The work of Michel Foucault will no doubt continue to provoke resistance. Even where his methods are embraced, one must question whether the name of Foucault is merely serving to further precisely the discourses his studies put into question. This resistance, which is at the heart of apparent acceptance, is founded in the notion of the subject. For there remains in the reception of Foucault a commitment to a certain notion of subjectivity that is informed to a great extent by neo-Marxism's emphasis on the role of consciousness in political change. Thus the work of Foucault, which in fact presents a rigorous critique of the very idea of subjectivity, has been made to affirm that which it sought to challenge.

    One of the most decisive instances of such a misreading of Foucault is one that would bring him into accord with a Habermasian notion of politicized self-representation. Such a reading perceives Foucault as offering an indication of how complex political repression can be and of how it can exert itself it in a variety of domains. Studies such as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish would, accordingly, be understood as dissections of the elaborate ways in which scientific disciplines and political regimes can deny the ability of social classes and groups to represent themselves. Bentham's Panopticon, as discussed in Discipline and Punish, would be the paradigmatic example of the gaze of power that surveys and regulates any attempt at self -representation. As such, Foucault fits in neatly with a historical scheme that posits that self-representation was part of a political struggle in which we are still participating. Yet in all such Habermasian readings, the concepts of power, subjectivity, repression, and resistance do not undergo the displacement that Foucault's work has made possible and necessary. To meet the challenge still presented by Foucault's work, it is necessary to examine what continues to condition the reception of Foucault.

    Although the reception of Foucault remains informed by the Habermasian ideal of politicized self-representation, the simple notion of a social class overcoming political repression through self-representation does not do justice to the thought of Habermas. This interpretation of Habermas was instigated by such early works as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This work in particular had a wide-ranging impact, especially in German-speaking countries, upon cultural and literary theory. This is understandable, for it is here that Habermas discusses in detail specific cultural movements and literary genres, offering even a discussion of Wilhelm Meister. Yet, because of the greater commitment to sociological analysis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere allows itself to be misread in a way that is antithetical to the larger philosophical intentions of the Habermasian project. Indeed, one might readily conclude from such a work that, although Foucault dismisses the concept of the subject, Habermas merely places the same concept in a historical scenario that asserts the political significance of a social class's efforts to establish a sphere of self-representation. This was clearly the effect of this book upon literary criticism in western Germany. There are already indications that its recent translation into English will further the effort to sanitize Foucault of antihumanism.

    Such a reading does make Habermas's work more compatible with a Marxist tradition defined by the Lukácsian emphasis on the role of class consciousness in historical change. The status of the subject, however, undergoes a more thorough interrogation than this assumption would suggest. Habermas's criticism of Foucault is based on the claim that Foucault argues for a conception of the subject that is too strong. According to Habermas, Foucault is bound up in the aporias of philosophical modernity, which are, in turn, caused by the insistence that epistemology be founded upon the self-certainty of the subject. "As long as the basic concepts of the philosophy of consciousness lead us to understand knowledge exclusively as knowledge of something in the objective world, rationality is assessed by how the isolated subject orients himself to representational and propositional contents."1 Habermas's intention is to bring to an end the subject-centered nature of philosophical modernity. As suggested here, this will require a reassessment of the subject's relation to objective reality. To attain this end, Habermas sets forth his theory of communicative action.

    Habermas's aim is to weaken both the status of the subject and the self-representations a subject may make of itself. To accomplish this and to avoid the danger of relativism, Habermas must ground the subject in something that both weakens and secures its status. He finds this ground in the realm of objectivity. Objectivity describes the realm of empirical sensations and the objects that cause them. Habermas stresses in "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests" that "[t]hings and happenings (persons and their utterances) are 'something in the world' that we experience or handle; they are objects of possible (action-related) experience or (experientially based) actions."2 These objects exist in a real empirical sense independent of any subjective experience of them. Yet any subjective experience of these objects is grounded in the certitude of their existence. Subjective experience of these objects is, in a certain sense, undeniable. Habermas underscores that "[p]erceptions cannot be false."3 Yet this subjective certainty is quite distinct from truth. Indeed, whether universal validity can be ascribed to these experiences is an entirely different matter.

