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Arnold I. Davidson History of the Human Sciences 2011 24: 25 DOI: 10.1177/0952695111411625 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/24/4/25 Published by:
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In praise of counter-conduct

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In praise of counter-conduct

History of the Human Sciences 24(4) 2541 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0952695111411625 hhs.sagepub.com

Arnold I. Davidson University of Chicago, USA and University of Pisa, Italy

Abstract Without access to Michel Foucaults courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucaults passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucaults thought. Indeed, it is Foucaults analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. It is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucaults work and more generally. Keywords conduct, ethics, Michel Foucault, politics, sexuality In the years between December 1976 and May 1984 Michel Foucault published no new books. Yet far from this being a period of silence, Foucault concentrated an extraordinary amount of intellectual activity in essays, lectures, interviews, and especially in his

Corresponding author: Professor Arnold I. Davidson, University of Chicago, Department of Philosophy, 1115 E. 58th Street, Stuart 228, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Email: fiorentina@uchicago.edu

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courses at the Colle ` ge de France. Without access to these courses, it was extremely difficult to understand Foucaults reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucaults passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucaults thought. But this essential moment has been rather undervalued due to the fact that the main legacy of this course has been to give rise to so-called governmentality studies. There is absolutely no doubt that the practices of governmentality and the historically precedent practices of pastoral power studied by Foucault in this course open up a new and significant field of inquiry, both within Foucaults own work and more generally. Yet one should not overlook the fact that pastoral power and governmentality are historically and philosophically contiguous in that they take as the object of their techniques and practices the conduct of human beings. If the government of men is understood as an activity that undertakes to conduct individuals, pastoral power concentrates this activity in the regime of religious institutions, while governmentality locates it in the direction of political institutions. As Foucault remarks,
. . . from the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, generally speaking I think that inasmuch as many pastoral functions were taken up in the exercise of governmentality, and inasmuch as government also begins to want to take responsibility for peoples conduct, to conduct people, then from then on we see revolts of conduct arising less from the religious institution and much more from political institutions. (Foucault, 2007: 1978)

Indeed, it is Foucaults analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. Beginning from the Greek expression oikonomia psuchon and the Latin expression regimen animarum, Foucault proposes the concept of conduct as the most adequate translation of these expressions, taking philosophical advantage of the way in which conduct can refer to two things:
Conduct is the activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction (la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts oneself (se conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire), and finally, in which one behaves (se comporter) under the influence of a conduct as the action of conducting or of conduction (conduction). (ibid.: 193)1

One already sees here the double dimension of conduct, namely the activity of conducting an individual, conduction as a relation between individuals, and the way in which an individual conducts himself or is conducted, his conduct or behavior in the narrower

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sense of the term. Yet Foucault moves quickly from the quite specific form of power that takes as its object the conduct of individuals to the correlative countermovements that he initially designates as specific revolts of conduct.
Just as there have been forms of resistance to power as the exercise of political sovereignty and just as there have been other equally intentional [voulues, that is, willed] forms of resistance or refusal that were directed at power in the form of economic exploitation, have there not been forms of resistance to power as conducting? (ibid.: 195)

These forms of resistance also have a double dimension. They are movements characterized by wanting to be conducted differently, whose objective is a different type of conduction, and that also attempt to indicate an area in which each individual can conduct himself, the domain of ones own conduct or behavior (ibid.: 1945). de savoir (The Will to Know), In the first volume of his history of sexuality La Volonte writing from a directly political point of view, Foucault had already insisted that resistance is not in a position of exteriority with respect to power, and that points of resistance do not answer to a set of principles heterogenous to relations of power (Foucault, 1976: 1257). Resistance is coextensive and absolutely contemporaneous to power; resistances exist within the strategic field of relations of power and relations of power themselves only exist relative to a multiplicity of points of resistance (Foucault, 2001a: 267 and 1976: 126). In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault also emphasizes the nonexteriority, the immanent relation, of conduct and counter-conduct. The fundamental elements of the counter-conduct analysed by Foucault are not absolutely external to the conduct imposed by Christian pastoral power. Conduct and counter-conduct share a series of elements that can be utilized and reutilized, reimplanted, reinserted, taken up in the direction of reinforcing a certain mode of conduct or of creating and recreating a type of counter-conduct:
. . . the struggle was not conducted in the form of absolute exteriority, but rather in the form of the permanent use of tactical elements that are pertinent in the anti-pastoral struggle to the very extent that they are part, even in a marginal way, of the general horizon of Christianity.2 (Foucault, 2007: 125)

