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Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of FeministDiscourse

Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse

by Isaac D. Balbus

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 4 / 1985, pages: 466-483, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=c51d4ec3-66bd-4122-9449-de6dade71cc3http://www.ceeol.com/


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DISCIPLINING WOMEN: MICHEL FOUCAULT

AND THE POWER OF FEMINIST DISCOURSE

Isaac D. Balbus

I. Introduction

In this essay I stage a confrontation between the genealogy of MichelFoucault and the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Dorothy Dinnerstein,Nancy Chodorow, Jane Flax and myself. I am obliged to resort to this artificebecause as far as I am aware none of the parties to this confrontation hasever before addressed the position of the other: the feminist psychoanalytictheorists have yet to make the discourse of Foucault the object of theircritique of masculine discourse as a simultaneous reaction to and denial of thepower of the mother, and neither Foucault nor his followers have extendedtheir deconstruction of the disingenuous discourse of the True to thediscourse of the theorists of mothering. This confrontation is by no meansarbitrary, however, because we shall see that from a Foucauldian perspective

the discourse of the mother looks like a paradigm case of a disciplinary TrueDiscourse, while from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint the Foucauldiandeconstruction of True Discourse betrays assumptions that can only becharacterized as a classically male flight from maternal foundations. Iffeminism necessarily embraces these foundations, then a Foucauldianfeminism is a contradiction in terms.

I shall argue that this opposition between feminism and Foucault can beresolved in favor of feminism and in part against Foucault. Thisargument will entail a demonstration that there are aporias or internalinconsistencies in the Foucauldian position that can only be overcome through

a reformulation of this position that would require us (a) to distinguishbetween libertarian and authoritarian True Discourses and (b) to assign thefeminist mothering discourse to the former rather than the latter category.Thus Foucaults discourse points against itself to the power of the veryfeminist discourse it would undermine.

II. Foucault versus Feminism

Let me begin with a summary comparison of some of the constituentelements of feminist and Foucauldian discourse:

FoucaultHistoryThe object of Foucaults genealo-gies are the variety of True Dis-

FeminismHistoryFeminist psychoanalytic theorists along with other feminists under-

Praxis International 5:4 January 1986 0260-8448 $ 2.00


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stand the history of all hitherto exis-ting societies as a history of thesubordination of women by and tomen. Women have always been ex-perienced by men as the dangeroussex (Hays) and men have alwayssought to avert this danger by exclud-ing women from positions of author-ity outside the family. Thus ostensib-ly different, even antithetical culturaland/or political arrangements aremerely variations on the common,overriding theme of misogyny andpatriarchy. Beneath the apparent dis-continuity of transitory historicalforms lies the massive continuity ofmale domination. It is precisely thiscontinuity that allows us to speak ofHistory rather than histories.(Dinnerstein, Balbus)

Western Philosophical discourseoscillates between a justification anda denial of this History. Either menhave been explicitly defined as super-ior to women (in order to rationalizetheir exclusion from extra-familialauthority) or both men and womenhave been subsumed under a cat-egory of Human Being that pur-

ports to be gender neutral but in factalways entails an equation of thehuman with what (up to the present)happen to be disproportionately mas-culine characteristics. Gender differ-ence is either transformed into hier-archical opposition or homogenizedout of existence. In neither case isthat difference understood to be con-sistent with non-hierarchical, egali-

tarian relationships between womenand men. Thus it is possible to speakof a History a patriarchal history of Western thought notwith-standing the otherwise profound dif-

Foucault

courses (P/K p. 131, L&G p. 90)through which the will to power hasbeen simultaneously expressed anddenied in Western societies.Expressed: True Discourses functionas regimes of truth that induceregular effects of power by virtue ofthe self-sacrifices they demand in thename of Truth and the status[they grant to] those who arecharged with enunciating it. (P/K,p. 131) Denied: True Discoursemakes it difficult if not impossible torecognize the power it produces bythe very fact that it insists on theopposition between power and truth:True discourse, liberated by thenature of its form from . . . power, isincapable of recognizing the will totruth which pervades it; and the will

to truth, having imposed itself uponus for so long, is such that the truth itseeks to reveal cannot fail to maskit. (AK, p. 219)

The task of the genealogist is not toproduce yet another, but rather tounmask all forms of, True Discourseby determining their conditions ofexistence and their political effects.

Since the 18th century the prevailingTrue Discourse of the West has beenwhat Foucault calls anthropologyor the discourse of continuous his-tory. Practitioners of continuoushistory traditional historians seek to disclose the Truth of thepresent by uncovering its origins inthe past; they are committed to aconcept of historical continuity, the

necessary presupposition of which isthe assumption that history is theunfolding of the essential attributesof Man. Man, in short, can becomethe object of history precisely insofar

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ferences among its various represen-tatives. (Flax, Balbus)

The heretofore culturally universalphenomenon of patriarchy is rootedin and reproduced by the equallyuniversal fact of virtually exclusivefemale responsibility for early childcare. In all culture it is a woman either the biological mother ormother-substitute who is both thesource of the satisfaction and thefrustration of the imperious needs ofthe infant; she is at once the beingwith whom the child is initially in-distinguishably identified and theone who enforces the (never morethan partial) dissolution of thisidentification. Thus it is the motherwho becomes the recipient of the

unconscious hostility that accumu-lates in children of both sexes as theresult of this inescapably painfulseparation. The mother who is lovedis also necessarily the mother who ishated.