    Objectivity, then, is not to be confused with truth. Habermas stipulates an important precondition that objectivity must fulfill to be considered a possible candidate for a truth claim: "the objectivity of experience consists precisely In its being intersubjectively shared."4 The true objectivity of perceptions resides in whether they can be expressed as claims or assertions in propositional form. The truth of these propositions, in turn, is dependent upon a possible consensus as to their usefulness and validity. Truth, therefore, is a matter of consensus about the assertions made in reference to objective experiences. "[T]he truth of propositions is not corroborated by processes happening in the world but by a consensus achieved through argumentative reasoning."5 Habermas develops this notion further in The Theory of Communicative Action, where he argues that a "judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself."6 Truth is the result of a consensus reached by subjects capable of verifying and responding to the general practicality and validity of assertions.

    The concern over objectivity and truth is not peripheral to Habermas's philosophy. In fact, this distinction motivates his consensus theory of truth. Habermas plainly points out in the "Postscript" that it "was precisely in order to separate more clearly the problem of meaning constitution from that of validity, that I tried to evolve a consensus theory of truth and to defend that theory against competing approaches."7 Both the notions of an ideal speech situation and of rational consensus are based on this crucial distinction. The strict demarcation of objectivity from truth serves, first of all, to ensure that empirical reality is granted an inviolate autonomy. Accordingly, theories or languages cannot impinge upon reality. These media do not change reality; they only interpret it. Habermas maintains that the "truth of a proposition can only be tested and grounded or discarded in the framework of a discourse or, more precisely, a theoretical discourse. However, the truth of a theory in no way determines the objectivity of its experiential content."8 Thus the status of both objective reality and the experience of it are made secure. At the same time, truth is made a matter of intersubjective consensus. Truth is thereby granted a status independent of objective certitude.

    In an aside directed against the movement of postempiricism that has grown out of Positivism, Habermas reveals what is no doubt the most important implication of the notion of objectivity.
 

The theory languages, which undergo a discontinuous development in the course of scientific progress, can interpret the structures of an object domain not yet penetrated by science. They can also to some extent reformulate them. But as long as we are not angels or animals, these languages cannot transform the structures themselves into conditions of another object domain. It is always the experience of identical objects of our world which is being interpreted differently according to the state of scientific progress we happen to have reached.9

The claim of the unity of objectivity provides consensus with a stable foundation upon which to base itself. Without this foundation, consensus would never be anything but a particular, localized consensus. Because reality does not fundamentally change, our experience of it is characterized by a unity that allows itself to be axiomatized in rational discourse. The unity of experience offers an ideal speech situation the possibility of reconciling all subjects to a course of action motivated by universal interests.10

    Objectivity grounds the status of the subject by situating it in a fixed empirical reality. All perceptions and truth claims are in some way related to this empirical reality. This reality gives propositions something to be about in a final sense. Habermas emphasizes the importance objectivity has in The Theory of Communicative Action:
 

Only against the background of an objective world, and measured against criticizable claims to truth and efficacy, can beliefs appear as systematically false, action intentions as systematically hopeless, and thoughts as fantasies, as mere imaginings. Only against the background of a normative reality that has become autonomous, and measured against the criticizable claim to normative rightness. can intentions, wishes, attitudes, feelings appear as illegitimate or merely idiosyncratic, as nongeneralizable and merely subjective.11

Subjective experience is validated inasmuch as it is adequate to this objective reality. Disagreement about objective reality must be attributed to differences in individual subjective experiences. Logically, therefore. it requires intersubjective debate to winnow out the Idiosyncrasies of individual subjective experience. Consensus makes it possible for subjectivity to secure the status granted to it by objective reality.12

    Yet, as outlined earlier, there is also a realm of objectivity with regard to propositions themselves. Although objective reality is indeed inviolate, propositions regarding it are not automatically ascribed a status commensurate with their subject matter. In fact, for a proposition to be objective, it must simply be considered acceptable as a topic of open debate. Whether an objective proposition is to be accepted as a truth claim is a matter for the open and argumentative process of consensus involving all actors in a speech situation. The subject per se is weakened, therefore, because priority is given to the intersubjective space in which truth is to be achieved.