Moreover, it is noteworthy that in the case of power/resistance and in that of conduct/ counter-conduct, Foucault stresses that the tactical immanence of both resistance and counter-conduct to their respective fields of action should not lead one to conclude that they are simply a passive underside, a merely negative or reactive phenomenon, a kind of disappointing after-effect (Foucault, 1976: 1267 and 2007: 195). In each case Foucault employs the same kind of almost technical expression: resistance is not la marque en nome `nes en creux of the pastorate creux of power, counter-conducts are not les phe (Foucault, 1976: 126).3 As he says in the interview Non au sexe roi, if resistance were nothing more than the reverse image of power, it wouldnt resist; in order to resist one must activate something as inventive, as mobile, as productive as power itself (Foucault, 2001a: 267). Foucault similarly underlines the productivity of counterconduct which goes beyond the purely negative act of disobedience (Foucault, 2007:

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200; see also 201). Finally, as a counterpart to the celebrated motto Where there is power, there is resistance, one could invoke Foucaults remark about the immediate and founding correlation between conduct and counter-conduct, a correlation that is not only historical but also conceptual (Foucault, 1976: 125 and 2007: 196). In light of all of these parallels between resistance and counter-conduct, what does the creation of the couple conduct/counter-conduct in 1978 add to Foucaults previous conceptualization? On the one hand, the notion of counter-conduct adds an explicitly ethical component to the notion of resistance; on the other hand, this notion allows one to move easily between the ethical and the political, letting us see their many points of contact and intersection. Foucaults three initial examples the appearance of desertioninsubordination, the development of secret societies and the rise of medical dissent bring to light both of these aspects of the notion of conduct/counter-conduct. Furthermore, Foucaults problem of vocabulary, his attempt to find a specific word to designate the resistances, refusals, revolts against being conducted in a certain way, show how careful he was in wanting to find a concept that neglected neither the ethical nor the political dimensions and that made it possible to recognize their nexus. After rejecting the notions of revolt, disobedience, insubordination, dissidence and misconduct, for reasons ranging from their being notions that are either too strong, too weak, too localized, too passive, or too substance-like, Foucault proposes the expression counter-conduct counter-conduct in the sense of struggle against the procedures implemented for conducting others and notes that anti-pastoral counter-conduct can be found at a doctrinal level, in the form of individual behavior, and in strongly organized groups (Foucault, 2007: 201, 204). When Foucault returns to the notion of conduct in his essay Le sujet et le pouvoir, he emphasizes that this notion is perhaps one of those that best allows us to grasp what is specific to relations of power, immediately placing conduct in a political field (Foucault, 2001b: 1056).4 As in 1978, he observes that conduct is both the act of directing [mener] others (according to more or less strict mechanisms of coercion) and the way of behaving [se comporter] in a more or less open field of possibilities, and then adds that the exercise of power consists in conducting conduct [conduire des conduites] (ibid.: 1056). Next, Foucault draws a direct connection between power and government, again distinguishing government from political and economic subjection, and highlighting the fact that to govern an individual or a group is to act on the possibilities of action of other individuals, is a mode of action on the actions of others (ibid.: 1056). Thus, according to Foucault, to govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of others (ibid.: 1056). Although much less conceptually detailed in La de savoir, Foucaults fundamental idea of studying power as a multiplicity of Volonte force relations has many of the same consequences as his later articulation of the notion of conduct. These force relations, unequal but also local and unstable, give rise to states of power, and modifications of these same relations transform those situations of power (Foucault, 1976: 1213). A force is not a metaphysical substance or abstraction, but is always given in a particular relation; a force can be identified as any factor in a relation that affects the elements of the relation; anything that influences the actions of individuals in relation, that has an effect on their actions, is in this sense a force. And thus force relations structure the possible field of actions of individuals. Resistance and

