Cultural History After Foucault

John Neubauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351312981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Both as historian and maker of culture, Foucault infused numerous disciplines of study with a new conceptual vocabulary and an agenda for future research. His ideas have called central assumptions in Western culture into question and altered the ways in which scholars and social scientists approach such issues as discourse theory, theory of knowledge, Eros, technologies of the Self and Other, punishment and prisons, and asylums and madness.The contributors to this volume indicate Foucault's achievements and the suggestive power of his work, as well as his methodological weaknesses, historical inaccuracies, and ambiguities. Above all, they attempt to show how one can use Foucault to go beyond him in opening new approaches to cultural history. Though comprehensiveness was not attempted, their essays broach the major controversial aspects of Foucauldian cultural history--the position of the subject, the fusion of power and knowledge, sexuality, the historical structures and changes--and they explicitly analyze them with respect to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century.In this collection, Neubauer presents analyses by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers of the entire, transdisciplinary range of Foucault's oeuvre, emphasizing the rich suggestiveness of its agenda. The breadth of the undertaking makes it suitable for seminars and graduate courses in numerous departments.

I
Modes of the Subject in Cultural History

1
No Sex Please, We’re American:
Erotophobia, Liberation, and Cultural History

GEORGE ROUSSEAU

“We are therefore in an impossible situation, unable to dream either of a past or a future state of affairs”

(Baudrillard, Hystenciling the Millennium)¹

I. Erotophobia

Thus Baudrillard on the toll our Western hysterias have taken as we approach 2000. My “we” is American: the Americans, past and future, who participate in this attempt to fashion a post-Foucaldian discourse: not as parody or imitation but in my own voice and inflection and about a subject that has preoccupied me for two decades. The “dream” is erotic: the forms of sexual expression that have been intrinsic facets of human cultures from time immemorial. The syndrome of regulation to which I refer has been discussed under other rubrics and pondered in the media but rarely in this coinage.

Erotophobia then: approximate to Europhobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and the many other phobias clamping down on our regulatory generation. The force of the word lies in the second root — phobia: an unnatural fear, a repulsion, not merely a benign dislike or gentle recoil. Erotophobia: in the longue durée, no culturally sanctioned mass hysteria developing over several centuries, despite cyclical peaks and valleys, based on the terror of sexual involvement. Hence the phobic basis of the hysteria. Some might praise this fear as an internal censor; even so, its recent consequences have been dire for almost every aspect of American life and culture except the economic. These resonances and their implications form the heart of my subject here.

Erotophobia: fear of Eros. Recoil from sex. Eros as state of mind, Eros as body act. A phobia and persistent fear. A construction without lexical or sociolinguistic profile. Without discourse or literature. The longue durée of erotophobia rather than its quondam appearances or the pattern of its cycles in history. Hardly a Foucaldian term, despite Greek roots, and neither a fixture of our contemporary mindsets or something on the tips of our imagination. Most of us have never heard of erotophobia, let alone invoked it.²

More locally in diverse America, the national desexualization within our collective fear of sexuality. The empty label — erotophobia — stares us in the face: inherent in our Puritan tradition (in H. L. Mencken’s constructed sense rather than the seventeenth-century historical version), revived throughout our American history, reinvigorated after two world wars, especially the Second with its contingent aftermath of McCarthyism (the inquisitions of all those who might have any ties to Communists, Jews, gays), San Francisco’s Haight Ashberry (the drugs and sex revolution at grass roots), and now, most fiercely, in the new proliferating mass hysterias of post-AIDS.

Erotophobia: the xenophobic insignia par excellence, because it brandishes all those whose customs and practices are “foreign” as sexual deviants of one type or another, as well as the form of cultural hysteria and popular delusion that assumes the individual in society is perpetually being exposed to sexual opportunity and encounter. But also collective paranoia or medical malady that even accounts in part for America’s legendary obesity? After all, one of the dominant explanations for the difference between the chic Parisian or Milanese woman decked out in designer clothing and the gross overweight of American women has been sexual expression and repression; especially the American woman’s inability to be sexually comfortable and sexually appealing. But erotophobia as the millennium’s silent epidemic? In millennial America can it lie among its worst transgressions? — in which case what kind of sexual transgression is erotophobia anyway? In an age of fierce regulation the curbing of sexual license appears legitimate, even predictable. Or is erotophobia a metonymy for American sexual history itself? — the repressive nightshade of its social arrangements. Unlike those hysterias to which women and other marginalized groups are said to be prone, erotophobia also afflicts men in large numbers, Amencan men.³

Whatever erotophobia’s aetiology, it seems intrinsic to America’s puritan civilization itself. But who has sustained it - who colluded in its cycles? Are America’s fundamentalist anti-sex churchmen not its devotees and proselytizers? Or the Alfred Kinsey of the famed “Kinsey Report” (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), now retrieved by his revisionary biographers who claim he was a “repressed homosexual” who inflated his statistics to render American sexuality less paltry and pallid than it actually was? Erotophobia derives not from Dr. Charcot and his histrionic Hedda Gablers, but flourishes from Atlanta to Anchorage, from Salem to Sausalito, as a native, if eclectic, form of the native culture of sexual repression. It is not the product of one American generation or past era. Its Golden Age seems to be now. Postmodern popular culture affirms it everywhere despite the silence of the scholars.⁴ Proof abounds in the new American cults of “appropriate” behavior and “appropriate” language (almost all reducible to sex, gender and race) but nowhere stronger than in the invigorated American “political correctness” and the massive amount of litigation tightening virtually every aspect of the definition of sexual encounter, sexual innuendo, sexual implication, from the mildest hug to the accidental pat.

