Michel Foucault's "Friendship as a Way of Life" | Negotiating Homosexuality

all right today we're going to be looking at mishelle fuko's friendship as a way of life this is an interview that is published in hatred of capitalism published by a semiotext this is a wonderful collection of various essays with semiot texts goal broadly to introduce French Theory to the United States and I really love this essay because it asks us to reexamine what exact L sexuality means for example when we ask what does heterosexuality mean you might say well it's the tendency to be sexually attracted to someone of the opposite gender but is it just

that is it just about an idealized sexual contact or is it also flirting is it how this plugs into different ways of interacting in social life all of these things Fuko is going to ask us to challenge a little bit and open up and he wants to come up with a definition of homosexuality that grounds it in a way of life in something that is defined by constantly renegotiating boundaries and asking us to plug ourselves in to culture as an individual now I think much of the questions and concerns that Fuko is Raising can be

best thought of in the context of Judith Butler's gender trouble now I know Judith Butler was writing after Fuko but in gender trouble on page seven she says do the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in a notion of women as subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals to extend its claims to representation which is to say that if our Liberation movement over women tries to construct a very concrete and sedentary idea of women May that actually end up interfering with our ability to account for all women who may exist on the periphery of what we would

consider to be a woman and in addition in the context of this essay how exactly does homosexuality come to have a definition and should it have a definition as a concrete definable matter or should it be more of a way of life a way of slippage and inserting yourself into different forms of interaction now the questioner of this essay who never is actually named so I'm not sure who it is but the questioner mentions that Fuko is a reader of legier which is a gay magazine I believe or publication of some kind and it's been

existence for two years at the time of them doing this interview and the questioner mentions that those who contribute are between the ages of 25 and 35 he asks Fuko if this discourse is something he finds positive and Fuko says yeah the existence of a gay magazine Journal is positive in its own but he questions the ability of himself to properly interact with that community given his age he's fairly late in his life at the time that he does this interview and as such he notices that the gay movement or just the kind of homosexual

Liberation movement is deeply embedded in the notion of young people loving each other specifically that it has this um useful youthful Zeal about it and which it's you know all these young people that are just coming out of their skin and they're recognizing themselves and they're in this process of self-recognition but maybe some older people feel like they've already done that so he's questioning his ability to really fit into this movement but he mentions that another thing to distrust is the tendency to Define homosexuality with the question of who am I or what is the

secret of my desire he says perhaps it would be better to ask oneself what relations can be established invented multiplied and modulated through homosexuality the problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships and this Bears much similarity to D and GUI who throughout capitalism and schizophrenia they their two-part series that they did together they're focusing on a functionalist idea of what is the state what is an assemblage um you know what is it to have an identity is not so much

to find the truth of one's desire I mean fuk really heading hitting it on the head here with Len gitari's objection to Freud or laon for example laon thinks that there is always this object of Desire that is outside of oneself and which one is oriented towards to finally get that thing which is going to make them a complete subject but that thing is always going to be outstanding and representing the nothingness that is the subject that the subject is always in this process of coming outside of themselves to try to find themselves now L

thinks that this is showcasing a lack of the subject that the subject is in a lacking state of not having its full self but fuk in addition to the and guat are pointing out that it's not so much about finding the secret of one's desire as a stable concept but viewing subjectivity what it is to be a subject what it is to be home homosexual or heterosexual indeed as not discovering the truth of sex but using sexuality as a tool treating oneself as a functionalistic entity which is going to engage in a number of different

relationships and as such if we try to reduce homosexuality to a very surface level men having sex with men or women having sex with women we in fact sterilize the concept and maybe take out a little bit of its revolutionary he says that homosexuality is not a form of Desire but something desirable so we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are the development towards which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship so in this essay if is going to focus on the idea that homosexuality

is not simply defined as this sexual lust per se but it necessarily entails other relationships with men that are not strictly sexual or other relations with women in the case of lesbians that is not strictly sexual but which may be influenced by sexuality yet nevertheless not reduced to it that this process of being a homosexual is just that it is a process it is not a definition that has the same definition for every person just like being a heterosexual doesn't mean the same thing for each person different people in their relationships have different boundaries of