The culturally universal fear andloathing of the female results fromthe subsequent transfer of this hatred

of the mother to all those who cameto represent her, i.e., to women ingeneral. And the exclusion of womenfrom positions of authority outsidethe family reflects the terror of everagain experiencing the humiliatingsubmission to the authority of themother within it. (In Marxism andDomination I have shown that thestarkness of this exclusion varies

directly with the painfulness of thissubmission.) It is in this sense thatmother-dominated child rearingmust be understood as the source ofpatriarchy. History has a meaning

Foucault

as he is its subject. This commitmentto historical continuity, in turn, bothsanctifies the present with the tra-dition of the past and privileges it asthe unique vantage point from whichthe past can be definitively known.Thus the traditional devices forconstructing a comprehensive view ofhistory and for retracing the past as apatient and continuous developmentmust be systematically dismantled.(LCMP, p. 153)

Hence Foucaults attempt to dis-mantle or deconstruct the assump-tion of Man-as-the-simultaneous-subject-and-object-of-history on whichcontinuous history rests. He arguesthat the effective material presuppos-itions for the existence of Man as

object and Man as subject are thedisciplinary technologies (that renderthe body at once docile and produc-tive) and the technologies of theself (that oblige the subject to speakthe Truth about itself) that haveflourished since the 18th century inWestern societies. Thus power exercised over both the body and thesoul is the condition of existence

for that form of knowledge that thediscourse of continuous historymakes possible. This form of know-ledge, in turn, functions to reinforceand renovate the objectifying andsubjectifying technologies throughwhich this power is produced.

This deconstructive history of thepresent demonstrates the discontinu-

itybetween the present and the pastand thus withdraws both thefamiliarity and the privilege confer-red on the present by the relationshipthat the discourse of continuous his-


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and that meaning is the flight fromand the repudiation of the mother.

It follows that women and men mustbecome more-or-less-equally theagents of the gratification and frus-tration of infants and young childrenif the inevitable hostility resultingfrom this combination is no longer tobe directed exclusively at women.And only when men, by virtue of

their complicity in this fatefulcombination, are no longer availableas blameless, overidealized refugesfrom maternal power will it be pos-sible for all of us to come to termswith, and outgrow, the resentmentthat would remain but that would nolonger be directed at one sex alone.Thus co-parenting is an indispens-able condition for the overcoming of

patrarchy and the emotional immatur-ity of which it is an expression.

Totality

The overcoming of patriarchy wouldentail a complete cultural transform-ation. Patriarchy is not an isolatedpart of, but rather a pervasive pres-ence within, any given humansociety.

The mother is not merely the firstwoman but also the first representa-tive of the world we encounter. Thehitherto culturally universal symboli-zation of the Earth as a womancaptures this connection between ourrelationship with the mother and ourrelationship with nature. Nature, in

short, becomes Mother Naturebecause it is the mother whonurtures. Under certain conditions ofthis nurturance to which I refer insome detail in Marxism and

Foucault

tory establishes between it and thepast. The demonstration of dis-continuity becomes the task ofgenealogy: to practice it is todiscover that truth or being do notlie at the root of what we know andwhat we are, but the exteriority ofaccidents . . . the forms operating inhistory are not controlled by destinyor regulative mechanisms, butrespond to haphazard conflicts(LCMP, pp. 146, 154). History, inshort, has no meaning. (L&G, p. 91)

Totality

The same will to power that accom-panies the discourse of global histor-ical meaning informs the discourse ofsociety as a totality that is present in

each of its parts. The theoreticalpretension to grasp the social wholebetrays a commitment to a trans-parent society in which there nolonger exist . . . any zones of darkness. . . or disorder (P/K, p. 152): anepistemological attachment to thecategory of totality necessarilyimplies a political attachment to tota-litarianism. (P/K, p. 80) Because this

epistemiological holism grants to atheoretical avant-garde the uniqueprivilege of representing the whole toall those who are presently, if notpermanently, unable to see it, it alsoenshrines the indispensable presenceof this avant-garde in the transitionto, if not the operation of, this formof society. (P/K, p. 83). For bothreasons, Foucault condemns the

tyranny of globalizing discourses,(P/K, p. 83) warns us that thewhole of society is precisely thatwhich should not be consideredexcept as something to be des-


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Domination the hostility thataccompanies its termination istranslated into a hostility toward thenature that the mother represents.The symbolization of nature as anabsolute, dangerous other that mustbe tamed lest it destroy us is rooted inthe unconscious, childhood sym-bolization of the mother as an otherwho must be punished for havingbetrayed our love. If the dominationof nature is the domination of themother, it follows that a less hostile,more co-operative relationship with(non-human) nature requires a lesspainful, emotionally explosive rela-tionship with the mother. As we haveseen, this is precisely what co-paren-ting would make possible.