    Habermas's criticism of Foucault is that he cannot admit this productive ambivalence into the notion of subjectivity. For Foucault, subjects can only be objects. According to Habermas. however. subjects can always make judgments about objective reality and set these forth as truth claims. Having done this, whatever a subject has said does indeed become an objective proposition open to criticism from any other actor in the process of consensus. Yet no subject, Habermas would emphasize, ever loses its right to participate in the communal process of selfunderstanding. Foucault fails to recognize that "killing off dialogical relationships transforms subjects, who are monologically turned in upon themselves, into objects for one another, and only objects."13 For Habermas, Foucault's writings are predicated upon this assumption. Accordingly. the fact that objective propositions can be made about objective reality seals the fate of subjectivity for Foucault.

    Habermas argues that Foucault collapses the distinction between these two realms of objectivity, real and propositional. This distinction is crucial for Habermas because subjectivity for him is precisely the capacity for propositional objectivity. For Foucault, subjects have no privileged status in the realm of objective reality; they are merely components of objective reality. This occurs because Foucault can conceive of the subject only in terms of the Cartesian cogito in search of certainty. Once this notion of subjectivity proves fruitless, the only alternative Foucault can perceive is to view subjects as objects about which objective propositions are made. In contrast with this, Habermas claims that "this attitude of participants in linguistically mediated interaction makes possible a different relationship of the subject to itself from the sort of objectifying attitude that an observer assumes toward entities in the external world."14  Habermas argues that the notion of consensus allows one to conceive of a realm of intersubjectivity that requires the ongoing participation of all involved subjects.15

    To be one and permanent, Habermas's notion of objective reality must renounce historical transformation. Even more, it must deny local history.16 Foucault, on the other hand, argues that the notion of reality is profoundly historical. The experience of this objective reality, likewise, does not betoken an undeniable, immediate event. Rather, experience, and anything that might lead to objective propositions, is always already informed by history. Objective propositions are so contoured by local histories into idiosyncratic speech situations that the recourse to objective reality in any particular discourse is merely a way of making an objective proposition unassailable. Foucault thus introduces history into realms that Habermas would want to be innocent of history.

    Foucault's project is to develop a politics of that discursive space that Habermas would have free of both history and politics. That moment when the enunciating subject places itself in a space it believes to be free of constraints or inhibitions has a history of its own. It is this history that Foucault's work attempts to articulate. Foucault points out that his "objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects."17 He explains further why the concept of the subject is of such strategic importance: "There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to."18 Foucault seeks to analyze the particular instances in which subjects accept certain discourses as speaking the truth about themselves. He brackets the question of consensus with this comment: "the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus."19 Foucault discounts the highly counterfactual assertion that the possibility of making validity claims is an intrinsic and constant part of all discourses. Power, for Foucault, manifests itself in the imperative to make validity claims that are at the outset part of an already articulated system of disposition and action.
 

[A] power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that "the other" (the one over whom power is exercised be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that. faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.20

The realm of communicative action, therefore, is not innocent of power, but wrought through with its own histories. This is because subjectivity, like objective reality, is constituted by various political conflicts and struggles. The focus of Foucault's analysis is to articulate the process whereby subjects submit to enunciating their position in a discourse that succeeds in binding liberation to the ritual of confession.

    For these reasons, the focus in Foucault's work on the ritual of the confession allows itself to be read as a refutation of the Habermasian ideal of communicative action. Contrary to Habermas, who sees in the auto-enunciation of the subject the possibility of a utopian politics, Foucault argues that the ritual of the confession, the self-inscription into discursivity, forms the means by which modern power is exercised. Foucault's last work, The History of Sexuality, offers the clearest analysis of the politics of the auto-enunciation of the subject. For this work, unlike the earlier archaeological studies, does not easily allow itself to be misread as the depiction of the repressive forces exerted upon subjects. Rather, the very concept of the subject is at issue in The History of Sexuality. Here the Incitement to discursivity inextricably intertwines subjectivity and subjection: "I have sought-it is my current work-the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of 'sexuality.'"21 When the subject affirms itself in a specular relation of self-recognition, It installs itself in a political regime predicated upon precisely such acquiescence. The possibility of this self-imposed subjection has become the basis of modern power.