oh are you allowed to say that other other people are attractive you know is that something that you in your relationship are comfortable with or is the boundary somewhere else are you allowed to have like celebrity crushes or you know all these very little things these are negotiated on an individual level and it seems a little silly to assume that these should be accounted for in this very um specific definition it seems that instead these broad terms we use like homosexual uality or heterosexuality or sexuality in general are in fact just that their general terms

to Encompass a wide range of behavior and the questioner asks Fuko if he's always thought about this and did he think this same way when he was 20 and fot responds as far back as I can remember to want boys was to want relation with boys that has always been important for me not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence how is it possible for men to be together to live together to share their time their meals their room their Leisure their grief their knowledge their confidences what is it

to be naked among men outside of institutional relations family profession and obligatory camaraderie it's a desire an uneasiness a desire in uneasiness that exists among a lot of people so we can see F broadening the idea of sexuality to say that it is not merely a sexual desire it is a broader desire that entails merely a sense of intimacy a sense of camaraderie that is a little bit deeper than just a general social camaraderie but it's something that like he says is negotiated between a lot of different people but it's a matter of existence it's

the bare fact of i as a man feel that I need to be around men that's just where I feel comfortable or I as a man feel like I need to be around women to be comfortable and obviously we're painting in very broad strokes and this should point out the fact that sexuality is essentially defined by its Divergence this is like when D say that assemblages are defined by their cutting edges of deterritorialization that these formalized structures are not defined by what they are but what they're spilling into what they have yet to be that

kind of that without which they are becoming and the point of making homosexuality an uneasiness is not to give it a sort of derogatory meaning because if we take this analysis to both ends of the spectrum it is in fact the case that this would apply to heterosexuality too that it is an uneasiness because it is this thing which is constantly being negotiated of where are our boundaries where does this point of uneasiness come about depending on the persons you're interacting with you'll get a number of different ways of you know um I don't know

how fast should you start kissing or having sex or meeting the parents or whatever it may be and I really like that Fuko is trying to zero in on the fact that homosexuality or indeed heterosexuality is not merely reduced to sexual inter interactions now the interviewer asks Fuko are these desires and Pleasures in relationships dependent on one's age and Fuko is like of course Very profoundly it will be he says that between a man and a younger woman the institution of marriage is going to make this easy they can they can make it work there

is a space for them to be allowed this contestation of the traditional rules he says but two men of noticeably different ages what code would allow them to communicate they face each other without terms or convenient words with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other they have to invent form a toz a relationship that is still formless which is friendship that is to say the sum of of everything through which they can give each other pleasure and the emphasis on Pleasure this is something that he's taking

from nature and we don't need to give it a pejorative meaning because pleasure is achieved not merely sexually pleasure is achieved like he already mentioned being in people's presence taking part in their Leisure their grief their confidences and being naked among one another and the fact that Society does not recognize certain relationships as opposed to other ones Fuko wants to take up the mantle here and say well actually this can be something very profound because there is nothing to assure the meaning of this movement but in a sense that means that there is an open

space available for this movement to be negotiated how EX exactly is a homosexual meant to navigate society and fuko's point is that well there is no one way it's something that is established in a number of formless manners one of which is friendship because this method of friendship among men I mean that is going to lay the groundwork for homosexual relations in the future to be deemed um acceptable being a able to be approached with an open mind when we think about the ways in which women are able to interact with each other versus the

way that men are able to interact with each other even just traditionally speaking it's clear to see that there are very different ways in which these gay versus lesbian relationships are negotiated now Fuko mentions that we shouldn't idealize homosexuality and turn it into this immediate pleasure of two young men meeting on the street seducing each other and just going at it he says there you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease and for two reasons it responds to the reassuring Cannon of beauty and it cancels everything that can

be uncomfortable in affection tenderness friendship fidelity camarad and companionship things which our rather sanitized Society can't allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force and this is an important thread that runs throughout fuko's philosophy which is that these formless modes of interaction are the most dangerous for society because they are grounds which have yet to be defined and have yet to be formalized and ensured through the state apparatus through institutions like the school or the prison or the clinic and thus Fuko thinks that