The mother is also the first, over-whelming adversary (Dinnerstein,p. 166) of the will of the child, thefirst representative of authority thathe or she confronts. Thus therelationship with the mother withinthe family sets the emotional stage forour subsequent relationship with thevariety of authorities we will encoun-

ter outside the family. The fear andloathing of women that the intoler-able exercise of maternal powerengenders becomes the unconsciousbasis for the acquiesence in, or eventhe affirmation of, first the authorityof the father and then the authority ofmen as a whole. Under conditions ofmother-monopolized child rearing,male authority is bound to look like

a reasonable refuge from femaleauthority. (Dinnerstein, p. 175)The struggle against political domi-nation therefore demands that thisform of child rearing be replaced

Foucault

troyed, and insists that the politicalthinker who would resist totalitarian-ism must reject [totalizing] theoryand all forms of general discourse.(LCMP, pp. 233, 231)

This repudiation of totalizing theoryextends to the effort of the theorist toenvision an alternative to the societywhose all-embracing logic he pur-ports critically to comphrehend. Uto-

pian thought merely substitutes yetanother totality for the one it is swornto eliminate, and thus it reproducesall the authoritarian political tenden-cies to whose eradication it isostensibly committed. Hence thestark Foucauldian conclusion: toimagine another system is to extendour participation in the presentsystem. (LCMP, p. 230)

Intellectual resistance to this systemdemands not general discourse butrather an analysis of the plurality ofspecific technologies of power thattraverse it. This commitment tospecificity over generality is thesociological parallel to the genealog-ical commitment to discontinuityover continuity. In Foucaults work

it manifests itself in careful attentionto the specificity of mechanisms ofpower . . . which each have their ownhistory, their own trajectory, theirown techniques. (P/K, pp. 145, 99)Thus one book on the power of themedical gaze (Birth of the Clinic),another on the power of surveil-lance (Discipline and Punish), andyet another on the power of the

discourse on sexuality (The Historyof Sexuality, Volume I ). Thus theintelligibility of Foucaults otherwiseperverse insistence that Je suis Plur-aliste. (HDD, p. 226)


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with child rearing that is sharedequally by women and men.So it is that co-parenting is essentialnot only for the overcoming of maledomination but for the supersessionof political and technological domi-nation as well. It is in this sense thatthe struggle against patriarchy mustbe understood as a struggle for anentirely new civilization, a civiliz-ation without domination.

Subjectivity

The development of the identity ofchildren of both sexes depends on aperiod of primary identification ofsymbiotic union with the motherthat results from her nurturantresponses to their imperious infantileneeds andon a subsequent separationfrom her, the perception of whichcan only be enforced through themothers frustration of these verysame needs. But here the symmetryends. Since both the girl and themother are female, the intenseidentification that the girl establisheswith the mother is consistent with,and becomes the basis for, her femi-

nine identity. This means that forgirls and women, issues of femininityor female identity do not depend onthe achievement of separation fromthe mother . . . (Gilligan, p. 8) Thus,despite this separation, the mothercontinues to be symbolized as another with whom the girl is con-nected and on whom the develop-ment of her self depends.

Hence women typically develop arelational orientation within whichothers are understood not as a threatto, but as essential for, the realizationof their identity. In Chodorows

Foucault

A Pluralism of Powers necessarilygives rise to a pluralism of resist-ances. Foucault insists on themultiplicity of the sources of resist-ance and refuses to privilege one asany more revolutionary or univer-sal than any other. He does notexclude indeed, he is committedto the possibility that these resist-ances might eventually combine tocreate a new (non-disciplinary) formof power (P/K, p. 133, D&R, p. 223)and thus a new politics of Truth(cited in Zinner, p. 224), but hisprincipled theoretical reticence pre-cludes him from naming this newform of power/knowledge. The muchmore modest but far less dangeroustask of the intellectual the speci-fic rather than the universal intel-

lectual is simply to struggleagainst the power that operates in hisown local disciplinary domain.

Subjectivity

We have already seen that Foucaultargues that the individual whomanthropological discourse conceivesas the subject of History is but theproduct of apparatuses of power/knowledge, of technologies of the selfand the discourses that both sustainand are sustained by these technolo-gies. Since the subject is not thevis--vis of power [but rather] one ofits prime effects (P/K, p. 98), theconstitution of the subjectivity of theindividual is simultaneously the con-stitution of his or her subjection.

(P/K, p. 97; DP, pp. 27-28, 192-194)

The theme of the founding subjectenables us to elide the reality (AK,p. 227) of this power-effect; it would


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words, they come to experiencethemselves as continuous with andrelated to the external object worldand emerge with a strong . . . basisfor experiencing anothers needs . . .as ones own. (Chodorow, p. 167)This means that women are uncon-sciously predisposed to fulfill theneeds of the other to empowerrather than exercise power over theother and thus that they areemotionally prepared for the nurtur-ing in general and the mothering inparticular for which they have here-tofore been disproportionatelyresponsible.

It is otherwise for the boy. Whereasprimary identification with themother is the source of the femalechilds recognition that she, too, is a

woman, this feminine identifi-cation is an obstacle that must beovercome if the male child is tobecome a man. Thus the develop-ment of his masculinity demandsthat the male child suppress thefeminine within him through therepudiation of any attachment to oridentification with the mother. Inorder to become a man he mustlearn to symbolize his first and mostsignificant other as an absolutelyseparate, alien object with which noconnection or communion can beestablished.

