Of Fear and Strangers, page 25
How had this come about? Beauvoir methodically unfurled her reply. As with biases based on race and ethnicity, biology had falsely highlighted differences that were, evolutionarily speaking, minor. Freudian psychoanalysis had merely inscribed male domination as a matter of inevitable anatomical difference, rather than social hierarchy. That infamous line—“anatomy is destiny”—was nonsense. Marxism also failed women, for it was not possible to deduce their oppression from a historical shift to private property. Only phenomenology allowed one to understand how the female was objectified. “Just as in America there is no black problem but a white one,” Beauvoir wrote, “just as ‘anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it’s our problem,’ so the problem of woman has always been a problem of men.” Fearful, hostile men sought to dominate women, repress their subjectivity, and then claim that these flighty beings were impossible to comprehend.
Men have acted as masters with the power to define the female Other, Beauvoir asserted. Men created values, morals, customs, and laws that secured their own imperium. Their myths made it seem logical for women to please men, to act as their serfs. Once, very long ago, since they were disadvantaged by pregnancy, childbirth, and menstruation, women had been forced to submit. That capitulation was so far from memory that it appeared timeless. Beauvoir’s notion that patriarchy was ancient and widespread had been supported by the anthropological work of her friend, Claude Lévi-Strauss. A former philosophy student at the École Normale Supérieure, Lévi-Strauss had done fieldwork with tribes in Brazil and elsewhere, and he had concluded that cultures were founded on dualities and oppositions, like Self and Other. Woman’s role in these binaries was as an object, as exemplified by rules of exogamy. Incest was precluded, the anthropologist concluded, not because of some sexual delicacy but because young women were gifts, things to be offered to another clan as peace offerings.
In the second volume of The Second Sex, Beauvoir described the phenomenology of woman’s “Lived Experience.” “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” the author declared from the start. She then tracked a girl’s development and socialization as the Other. Beauvoir leaned on her impressive grasp of childhood development and alternative psychoanalytic theories, weaving in Alfred Adler’s inferiority complex, Karen Horney’s critiques of castration anxiety, and the early work of Jacques Lacan. As girls matured into young adulthood, she argued, they faced a crisis. Asked to assume an adult identity that entailed being defective, woman shared that fate with Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas. “She makes her way toward the future,” she wrote, “wounded, shamed, worried, and guilty.”
Female sexual development was distorted by patriarchal pressure. Women took many wrong turns in the face of being Othered; they might become mystics or narcissists or those defined by being in love. Lesbianism, however, was not an erroneous path; it could signify the emergence of an authentic self. “Homosexuality,” Beauvoir wrote, “can be a way for woman to flee her condition or a way to assume it.” Psychoanalysts erred by failing to envisage this.
In conclusion, Beauvoir scanned the political horizon and found little reason for hope. The Soviets promised equality to women, but had not delivered. Was misogyny anywhere in retreat? Where was it, she lamented, that being a human being was “infinitely more important than the singularities that distinguish human beings?”
Published in 1949, The Second Sex sold 20,000 copies in the first fifteen days. It also was met with criticism; in Le Figaro, François Mauriac asked if such a decadent work had a place in intellectual life. Albert Camus said it made fools of French men. But legions of readers in Europe and America made it their manifesto, and thereby unleashed a revolution. This book would become, as the young Beauvoir imagined, a “fountain-head” for second-wave feminism. It can also be seen as one of the founding documents for subsequent liberation ideologies taken up by sexual and gender minorities. All these subjects were closeted. Long quieted and estranged from themselves, they had learned to dismiss, hate, and deny their authentic experience. Having been so socialized, they alienated themselves. They had been forced to become both the xenophobes and their victims.
All this came from a woman whose father had taunted her by saying her brilliance was perversely male. Beauvoir’s lucid, encyclopedic, yet eminently readable work caught on and empowered a global movement. For a long while she pushed back against feminism, preferring socialist solutions to gendered ones. Like Sartre, Beauvoir clung to the hope that a classless society would end patriarchy. By the 1970s, she displeased many of her more liberated daughters, holding out against their endeavors, insisting that the body should not be made “the center of the universe.” In this irony, Beauvoir was no different than countless other radical innovators like Locke, Freud, Marx, and Sartre. Her understanding of what should be outstripped her “Being-in-the-World.”
FOR TWO DECADES, postwar French political and intellectual life centered around Sartre and Beauvoir’s phenomenology with its application to anti-Semitism, colonialism, and the battle between the sexes. Who else had been made Other by Western, Christian, patriarchal society? followers asked. At the same time, old problems regarding history and ethics dogged existentialists, as was made manifest by Sartre’s awkward courtship with the Soviets.
After World War II, Sartre had embraced utter freedom, which made him anathema to the French Communist Party. Along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, he returned the favor and condemned Stalin and the Soviet labor camps. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union seemed to liberalize. Sartre moved closer to Moscow, despite its oppressive politics. After all, the solution to the problems that he had diagnosed remained not some liberal notion of toleration, but rather a classless society. After the invasion of Hungary in 1956, Sartre again broke off ties. Then a few years later, he met with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba and sang their praises, only to again denounce the Soviets when they crushed the Prague Spring in 1968.
