The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

There seems to be quite a few novels I've read this year you can only describe as bone-achingly tragic. I haven't long read Sophie's Choice. It's difficult to find the words that can sum it up - you come away wanting to neck a jar of razor blades. This has come not long after The Remains of the Day, Giovanni's Room, and On Chesil Beach. And just to add yet more to a catalogue of books dripping with woe, I've just finished Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage.

Be warned, there are some spoilers below.

Beginning shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Michael is an unremarkable mommy's boy leading a very ordinary existence at the family grocery store. In an instant his life changes - a group of panicky young women burst into the shop, desperately seeking first aid for a girl who'd fallen and banged her head amid the parades of local boys who'd joined up. In what is a rash moment for Michael, he bandages Pauline up and rashly runs off with her to enlist. Before long the army has swallowed him up, only to be swiftly spat out again with a wound picked up on manoeuvres. But the couple remain caught in hysterical tumult of the times and he and Pauline are soon wed. But it is abundantly clear this marriage is a mistake. The unravelling of the relationship and the subsequent fall out is painfully tracked over 60 dysfunctional years.

Superficially there's nothing in the premise that causes a spotlight to pick The Amateur Marriage out of the mass market herd. Doomed marriage, middle class respectability, and 1950s families have long been a fictional staple. But The Amateur Marriage is an interesting book. To begin with, the characterisation is rigidly gendered. At first the protagonists appear in thrall to the usual stereotypes - Pauline is emotional and irrational, Michael is measured and reasonable. The basic personality clash is the foundation for three decades of quarrels and argument. But overall, the women are the dynamos of this book - their biographical trajectories are toward having a career or being domineering wife. In all cases, they're independent, they're individuals. The three males characters on the other hand are all basically the same. They're unprepossessing, quiet, easily dominated, boringly rational, and are very dependent on the women. But Tyler does not use strong women to critique the family unit, rather they are the central supports for what is a meditation on masculine crisis.

Ostensibly the book is about Pauline and Michael, but I could not get away from the feeling it's all about the man. At every point in his life, Michael is haunted by the alternative lives he could have led with the simple and uncomplicated girls of his youth. When he marries for a second time, it appears he has found his soul mate at last. Anne is not prone to rages or emotional outbursts, she too is measured and reserved. But towards the novel's close, his retired elderly self is vexed by her refusal to retire. For a man who'd worked for himself all his life, placing him in a position where he has nothing to do while Anne stays working is almost too much for him, and the longing for Pauline, who, despite everything, at least allowed him to be the breadwinner, comes poignantly flooding back. Though Pauline too reflects on regret, is it subsumed by a life mitigated by the close bond she has with her children. Ultimately she is forced to find herself as a mom because this is all that is open to her. Paradoxically, Michael's economic independence, his more distant relationship with his children, and the freedom granted him by his divorce from Pauline continually place him in a position of existential angst. The masculinity derived from being the man of the house(s) is consistently undermined by the dependence he has on his wives, a dependence that paradoxically enables him to keep this position.

The conclusion is plain, Careers, feminism, and uppity women are all challenges to the forms masculinity has assumed in the context of the nuclear family, but if there is a crisis in masculinity, it is internal to the very relationships that constitute and reproduce it.

Come to Stoke-on-Trent

As a proud Stokie through choice, I felt the need to share this wonderful hymn to the Potteries with you.





AVPS is currently rubbing the sleep out its eyes and should be resuming regular posting shortly.

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

AVPS is having an extended summer snooze.

It will be back round about August time with a few changes here and there.

Hope you're not missing the blog much.

Starting Over

As you may have noticed, it's been a while since I last posted. This once I'll skip the usual roll call of excuses and jumpstart the blog by promising nothing. Over the last few months I've promised posts on this and that without having the time to actually write them. It was as if to conjure the outlines of what I wanted to say from the recesses of my mind would be enough. All that remained was the short work of reeling them off and hey presto! A new post would be born. Unfortunately blogging's not like that. So all I can promise are pretty infrequent updates here and over at Militant.