This unconscious symbolization ofthe mother as an object sets the stagefor a generalized objectifying stancetoward the entire world of others that

the boy will subsequently encounter.Since masculinity is defined throughseparation (Gilligan, p. 8), the veryrelationships that women perceive asessential for the realization of their

Foucault

have us believe that the very power/knowledge complexes that produceindividual subjects have been pro-duced by them, and thereby makes itimpossible even to formulate theproblem of the subject as an object tobe explained. (L&G, p. 101) Thusthe genealogist must dispense withthe constituent subject . . . get rid ofthe subject itself (P/K, p. 117) infavor of an analysis of the varioustechnologies of the self and associateddiscourses by means of which thesubject has been historically consti-tuted.

Foucault locates psychoanalysis as a,or perhaps even the, masterdiscourse/technology of the self incontemporary society. (P/K, p. 219)

It unites the confessional mechanismsthat have long been characteristic ofWestern civilization proceduresthat incite the individual to reveal thehidden truth about himself with amore recent, post-19th centurydeployment of sexuality, in orderto ensure that the Truth of theindividual subject will be his sexu-ality. Since the subject-to-be is in-

itially unaware of, indeed resistant to,this Truth, his constitution as asubject is inseparable from his sub-jection to the power of a GreatInterpreter (D&R, p. 180) who isassumed to have privileged access tothe Truth. And, since this interpre-tive process culminates in the sub-jects affirmation of an unambiguous-ly sexual identity, this process

categorizes the individual, markshim by his own individuality,attaches him to his own identity [and]imposes a law of truth on him whichhe must recognize and which others


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gender identity will characteristicallybe experienced as threat to the ident-ity of men. Men will attempt to wardoff this danger by avoiding intimaterelationships or by transformingthem into relationships in whichthe self establishes invulnerability byachieving distance from, and controlover, the other. Thus men areemotionally prepared for the mani-fold ways violent and non-violent in which they will seek to exercisepower over the variety of others theywill confront.1

Western philosophical discourseoperates entirely within the limits ofthis masculine horizon. The emo-tional orientation of men is trans-formed into the master assumptionthat the appetites or passions areself-seeking at best and anti-social atworst. What divides Western phi-losophers is merely the answer theygive to the question of whether it ispossible and/or desirable for humansto rise above these passions. Idealistsfrom Plato through Kant to Haber-mas argue that the faculty of reasonenables human beings to discover or

elaborate universal principles ofsocial obligationthat can override theappetites and thus make social justicepossible that, in short, reasonshould rule over passion. Materialistsfrom Thrasymachus through Hobbesto Nietzsche counter that theostensibly rational articulation of uni-versal principles of social obligation isitself part of the passionate struggle

to exercise power over others and thatjustice is merely the name given tothe outcome of this struggle that,in other words, reason is forever aslave to passion. This masculine

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have to recognize in him. The resultis a thoroughly subjugated subject inthe twofold sense of being subject tosomeone else by control and depend-ence, and tied to his own identity by aconscience or self-knowledge.(D&R, p. 212)

In this remarkable passage Foucaultdispenses not only with individualsexual identity but with individual

identity tout court. An attachment toan identity that one recognizes and isrecognized by others is not the inevit-able outcome of any form of socialinteraction but rather the result of theform of interactions peculiar to thetechnologies of the self that prolifer-ate in the contemporary disciplinarysociety. The celebration of an indi-vidual identity that is somehow un-

realized or distorted in thatsociety does not contest but merelyconfirms its power. The genealogistrefuses this ruse and recognizesinstead that nothing in man noteven his body is sufficiently stableto serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understandingother men. (LCMP, p. 153) Itfollows that the struggle against thedisciplinary society must be wagedagainst, rather than on behalf ofsexual, or any other form of, identity.Thus Foucaults cryptic conclusionto The History of Sexuality, Volume I:the rallying point for the counterat-tack against the deployment of sexu-ality ought not to be sex-desire butbodies and pleasures. (p. 157)


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oscillation between a self-seeking

materialism and a dispassionate ordisembodied rationalism has recentlybeen transformed by Lawrence Kohl-berg into an evolutionary theory inwhich the passage from materialismto rationalism is conceptualized as aninvariant sequence of moral develop-ment. But, as Carol Gilligan haspointed out, what is missing in Kohl-berg and the entire Western philo-

sophical tradition of which his theorymust be understood as an attemptedsynthesis is precisely the assumptionthat the passions are or can be social,and that social interaction might beinformed neither by self-seeking pas-sion nor by abstract, rational obli-gation but by the nurturing or caringthat has hitherto been the distinctiveorientation of women.

The realization of this possibilityrequires the elimination of the asym-metries in the preoedipal experiencesof the male and female child. Oncethe father joins the mother as an earlycaretaker of the male child, this childwill now experience a primaryidentification with a parent of hisgender; the formation of his mascu-

line identity will, therefore, no longerdemand the suppression of his pri-mary identification and the assump-tion of an exclusively oppositionalstance toward his first love-object.Under these conditions, boys can beexpected to grow up far morerelationally-oriented than they areunder mother-dominated childrearing. Thus it is reasonable to sup-

pose that they will no longer bedriven to exercise power over othersand will instead be emotionallyinclined to empower others as theyare empowered by them. Co-