From at least the Renaissance to Freud, men have occasionally been hysterical, although erotophobic is not a term Freud ever used to describe them. Men have developed nervous illnesses, however disguised, long before neurasthenia became fashionable among the Marcel Prousts and Théophile Gautiers. But the hysteria of don’t touch me, don’t breathe on me, don’t dunk out of this glass — differs from this lassitude. This is not neurasthenia in another key but full-blown social erotophobia, the subject of this essay.⁵

In the Netherlands, where a remarkable tradition of toleration — especially sexual toleration — has survived the centuries, this urgent message about the conjunction of erotophobia, hysteria, and post-Foucaldian discourse seems especially germane. But there is also another sense in which erotophobia is the post-Foucaldian mindset that would have engaged Foucault himself as part of the ethos of American self-care. Erotophobia: the word almost no one can pronounce, yet whose ethos every American has experienced in one way or another, especially in its homophobic versions. The suspicion is that the historians who might chronicle this phenomenon have fabricated or imagined it.⁶ But I think not, despite those far-flung John Wayne “masculinists” who accuse us of prejudice or derogate us as “masculine feminists.” Besides, the testimony of Europeans in America, and Americans returning to the beimaß constitutes ample evidence, for perspective counts for much in gauging the comparative ethos of a culture of erotophobia. And the fact that we Americans have been unable, or unwilling, to document this cultural syndrome, speaks volumes in itself.⁷

Discussion of postmodern erotophobia cannot be accomplished outside the orbit of America’s proliferating hysterias: its disjunctions between acts and the language used to account for them. Continental America approaching 2000 is still a psychoanalytic age despite all the partisan protests and anti-psychiatry movements. And it is the case that most psychiatrists will not go on record as agreeing that sexual deprivation actually converts to, that is causes, physical symptoms within illness. Doctors have always wanted sickness to be physiological. But erotophobia now flourishes mightily in politically-correct America precisely because hysteria remains its (America’s) base-root insignia. All are subsumed within the realms of the appropriate: the new yardstick for human behavior.

We Americans have, of course, our fierce intellectual critics, from Noam Chomsky to Edward Said; from Polish producer Roman Polanski to the dozens of expat Americans who will not go home. Part of the reason (not all, of course) entails the domain of erotophobia, although it is never called by this pathological sounding label. American feminist Elaine Showalter believes that Gulf War Syndrome and chronic fatigue exist in the mind rather than in viruses or genes, as do recovered memory loss, satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorder, and alien abduction.⁸ Where did these hysterias originate, and for what do they compensate? In a puritan nation (which America remains despite its diverse populations who will soon outnumber its WASPS) there is little toleration for, nor threshold of, sexuality.⁹ Thus the loop comes full circle: from puritan antisex to proliferating postmodern hysteria, as in the current fashion to find child abuse rampant. When Marcia Clark, the O.J. Simpson prosecutor, announced relatively recently, first, that she too was raped at seventeen, and secondly, that by the time the trial ended she and Christopher Darden, her co-counsel, were “closer than lovers” despite their relationship never having been physical, she perfected her no-sex, virtual reality persona before American cameras, for the screen was the only place most Americans had ever seen her.¹⁰ Only in racially and sexually diverse America can such multifarious hysterias coexist: we invent them and export them, like Coca-Cola, to the rest of the world.

The desexualization of America struck social scientists in the aftermath of the Sixties. The great wave of free love and drugs had come and gone: what had been its determinants? Charles Winick, an American social scientist, wrote about Desexualization in American Life at the end of the Sixties. He was followed by others attributing America’s hysterias over abuse, crime, random murder, and violence to repressed sexuality — the same suppressions to which illnesses from cancer to road rage are now sometimes attributed. But is erotophobia a form of illness rather than a moral condition or social category? — especially if it makes people sick. That is sexually sick. Historically speaking, sexual repression never became a topic in polite discourse in America, and it barely is now. But the HIV that was carried across our borders in 1980 was an accident waiting to happen; and to some of us this form of historical psychoanalysis based on sexual repression seemed Foucaldian before Foucault was widely read in America.¹¹