    This concern is evident throughout Foucault's work. Indeed, the early Madness and Civilization provides a clear outline of the politics of the discursive space that is subjectivity. This instance is worth considering briefly, for it suggests a means of reassessing the earlier Foucault. As with the Panopticon, a much misappropriated image, the issue here is not repressive institutional force, but the inauguration of subjectivity. More precisely, the issue here is the inauguration of subjectivity as a political event. Thus, for example, in tracing the treatment of insanity in the age of Enlightenment and the institution of the asylum, Foucault discusses Pinel's treatment of the mad. In contrast to earlier punitive measures taken against the mad, Pinel made it crucial for the mad to recognize themselves as mad. The mad were made to observe the madness of others and thereby to perceive their own lack of reason.
 

[T]he mad man recognizes himself as in a mirror in this madness whose absurd pretensions he has denounced; his solid sovereignty as a subject dissolves in this object he has demystified by accepting it. He is now pitilessly observed by himself. And in the silence of those who represent reason, and who have done nothing but hold up the perilous mirror. recognizes himself as objectively mad."

What is essential here is that the subject recognize in itself the phenomenon that the institution has set out to discipline. The subject thereby assumes and adopts the necessity of disciplining itself.
 

But the asylum, in this community of madmen, placed the mirrors in such a way that the madman, when all was said and done, inevitably surprised himself, despite himself, as a madman.... [Madness] became responsible for what it knew of its truth; it imprisoned itself in an infinitely self-referring observation; it was finally chained to the humiliation of being its own object. Awareness was now linked to the shame of being identical to that other, of being compromised in him, and of already despising oneself before being able to recognize or to know oneself.23

The subject becomes not only that which is known, but that which must know itself. This is, moreover, never an event that happens for the benefit of the subject. The subject becomes something that must know itself for the benefit of the political regime that makes this event possible and compulsory. The aim of this regime is to ensure that the subject is brought to monitor and control that which the regime deems necessary to monitor and control. It is not enough, however, for the subject to recognize its transgressive nature. The subject must submit to a discourse that promises to disclose the truth of itself. The subject must also submit to the necessity of administering its relation to itself. This requires the everrenewed enunciation of what it is. In this way the subject is situated in a discursive space that requires the ongoing confession of its constantly receding and changing transgressive nature.24

    Although this phenomenon of auto-subjection is specific to the control of the mad in Madness and Civilization, it is part of a larger aspect of modern power that Foucault examines in increasingly greater detail throughout his work. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault examines the necessity of confession in relation to sexuality. This is because
 

the project of a science of the subject has gravitated, in ever narrowing circles, around the question of sex. Causality in the subject, the uncon-scious of the subject, truth of the subject in the other who knows, the knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an opportunity to deploy itself in the discourse of sex.25

The History of Sexuality is thus not a study of sexuality per se. Indeed, Foucault would prefer to set aside the question of what sexuality in itself is. Instead, sexuality is focused upon as the ongoing principle of how subjects are made to relate to themselves in modem Western societies. Sexuality, therefore, is not approached as if it were repressed or as if it required liberation. Rather, sexuality is presented as a discourse that requires the ongoing production of its truth.26The truth of the subject must perpetually be examined and brought to discursivity. This confession, moreover, takes place in a discursive space that is at the outset structured to make this act of auto-subjection appear to be one of liberation.27 Yet, as Foucault argues,
 

[t]he confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile.28

It will be necessary to specify the phases of the discourse of sexuality in order to characterize accurately the political regimes that benefit from the act of confession. It is clear, however, that, the discourse of sexuality requires that it be articulated by the subject. In fact, its ongoing articulation is subjectivity. The discourse of sexuality, being perhaps the most generalized and all-pervasive discourse of the subject in the West, has come to be the principal means of bringing the subject to discipline itself.29