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By now the opposition between Foucauldian and Feminist psychoanalyticdiscourse should be clear. Each treats the other as part of the problem forwhich it understands itself to be a remedy. The Foucauldian perspectiveindicts feminist psychoanalytic theory for relying on all three of theconstituent, interrelated elements of a contemporary True Discourse:continuous history, the concept of totality, and the theme of thefounding subject. The idea of a universal Patriarchy that is rooted in anequally universal mother-dominated child rearing simultaneously masks thestrangeness of the contemporary disciplinary society and privileges oneform of the struggle against it, namely the struggle for co-parenting, over allother types of resistance. The nightmare of a patriarchal society a wholethat is present in the way in which we work, decide, philosophize, and evenfeel as well as the vision of a post-patriarchal society in which these parts of

life would all be thoroughly re-organized betray the inevitably totalitarianpretensions of a Reason that believes itself to be capable of objectifying theconditions of its own existence. And the reliance on psychoanalysis to revealthe hidden origins of an allegedly already-existing, gendered subjectivity atonce contributes to the constitution of this subjectivity and veils thisconstitutive process. Thus, from a Foucauldian perspective, Dinnerstein,Chodorow, and Flax are discipliningwomen; that is, they are committed to aform of True Discourse that is both cause and consequence of the disciplinarysociety that Foucault contests.

From a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, Foucaults deconstruction of

of disciplinary discourse/practice betrays all the signs of its masculine origin.His ban on continuous history would make it impossible for women even tospeak of the historically universal misogyny from which they have sufferedand against which they have struggled, and would appear to reflect theblindness of a man who so takes for granted the persistence of patriarchy thathe is unable even to see it. His gender-neutral assumption of a will to power(over others) that informs True Discourses and the technologies with whichthey are allied transforms what has in fact been a disproportionately maleintoa generically human orientation, and obliterates in the process the distinctive-ly female power of nurturance in the context of which masculine power is

formed and against which it reacts. His critique of totalizing reasoncondemns as totalitarian the very awareness of the pervasiveness of maledomination that women have so painfully achieved, and entails an equation ofIdentity with loss of freedom that is but a conscious translation of theunconscious opposition that men experience between autonomy and identifi-

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parenting is the key that can unlockthe possibility of a society in whichthe nurturance and caring that havethus far been largely restricted to thearena of the family come to informthe entire field of human interaction.


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cation with the (m)other. Finally, the dismantling of all psychoanalysis as atechnology of the self dissuades us from taking seriously the particular form ofpsychoanalysis that alone can enable us even partially to undo this andother patriarchal opositions. In short, Foucauldian genealogy disciplineswomen by depriving them of the conceptual weapons with which they canunderstand and begin to overcome their universal subordination.

III. Foucauldian True Discourse

The disciplining of women or women who discipline? How is it possible toadjudicate these competing claims? Do not be misled by the reference toadjudication. I write not as a neutral observer but as a partisan of feministpsychoanalytic theory, as someone who is committed to its Truth and thepractice with which it is connected. My goal, therefore, is to persuade theFoucauldian that he or she should take feminist psychoanalytic theoryseriously. But this is precisely what the Foucauldian will not do, as he or shebelieves that the only way to contest the inevitably authoritarian effects of allTrue Discourses is militantly to refuse their seductive appeal to Truth. Sinceit is the belief in the invariably authoritarian effects of all True Discourses thatprevents the Foucauldian from taking feminist psychoanalytic theoryseriously, my first task is to disabuse him or her of this belief. The fact that Iapproach this task not only as a partisan of feminist psychoanalytic theory but

also as someone who shares the Foucauldian abhorrence of authoritarianeffects (and whose effort to annul the equation between True Discourseand authoritarianism is, therefore, principled and not merely strategic)establishes, I believe, the common ground on a which the dialogue necessaryfor this task can take place.

This task begins with a demonstration that the Foucauldian is implicitlycommitted to the very True Discourse that he or she explicitly rejects.Although Foucaults manifest discourse repudiates continuous history,totality, and founding subject, it is not difficult to detect in his writings alatent discourse in which each of these interrelated themes assumes a

prominent place.Consider first his critique of continuous history. According to Foucault

the concept of historical continuity is merely the effect of an anthropologicaldiscourse that defines Man as the subject and object of history, a discoursethat is by no means historically continuous but rather coeval with therelatively recent emergence of disciplinary technologies and technologies ofthe self. It is precisely the discontinuous, namely the specific nature of thedisciplinary power/knowledge complex, that the concept of continuoushistory conceals and that the genealogist must reveal. But this appeal todiscontinuity is undermined by the assumption that the disciplinary age is by

no means the only one in which power and knowledge have been inextricablyintertwined, and that this unholy alliance is, rather, virtually as old asWestern civilization itself. (AK, p. 218) Western history, Foucault tells us, isnothing but the succession of different power/knowledge complexes, differentregimes of truth. (L&G, p. 90) So we are back to a notion of historical


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continuity, even if the continuous object of Foucaults history is not Manbut the will to power/knowledge through which he is created andtransformed. As Dreyfus and Rabinow have observed, to make the incestuousrelationship between knowledge and power the object of discourse is to seek toconvey a Truth about this power relationship by means of which it can besubverted. (D&R, p. 132) Thus Foucault remains within the very oppositionbetween power and truth that he opposes. He remains, in other words, withinthe discourse of the True.