II. America, Puritanism, Erotophobia

It may appear a gross exaggeration but a sexual history of our generation in America omitting erotophobia is like the history of Germany without Auschwitz or Italy without Fascism. That is, the sexual consequences of “Puritan nation” (in the phrase of this major school of American history) cannot be shunted away. The only difference in valence is its relative impoliteness. Compare us with any previous American generation, or even with the buttoned-up English Victorians, and we Americans outperform all others in the mass-hysteria-based-on-sexual-fear that erotophobia is. It is not that we are silent about what we do, but what every study shows we have actually been (or not been) doing, and if the studies of all manner of social scientists are valid, our attitudes to the body are so phobic they hardly compensate for whatever intimate pelvic thrust has endured in American life with impunity. America: the Puritan soil for erotophobia; it seems to reside in our blood cells; in our native antipathy to “body intercourse” (the summation of body language and physical contact) as indigenous to our Puritan heritage as the new proliferating hysterias themselves. A nation intent from the start on breaking away from Europe and its Mediterranean center in this primary phobic response to natural human sexuality. Yet American Puritanism should also be viewed through foreign eyes as a fundamentally anti-erotic dominant Wasp discourse. Perhaps this is what the historians of the American novel (for example, classical American novel critic Leslie Fiedler) have meant when claiming that the American male, despite alleged machismo, fears for his virginity more than anything. Hence the passive heterosexual male of our native American literature who Fiedler configured as a closeted passive homosexual. Fiedler’s heirs in literary criticism — especially the queer theorists — have pried open the epistemology of this closet.¹²

Erotophobia is also the night-time opposite of erotomania’, the condition of lust about which Foucault has written so eloquently in the History of Sexuality (HS, II, 50). Yet even the medical history of erotomania is not what we would imagine: in the ancient world, the Renaissance, and even in Foucault’s L’age classique, when another mania — nymphomania — will be born (1771).¹³ The abbreviated early modern “history of sexuality” has been a tale about freedom replaced and repressed by constraints that were labelled and medicalized. Vis-a-vis sexuality, the story is that unhindered Catholic (almost pagan) license was replaced by a repressive Protestantism that in the long eighteenth century was medicalized into the manias some of whose labels endure: erotomania (Ferrand), metromania (which replaced the old wandering and rampaging uterus), nymphomania (Bienville). Early Modern doctors who medicalized female sexuality were searching for names and characteristics to mark out this behavior of lust gone out of control. As such, their endeavor resembled other early attempts in the history of sexuality to chart the paths of deviation, however fraught with error and prejudice they may have been. The doctors suspected the matter to be more complex than they could account for in their learned treatises, but this lapse in itself did not deter them from writing. Yet if constraint and repression were already in place in Protestant lands ca. 1750, why the need for erotophobia? What was this version of response? I am suggesting that erotophobia was not part and parcel of that (northern) European mindset but something indigenous to the peoples across the ocean in the colonies; and that although it was seeded then, in the structures of the early colonies, it did not appear in America with any palpable force (just as erotomania did not appear in Europe until the cults of sexual repression were medicalized) until certain social conditions could coalesce: in the evolution of the American workplace into the litigious precinct it has become; in the development of America’s vast legal profession; and in medicine under the burden of the new “plague” which was misunderstood and feared throughout the Eighties. Hence the convergence of conditions rather than any single factor is the requirement for erotophobia: a phobic reaction caused by heightened fear engendering mass hysteria. The metaphor of temperature may be best to explain the genesis of these convergences. Erotophobia arises only when the thermometer reaches a certain temperature, as it did in America in the 1980s under the stress of all the above conditions, especially the so-called “Gay Plague” occurring in the midst of a sexual revolution already unbearable to so many segments of America society.

Furthermore, in that early modern world erotomania was tempered by a medical model privileging the retention and waste of female seed: the withholding of which led to so many female maladies d’amour, as described in seventeenth-century French physician Jacques Ferrand’s De la maladie d’amour which Edward Chilmead translated in 1640 as Erotomania or a treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptoms, prognosticks, and cure of erotique melancholy¹⁴ Male seed was regulated by other conventions and prescriptions than female. A century later, Dr. Tissot’s Swiss Protestant milieu became riddled with moral considerations further reinforcing patriarchal gender empowerments. Men assumed more, not less, control over the medicalization of sexual conditions: in collecting, classifying, and describing them; so much so that a condition such as erotomania was medicalized as were so many other “melancholies” of the day. Further back, Plato’s lust, or erotomania (the Greeks used this word but without the thick medicalizing function of the seventeenth-century doctors), always permeated the body rather than the soul (HS, II, 45). The soul was said to be immune — unavailable to the pollution. Down through the ancient and Renaissance worlds, erotomania was conceptualized as a fever of the mind interacting solely with the diseased body; the whole fabric of the body could be infected except the soul. Thus erotomania and erotophobia are opposites: the former a fever for sexual coitus, the latter a gesture of perpetual recoil, but with this twist: that in Europe the post-Tissotian moralists sentimentalized erotomania and then medically transformed it into madness. Ophelia and her sisters were afflicted by its fever. Like its child, nymphomania, it left the realm of spirits and fibres and nerves for loftier regions of mind and became a moral defect. By 1874 the now obscure Dutch physician W. H. van Buren claimed in consonance with the medicine of his t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributor
• Introduction
• Part I. Modes of the Subject in Cultural History
• Part II. Modes of Doing Cultural History
• Part III. Modes of Conceptualizing Cultural History
• Bibliography