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counter-conduct modify these force relations, counter the locally stabilized organizations of power, and thereby affect, in a new way, the possibilities of action of others. A force relation can be immanent in a physical environment, in a social configuration, in a pattern of behavior, in a bodily gesture, in a certain attitude, in a way of life. All of these features can structure the field of action of individuals, and thus power and resistance come from everywhere (ibid.: 122). Foucaults analysis of the different forms of counter-conduct found in a number of anti-pastoral communities in the Middle Ages brings clearly to the forefront the political dimension of counter-conduct. As he says in concluding his discussion, in some of these communities there was a counter-society aspect, a carnival aspect, overturning social relations and hierarchy (Foucault, 2007: 21112). But even apparently personal or individual forms of counter-conduct such as the return to Scripture or the adherence to a certain set of eschatological beliefs have a political dimension, that is, modify force relations between individuals, acting on the possibilities of action. Reading Scripture as a spiritual act that puts the faithful in the presence of Gods word and which consequently finds its law and guarantee in this inner illumination is a counter-conduct that is used against and to short-circuit, as it were, the pastorate (ibid.: 213). And eschatological beliefs that imply that the faithful will no longer need a shepherd are also a way of disqualifying the pastors role, a counter-conduct with profound political effects (ibid.: 214). The ethical dimension of counter-conduct is clearly present when Foucault mentions the devotio moderna, an anti-pastoral struggle expressed and manifested in a whole new attitude, religious comportment, way of doing things and being, and a whole new way of relating to God, obligations, morality, as well as to civil life (ibid.: 204). Foucaults detailed discussion of asceticism as a form of counter-conduct beginning from the idea that ascesis is an exercise of self on self; it is a sort of close combat of the individual with himself in which the authority, presence, and gaze of someone else is, if not impossible, at least unnecessary cannot help but bring to mind his late idea of ethics as a relation to oneself, the constitution of oneself as a moral subject, and the related notions of modes of subjectivation and practices of the self (ibid.: 205; 1984: 3645; 2001c: 143741). When Foucault introduces the idea of ethics as the selfs relation to itself, as distinct from a moral code and the actual behavior of individuals with respect to this code, he does so by claiming that there are different ways of conducting oneself [se conduire] morally, emphasizing this other aspect of morality, namely the way in which one should conduct oneself [se conduire] (Foucault, 1984: 37). What then follows is a much more precise and unambiguous description, from the ethical point of view, of the second sense of conduct mentioned in Security, Territory, Population. And Foucaults conclusion links together the aspects of conduct as moral action and as moral self-constitution:
There is no specific moral action that does not refer to the unity of a moral conduct; no moral conduct that does not call for the constitution of oneself as a moral subject; and no constitution of the moral subject without modes of subjectivation and without an ascetics or practices of the self that support them [the modes of subjectivation]. (ibid.: 40)

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In the first lecture of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, when Foucault takes up the notion of the care of the self [epimeleia heauton], he identifies three components of this care: a general attitude with respect to oneself, to others and to the world; a form of attention turned towards oneself; a series of practices or techniques of the self (Foucault, 2005: 1011). Attitude, attention and practices of the self are all features of the ethical sense of conduct. In Le sujet et le pouvoir Foucault stresses that power, understood as the government of men, includes the element of freedom:
Power is only exercised on free subjects and only insofar as they are free understanding by this claim individual or collective subjects faced with a field of possibility in which several conducts, several reactions, and various modes of behavior can take place. (Foucault, 2001b: 1056)