    In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault addresses sexuality in ancient Greece. Contrary to the common perception that sexuality in ancient Greece was characterized by the guiltless pursuit of pleasure, Foucault argues that sexuality was seen as something that required a certain amount of vigilance. Given that sexuality qua discourse has always found its origins in the ruling class, the discourse of sexuality admittedly had little to say about women or slaves.30 Instead, the discourse of sexuality organized a mode of being for the ruling class. It formulated a code of conduct in accord with an ontology of the subject. Sexuality, thus, became a domain in which one demonstrated one's mastery by displaying a mastery of oneself. Sexuality furthered the mastery of this class by making it see the necessity of mastering itself.
 

Sexuality in general provided access to the intelligibility of the subject's mode of being. It also provided a means of maintaining vigilance over possible actions that would not be in accord with the nature of the subject. The realm of sexuality was to include actions isomorphic to the subject's social status: "What one must aim for in the agonistic contest with oneself and in the struggle to control the desires was the point where the relationship with oneself would become isomorphic with the relationship of domination, hierarchy, and authority that one expected, as a man, a free man, to establish over his inferiors."31 Thus sexuality was to be a veritable theater of one's social being. All sexual relations were to be a rehearsal or confirmation of one's social status. Forms of sexuality that threatened to rupture this isomorphic relation constituted problematic areas of sexuality. Sexual conduct that did not coincide with the status of the subject became a topic of reflection.32

    What is decisive about the Greeks for Foucault is that pleasure had a use. Pleasure was not, as is often asserted, pursued for its own sake. Rather, pleasure permitted and regulated the subject's relationship with itself, and this in turn regulated its functioning in the social order. A relationship with the self, Foucault explains
 

is not simply "self-awareness" but self-formation as an "ethical subject," a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice. defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as a moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.33

Thus while not a confession of the flesh, the Greek relationship to the self was decisive in making vigilance in the domain of sexuality necessary to participate in a political regime. It is this aspect that lends sexuality in Greek antiquity its significance for the history of sexuality. The sexuality of ancient Greece does not so much describe a decisive limit to the Christian West as announce a fundamental way in which subjects have been made to know themselves.

    The transition from paganism to Christianity. then, is not characterized by a decisive break in the discourse of sexuality, according to Foucault, but by a modification of the subject's relation to itself.
 

The evolution that occurred--quite slowly at that--between paganism and Christianity did not consist in gradual interiorization of rules, acts, and transgressions; rather, it carried out a restructuration of the forms of self-relationship and a transformation of the practices and techniques on which this relationship was based."34

The Greeks did not present a mode of sexual conduct that was antithetical to the Christianized West. Rather, the Greeks introduced the practice of the subject's reflective relation to itself in sexual matters. They set forth a sexual discourse constituted to ensure the enduring and isomorphic relation between political order and the subject's experience of itself. As a result, the shift from paganism to Christianity was characterized by an intensification of this relationship to the self. "In short, and as a first approximation, this added emphasis on sexual austerity in moral reflection takes the form, not of a tightening of the code that defined prohibited acts, but of an intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject ' of one's acts."35 The true meaning of The notion of ancient Greece's sexual freedom is perhaps the significance it held for the repressive hypothesis. Yet, in fact, the decline of paganism merely brought about a further exploitation of this new means of power. As in ancient Greece, sexuality in later pagan cultures was part of a regulation of social relations: [t]he care of the self--or the attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselvesappears as an intensification of social relations."36

    Nonetheless. the discourse of sexuality began to lose its explicitly isomorphic relation to social status. As Foucault writes in The Care of the Self: "It is then a matter of forming and recognizing oneself as the subject of one's own actions, not through a system of signs denoting power over others, but through a relation that depends as little as possible on status and its external forms, for this relation is fulfilled In the sovereignty that one exercises over oneself."37 Not mastery so much as selfmastery became the essential aspect of sexuality. What became necessary for the subject was that it "recognize the numerous complex conditions that must be jointly present if one is to perform acts of pleasure in an appropriate manner, without danger or harm."38 I It is this problematization of the relation of the subject to itself that becomes the basis of a new form of power: pastoral authority.