Stoke Front

Things have got interesting in Stoke. Starting with the bad news, the BNP got three more councillors elected to the city council. But they say every cloud has its silver lining, and that around the black cloud of the Stoke fash has been particularly shiny. First well known BNP'er Steve Batkin got beaten in his ward by Labour, no doubt owing to his incompetence, some sharper UAF-style leaflets going out, and canvassing by Keele Labour Students(!). Good to see some in the Labour party have still got the guts to address working class people, even if the politics they're pushing is the same old same old. Second, Batkin side-kick Mark Leat (another BNP councillor in Longton North) has received his marching orders from fash council group fuhrer, Alby Walker. Word is incompetence and being off-message led to Leat's excommunication - so what else is new? If this means the far right vote will be split in Longton next time round, and some disillusioned fash activists drop out, so much the better.

Some of you sad enough to follow the fortunes of erstwhile Socialist Party councillors, the Sutton brothers, may be interested in their results. By the standards of what the far left can expect their vote was respectable (Dave managed 360 votes (11.6%) in Tunstall, Paul 287 votes (10.2%) in Abbey Green), but I would imagine both would be very disappointed with these figures, especially Dave as he was the sitting councillor. As both were of the mind it was the SP's fault Paul lost his seat last time, one wonders what cock n bull story they'd come up with to explain this.

CNWP

On the Campaign for a New Workers' Party, there has been some movement. Yes, despite what our friends in Workers' Power and Permanent Revolution would have you believe, the CNWP does have a life independent of annual conference. Sometimes. Yours truly chaired its public meeting a fortnight ago today down in Stoke Town Hall. What was interesting about the 28 people who came to this was that the majority were entirely new people I'd never seen at a Stoke lefty meeting. Even some of the SP comrades weren't the usual activist suspects. In my opinion the meeting went really well, but whether it can be judged a success will be determined by the number of comrades who will come along to the N Staffs CNWP group meeting later this month. Watch this space when the time comes.

As for the national CNWP conference held last Saturday, I thought it was alright. In many ways it was better than last year's. One thing that irritated me intensely about that particular occasion were the number of comrades, including some in my own organisation, who got up and waxed about how bad New Labour is without offering a way forward for the campaign. There was much less of that this year. Where comrades did make that style of intervention they remarked on the CNWP's potential to relate to workers in struggle, a potential greater than any of the revolutionary socialist organisations of the British left at the moment. As usual, comrades from Workers' Power, cpgb, and Campaign for a Marxist Party disagreed. In fact, WP went so far to say they would quit if a reformist programme was adopted. Well, no programme, reformist or otherwise was voted through by the conference. There was a list of What We Fight For-style demands that were, but these can hardly be said to constitute a programme. It was perhaps for this reason that comrades Brenner, Dewer, and a couple of shouty shouty Revo types from Leeds stayed put.

Overall it was more business-like and more focused, but it did reveal a few underlining problems. The first was the total dominance by my organisation - the officers are nearly all SP comrades. This in my opinion isn't a bad thing in itself, but it makes it much harder to counter accusations of the campaign being just another front organisation. On the other hand, the ultra left seemed content to leave it this way. Only Phil Sharpe from the CMP put himself forward for election, and that was for the rather innocuous position of press officer. Second were numbers. 350 or so comrades attended, which is about a hundred fewer than last year. Also, I suspect numbers of non-SP comrades were down while the proportion of SP comrades up. While there were some new people there, they were few and far between. Finally, there seems few concrete examples of functioning CNWP groups in evidence. A motion was put by Berkshire CNWP, but that was about it. From what I can gather public meetings are taking place on a fairly regular basis up and down the country, but whether it leads to permanent groupings is a lot less clear. There is no point skirting around this issue. If the CNWP isn't built from the ground up, if local groups aren't initiated and assume an active existence, then next year's conference will be a very forlorn affair indeed.

PhD

On a final note, the PhD's coming along at a steady pace. I did until recently have some difficulty getting hold of SWP comrades, but in the best traditions of the cosmic joke, you wait for one and two show up at once. Nevertheless I'm still looking for volunteers to be interviewed between now and the end of July. If you're an SWP comrade I want to hear from you. If you're an ex-SWP or ex-SP comrade I want to hear from you. If you're an ex-SWP SP or an ex-SP SWP comrade I want to hear from you! Apologies to 'vanilla' SP comrades with a burning desire to be interviewed, my quota's full up!