if we treat homosexuality as merely an idealized sexual encounter we fail to realize that it's not always this pretty that that homosexuality as a way of life is so formless right now especially as it is just now starting to be regularly appreciated as just a normal part of people's lives it is so formless that it is not just this straight line it's this zigzagging pattern of different people with different definitions and different Tendencies interacting with each other and if we create this fantasy we will actually cover over these lines um he calls them lines of

force it's eerily similar to lines of flight in D and gu but these lines of force these uneasiness and these uncomfortability that occur in negotiating friendships camarades companionships these are where sexuality takes on its revolutionary nature this is where people can start to openly feel naked in front of each other while having all their clothes on so to speak this is where sexuality can not be forced into the perverse lens of making out in Alleyways it can be a way of forming loving relationships that don't always have to exist as just onard they can be

something openly carried with he continues I think that's what makes homosexuality disturbing the homosexual mode of Life much more than the sexual act itself to imagine a sexual act that doesn't conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people but that individuals are beginning to love one another there's the problem the institution is caught in a contradiction affect intensities Traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and Shake It Up This is an interesting dialectic that is shared once again by D and gu which is that these lines of force

these affections as they are called these intensities allow for formal definitions to be established certain definite ways in which you ought to be as a homosexual as a heterosexual these would be the kind of I don't know homosexual culture that starts to be established you know the the gay bars and Club scenes and you know in like feminist studies for example there's like the the Butch and you know all these different ideas of these kind of metastable states of like subcultures within lesbian culture or within homosexual culture these can form out of the different con

contested intensities that create homosexual relations so this uneasiness has the power to create loving relationships that both keep going institutions and also shake up institutions and this is important that being homosexual or becoming homosexual or being or becoming any of these minority groups is not always inherently revolutionary like I think this is something that people who aren't in these minority groups of which I would call myself not one of these people who are in minority groups it's hard for us to realize that for example people who are transgender or I mean I'm an atheist so

maybe one of these minority groups people in these groups don't always want to be revolutionary sometimes they just want to be normal all the time when I'm watching videos about transgendered persons the comments are like I just want to live my life and be able to have a sense of mental equilibrium and be left alone just like everybody else it's like yes that is exactly what fuk is saying is that what it be means to be homosexual is not always a Stonewall kind of situation of like key breaks in history sometimes it's just living sometimes

it's just existing and being an individual who can establish their own relationships that isn't always formalized but it also can be revolutionary it can be magical and new and creative and thus I really like the sword that is being dawned here there's this dichotomy between sheathing The Sword and un sheathing it of selectively choosing when are we going to jump onto the scene and when are we going to interact with the milu of culture and Society in a not so overt way in a way which establishes stable relationships like friendship Fuko says look at the

Army where love between men is ceaselessly provoked and shamed institutional codes can't validate these relations with multiple intensities variable colors imperceptible movements and changing forms these relations shortcircuit it and introduce love where there's supposed to be only law rule or habit and fukko is going to continue to talk about the Army a little bit later in this essay but this is a little bit of a Prelude where he points out that often times there is a I don't know there's a cutting off right in the middle of maybe what we would consider homosexuality in the

sense of you know the Army is a state apparatus or a state institution which actively encourages camaraderie amongst men but it can only be camaraderie and of course there is a a very fine line here between you know friendship and camaraderie and tenderness and Fidelity in affection and eroticism and sexuality these exist on a gradient and it's very hard to section this up and make it such that okay you can love each other but only in a brotherly way not in a homosexual way it's like what does that even mean what does it mean to

love someone in a brotherly way versus a homosexual way fuk points out that these modes of life these ways of life are contested and that the Army exists in this very precarious situation where it has to negotiate this line often times with Force but it's very difficult to do this when you have men going through these tragic situations together and you have to figure out okay how do we ensure that like they don't have sex with each other and that they just love each other enough to die for each other it's a very precarious situation