The totalizing Reason against which Foucault inveighs is likewise present inhis work. Despite his explicit repudiation of all forms of general discourseand his insistence on the specificity of mechanisms of power, he speaks ofdisciplinary power as an integrated system (DP, p. 176), of the spread [ofdisciplinary mechanisms] throughout the whole social body (DP, p. 209), ofan indefinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism (DP, p. 216), theomnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline [and] the judges of normality(DP, p. 304), and the formation of what might be called in general thedisciplinary society. (DP, p. 209). Here we are a long way from the pluralistFoucault. As Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, a concept of the disciplinarysocietyis nothing if not the product of a totalizing theory of society. (FL, p.69) Indeed, we should scarcely expect otherwise. To hold, as Foucault does,disciplinary technologies responsible for the very constitution of themodern-individual-as-object-and-subject is necessarily to attribute to them a

totalizing power that only a totalizing theory can name. And, if thesetechnologies lacked this totalizing power if they were less globally anddangerously determinative what would be the point of Foucaultsprodigious effort to dismantle the True Discourses that sustain them? Thepoint is that the mere identification of the object against which the genealogiststruggles requires the very concept of totality that the genealogist wouldunambiguously condemn.2

So too, finally, does the conceptualization of the struggle against thisdisciplinary object demand that the genealogist violate his or her prohibitionon the founding subject. We have seen that Foucault argues that the

subject is but an effect of disciplinary power/knowledge and that thetheorist who would subvert this form of power/knowledge must therefore getrid of the subject. But the one subject who cannot be gotten rid of is thetheorist him/herself. The very intention to identify knowledge/power com-plexes as objects for deconstruction presupposes a subjectivity that is not aneffect of these complexes but is, rather, an animating source of thedeconstructive discourse. And the problem is not merely that Foucault cannotaccount for his own resistance without revoking the ban on the constituentsubject. It is also that he cannot account for anynon-reactive resistance anyresistance that anticipates the new form of power/knowledge to which he is

committed without making reference to a subjectivity that is more andother than an effect of discipline. Thus Lemert and Gillan are correct toobserve that there is more subjectivity in Foucault than a casual readingwould suggest (p. 106), as Foucault himself appears to acknowledge when hetells us in an interview that it is through revolt that subjectivity . . . introduces


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itself into history and gives it the breath of life. (OR, p. 8) The difficulty isthat this subversive subjectivity cannot be explained within the framework ofa discourse for which subjectivity and subjugation are correlative terms. By

speaking of a subjectivity that breathes life into history that is, in short,its animating source Foucault embraces the very theme of the constituentsubject with which, he informs us, we must dispense.

I have demonstrated that there is a Foucault who is committed to a form ofTrue Discourse in opposition to the Foucault who insists on the perniciousconsequences of all forms of True Discourse. There are two possible ways toresolve this opposition. We can accept the position of the latter Foucault, inwhich case we will be obliged to refuse to take seriously everything that theformer has to say about a trans-historical domination, the disciplinary society,and the possibility of its subversion. Or, we can take seriously these global

claims to Truth, in which case we will have to reject the thesis that all suchclaims have necessarily authoritarian effects. I assume that the radical,politically conscious Foucauldian prefers to be able to speak of the continuityand pervasiveness of domination as well as the possibility of its transcendence,and that he or she will therefore reject the Foucault who maintains that thiscan not be done without contributing to its contemporary reproduction. Iassume, in other words, that the thesis of the inevitably authoritarian effectsof all True Discourses will have to be abandoned in favor of the authoritarianeffects of some True Discourses and the libertarian effects of others.

How might this distinction be drawn by the Foucauldian who comes to

recognize its necessity? I believe that the criteria for this distinction havealready been implicitly established by Foucault himself, and that we need onlyto make them explicit by contrasting the specific form of True Discourse towhich one Foucault is, in fact, committed with the specific form of TrueDiscourse that indeed entails the authoritarian political consequences that theother Foucault incorrectly attributes to all forms to True Discourse.

Recall, to begin with, the genealogical remedy for continuous history:the traditional devices for retracing the past as a patient and continuousdevelopment must be systematically dismantled. (emphasis added) Thissuggests that it is historical continuity understood as an evolutionary

development that is the real danger that the genealogist must combat. Theconceptualization of historical continuity as a rational progression does indeedprivilege the present as the necessary culmination of that progression, and thethinker who would undermine rather than privilege the present musttherefore also strive to undermine this conceptualization. But historicalcontinuity need not be conceptualized as development or progress, and, as wehave seen, is not so conceptualized by the Foucault for whom history has beennothing but the succession of different apparatuses of power/knowledge,transitory manifestations of relationships of domination-subordination.(Smart, p. 76) That Foucault is able to develop a powerful critique of the

contemporary, disciplinary form of these relationships of domination-subordination in spite of or perhaps because of this notion of historicalcontinuity demonstrates that this notion does nothing to privilege the present.By linking the present to the past it may make the present more familiar,but it is a familiarity that breeds contempt.