Abbey Green

Abbey Green ward in Stoke occasionally crops up as a topic of discussion over at the UKLN, not least because in 2006 Paul Sutton, a Labour councillor, left that party to become the Socialist Party candidate in the year's council election. Since we were unable to retain the seat he and his brother, Dave (a sitting councillor in Tunstall) dropped out and left. Recently a thread on Urban 75 has been speculating around Dave Sutton's passage from the SP into the LibDem Alliance grouping, and also some have taken the opportunity to make sectarian capital from Stoke SP's failure to stand in Abbey Green this year. In this post I'm interested in setting the record straight about both, but more importantly what lessons socialists can draw from the episode with the Sutton brothers.

I'm not going to dwell on the 2006 election campaign - the prospects and results can be viewed here and here respectively.

Stoke comrades knew it would be more of a challenge to retain the Suttons if Paul lost his seat. Unfortunately the pair of them couldn't get away quick enough. After the ballot last May the brothers attended one party social event and one meeting of the NHS SOS campaign in the week immediately after. And then, nothing. This was despite phone calls, emails, and one visit. Next we heard was a letter of resignation received at the national office in November. Unfortunately I missed the branch where it was discussed but from what I can gather it accused leading comrades of dictatorial behaviour and believed Stoke branch were responsible for the loss of Paul's seat. Not once were these perceived grievances were taken up in the branch prior to the election nor did they make any attempt to address them afterwards. Neither did they take the opportunity to reflect on their own performances during the campaign. Small wonder a large number of comrades feel used by the branch's experience with the Suttons.

The chief problem was one of very different political cultures. They come from that proud Labour tradition where political differences are an outcome of personal differences; of the absence of an active and critical party membership and little feeling of responsibility toward it; and a politics where socialism is about state control and not the democratic self-organisation of working class people. Some comrades may ask that if this was the case, why were they accepted as SP members? Quite simply they appeared to be moving left at the time. They were having regular discussions with leading comrades in the branch, buying and reading a lot of party publications, and were visibly shaken by the lengths to which the Labour party machine went to make their life difficult in the council chamber. I can remember one such occasion where you could almost see the Labourite scales falling from Paul Sutton's eyes. Also (and despite the added weight they brought to our organisation) they were treated as any other potential SP member. Comrades coming into the organisation do not have to pass a revolutionary litmus test. They needn't know every aspect of Grant-Taaffe Thought. We do not set them an entry exam. The party would rather educate and train activists "in-house" than have them waiting outside until all the Marxist boxes have been ticked.

What could have been done differently? The pace of the electoral work meant the weekly meetings with the leading comrades fell by the wayside. In my opinion these by themselves could not have prevented their departure but would have provided a useful corrective to their continued Labourite prejudices. Another problem was integrating them into party work. They were quite happy to do stalls in Hanley and the Abbey, but it was a nightmare to get them out canvassing - itself another hold over from the do-nothing culture of the local Labour party. They were good at addressing their ward caseloads but not once did they take to the doorsteps to argue politics.

Ultimately we could only do so much. As any agony aunt will tell you, it takes two to make a relationship work. I think we did the best we could at the time. If Labour representatives do turn to the revolutionary left in the future, sensitively challenging their politics while involving them in party activity isthe common sense approach to integration. It would be interesting for instance to hear how the SWP have integrated the councillors they've managed to recruit from Respect.

Since the election Dave Sutton has sat on the council with a grouping of independents, which itself has gone into alliance with the LibDems. Hence the confusion over Dave's political affiliations. He remains one of the better sitting councillors and is regularly in the local press speaking up against cuts, closures, and mayoral cronyism. He is seeking re-election as a self-titled 'independent community councillor', as is Paul on a vague left anti-cuts platform. Personally speaking if I lived in either ward I would probably vote for them in the absence of a socialist candidate.

On the topic of a socialist candidate, the failure to stand this time round in Abbey Green is not evidence of a collapse in the branch, a fear to make plain our politics, or of a move not to split the so-called anti-fascist vote. Sectarians will be disappointed to learn that it came down to problems with the paper work. While Stoke comrades are disappointed that we're not standing this year it has meant we've been able to concentrate on solidarity work with the Burslem posties, which could potentially be more significant.

Branch Meeting: The CPGB and the Trade Unions

No, we were not spending our valuable time talking about our Weekly Worker friends. The topic of tonight's talk was the implantation the old Communist Party had in the trade unions, what they did with it, and how the Socialist Party and the rest of the left can avoid the mistakes they made.

