Ethics, Positivity, and Gender

Abstract

In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault argues that the art of Deleuze and Guattari's work lies in its formulation of new questions: Questions that are less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed (xii). Foucault also describes Anti-Oedipus as a book of precisely because it acts as, and concems itself with, art: Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica (xii). This three-fold connection between art, erotics and the polis is, of course, central to Foucault's own History of Sexuality: a work that also concerns itself with a new type of question. Like Anti-Oedipus, Foucault's genealogy of modem sexual hermeneutics demands that we focus less on an action as meaningful (seeking its origin or why it occurs) and more on the action as an event (describing its function or how it works). In fact, Foucault's genealogy can itself be seen as an event; for the History of Sexuality will describe an ethics organised according to a series of questions or problems that trouble the self-evidence of modem ethical hermeneutics. In this essay I want to (i) explore the ethical implications of Foucault's anti-hermeneutic concept of the self and (ii) relate Foucault's contribution to traditional theories of ethics and (iii) suggest some ways in which Foucault's work on ethics might contribute to the question of feminist ethics. I Foucault's opposition to the nineteenthcentury tradition of hermeneutics was spelled out clearly in his early archaeological work. One of the distinguishing features of the notion of was its purely immanent systematicity (Archaeology 74). Whereas traditional notions of the sign referred to a prior level of meaning (such as intention, history or Being) that the sign would reveal, discourse was positive (112). It was not the sign of something else (a re-presentation), nor the exterior token of an interior meaning, nor the effect of an exterior ground (history, Spirit, Being). From a Foucauldian point of view thinking discourse as immanent and positive would mean seeing any outside of discourse as an effect of the discursive formation, while also acknowledging that any such posited outside would always be determined or marked by discourse (112). The nineteenth-century positing of History as the absolute ground of human life, for example, produces history as its transcendental exteriority through a number of discourses -Lebensphilosophie, the human sciences, anthropology etc. (Order 368). The aim of the archaeologist, on the other hand, is not to look for meaning behind the sign; rather, the idea of discourse enables a mode of describing the sign itself as active and productive (Archaeology 125). Of course, this is not to suggest that the description of the discursive system is not normative.' If Foucault's work of the early archaeological period was a form of positivism, it was so in at least two senses. Firstly, the emphasis upon pure description without commentary was not so much a reaction against normativity as it was a focus upon discourse itself-as opposed to any intention, meaning, spirit, or consciousness of which discourse would be the sign. (And, as we will see, the anti-normative pretensions of positivism are well and truly set aside in Foucault's later genealogical work.) Secondly, the positivism of archaeology described not only a method but also the nature of discourse itself. If discourse is seen as positive it is because discourse is itself effective, productive, eventful and dynamic. Discourse is not the negation of a silent and ineffable ground (either of consciousness or historicity). Accordingly. archaeology enables an immanent description of the discursive field where signs, events, actions, practices and spaces are discursive, or aspects of a general field of relations and differences. And it is in this sense that Foucault writes of discursive events and discursive practices (Archaeology 164).2 If there is no pure exteriority of which discourse is the sign or effect, then the dynamic character of discourse must be accounted for from within discourse itself. …