in continuing on the line of pleasure Fuko says what we must work on it seems to me is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure we must escape and help others escape the two ready-made formulas of the pure sexual encounter and The Lover's Fusion of identities and Fuko loves to do this he loves to find these binaries or find these set ways of being in society and he likes to push them he likes to I don't know it's kind of like in a thousand plateaus where julus

and guari are talking about pores on the face and suddenly the pores on the face expand and become all these black holes and and envelop the face in this constant becoming there's these very Vivid images of taking all the little minor parts of filis guari the face and almost imagining them expanding and bludgeoning our set ways of life and this is what Fuko is saying is it's not about liberating some desire which has been repressed that's wrong because we put our desire as something readymade by the state something handed down in a top- down manner

but Fuko wants to think the opposite of that he wants to think of this as a bottom up contestation of boundaries and thus it's not liberating our desires but it's creating our desires and it's refusing to let the state and institutions and familial structures and cultural traditions tie us down to living certain very formulaic ways of life like the pure sexual encounter we could think of this as the very traditional idea that sex is only procreative and it's only supposed to be pleasurable for the man this is a this is something you can fall into

without ever having to ask how this works there are plenty of women who are are raised like this and men who are raised to expect this and it requires breaking down these boundaries it requires saying no men it is your job to have an equitable relationship with your partner to please them however that means whether that's in Friendship whether that's in listening to them and also indeed sexually but the important point is it's not just about sex it's about all these other modes of or ways of life of living with other people and that's the

disturbing part about establishing these new boundaries certainly many who are watching may be like well this is just a little bit too like hippie dippy we we have perfect ways of living and interacting and they're based on biology you know men and women should be together because that's how we recreate the species but this is totally truncating the idea of life into basically affection marriage procreation death it's a very um it's a very flat way of life and fuk is not about that Fuko is all about finding the richness in life manufacturing as n says

a gay science a happiness science a way of deciding one's pleasure on one's own on one's own terms not by finding a set object of Desire or pleasure outside of oneself but negotiating that within oneself and externalizing that through action to kind of continue driving the point home fuk mentions that figuring out exactly what this notion of a mode of Life of homosexuality is requires what he calls a diversification which would also be a form of relationship and which would be a way of life and he continues to be gay I think is not to

identify with the psychological traits and the visible Mass s of the homosexual but to try to Define and develop a way of life and this is similar to me to the and gu's notion of mapping versus tracing and for them these are basically two kind of broad ways of life you have tracing which is finding these visible masks identifying with these visible masks that talks about this is finding things that already exist and latching on to them and treating them as the identity you always needed this like this is the therapist I always needed this

was the self-help advice I always needed this was the new toy I always needed you know whatever this is this idea of tracing right there there's a model that already exists and you trace over that model and you're kind of following a pre-formulated pattern pattern fukko is like no that's not really going to work and dingari don't think that either because they're like well this is just this is not creative this is going to allow for what they call Micro fascism to come about and just fascism in general this sort of nationalistic truncation of people

into these big Muller categories where they're just all the same and they oppose this to mapping mapping is where one makes one's own map one is a cartographer of one's way of life and in a similar way I think Fuko is pointing out that to be gay is not to latch on to these pre-formulated masks but to Define and develop these masks for oneself and indeed one will have have to use masks kind of continuing this mask and face analogy a little bit further we never see each other face to face we see each other

through masks through performative faces that we put on to interact with each other the face of the boss the face of the son the face of the father and these are all structured by culture which is going to subtly influence how did I come to that definition of what a father ought to be or what a son ought to be and therefore we're always going to use these masks we're never going to really get inside one another so to speak we're never really going to get to that point where we do see each other truly

naked in a strictly epistemological kind of abstract sense there are always going to be these barriers I mean think about the very physical barrier of you cannot become someone else strictly speaking I can get very close to someone I can be skin on skin with them but they will always be a different person and in this sense fukko is trying to point out that you're never actually going to be a homosexual you're always going to be in the process of becoming a homosexual precisely because there is no homosexual with a capital H there is no