Comrade S went back to the CPGB's pre-history in the grass roots militancy that gestated in the industrial hothouse of the First World War. Committees of shop stewards had mushroomed across unions, and importantly a number of its militants (organised by the then Socialist Labour Party) fed into the infant CP. This union strength was the basis for the emergence of the Minority Movement in the early-mid 20s - a powerful trend in the labour movement that claimed one million trade unionists. Baring in mind the MM was affiliated to the CPGB, this was a colossal achievement for an organisation numbering only 6,000!

But what did this amount to? Looking at the historical record, its power was only latent. S argued it managed to get people voted into TUC positions but that was about it. While undoubtedly MM supporters were active in the 1926 General Strike it did not act in a concerted fashion, and was put on the back foot after the class suffered a strategic defeat. Part of the reason was the lack of a clear lead coming from the CPGB itself. As a young, militant organisation composed for the most part by grass roots activists, it saw the trade unions as corrupt and corrupting institutions. But for the most part its practice was to win positions within it, which of course was at odds with the analysis it was professing.

With the coming of the infamous 'Third Period' over 1929-33, the union influence further declined. Whereas in the past the CP was prepared to work with other lefts, this was now officially frowned upon. Labour party trade unionists and others were branded 'social fascists', and the effect was to flush a lot of previously accumulated political capital down the loo. The party's ultra-leftism did not rally the masses to its banner, instead it isolated itself from the class. In my opinion one can lambast the Communist International for officially promoting this stupid behaviour, but its sectarian seeds had to fall on fertile ground for them to be taken up enthusiastically by so many CPs. For example, in Germany the KPD did not unite with the Social Democrats against the Nazis simply because Stalin told them not to. They genuinely detested the SPD for the way it had beheaded the German revolution and crapped on workers' struggles throughout the Weimar years. But I digress.

With the destruction of the German workers' movement and partially because of workers' unity in the face of fascist provocations in France, the Comintern line started favouring a cross-class alliance of all anti-fascist forces. In Britain this meant the CP in the trade unions had to rebuild the relationships it had previously sqaundered. This was complicated later on with the outbreak of war and a zig-zagging of the party's position (from anti-fascist conflict to inter-imperialist war to anti-fascist conflict again). Though much has been made of the CPGB as an agent of industrial peace during the war years, it nevertheless managed to retain trade union credibility through an involvement in small scale, workplace-centred strikes. It was this base and not really any prestige the USSR had won that forms the starting point of its trade union strength in the post-war period. Its trade unionism assumed economistic forms. CPGB comrades were elected to union positions on the basis of their being model trade unionists who could win battles over pay and conditions - their politics were more or less inconsequential. And given the CPGB moved more to workplace-based branches after the war, this exacerbated the submerging of its politics into routine trade unionism.

In a sense this approach paid off. It was able to punch way above its weight in the labour movement and was an extremely significant trade union actor by the 1960s. But again, it was what was done with this influence that was the key criterion by which the party should be judged. Moving away from the idea unions were institutionally corrupt, they were now seen as neutral apparatuses that could play a significant role in socialist advance. But significantly workers' activity now played a walk-on role. The rank and file were fodder to be mobilised to push the TU tops into taking official action, and thereby move the country along that British road to socialism. There was no place in this strategy for unsanctioned and spontaneous workplace activity. Socialism would be delivered from on high, by the bureaucrats and a CP-backed Labour government.

Despite the paucity of strategic vision the party played key roles when our class went on the offensive in the late 60s and early 70s. Its front group, the Liason Committee to Defend Trade Unions contributed to the defeat of Labour's In Place of Strife and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of strike days against the Tory Industrial Relations Act. But this was a proud exception to much of what its trade union work had become. In the T&GWU it was effectively an election machine for the soft left but designated 'fellow traveller', Jack Jones. Elsewhere such as in the building industry, in the NUT and NALGO, its activists were bureaucratised and were effectively part of the apparatus while the Trotskyists assumed the mantle of standing up for the rank and file.

S finished the lead off at the end of the 70s, before the onset of the awful 80s and the party's final liquidation in 1991. In sum the comrade suggested three key lessons the SP and the left today can draw from ithe CPGB's 70 years of experience.

1) Organising in workplaces should not come at the expense of excluding other forms of party work. S flagged up the existence of part-time CPGB'ers who were only really party members during the hours they worked. If activists are more rounded out, so will the party.

