluralism has been a dance of sameness, which seeks to reassure us that certain differences "don't matter," "aren't dangerous." Foucault is quite clear that differences do/should matter. The way to open this possibility, however, is not through the play of truth which authorizes certain experts to tell us what matters, but through the formation of truly reciprocal relations, where we acknowledge difference because we must, because we are not insulated from the judgment and action of those "others." If we are to build theory, we must refrain from building theory on the bodies and lives of those we have been trained not to hear, and we must be free to build it without seeking permission from the authorities. We need to speak for ourselves, with no right, with every right.




Foucault allied himself with this project, even though he failed women in specific moments. Our work must be not to reject him for his failures but to use his insights to further our own successes.

Manuscript submitted 26 September 1988 Final manuscript received 28 July 1989

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