Rules are empty? Foucault in Modern Reformation
I’ve blogged a bit about Foucault before, although I am not well-positioned to critique his historiography, which many contend was shoddy. Still, I find his ideas intriguing and am always interested to see how he’s quoted by people to make their points. Foucault, like many philosophers, has a set of views which has evolved over time. He also seems to use some terms in a non-technical way, so when he says “truth”, we have to figure out, from context, what he’s getting at.
In any case, Dr. Samuel Hensley, who is a pathologist at Baptist Medical Center in Jackson, co-chairman of their Ethics Study Group and also adjunct professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, has written an article about the “philosophical postmodernism [of homosexuality ] with a resurgence of a pre-Christian pagan sexual ideal.” I doubt he has much background in philosophy, but he’s the one who decided not to restrict his claims to purely pathological and clinical ones, so below the fold I say a little about his discussion of the “homosexual movement” and “postmodernism.”
Hensley’s major claim is a familiar one, that “acceptance of alternate or same sex lifestyles will undermine the family defined as one man-one woman in marriage according to God’s word.” To support this contention, he cites from a book which, as I mentioned before, is not one commonly used by the gay rights movement to make their case for equality. Yet because the quote is sufficiently “scary” and has the ring of philosophical authority, Hensley pulls it from After the Ball. Here is the quote in its entirety, and then Hensley’s interpretation:*
Rules are empty are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing those rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. with a preface by Donald F. Bouchard; trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 151.
Hensley then goes on to explain it, saying, “In other words, any rules we live by, whether given by God or not, have no basis in absolute truth and so can be perverted and turned against others who disagree with us. In this case, it means that rules regarding the family can be reinvented and turned against Christians who understand the nuclear family to be based on God’s revelation.”
Oddly, Hensley tries to support this contention by quoting a piece of satire as an actual threat (the author’s name Michael Swift is a pseudonym, meant to recall another famous satirist): “The family unit-spawning ground of lies, betrays, mediocrity, hypocrisy and violence, will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated.”
Sandwiched between the introduction and Hensley’s interpretive creativity of a 1987 satirical essay, the Foucault quote indeed appears dastardly. But is it?
For one thing, Hensley is disingenuous in his addition of “whether given by God or not” above. The point of Foucault’s genealogy is that social rules are not given by God, but rather have a basis in history. Thus, the idea of “perversion” and “reinvention” as Hensley means them are out of place. Foucault’s task in this quote is descriptive, not prescriptive. He is not advocating here for an uprising of gay mercenaries that will eliminate the family unit. The “violence” he is alluding to is the violence within the structure of society’s rules, even within the Christian ritual of confession (History of Sexuality) or the self-policing Panopticon.
Ironically, it seems that Hensley is attributing a thesis to Foucault that is the very claim he was interested in rejecting: that there is some kind of truth about our sexuality that, when known, will break the bonds of sexual repression. It’s difficult to interact with Hensley’s facile understanding of “postmodernism” (gay theologians, feminists and Foucault all fall under this broad description). However, it seems like he is arguing that gay activists 1) are claiming that marriage is a social construction, not god-revealed and 2) thus human sexuality can be expressed beyond the boundaries of “the family” and alternate sexual relationships would be “legitimate.”
Bringing Foucault into this picture only muddies things. Foucault did not see power as aligned only with the government (i.e. the sanctioning of marriage as a civil bond, defining normative sexuality). Rather, human beings are part of power structures as they interpret their identities through the clinical, through extensive questioning of causal links between sex acts and psychology, through positing a “latent” or hidden side to sexuality that even the subject is incapable of introspecting, through interpretation and medicalization of sexuality. (These are taken from his History of Sexuality Part I). While Foucault might agree that marriage as understood by the state is a social construction and that, in today’s context, legitimating same-sex relationships requires civil consent, that’s not the end of the story, by any means!
Further, I’m always bewildered when these kinds of articles push aside the role of society in defining marriage. Especially evangelicals, who have to wade through presuppositions in Pauline epistles and distinguish what is cultural and what is revealed, should be aware that, at least to some degree, male-female relating has always carried fluctuating norms pertinent to a specific time and place.
I’m not going to go into the rest of Hensley’s article**, which concludes by 1) a theological treatment of biblical passages, 2) a horrifically short-sighted and pat set of claims concerning one particular kind of male-male sexual interaction accompanied by 3) rejection of any almost any genetic component to same-sex attraction 4) explanation of homosexuality by emotional trauma and 5) the contention that it is possible to change, but if not, gays should live chaste lives. It is boilerplate stuff. Ironically, however, it is all the stuff of Foucault’s investigation into power structures. Rather than Foucault rejecting a “postmodern no-truth” doctrine, which Hensley appears to understand him as espousing, along with (contradictorily enough) a repressive hypothesis of some kind, he’s investigating the kinds of power structures that humans are subject to, structures which are illustrated by Hensley’s own article.
I’ll close with a quote from The History of Sexuality An Introduction which could describe Hensley’s article, along with much of the evangelical ex-gay movement:
The obtaining of the confession and its effects were recodified as therapeutic operations. Which meant first of all that the sexual domain was no longer accounted for simply by the notions of error or sin, excess or transgression, but was placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological (which, for that matter, were a transposition of the former categories); a characteristic sexual morbidity was defined for the first time; sex appeared as an extremely unstable pathological field: a surface of repercussion for other ailments, but also the focus of a specific nosography, that of instincts, tendencies, images, pleasure and conduct.
This implied furthermore that sex would derive its meaning and its necessity from medical interventions: it would be required by the doctor, necessary for diagnosis, and effective by nature in the cure. Spoken in time, to the proper party, and by the person who was both the bearer of it and the one responsible for it, the truth healed.
Nothing better than a pathologist writing for a theological magazine to demonstrate the insightfulness of Foucault’s description!
*I’m not actually sure if he is getting the quote from After the Ball or where–he footnotes the Swift quote with a reference to the Foucault book I cite. I think somehow he has gotten his sources mixed up.
**Oh, and an afterthought to Hensley’s central claim–that “teh gays” are out to “undermine” the heterosexual family unit (whatever that means–I’m not sure how expanding recognition to same-sex will put opposite-sex in any different situation). The sad thing about the article is how Hensley brushes aside the possibility that most gay people merely want recognition themselves, not a reversal of power-roles, where we exclude straights. He says “While some homosexuals may truly desire a “live and let live” attitude on the part of our society, many gays realize that their lifestyle represents a fundamental challenge to an orthodox understanding of the basic family unit.” Italics are mine. Given the central philosophical mistake Hensley makes about the Foucauldian critique of power, how likely is it that “many gays” are postmodern philosophers, hoping for a resurgence of pagan sexual ideals? The scary gay straw man is getting old to me–and it’s frustrating to see it repeated by medical doctors in purportedly careful and reflective theological journals.
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