2) It is important to get comrades into elected positions, but not neglect the shopfloor.

3) Making alliances with other forces in the unions and labour movement is necessary, but to bury political identites or attempt to hide differences would be a mistake. A false unity is no unity at all.

This was followed by a wide ranging discussion, traversing the roots of Stalinism and how it informed CPGB trade union practice, the party's social life, Chavez(!), and the need for working class political independence in all our work. Undoubtedly this was helped by the presence of a couple of Burslem posties and it usefully prefaced a later discussion on the latest developments in their workplace, the role of the CWU, and the problems of working class organisation.

In my opinion this was a timely discussion, and not just because of Stoke branch's solidarity work. Our party in many ways is beginning to resemble the CPGB in miniature with regards to union implantation, and so the danger to repeat past mistakes is always there. Though in my opinion our politics are superior to those of the CPGB in all phases of its development, these by themselves will not innoculate trade union comrades from workplace routinism and the other "attractions" of TU work. We need to thoroughly examine our practice and that of others to ensure we attract as many existing activists as possible, that we continue to rebuild the labour movement, and work toward the offensive organisation our class.

A Very Bad Man Writes ...

I must apologise for keeping my audience on tenterhooks. Yes, all 15 of you. I haven't really joined the Tories. This transcribing/working lark has left me with scant time to devote to this here blog. I hope I'll be able to resume something approaching normal service shortly.

I might as well take the opportunity to plug the newest blog on the block. Some SP comrades have got their heads together and launched Militant - The Marxist blog for labour and youth on an unsuspecting public. Expect cutting commentary and analysis from blogland's Marxists, and also the odd piece from yours truly.

I haven't forgotten those Virilio, Foucault, and GDH Cole pieces either. They're still simmering away in the back of my brain.

Goodbye to the Left

I first became interested in politics 20 years ago, when our school held a mock election to run in parallel with the 1987 general election. Being only 10 years of age I asked my Mum and Nana who I should vote for. They advised I should support the Conservatives. They told me Margaret Thatcher had helped make Britain a strong country again after it had gone to the dogs under Labour. Bullying unions would no longer make life hell for people who just wanted to get on with their lives. The working class would reap the benefit from being able to invest their hard earned savings in the privatised schemes the Tories were planning. Others were being offered the opportunity to own their own homes and living standards were being raised right across the board. Labour would, I was told, scrap our nuclear weapons meaning there was nothing stopping the Russians invading. But what stayed with me most was the belief that hard work would be rewarded – all Labour wanted to do was tax us to the high heavens.

I duly marked my cross against the Tories and quite happily urged my class mates to do likewise. I’ve long cherished the memories of sitting in the dinner hall, transformers sandwich box on knee, holding my own against 9 and 10 year old Kinnockites. And in the end the blue team won out. I think the Tories romped home with 220 votes, Labour with a hundred fewer and the Alliance with a pathetic 30-something.

This is where I date my political life from. I was proud to call myself a Conservative until the aftermath of the 1992 general election. Then I became increasingly disenchanted with the society that the Tories had created, one where the much-vaunted conservative values of community and mutual respect had been brushed aside by dog eat dog greed and an I’m alright Jack philosophy. The victims of the Tory years, the unemployed and those on low incomes, had in the twisted parlance of the times become the cause of the ills that bedevilled Britain. I found myself moving to the left. My experiences of the workplace and introduction to the ideas of Marx at FE college changed my thinking completely. Between 1992-5 I went from an enthusiastic true blue Tory boy to the deepest red, seething with anger at the appalling destruction capitalism visited on people’s lives.

I’ve now been on the left for 12 years, the overwhelming majority of that time in or associated with various left groups. And what a state our movement has become in that time. Four promising left unity initiatives (Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect, Scottish Socialist Party) have come and gone, their potential pissed up the wall through petty sectarianism, Jupiter-sized egos, a hopelessly undemocratic culture, and a failure to connect with the working class it claims to be the vanguard of. The sad fact is even the useless hatemongers of the BNP have a better handle on what working class people are thinking than the left's self-selected leaders and tribunes.