    What was once required only of a ruling elite now becomes a necessary procedure for all constituents of a political regime. This decisive shift not only institutionalizes the ritual of confession, it also makes a new political power possible. Pastoral power henceforth regulates the subject's search into its innermost self for the merest sign of misconduct.
 

For the Stoics, the true self is defined only by what I can be master of... For the Christians things are quite different; for Christians the possibility that Satan can get inside your soul and give you thoughts you cannot recognize as Satanic but that you might interpret as coming from God leads to uncertainty about what is going on inside your soul. You are unable to know what the real root of your desire is, at least without hermeneutic work.39

No longer confined to the realm of actions, the entire space of interiority, which was constituted by power to begin with, becomes a site of possible transgressiveness. The vigilance of the subject went from being a selfregulation of conduct within paganism. to being a hermeneutic of the self within Christianity. Thus an intensification of social relations could be achieved by subjectivity in general being conceived of as a field that required interrogation and surveillance.

    The trajectory that Foucault outlines in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self has, in the modern West, disseminated itself so as to be virtually ubiquitous. As Foucault notes, "[t]he Middle Ages had organized around the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance a discourse that was markedly unitary. In the course of recent centuries, the relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities...."40 The discourse of sexuality, i1o longer restricted to the ruling class, constituted a new mode of being a subject. By encompassing virtually all subjects, this new mode permitted power to operate precisely as subjectivity.
 

[O]ne had to speak of it as a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses.41

In this manner, the articulation of sexuality could become the very basis of a then as yet undreamed of power. By means of it, power could exert itself on the level of entire populations.

    It should be stressed that Foucault does not hypostatize the concept of power with regard to sexuality. Indeed. Foucault claims that "sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects."42 For the bourgeoisie elaborated the modem understanding of sexuality in opposition to the sexuality of the aristocracy. The body of the aristocrat was defined by its blood, its lineage. The bourgeoisie appropriated the confession of the flesh, administered by pastoral power, to establish its own class-specific sexuality: "This class [the bourgeoisie] must be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a 'class' body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race."43 As its power was not dependent upon inherited land, but on real and potential physical capacity, the bourgeoisie managed its sexuality as one of its most precious resources. Because the maintenance of its power also required the physical capacity of labor, the bourgeoisie similarly administered the sexuality of labor. Foucault describes the two phases of this dissemination of sexuality across class lines:
 

The first phase corresponded to the need to form a "labor force" (hence to avoid any useless "expenditure," any wasted energy, so that all forces were reduced to labor capacity alone) and to ensure its reproduction (conjugality, the regular fabrication of children). The second phase cor responded to that epoch of Spätkapitalismus in which the exploitation of wage labor does not demand the same violent and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century, and where the politics of the body does not require the elision of sex or its restriction solely to the reproductive function; it relies instead on a multiple channeling into the controlled circuits of the economy-on what has been called a hyperrepressive desublimation.44

It is with this second phase of late capitalism that the ritual of confession is disseminated across class lines. Entire populations can thereby be brought to administer themselves. Thus the isolated phenomena of reflection and confession with regard to sexuality that Foucault examines in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self become ubiquitous throughout society. The modern West thereby becomes characterized by what Foucault terms bio-power. Bio-power is a regime that depends upon an entire population administering and confessing Its own sexuality. Its very economy is dependent upon pleasure and the confession of "repression." And although bio-power does administer populations with regard to health and longevity, it does so only to maintain itself. For the struggle of biopower to maintain itself involves entire populations. It is for this reason that the military defense of bio-power is always predicated upon genocide.45

    Habermas might perhaps concede the validity of Foucault's notions of sexuality and bio-power, but he would still insist that these are merely descriptive. They refuse to admit the normative basis of their critique. In its more popular form this question manifests itself in the claim that Foucault leaves no room for resistance or revolution, that his analyses are remorseless descriptions of a power made invincible. Yet Foucault has said that "[p]ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."46 Power is exerted by each individual, Foucault would claim. This is precisely what happens when the subject confesses its transgressive nature. In such instances, however, the subject exercises this power against itself.47 Foucault's work attempts to study how modern Western societies have come to rely on the individual subject exerting its own power against itself. This is not, as some would suggest, to argue that the individual subject has no power. Rather, it is to argue that what the subject believes to be the exertion of its power is merely the means whereby it submits to the power of a political regime.