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Reconsider next Foucaults critique of totalizing Reason. The equationhe establishes between the epistemology of totality and the politics oftotalitarianism is based on the argument that the impulse to know the whole to see its presence within the manifold parts implies a commitment to asociety in which individuals are allowed no hiding places from the surveillanceof those who presume to represent it. But the plausibility of this argumentrests entirely on an asserted but undemonstrated identity between seeing andsurveillance. Surveillance, as it is understood by Foucault, recognizesindividuals only as more-or-less interchangeable parts of the power-machine;it robs them of any individuality that is not functional for the reproductionof the society as a whole. It is, in short, a way of seeing the other thathomogenizes the differences between it and any other other, and therebyobliterates its autonomy. But this is not the only way of seeing the other. Theother can be recognized as an other with whom we share connections withwhom we are identified yet from whom we are nevertheless different. Thusthe impulse to see the whole can be an impulse to recognize and celebrate the persistence of heterogeneity and autonomy within the context ofcommunity and identification.

In his leap from totality to totalitarian Foucault ignores this crucialdistinction between a homogeneous and a heterogeneous totality. Yet his own(totalizing) critique of the disciplinary society implies a commitment to thelatter: if he were not an epistemological holist, it would be impossible for him

even to conceptualize that society, but if his holism were of the homogenizingvariety, he would have no grounds on which to condemn its impulse toobliterate heterogeneity. (Unless one were to argue that Foucault is anempirical holist and a normative pluralist, an argument that entails anultimately indefensible separation of description and evaluation.) The factthat he argues for a multiplicity of sources of resistance to the disciplinarysociety should not mislead us, for he recognizes the necessity for alliancesamong those whose resistance flows from these different sources, and thepossibility of an alliance (that is not purely tactical and therefore short-lived)presupposes the possibility of recognizing what these otherwise heterogeneous

agents have in common. (LCMP, pp. 216-17) Thus Foucault demonstrates,despite himself, that a thinker who is committed to an epistemology ofheterogeneous totality will resist, rather than succumb to, the totalitariantemptation.

We have seen that the Foucault who tries to get rid of the subject is atodds with the Foucault who embraces subjectivity as a vital source of history.He is silent about the nature of this subjectivity, but I think we are entitled toinfer from his reference to bodies and pleasures as the rallying point for thecounterattack against the deployment of sexuality that the subjectivity thatmanifests itself in transformative resistance has a bodilybasis. To account for

this type of resistance, it would appear that Foucault is obliged to takerecourse to a concept of an embodied subjectivity that is a source ratherthan an effect of power, a lived body that is more than the result of thedisciplinary technologies that have been brought to bear on it. (D&R, p. 167)But a concept of embodied subjectivity or a lived body entails that the body


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is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or forunderstanding other [people], i.e., it necessarily implies precisely that notionof bodily integrity or identity that is refused by Foucault.3

In his equation of individual identity sexual or otherwise withindividual subjugation Foucault has confused the indentity of the embodiedwith the identity of the disembodied subject. The latter, but not the former, isthe proper object for a Foucauldian deconstruction. It is the individual whocan only relate to his body as an object from which he is separate and overwhich he must exercise control the individual with a simultaneouslydocile and productive body whose subjectivity has been shaped bydisciplinary technologies and technologies of the self, and it is the traditionalepistemological subject of either empiricism or idealism the subject that isdistinct from its object of knowledge that both reproduces and isreproduced by these technologies. Thus any True Discourse that relies on adisembodied founding subject does indeed both mask and justify theauthoritarian process by means of which such a subject has (at least in part)been formed. But a True Discourse that posits an embodied founding subjectis a prerequisite for any material appeal against this very process.

IV. Conclusion: Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory as a Liberatory True Discourse

I believe that I have established that our Foucauldian interlocutor would be

obliged to agree that a True Discourse whose constituent elements were (a) aconcept of continuous but non-developmental history; (b) a concept ofheterogeneous totality; and (c) a concept of embodied subjectivity would satisfythe criteria for a non-authoritarian, potentially liberatory True Discourse. Myfinal task is to demonstrate that feminist psychoanalytic theory is a TrueDiscourse that satisfies these three criteria and thus that the Foucauldianshould take it seriously.

Feminist psychoanalytic theory clearly satisfies the first criterion. Thehistorical continuity that it takes as its object is not development butdomination; not the triumphant march of Reason as such but rather the

hegemony of a particular form of reason that is shot through and through withthe poisonous passion of patriarchy. Thus the feminist theorist does notprivilege, but demands a fundamental break with, the present, one thatinvolves the construction of a new form of reason and a new form of power. Inthis it is at one with the Foucauldian project.

Feminist psychoanalytic theory is also committed to the concept of aheterogeneous totality. It is based on the assumption that the development ofthe self depends on an identification with the other and thus that communityand autonomy are not only not inconsistent but are, in fact, mutuallyconstitutive. It demonstrates that where the first significant other is a woman,

the very identification that is essential for a genuinely autonomous self isexperienced (by the male) as a threat to the self, and that the inevitable resultis both a damaged self and a damaged community. And it is animated by theimpulse to undo this damage by helping to create the conditions co-parenting under which the identification with our initial significant


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others would no longer be experienced as an obstacle to, but rather as what itreally is, namely an essential source of, an authentic sense of self. The feministmothering discourse makes explicit the implicit Foucauldian commitmentto a heterogeneous totality and specifies the conditions under which thiscommitment can be fulfilled. It is, therefore, as militantly (and perhaps morerealistically) anti-totalitarian as the thought of Foucault.