the homosexual that everyone should conform to that's a bad way that's a fascistic way of thinking about identity so instead Fuko wants to focus on defining and developing a way of life which is precisely defined by chasing after things that one is deciding upon rather than accepting things which have been prepackaged for oneself by another I think it's really interesting how fukko does not want to box in homosexuality he he never wants to do that if you read his history of sexuality you will see that he is Keen on not boxing in sexuality as some

pre-formulated category and in the same way as he was already doing with dispensing with homosexuality as exclusively an idealistic sexual encounter he says homosexuality is an historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but due to the biases against the position he occupies in a certain sense diagonal lines that he can trace in the social fabric permit him to make these virtualities visible so like I was already talking about before in the fact that one is always going to be en countering one another's masks and

never never their inner substance I mean just just literally in terms of not being able to become one another and get inside one another's head but even more abstractly than that there is always going to be these barriers to each other that like Fuko mentions these biases are going to not allow us to get to where we can truly absolutely Ely 100% know another person and this is okay of course no no one sits in their bed going oh my gosh I just I I hate that I don't know every single thought that my partner

is thinking I mean sometimes maybe you want to know what your partner is thinking but not all the time I can't can't think of anybody who literally just wants to be that other partner's thoughts maybe you are and you just you love your partner that much maybe that's just a me thing but the point is that because of these biases existing fukko puts this in an interesting Paradigm where he says that this allows one to draw these diagonal lines across the social fabric it allows one to kind of like wulus and GUI are talking about

strata as kind of ways of talking about identity they're talking about strata as in in a geologic column like in a mountain you have these horizontal strata of rocks and there are these bands of minerals that have similar composition and color and density and all this different stuff and they talk about the fact that these strata don't always stay in these horizontal lines sometimes they're cutting diagonally across and what they call deterritorializing but we could just think of this as kind of escaping out of these strict norms in the social Fabric and this is what

fukko is trying to bring forth when he's talking about making these virtualities that of what homosexuality is to oneself visible precisely by not staying in your lane so to speak now fuk mentions reading a book on friendships between women and he talks about how this is bringing to mind that women have always been a little bit more permitted to be physical with each other women do each other's hair they help each other with makeup they dress each other they go in the bathroom with each other all of this different stuff but on the contrary man's

access to his fellow men's bodies has often been forbidden in a much more clear way I mean I think this is fairly uncontroversial to say the least that you know when you go to a social Gathering um the girlies are always hugging each other whereas the men are a little bit more you know they've got more of an upright posture hugs are only between like very close man friends I certainly find this to be the case because I'm a quite a hugger myself and a lot of men find that a little off putting sometimes like

maybe I'm a little fruity or something like that but not the case it's just again redrawing these boundaries and he mentions that while contact between women has generally been tolerated really the only time when contact in the sense of this intimate relationship between men was rigorously necessary was during war in which men were being put in Barracks together and putting platoon together and spending these long amounts of times in these very emotionally strenuous situations together and he says the same thing is the case in prison camps and that you've got these soldiers and officers especially

young ones who were spending months and years together on the battlefield in strenuous situations and they're practically living on top of each other and just the impending idea of death being present and this kind of Devotion to one another that resulted this was enough to make this otherwise abnormal contact between men feel fairly normal you know he mentions that there's these talks about camarad Y and brothership and he says that one can wonder how in these absurd and grotesque Wars and infernal massacres the men managed to hold on in spite of everything through some emotional

fabric no doubt I don't mean that it was because they were each other's lovers that they continued to fight but honor courage not losing face sacrifice leaving the trench with the captain all that implied a very intense emotional tie it's it's not to say ah there you have homosexuality I detest that kind of reasoning but no doubt you have there one of the conditions not the only one that has permitted this infernal life where for weeks guys floundered in the mud and chit among corpses starving for food and were drunk the morning of the assault

so Fuko is pointing out the fact that I mean men can't be completely isolated from each other and that as this cultural milu appears in which women are a little bit more allowed to have this physical contact with one another there are only these very specific instances where men are allowed to interact with each other and certainly this is like he says this isn't just homosexuality this isn't like oh they all secretly want to be lovers with one another but it does attest to the fact that the military very concretely takes advantage of this emotional