This quotation underscores Foucaults assertion that power never exhaustively determines a subjects possibilities, and it specifies the relevant field of possibility as that of conduct or behavior, taking the latter in the widest sense of the term. If we recall Foucaults remark that ethics is the deliberative form that freedom takes, the deliberative practice of freedom, we can also see that for Foucault ethics is in effect a kind of freedom of conduct (Foucault, 2001d: 15301). In a series of remarkable formulas concerning freedom, Foucault speaks of the insubordination of freedom, the rebelliousness of the will and the intransitivity of freedom, the art of voluntary inservitude and of deliberative indocility (Foucault, 2001b: 1056; 1990: 39). All of these phrases belong to the semantic field of counter-conduct and make evident the double ethical and political scope of this counter-conduct. The discussion of asceticism in Security, Territory, Population is a perfect example of the art of voluntary intractability, the exercise of freedom as a form of counter-conduct. According to Foucaults analysis, Christianity is not an ascetic religion, since the organization of pastoral power with its requirement of permanent obedience and renunciation of ones individual will is incompatible with the structure and practice of asceticism:
. . . whenever and wherever pastoral counter-conducts develop in the Middle Ages, asceticism was one of their points of support and instruments against the pastorate. . . . Insofar as the pastorate characterizes its structures of power, Christianity is fundamentally antiascetic, and asceticism is rather a sort of tactical element, an element of reversal by which certain themes of Christian theology or religious experience are utilized against these structures of power. (Foucault, 2007: 207)

The challenge represented by the ascetic exercise of the self on the self, which becomes a kind of egoistic self-mastery, provokes a counter-conduct to pastoral obedience, and gives rise to a type of apatheia that is much closer to the Greek apatheia which guarantees the mastery of oneself than to the Christian apatheia, part of pastoral power, which requires the continual renunciation of a will that is turned towards oneself (ibid.: 1789, 2068). Finally, mysticism is a form of counter-conduct that has the distinction of being an experience that by definition escapes pastoral power (ibid.: 212). Eluding

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pastoral examination, confession and teaching, mystical experience short-circuits the pastoral hierarchy:
In the pastorate, the pastors direction of the individuals soul was necessary, and no communication between the soul and God could take place that was not either ruled out or controlled by the pastor. (ibid.: 213)

The direct, immediate communication between the soul and God in mysticism thus marks the distance separating mysticism from the pastorate. When in the discussion following his lecture Quest-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aukfla rung], given less than two months after the conclusion of Security, Territory, Population, Foucault designates mysticism as one of the first major revolts of conduct in the West, he underlines the conjunction of the ethical and the political in the history of mysticism: mysticism as individual experience and institutional and political struggle are absolutely united, and in any case constantly referred to one another (Foucault, 1990: 59). Spiritual movements intertwined with popular struggle are one historically prominent source of counter-conduct. It is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. The juridification of moral and political experience has meant that the role of conduct has typically been subordinated to that of the law, thus losing its specificity and its particular force (Foucault, 1984: 412). Perhaps the major exception to this absence of attention to the sphere of conduct can be found in the third chapter of John Stuart Mills On Liberty, where the political and moral importance of conduct is central.5 As Mill says,
No ones idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another. No one would assert that people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the conduct of their concerns, any impress whatever of their own judgment, or of their own individual character. (Mill, 1977: 262)

But as Mill goes on to observe, we are governed by custom, the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, and we do not choose our plan of life or determine our own conduct (ibid.: 261, 2623).
I do not mean that they [individuals] chose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes . . . (ibid.: 2645)

Eccentricity of conduct is Mills name for counter-conduct, and he strikingly opposes originality in thought and action to the despotism of custom (ibid.: 268, 272). Indeed, On Liberty contains moments of lyrical encomium to counter-conduct:

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In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. . . . That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. (ibid.: 269)

And Mill recognizes that uniformity of conduct weakens the possibility of resistance:
The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves, grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it. (ibid.: 275)

The counter-conduct required by putting into practice ones own mode of laying out his existence is the only domain of force consonant with the political principle of liberty and the politics of individual differences (ibid.: 270, 2725). I do not, of course, intend to be arguing that there is a direct filiation between Mill and Foucault. Indeed, in all of Foucaults discussions of and references to liberalism, Mill never appears once. But this absence does not undermine the philosophical significance of the fact that, in the history of liberalism, Mill is the only philosopher to have so clearly carved out an ethicopolitical concept of conduct. Nor do I mean to be suggesting that Foucault embraces the type of individualism found in Mill. Nonetheless, all of the endless and tedious critiques that claim that Foucaults political and moral philosophy has no room for agency would exhibit their baselessness if one were simply to keep in view that counter-conduct, political and ethical, is an activity that transforms ones relation to oneself and to others; it is the active intervention of individuals and constellations of individuals in the domain of the ethical and political practices and forces that shape us. However much Mills conclusions may differ from Foucaults, On Liberty has the merit both of isolating the conceptual specificity of conduct and of identifying its singular ethical-political value. Foucaults appreciation of the feminist and gay movements can best be understood from the point of view of the notion of conduct/counter-conduct. Already in Security, Territory, Population, Foucault connects one historically important form of counterconduct to the status of women: these revolts of conduct are often linked up with the problem of women and their status in society, in civil society or in religious society (Foucault, 2007: 1967). And he gives as examples the movement of Rhenish Nonnenmystik, the groups formed around women prophets in the middle ages, and various Spanish and French groups of spiritual direction in the 16th and 17th centuries. Foucaults interest in the modern history of relations among women revolves around the question of female friendship, how it develops, what kind of conduct it involves, how women were bound to one another through a certain type of affect, of affection. He was especially attentive to the response [of women], often innovative and creative, to a status that was imposed upon them (Foucault, 2001e: 1108). And he was well aware that the creative counter-conduct of women was often the target of the harshest criticism against them, as if the civil debate around juridical issues could not but degenerate

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when the topic turned to the behavior of women. He would certainly have shared the acute perception of Mill: . . . the man, and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing what nobody does, or of not doing what everybody does, is the subject of as much depreciatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency (Mill, 1977: 270). Foucaults famous remark that what makes homosexuality disturbing is the homosexual mode of life much more than the sexual act itself is directly related to the way in which this mode of life is a center of counter-conduct (Foucault, 2001f: 983). Foucault attaches great significance to that aspect of the gay movement which puts into play relations in the absence of codes or established lines of conduct, affective intensities, forms that change (Foucault, 2001g: 1152 and 2001f: 9823). Foucault describes these relations with the same expression, court-circuit, that he had used to describe religious counter-conduct: these relations create a short-circuit, and introduce love where there should be law, rule, habit (Foucault, 2001f: 983). Gay counter-conduct, a new mode of life, gay culture in the widest sense of the term, is what fascinated Foucault:
. . . a culture that invents modalities of relations, modes of existence, types of values, forms of exchange between individuals that are really new, that are not homogenous to nor superimposable on general cultural forms. If this is possible, then gay culture will not be simply a choice of homosexuals for homosexuals. It will create relations that are, up to a certain point, transposable to heterosexuals. One has to overturn things a bit, and rather than say what one said at a certain moment Let us try to reintroduce homosexuality into the general normality of social relations let us say the opposite: No. Let it [homosexuality] escape as far as possible from the type of relations that are proposed to us in our society, and let us try to create in the empty space in which we find ourselves new relational possibilities. (Foucault, 2001h: 1130)