This back-and-forth had a wearisome effect. In the last years of his life, the intellectual celebrity who did so much to create the first postwar youth culture lost a good deal of his authority. He failed to build a coherent politics that linked existential freedom with an egalitarian society. In his final years, he and Beauvoir held out hope for Chairman Mao Zedong’s China and its Cultural Revolution, the path that transformed millions of Beings-for-themselves into “hooligan swine,” “parasitic reactionaries,” and corpses. Former allies like Raymond Aron broke with Sartre over his Marxism. The final straw between Sartre and the once beloved Camus was the latter’s anti-totalitarian book, The Rebel.
Sartre’s Olympian dicta especially wore thin on the younger generation. During the 1960s, Les Temps Modernes and existentialism lost ground to the circle around the journal Tel Quel. Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology and Raymond de Saussure’s linguistics helped give birth to structuralism and then—because what is a successful intellectual movement without spin-offs—post-structuralism and deconstruction. Philosophers, sociologists, literary critics, and anthropologists looked for insights into social systems as manifested by customs, rituals, common ways of thought, and language itself. From their periphery came a thinker also eager to cast off Sartre’s influence. He zoomed in on Sartre’s missing link, the one that made him reliant on Marxist dreams. That, Michel Foucault concluded, was a failure to more deeply comprehend power.
Born in Poitiers in 1926, Paul-Michel Foucault was the son of a surgeon, whom he later recalled as violent and domineering. Expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, the awkward and reserved boy’s alienation was exacerbated by being secretly gay. After attending a Jesuit secondary school, he hurried to Paris in 1946, where, during the heyday of existentialism, he won admission to the École Normale Supérieure. As a student, his menu included a large helping of phenomenology, as well as the political philosophy of Hegel and Marx as put forth by two teachers, Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. Despite the lively ferment, Foucault was miserable. Isolated and obsessed with urges to self-mutilate, he cut his wrists, joked with others about hanging himself, and then in 1948 tried to commit suicide. The tormented youth entered a number of treatments; his father sent him to the inventor of Thorazine, the literate Dr. Jean Delay, who befriended the boy but did not help him. Foucault also engaged in a brief psychoanalytic treatment, which he abruptly terminated when the analyst took a vacation. Still, these experiences fostered a fascination with psychology and psychopathology, which Foucault adopted as the focus of his studies.
In 1949, a year after graduating, Foucault joined the Communist Party at the encouragement of his professor, the ardent Althusser. However, the party’s demand for thought control was intolerable, and three years later he quit. During the next decade, Foucault failed and then passed the agrégation, taught psychology, wandered around Europe, and took a series of jobs as a French cultural representative in Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw. He drove fast, indulged in drugs, and had a stormy on-again, off-again relationship with the composer Jacques Barraqué. Amid all this, he would crack up his friends by declaring that one day he would occupy a Chair of Madness at the Collège de France.
His joke turned out to be much more than that. For, in Uppsala, Foucault came upon a rich trove of books that allowed him to conduct an “existential analysis” of psychiatry. In 1960, more than ten years after graduating, this wayward student returned to Paris to defend a thesis developed from those materials. In it, he extended the focus on the Other to another group of invisible strangers. An array of previously unclassified individuals, he claimed, had been deemed “mad” during the Age of Reason. They were the Enlightenment’s Other. Eccentrics, paupers, weirdos, vagrants, and sickly individuals were all reclassified and objectified, then locked up in asylums, in what Foucault called “the Great Confinement.” Reason spoke through experts, and it also spoke for these silenced outcasts.
Sweeping, provocative, and powerfully written, Foucault’s thesis made extraordinary claims, and despite being criticized for a great many unfounded generalizations, the prodigal student passed. His thesis, History of Madness in the Classical Age, was in print a year later. It would be the first in a series of stunning, critical histories in which Foucault revealed the way in which social forces led to humans who were objectified and negated in their subjectivity, redefined as deviants, criminals, or patients.
Influenced by structuralism, Foucault turned his focus to the way specific discourses and kinds of embedded logic created the authority for institutions to categorize and control these Others. They had been processed by bureaucracies, examined by doctors and assessed by judges. Such was the way power was exercised in post-Enlightenment societies. Pillars of Western rationality, these institutions had been unexamined, since they were seen as beacons of benevolence and scientific achievement. They safeguarded the normal, the reasonable, and the right. This, however, was not progress. The Age of Reason had reworked feudal codes and sought even more control, Foucault argued. They had transformed bias into the seemingly benevolent management of the irrational. Not a scream could be heard.
