Foucault's discussion of the public vs. the private in The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality bothers me in ways my own historicism often does. Discourse, for the late Foucault, communicates through winks, blinks and sly suggestion. History shouts. I understand this reasonable distrust of historical and archeological accounts and sympathize with his preference for reading ancient Greek customs through Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon. After all, the seams show under the strain of philosophical consideration much more vividly than they do in the official record. One can infer that certain laws were written in order to ban an unfortunate but common behavior, like murder; but one cannot assume that all laws address actual behavior, like the oft-proposed flag-burning amendment. (They burn 'em overseas, I know, but I believe that outside our jurisdiction.) So instead of relying on inference, Foucault (and a generation of New Historicists) plumb non-standard cultural artifacts for information likely not included in official records. In short, Foucault reads the history of Greek custom through Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon for the same reason I read newspapers, circulars, and literature to understand fin de siècle American culture. But this is old news.
Foucault didn't invent the social history, and his quarrels with the Annales school notwithstanding, his theory of discourse and its theory of mentalities spanning la longue durée share more assumptions than either party admits. But Foucault's approach hit the American scene at the height of dissatisfaction with the a-historical quality of American literary studies in its New Critical and post-structuralist incarnations. (Neither was nearly so a-historical as both accused the other of being. But that's not significant now.) So the adoption of Foucault by literary scholars has as much to do with his timeliness as the substance of his thought. His "history" bucked the historical stuffiness they thought retrogressive, so when the profession turned to "history" it couldn't help but slam into Foucault. His timing aside, the political nature of Foucault's post-1968 corpus appealed to the newly tenured and increasingly powerful (within the academy) former campus radicals. From here this account ventures in two different, but related, directions: it speaks to the problems with Foucault's historiography or it could address the adoption of those problems (and their dogged pessimism) by New Historicists.
Late Foucauldian Historiography
When I mentioned how Foucault employs Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon in The Uses of Pleasure, I deliberately elided his other major source, Diogenes Laertius, because Diogenes Laertius was not himself a philosopher so much as an historian of philosophy. His Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written sometime between 200 and 500 AD, is exactly the kind of source Foucault otherwise eschews. Whatever information it contains, based centuries old heresay, cannot be said to belong to Greek culture in the same manner as the work of Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon's did. So the infamous story about Diogenes the Cynic, as related by Diogenes Laertius somehwere in the ballpark of 300-600 hundred years after Diogenes the Cynic died, should speak to the culture moment of Diogenes Laertius and not that of Diogenes the Cynic. But in this case, Foucault accepts the validity of this historical account because, for lack of a better phrase, it is intellectually and argumentatively convenient for him to do so.
This bothers me. As does the fact that this post was meant to be nothing more than a preface to some cracks about the benefit of public masturbation. Instead it has become a rather windy whinge of suspect general interest. So don't read this. I'll the New Historicist angle tomorrow. I can't believe I suckered myself into spending an hour complaining about Foucault.
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