I’ve just had enough of all this petty crap. I’ve been thinking a lot about my politics. The revolutionary left offers nothing. Similarly the soft left of the Labour party are completely useless – if they had a spine they might be dangerous. Instead I’ve come to the conclusion that the Tories under David Cameron are the only ones with the modern, forward-looking politics Britain needs. After years in the wilderness here’s a party oozing with confidence and free from the sleaze and cronyism that has bedevilled it in the past. This is a party going places. Tory associations have filled up with the young dynamic professionals and entrepreneurs that can get this country back on its feet after a decade of Blairite mismanagement. And the Tories are far from being a party of the middle and upper classes. The work Cameron’s team are putting into poverty reduction will put an end to the gross inequalities that continue to blight the nation. And on the Green agenda the Conservatives are leading the way. It’s all very well the left bleating about capitalism being the fault of global warming, but in fact the problem’s more mundane than that – people’s unsustainable life styles are the root cause. Cameron’s thinking on carbon off-setting, sustainable development and recycling offer the best way out of the environmental crisis. There’s certainly more chance of them making a difference instead of the left’s pie in the sky “solutions”.

I have resigned all my left and labour movement affiliations. I’m turning the responsibility of the UKLN over to the other mods. Obviously they disagree with the conclusions I’ve drawn but can see why I’ve drawn them, and respect my position for all that. I will however be continuing with my blog.

I would wish all the friends I’ve made on the British left all the success, but unfortunately I can’t now we’re on what you would call the opposite sides of the barricades. You’re all barking up the wrong tree. David Cameron’s Conservatives is now the natural home for genuine radicalism, and I call on all of you to join me in the new Tory party.

Foucault, Power, and Sex

Just a few words on Michel Foucault’s understanding of power and his first volume of the History of Sexuality before I write a post on the second, The Use of Pleasure (1984).

According to his celebrated Two Lectures (1976) political theory has traditionally concerned itself with questions of sovereignty, power, and rights. In this model the sovereign-state has been treated as the source and repository of power. As it has the monopoly over the means of (legitimate) violence, in the final analysis its subjects obey under the threat of the use of officially sanctioned coercion. Here, the rights of the citizen are conceived as checks on the power of the sovereign, to prevent it from arbitrarily exercising its power.

Foucault however thinks this is too rigid, too narrow. His microphysics of power is very different because his concern is with a politics of how masses of human bodies are regulated, leading him to ask radical questions about the conventional model of power.

There are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise, and constitute the social body and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated or implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. (Power/Knowledge (1980), p.93)

Take the contemporary understanding of sexuality for example. Whether we’re gay, straight or bi, sexuality is something that defines who we are. This isn’t because it’s an expression of an essential nature. It just so happens to be an effect of how human bodies have come to be regulated over the last couple of centuries. As we’ll see in a future post, an ancient Greek freeman who preferred sex with young men didn’t have any conception of being different to other freemen who preferred sex with women, and neither was he seen as different. Set this against our modern understanding of sex. Who we are attracted to and who we sleep with defines our being in ways incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks.

Power for Foucault is bound up with “knowing” its object so it can be transformed into its subject. It is complex in its scope and specific in its operation. Because of its fluid-like character and ability to generate so many different kinds of subjects, power cannot reflect the will of the state, the operation of the economy, or any idea of human nature. In fact Foucault reaches a radically opposed conclusion: notions of an essential nature, rights, or bourgeois interests are effects of power.

Foucault’s method (what he, following Nietzsche calls a genealogical approach) is to study power from the bottom up, to trace the lines of descent of political technologies of the body to illustrate the emergence of particular kinds of subjects and the passing of others.

This is Foucault’s concern in his unfinished project, The History of Sexuality (1976-84). In the first volume his objective is

to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world. The central issue is … to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. (History of Sexuality: An Introduction, p.11)

Foucault’s discussion begins with the immediate pre-modern era. He argues that the regulation of sexual practices were the responsibility of ecclesiastical and legislative discourses and institutions. The married couple was located as the primary site of sexual behaviour. Sex was about procreation and marriage functioned as a reproductive pact between allied families. Sex outside of marriage was outside the purview of sexual regulation in the case of infants, and punished if it took place between men. This pattern of regulation underwent a significant mutation at the beginning of the 18th century, linked to the emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem that had to be managed. It was in the interest of emerging nation-states had to know about sex in terms of its citizen’s capacity to reproduce and ability to be disciplined in all matters sexual.