At first, not a review could be heard either. Foucault’s book was met with bafflement and silence. Marxists and rightists agreed on one thing: it was abysmal. In Les Temps Modernes, the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni called the book repetitious, confused, and obscure. Nonetheless, Foucault forged forward, examining how social structures and expert discourses defined the supposedly rational, healthy, law-abiding, non-perverse citizen by creating marginalized Others whose subjectivity was controlled by judicial, penal, medical, and psychiatric authority. Long-lost confrontations—over, for example, heterosexual norms and gender rules—had given birth to august institutions, laws, expert knowledge, and “common sense,” ultimately “truths” that were—as Nietzsche once proposed—merely the truths of the victors. Disciplinary authority took in strangers and spat out “objective” categories for the psychotic, the perverse, the criminal, and the delinquent. Power smoothly exerted itself through techniques of observation, normalizing classifications and judgments, and “necessary” forms of control; it operated through measurements, statistics, psychological data, and medical science, as well as legal precedent and the rule of law. The stranger was tamed, managed, turned into an object, and thereby known without his speaking a word.
Ironically, this deeply original historian got his due only when he penned an abstract structuralist work in 1966 called The Order of Things. Lumped in with the fashionable Tel Quel crowd, Foucault suddenly became a public intellectual. He even became worthy of a series of attacks from the Sartreans, including a broadside from the master himself. The young man, Sartre thundered, was ahistorical and bourgeois; he failed to see that behind everything lay dialectical materialism. This accusation was a gift; it allowed Foucault to fire back at the old man for trying to prop up the corpse of Marxism. And he went further:
It is around the years 1950–1955, at a time when, as a matter of fact, Sartre was renouncing, I believe, what one might call philosophical speculation, that he invested it at its interior with a behavior that was a political behavior.
The philosopher had killed his own movement, Foucault argued, to become a political oracle, who pronounced on the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Two years later, Foucault’s position as leader of a new generation was furthered by his role in the 1968 student revolt. He was at its center, despite efforts to push him aside by the French Communist Party, whom he later concluded was spooked by his condemnation of internment and the political misuse of psychiatry, abuses of which the Soviets were prime examples.
Neither a Marxist nor a rightist, Michel Foucault occupied a rather unique place in French politics. In 1970, his allies helped him secure a lifetime post at the Collège de France. His comical quip had come true. From that perch and visiting professorships in the United States, he continued to examine the machinery of marginalization.
Michel Foucault
Foucault gravitated toward political theory since no one, he believed, had proposed compelling answers to the twin catastrophes of the twentieth century, Fascism and Stalinism. Western liberal toleration had been underwritten by a cadre of professionals, functionaries, and judges, who divided up and managed to exclude and control the intolerable. Communists hid their dividing strategies under the pretense of classlessness, but they demonized anyone who did not echo the party line. Both dominant political systems required Others so as to unify the rest. It was the Spanish Inquisition without the drama, without the racks. And at the center of all this was one endlessly ambiguous word.
What exactly was “power”? Where was it located? How did it exert itself, and in what way could it be more meaningfully analyzed? These questions fascinated Foucault in the final years of his life. Hegel and Sartre focused on a relational model; power, they seemed to say, inhered in relationships. It stemmed from the intentional desire of the Subject. Foucault had long since moved away from such conscious intentions to show how power resided in quite rational discourses and their social structures. If Francis Bacon asserted “knowledge is power,” for Foucault that statement seemed to be a tautology, since knowledge and power were so deeply intertwined as to be almost synonymous. Knowledge-power—“pouvoir-savoir” as he called it—could be hyphenated, made into one.
In his introductory volume, The History of Sexuality, Foucault delineated the manner in which his view of power had changed. Once following Freud, he had considered how external social and political repression took up residence in the self-regulating functions of the mind. However, studying the history of sexuality, Foucault came to realize that repression also provoked discourse, making that which was “abusively reduced to silence” also “dangerous and precious to divulge.” Instead of silence, the repressed led to an incessant panoply of normalizing discourses on, for example, sexuality; they signaled and marked the manner by which social power was exercised. “What is peculiar in modern societies,” he wrote, “in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”
Two years before he died, Foucault published an essay, “The Subject and Power,” that can be read as his final statement on this subject. The argument is short, often more evocative than fully argued, but rich. It is built around a series of trinities, as if his Jesuit tutors still had him by the ankles. Human beings, he contended, were molded into modern subjects by three defining processes: the sciences, social dividing practices, and an individual’s own self-creative efforts. The subject was then entangled in three kinds of relations: the productive, best understood by economics; the communicative, a domain for semiotics; and power relations, which still had no good method of study. A “microphysics of power” was required for such relations to be understood, for they had no center, but were widely dispersed within families, workplaces, everyday practices, customs, and institutions. One must be on the lookout for a “system of differentiations which permit one to act upon the actions of others.” “Every relationship of power,” he wrote, “puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results.” These distinctions—me and you, male and female, straight and gay, normal and strange, subject and object—were the leverage points for domination and mastery.
In 1984, while working on his multivolume history of sexuality, Foucault died of AIDS, but his work continued to grow in stature. The fear and hatred of strangers, he had shown, not only manifested itself in pogroms and race riots but also lurked in seemingly reasonable places, inside the heart of society, perhaps inside all hearts. Dividing practices that led to homophobic attacks silently inhered in institutions and practices. They created “safe” domains to be a citizen, to be normal, never the xénos, always the host. Institutional racism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant bias exercised their will in these closeted ways, which is why in interviews and lectures, Foucault called for the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” Only confrontation forced such normalized bigotry out into the open.