Finally, the self to which the mothering discourse is committed is aneminently embodied self. It is through an intimate, continuous and nurturantcontact with the bodyof the mother that our earliest, most fundamental needsare satisfied. The identification with the mother that results from thesatisfaction of these needs is, therefore, an identification with the mothersbody. Since it is this identification with the mothers body on which theformation of the self initially depends, it follows that the self can only be anembodied self. It also follows that our sense of bodily self will depend on our(unconscious) relationship to the body of the mother within us. If boys undermother-monopolized child rearing are obliged in order to become men tosuppress the mother within them, this can only mean that they will be obligedto suppress their bodies as well. Only when the male child internalizes thebody of a nurturer of his own gender only under co-parenting will themortifying repudiation of the body no longer be associated with masculinity.

Thus feminist psychoanalytic theory gives an account of the formation ofembodied subjectivity that purports to explain the conditions under which

it will be denied in order to contribute to the conditions under which it will beembraced. If we insist on calling the therapy that flows from this theory atechnology of the self, then we will have to admit that there are technologiesof the self that can enhance, rather than destroy, the embodied subjectivity ofwhich Foucauldians are the covert partisans.

To conclude: I believe I have shown that feminist psychoanalytic theorysatisfies all three Foucauldian criteria for a non-authoritarian, potentiallyliberatory True Discourse, and thus that there are no good Foucauldianreasons for refusing to take seriously its claims to truth. But there are, ofcourse, other, perhaps more fundamental reasons than Foucauldian ones for

not wanting to listen to this eminently subversive, deeply disturbingdiscourse.

NOTES

1 For an effort to relate the different ways in which men have exercised power over others to

the different modes of mothering they have experienced, see Marxism and Domination,

pp. 327-333 and my Habermas and Feminism: (Male) Communication and the Evolution

of (Patriarchal) Society,New Political Science, no. 13 (Winter 1984), pp. 27-47.

2 As Mark Poster has recently reminded us, Sartre demonstrated that all perceptionrequires totalizations, that an observer is always privileged in drawing together disparate

acts in an historical field revealing a totalization, even though individual actors may not be

cognizant of it.Foucault,Marxism & History(Oxford: Polity Press, 1984), p. 21. See also

Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Knopf, 1963), pp. 85-166. Gestalt


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psychologists also provide support for the proposition that totalizing reason is inherentin perception.

3 Whether bodily identity also implies sexualidentity depends on what is meant by sexual

identity. Since the object-relations version of psychoanalytic theory on which themothering feminists rely repudiates the orthodox Freudian conceptualization of thesexual drives or the libido as a- or anti-social in favor of the conceptualization of the libidoas directed towards the other . . . as object-seeking (Jessica Benjamin, The End ofInternalization: Adornos Social Psychology, Telos, no. 32 (Summer 1977), p. 47), themothering theorists share Foucaults critique of the notion of a primordial, pre-socialsexuality that the power of sociality can only repress. (For Foucaults critique of thisrepressive hypothesis, see The History of Sexuality, Volume I, chapter one.) Since theyalso reject at least implicitly the orthodox Freudian assumption that heterosexualityis the normal outcome of the process through which an embodied identity is formed, theywould also be obliged to agree with Foucaults critique of psychoanalytic and other

technologies of the self that constitute individual identity as a specifically heterosexualidentity.

Since, on the other hand, our bodies are gendered bodies since under any conceivablecircumstances (short of a genetically engineered transformation) human beings will have tomake cultural sense of their physiological maleness and femaleness thecommitment of the mothering theorists to embodied identity perforce entails acommitment to a specificallygendered identity. Thus, even if it were the case that underco-parenting bi-sexuality became the normal form of sexual preference, the assumptionsof the mothering theorists lead us to expect that bi-sexual people would continue to definethemselves as men or women and that this definition would continue to constitute an

important dimension of their identity or sense of self. It is in this limited sense that anotion of embodied identity necessarily implies a notion of sexual identity, and thusthat Foucaults implicit commitment to the former puts him at odds with his explicitrepudiation of the latter.

Works Cited

By Foucault

AbbreviationAK The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language.

New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:Pantheon, 1977.

HDD History, Discourse and Discontinuity, in Salmagundi, no.20 (Summer-Fall 1972), pp. 225-248.

LCMP Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays andInterviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.

OR On Revolution, in Philosophy and Social Criticism vol. 8, no.1 (Spring 1981), pp. 5-9.

P/K Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980.


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On Foucault

D&R Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1983.

L&G Charles C. Lernen and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: SocialTheory and Transgression. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1982.

FL Frank Lentricchia, Reading Foucault (Punishment, Labor,Resistance),Raritanvol. 1, no. 4 (Spring 1982), pp. 5-32.

Smart Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique. London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Zinner Jacqueline Zinner, Review of Michel Foucault, La Volunt de

Savoir. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976. Vol. I of Historie de laSexualite, in Telosno. 36 (Summer 1978), pp. 215-225.

Other Works

Balbus Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism and Domination: a Neo-Hegelian,Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Tech-nological Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1982).

Chodorow Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering:Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkely: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978.

Dinnerstein Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: SexualArrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper & Row,1976.

Flax Jane Flax, Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Uncon-scious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology andMetaphysics, in Sandra Harding and Merril B. Hintikka,eds., Discovering Reality (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), pp.245-281.

Giiligan Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1982.

Hays H.R.Hays, The Dangerous Sex. New York: G.P. PutnamsSons, 1964.

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