    Habermas's notion of a speech situation in which subjects confess the idiosyncrasies of their individual subjective experiences so that consensus might be established is, for Foucault, precisely how power is exerted in modern Western societies, not how power is achieved. Foucault would ask: What has made this space of enunciation possible? What is its history, its politics? Habermas would, of course, have to take recourse to objective reality to answer these questions. Foucault prevents such a strategy by persistently stressing the historicity of the subject's relation to anything that might be characterized as subjective. Accordingly, Foucault does not admit the notion of objective reality into his analyses. He thereby, admittedly, deontologizes consensus. Yet this tactic pluralizes resistance. As Foucault states, "there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of rebellion, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case."48  It is toward this plurality of resistances that Foucault's work is case. oriented. For "it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible."49 Thus, Foucault's work Is not simply descriptive. His work is a calculated historicization of localized resistances. As a result, Foucault's work is indeed remorseless in its analysis of how power has coopted the very notion of liberation. Yet its aim is to fiction a politics that would be predicated upon the historicity of past resistances. As Foucault says of The History of Sexuality, "[t]he object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently."51

    Foucault's work ultimately reveals a commitment to a form of resistance about which our own history can perhaps give us little information, but which thereby seems all the more imperative, His work enacts its own resistance by making it clear that it itself is yet to be made into history. For only when the ritual of confession ceases to be a means of power will Foucault's work become merely historical. In striving for this future history, one can do no better than to hope that Foucault continues to be a subject that is irresistible.
 
 

From:
Transitions in Continental Philosophy, Arleen B. Dallery, Stephen H. Watson, and E. Marya Bower, eds. (SUNY Press, 1994).
 

NOTES

1. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987). p. 314.

2. Jürgen Habermas, "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests," trans. Christian Lenhardt, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973). p. 167.

3. Ibid., p. 169.

4. Ibid.. p. 168.

5. Ibid., p. 169.

6. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press. 1984). p. 9.

7. Habermas, "Postscript." p. 179.

8. Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), p. 391. (The paragraph from which this quote has been taken does not seem to have been included in the English translation. The translation here is my own.)

9. Habermas, "Postscript," p. 17 1.

10. Mary Hesse raises the following question with regard to Habermas's notion of truth: "the implication is that every culture implicitly contains this very ideal of truth. Habermas wishes to describe this as neither an empirical description, since it is highly counter-factual, nor an option for arbitrary decision, but a transcendental Implication of discourse as such. But what is his response to actual situations in which it is of the essence of the culture not to recognize such an ideal? These may be cases of totalitarian oppression in complex societies, or mythopoetic authority in archaic ones." Mary Hesse, "Habermas' Consensus Theory of Truth," in Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). p. 221.

11. Habermas, Action, p. 5 1.

12. For the implications this has for rational ity-which is ultimately what Habermas seeks to secure by means of a consensus theory of truth-see Rodolphe Gasché, "Postmodernism and Rationality," The Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 528-538. There Gasché notes: "Yet, if rationality Is the Issue today. Is it merely to conjure the alleged lack of philosophical argumentation and discursive consistency? Is it not, rather, because thinking has discovered a new sort of finitude which requires not the abandonment of the traditional forms and claims that constituted it, but their displacement within operations of thought whose calculated economy obeys a 'rationality' of its own?" (p. 539).

13. Habermas, Modernity, p. 246.

14. Ibid. p. 297.

15. I suspect that the notion of consensus outlined here could have occurred only to a tenured professor in Germany. To everyone else who must work from paycheck to paycheck the real constraints on the "free" participation in speech situations are much more evident.