This new space of, so to speak, gay counter-conduct will create the possibility for others to enrich their life by modifying their own scheme of relations, with the effect that unforeseen lines of force will be formed (Foucault, 2001h: 1130 and 2001f: 983). This space of counter-conduct cannot be reduced to the juridical sphere, and that is why Foucault maintained that one should consider the battle for gay rights as an episode that cannot represent the final stage of the struggle (Foucault, 2001h: 1127). The real els] of the battle for rights should be looked for much more in attitudes, effects [effets re [in] schemes of behavior, than [in] legal formulations, and thus the attempt to create a new mode of life is much more pertinent than the question of individual rights (ibid.: 11278). The rights that derive from marital and family relations are a way of stabilizing, rendering stationary, certain forms of conduct; as Foucault says, extending these rights to other persons is but a first step, since if one asks people to reproduce marriage bonds in order for their personal relation to be recognized, the progress realized is slight (ibid.: 1128). Our legal, social, institutional world is one in which the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely schematized, extremely poor (ibid.). Given that a rich relational world would be extremely complicated to manage, the institutional framework of our society has attempted to narrow the possibility of relations, and, following Foucaults diagnosis, we have to fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric of our

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social world (ibid.: 11289). We have all heard the progressive sentiments of those liberals who announce that they are not opposed to gay marriage as long as they behave like married couples. It is precisely the threat of counter-conduct, and not the legal status, that is most disruptive and unsettling. This is certainly one reason why Foucault announced that after studying the history of sexuality, he wanted to understand the history of friendships friendships that for centuries allowed one to live very intense affective relations and that also had economic and social implications (Foucault, 2001i: 1563). The kinds of counter-conduct made possible by these friendships both changed the force relations between individuals and modified ones relation to oneself. One conducts oneself in another way with friends, fabricating new ethical and political possibilities. Beginning in the 16th century, as we find texts that criticize (especially male) friendships as something dangerous, this type of friendship begins to disappear (ibid.: 1563). And Foucaults suggestion was that this space of dangerous friendship came to be occupied by the problem of homosexuality, of sexual relationships between men: the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the fact that homosexuality was declared a social, political, and medical problem are part of the same process (ibid.: 1564). The constitution of homosexuality as a separate medical and psychiatric problem was much more effective as a technique of control than the attempt to regulate friendship. Even today, behind every intense friendship lurks the shadow of sex, so that we no longer see the striking perturbations of friendship. The counter-conduct of friendship has become pathologized the unruliness of friendship is but a form of abnormality. The appearance of a type of conduct within the conceptual space of the normal and the pathological often has the effect of weakening the ethical and political force of this conduct. A behavior considered abnormal no longer possesses either an ethical value nor a political efficacy. In his lecture of 5 March from the course Abnormal, given by Foucault in 1975, one finds a dense but paradigmatic analysis of the campaign, the crusade, against masturbation, a campaign that will transform the counter-conduct of masturbation into an episode of the correction of the abnormal. Foucault clearly demonstrates that, notwithstanding all of the exhortations, recommendations and injunctions, this crusade assumes the form of a medical control linked to structures of medical knowledge, a true medicalization of conduct:
When one forbids children to masturbate one threatens them with an adult life crippled by illness, rather than an adult life lost in debauchery and vice. That is to say, there is not so much a moralization as a sanitization and pathologization of masturbation. (Foucault, 2003: 237)

How can we look for the possibility of counter-conduct faced with the threat of pathological paralysis? The register marked by illness obfuscates the ethico-political dimension of conduct and places in the foreground the hygienic control of behavior. A principle of normalization takes the place of ethical freedom, political resistance. The art of deliberative indocility cedes its space to a science of abnormality. Even when masturbation becomes an object not only of physico-physiological, but of psycho-psychiatric examination and