tie and this is not to put it in a nefarious light but it does point out very seriously that the love among men is something that is not necessarily shunned by the military or in prison camps this is in fact something that they probably held on to and this intereses with ideas of honor and courage and sacrifice I mean the sacrificing of some of one's life for one another that is the definition of a way of life of putting oneself at stake for a form of love that of course is not just sexual it's a

lot deeper than that and I think that's what Fuko is pointing out when I mean he's talking about the fact that he wanted relations with boys that it's just a matter of existence that he wanted to be together with boys and I think it's very interesting to realize that in effect this is how all humans are we have this desire for camaraderie relationship um I mean eroticism all these different points and methods of interaction exist in different people to different extents and thus Fuko is bringing out the fact that in fact this is not totally

sanctioned off we see it appearing in very limited senses sometimes and then in fact this shows that there is an open spot in which the idea of homosexuality can be contested and in which we can see concrete male friendships coming about and Fuko talks at the end about a homosexual culture a polymorphic varied and individually modulated relationship and this is similar to The Very opening quote that I talked about with Judith Butler this concrete idea for example in feminism of women as a unitary subject and Judith Butler points out that maybe if we make this

something concrete and something formalized we might actually be leaving people out we might actually be anti- representation in the sense that well only some people get representation it's kind of like when you know all men could vote when the US was founded but not really first of all it was not all people it was all men even though it was often even today it's like oh that was talking about Mankind not just men it's like no only men could vote and not only that but landowning men and not only that but landowning white men so

we have all these additions and qualifiers to Notions of legitimate subjects that prevent true representation and you could say that Judith Butler is just taking this to the ex extreme but I think both her and Fuko are pointing out that identity is not something stable and concrete if we do that we might actually be lapsing into what andari call microfascism these little moments in which flows and possibilities for creativity are constricted at the neck Fuko mentions that this idea of a program is a little dangerous he says as soon as a program is presented it

becomes a law and there's a Prohibition against inventing and he continues there ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings that Americans call coming out that is showing oneself the program must be open we have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary we must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity we must think that what exists is far from from filling all possible spaces to make a truly unavoidable challenge of

the question what can we make work what new game can we invent and the game part is very similar to for example L vien Stein's notion of language games that we tend to think of languages as formalized systems and that there is some syntactical grammatical constructive similarities amongst all langu that make language a very definite thing and nonsense a very definite thing that is opposed to language but vidin points out that well no the languages are kind of like how games are games not all games have the same structure I mean you can't point out

one thing that all games have in common even the idea of leisure because some people do games as a profession professional like a sport like chess or something like this and this is their life um the rules are obviously not the same across all games all games have very different rules and the point here is that to be a homosexual just as it is to be heterosexual is in part performative it is a question of putting on a performance which is an active process of as says showing oneself it is not having shown oneself but

showing being in the process of revealing oneself through creative strategies in which we do not present a program that others ought to follow but rather say this is me and how is this me but by seeing my actions and thus that which appears as intelligible is not the the only thing that must be that which appears here as social institutions and state apparatuses and cultural ways of living these are not the only possibilities these are not Necessities as he says we have to imagine filling all possible spaces and you might think that this is just

needlessly pedantic that he's creating for no reason but I think the point is that without creation we'd be dead I mean think about this on kind of a biological level without the body constantly creating new substance it would die and in the same way I mean life is a process of living it is not sedentary otherwise it's dead and in the same way sexuality is something that is contested and that is created through filling this empty space with a number of possibilities which don't have to be formally imposed but rather creatively contested through very benign

ways like friendship and through equally sensual ways like sexual contact so I hope this has given you some insight into the philosophy of mish fukko I think this is a really great essay for seeing some of the ways in which fuk is going to plug this general idea of a way of life into critiques of the clinic and the prison and other state apparatuses and this gives us a sense to how we can contest our own faces that we've fallen into Asos and would stay and thus I would encourage you to watch any of my

other lectures and put any constructive criticism in the comments and maybe go and read this hatred of capitalism collection by semiotext you'll find a lot of very interesting essays and I think it'll give you some interesting ways of life to pursue so that's it and I'll see you in another [Music] lecture