16. The crux of Habermas's argument is that the media of consensus formation are innocent of power. This is itself an assumption informed by history. For it is part of the ideology of late (and state monopoly) capitalism that the state is informed of the interests of the people via neutral means of communication. These media of communication, however, are specific' political phenomena that will continue to exercise their own politics.

17. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power" in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 208.

18. Ibid., p. 212.

19. Ibid., p. 220.

20. Ibid., p. 220.

21. Ibid., p. 208. Foucault also explains, with regard to the power that is thereby exerted: "This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, Imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects" (p. 212).

22. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1973). p. 264.

23. Ibid., pp. 264-265.

24. Foucault elaborates on this in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980). p. 58: "Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth.... For a long time, the Individual was vouched for by the reference of others and the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal- (family, allegiance, protection); then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself."

25. Ibid., p. 70.

26. "The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth." Ibid., p. 68.

27. Foucault explains the notion of confession as follows: "What I mean by 'confession', even though I can well see that the term may be a little annoying, is all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himself." Michel Foucault. "The Confession of the Flesh," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 215-216.

28. Foucault, Introduction, pp. 61-62.

29. With regard to the study as a whole, Foucault takes pains to analyze and distinguish his work from what he terms "the repressive hypothesis." For the discourse of sexuality in modern Western societies operates on the assumption that it has been repressed up until very recently. In this way the necessity of confession only disseminates itself further. Indeed, Foucault raises the question: "Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it 'repression'? Was there really a historical rupture between the age of repression, and the critical analysis of repression?" (ibid., p. 10). Foucault thereby emphasizes that his study is not aimed at identifying what the discourse of sexuality has repressed. The History of Sexuality seeks instead to identify how the discourse of sexuality functions to situate subjects in a self-regulating system of discursivity and behavior. These systems are organized roughly into three historical phases characterized by the following- the care of the self, the confession of the flesh, and the confession of repression.

30. As Foucault explains: "For them, reflection on sexual behavior as a moral domain was not a means of internalizing, justifying, or formalizing general interdictions imposed on everyone; rather, It was a means of developing-for the smallest minority of the population, made up of free, adult males-an aesthetics of existence, the purposeful art of freedom perceived as a power game. Their sexual ethics, from which our own derives In part, rested on a very harsh system of inequalities and constraints (particularly in connection with women and slaves); but it was problematized in thought as the relationship, for a free man, between the exercise of his freedom, the forms of his power, and his access to truth." Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2. The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 253.

3 1. Ibid., p. 83.

32. One of the most difficult cases with regard to this was the love between men and boys. This is because the boy involved was to one day enjoy a social status equal to that of the man's. The assumption of a role that was potentially submissive posed therefore a threat to the social order and the nature of subject.

33. Foucault, Pleasure, p. 28.

34. Ibid., p. 63.

35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3. The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 4 1.

36. Ibid., p. 53.

37. Ibid., p. 85.

38. Ibid., p. 143.

39. Dreyfus and Rabinow. Michel Foucault, p. 244.

40. Foucault, Introduction, p. 33.

41. Ibid., p. 24.

42. Ibid., p. 127.

43. Ibid.. p. 124.

44. Ibid.. p. 114.

45. Foucault comments on this in "The Political Technology of Individuals." Technologies of the Self. ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988): "in all history it would be hard to find such butchery as in World War 11, and It Is precisely this period, this moment, when the great welfare, public health, and medical assistance programs were instigated. The Beveridge program has been, if not conceived, at least published at this very moment. One could symbolize such a coincidence by a slogan: Go get slaughtered and we promise you a long and pleasant life. Life insurance is connected with a death command" (p. 147).

46. Foucault, Introduction, p. 93.

47. To explore this micro-politics in more detail, the relationship between Foucault and the work of Gilles Deleuze would have to be explored. See, (or instance, "Intellectuals and Power. A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1977), pp. 205-217 as well as Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988).

48. Foucault, Introduction, p. 96.

49. Ibid.. p. 96.

50. Foucault, Pleasure, p. 9.