Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

46 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
The editors of Feminism and Foucault, Reflections on Resistance consider
whether theirs is “yet another attempt to authorize feminism by marrying it into
respectability” (Diamond and Quinby: 1988, p. ix). They decide that Foucault helps
challenge feminist “orthodoxy” and this is helpful in our historical conjuncture
“when feminism is on the defensive politically” (1988, p. ix). Foucauldian analysis
will help feminism be humble in anti-feminist times! (Have there been times when
feminism has not been under attack)
Some insist they find Foucault attractive because his work is interdisciplinary (but
so is Women’s Studies). It resists classification as philosophy, history, or sociology,
and rejects the traditional methodologies of those disciplines. For example, Foucault
speaks of “a ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge” (1980a, p. 73). His
archaeology of knowledge has been appealing to feminists who have recognized the
limits of trying to work within the economically deterministic paradigms of orthodox
marxism and Althusserian structuralism. Althusser’s essay on ideology is rejected by
Foucault, who writes that ideology is not a king who creates subjects for economic
relations of production. Instead, he speaks of a process of subjectification. He argues
against the thesis that sexuality has been repressed for purely economic reasons, and
describes the proliferation of sexualities and their codification in power, a discursive
practice accomplished with the intercourse of knowledge and pleasure. Sex has not
been repressed, according to Foucault, it has been provoked, stimulated, formed. In
The History of Sexuality, 4 presented as “the re-elaboration of the theory of power”
(1980b, p. 187), Foucault approaches the question of ideology and power by
denigrating both the juridical-liberal and Marxist views. He urges us to cut off the
head of the king; that is, to refuse a substantive, singular locus of power which
descends from a centre. While the project of asking not what is power, but how it is
exercised, is an important and necessary one, Foucault’s only answer to “what is
power” is “it moves.” He reverses the Copernican revolution and replaces Man with
the Sun/Son, still an androcentric energy.
Foucault’s project is to overthrow conventional conceptions of power as a purely
repressive mechanism: we “must conceive of sex without the law, and power
without the king” (1980a, p. 91). He forces a re-examination of the repressive
hypothesis. “Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are
brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of
repression Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which
power is exercised…” (1980a, p. 10). He couples and uncouples knowledge/power/
knowledge to argue for a new understanding of the mechanics of power: the power
of discourse and the discourse of power, taking into account specifically the
deployment of sexuality. Foucault plans to cut off the head of the King, to destroy
the idea that there is one central, substantive locus of power:
4. The original French title of this volume is La Volonté de savoir. The English translation, The
History of Sexuality, wrongly emphasizes the sexual at the expense of the will to know, which was
Foucault’s reference to Nietzsche’s The Will to Power and the Greek axiom, Knowledge is Power.