As the problematic of population management grew, the 19th century saw an explosion of discourses around sex. The centrality of the married couple in the old discursive regime was repositioned as the unspoken norm of sexual behaviour. In contrast all other behaviours that didn’t conform became marked by the discourses of sexuality. The ‘margins’ of sex were labelled and regulated by seizing hold of the body and learning (constructing) its sexual truths. For example the discovery of ‘the homosexual’ was the same moment of its invention. Prior to this moment, familial, legislative and religious practices proscribed same-sex relations, but it was only in the Victorian era when the person who engaged in such acts was positioned as a homosexual subject.

In this move from sex acts to sexuality-as-identity, the metaphor of ‘the confessional’ as a technology to extract/produce the truth of bodies assumes central importance. This “scientific” practice was characterised by five devices.

1. The confession was wedded to scientific methods of data collection and psychological techniques.

2. The belief that sex is the root of all psychological maladies and that talking over one’s sexual behaviour to an expert was essential if the problems were to be overcome.

3. Every act committed and each sentence uttered is potentially symptomatic, rendering the interpretation of the confession problematic and decipherable only by especially trained experts.

4. The aim of providing useful knowledge that could fit the received paradigm shaped the discourse between analyst and analysand. Together they produce a truth.

5. To provide raw material for knowledge. Any cathartic effects are ultimately secondary.

In sum, these devices produce sexuality as a viable object for scientific investigation, and feed the object and its associated knowledges back into the ensemble of power. Truth is not uncovered by the operation of knowledge; it is an effect of power.

As socialists this understanding of power has a number of implications for our political practice, but that will have to be left for another time. What does come out from Foucault’s genealogies, (including Discipline and Punish (1975), his immediately preceding work on the birth of the prison) is the utterly powerless position of the subject. In both these books the body is subjected to so many disciplining technologies that it appears to passively accept them. This is strange because Foucault makes it quite clear that power begets resistance. Without resistance or the potential for resistance, we cannot speak of power. Unfortunately resistance is merely asserted as an essential property of his approach and is not explored with reference to either punishment or sexuality. Perhaps this lacuna in his thought partially explains why there was an eight year gap between the publishing of the first and second volume, because the change in emphasis is striking. The passive bodies of the Introduction give way to matters of individual ethics and management of self in The Use of Pleasure. A post discussing the main aspects and emphases of the latter will appear in the next few days.

Early Morning Barbecue

I awoke in the early hours of Saturday morning to find the bedroom bathed in pulsating blue light. Cat leaped from the sack to peer out the window - it was a fire engine! How exciting! We both hurried to the back bedroom and was greeted by a crappy old van happily blazing away. How we oooed as the front tyres exploded, and aaahed as the flames yielded to the smothering embrace of foam. After a short scuffle with the firefighters the fire flickered and died and the good people of my block of terraces could retire to their mushrooms to resume their nocturnal forays into dream land. But eager to record the aftermath for posterity (and to prove I have a real existence outside the internet), atop this post you will find one of my photos.

Frequent visitors will notice a few subtle changes to AVPS in the links department. First up are various sociology blogs I've managed to turn up in my internet wanderings. This list of links will I hope bolster AVPS's tenuous claim to be a sociology blog.

I've also taken time out to compile a list of establishment blogs, comprising sundry Blairites, Tories, LibDems and other fellow travellers of the bourgeoisie. Here you'll find people like Iain Dale, apparently the left's pet Tory; the increasingly unhinged Guido; David Miliband - one of the few Blairites I actually like; the freaks of Harry's Place and much else besides.

Counter-hegemonies have had some attention lavished upon them too. I welcome John Angliss, Labour of Love, Leanne Wood, Leftwing Criminologist, Mike Marqusee, Never Trust a Hippy, Red Squirrel's Lair, Renegade Eye, The Pleasures of the Popular, and The Soul of Man Under Capitalism to the AVPS blog roll. Also, applying the Norman Geras rule of bumping off blogs that have remained quiet for a couple of months, it's goodbye to Bolshevichka and JJB Fightback (the latter having ceased trading completely). I hereby serve warning to Air Pollution and The Revolution Decides - you're for the chop if you don't post soon!

Lastly on the links front, I've added the new site of the CWI Scotland to the socialist websites section.

And that's your lot! This week you can expect posts on Michel Foucault, the Third Way, and Paul Virilio along with the usual supply of incisive commentary, reportage and polemic ;)

PS Forgot to add the Obsolete blog to the above roll call. Sorry comrade!