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intervention it always remains an ethically and politically neutral behaviour. In one of the most popular recent European books on female sexuality, Nuestro sexo. A la conquista de una sexualidad divertida by Lorena Berdu n, published in Spanish in 2004, we discover this hodge-podge of information and reassuring advice:
An infinite number of things have been said about masturbation, both negative and positive. Until a short time ago this practice was not considered a completely healthy thing and, obviously, that a woman would do it was little less than unthinkable. For this reason few women had the courage to admit out loud, as men could do, that they had sometimes tried it. Nowadays, fortunately, many of these prejudices are disappearing, even if some people still think that women hardly masturbate. What is certain is that almost all women, some more some less, have flirted with their own genitals when alone, even if, it has to be said, it seems that women masturbate less than men. One has to try to see masturbation as another way to obtain pleasure, a practice that helps one to know ones own body and its responses to sexual stimulation . . . and certainly it has more advantages than disadvantages. Normally girls discover masturbation later than boys, sometimes by accident, often times because they have heard it being talked about and simply want to try it. And some women feel a little guilty doing it; its even the case that they dont succeed in relaxing and reaching orgasm in this way. In this case, the best thing is to let it go and try again when there are clearer ideas. Everybody feels this kind of natural impulse towards their own body, the impulse to try out things that are very intimate, and this doesnt harm anyone. (Berdu n, 2007: 501)

The hygienic accent of this passage and the tone of its conclusion that certainly it [masturbation] has more advantages than disadvantages, that masturbation doesnt harm anyone come directly from 19th-century treatises. Obviously, instead of the condemnation of this practice we find the innocence of a natural impulse therefore it is not necessary to make children sleep with their hands tied and attached by cords to the parents hands, so that the adult will be awakened if the child moves his hands (Foucault, 2003: 247). Despite the difference in medico-psychological evaluation, the practical recommendations of Nuestro sexo take away every potentiality of counter-conduct from masturbation, inserting it in the aseptic framework of normality:
Do not introduce objects into the vagina with which you can hurt yourself. All sexual toys acquired in a specialized store are fine, but forget the homemade remedies like vegetables, candles, and so on. Even if reading these things you might begin to laugh, I assure you that there are women who do it, and this can be very dangerous for ones health. If you introduce your fingers into your vagina, make sure first that they are properly cleaned and pay attention to the nails. Very long nails can create small wounds within the vagina. If you masturbate with spray from the shower, do it in such a way that a lot of water does not enter the vagina because it can alter the natural pH that protects it. Always remember that when the genitals are stimulated, your hands must be clean and a little moist in order not to cause harm. You can take advantage of the vaginal fluids themselves or of preseminal liquids, use saliva or a lubricating cream. Slippery caresses are much more pleasurable and stimulating. (Berdu n, 2007: 1512)

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We are here far from the gesture of Diogenes when he masturbated in the marketplace: Masturbating himself in public, he said: Ah! If only one could put an end to hunger by rubbing ones stomach in this way! (Paquet, 1992: 119). This ancient scandalous counter-conduct has become for us a simple case of what we refer to as lewd and lascivious behaviour with the risk of some visits to the psychiatric clinic (if not the threat of some time in prison for having violated the law). In fact it is difficult to imagine today how masturbation could again become a counter-conduct, could find again a space in the ethical and political field of conduct. Harry Mathewss book Singular Pleasures, which describes 61 scenes of masturbation, can help us to reinvigorate our imagination. Many of the scenes recounted by Mathews involve an ethical relation to oneself or a political relation between two individuals, and sometimes bring to the fore both dimensions. I will cite a few of these micro-narratives to give you a sense of Mathewss inventiveness:
A man is masturbating as he contemplates a finely brushed poem by Wang Wei, seated on a straw mat in his garret in Mukdan. An ascetic sensualist, he has striven all his life to unite in one moment of revelation the pleasure of poetry and masturbation. On this warm spring morning of his sixtieth year, he senses that the sublime fusion may finally be at hand. A member of MAID in Bangkok [Masturbation and Its Discontents MAID for short is, Mathews explains, a quasi-subversive organization [that] encourages its members to invent obstacles to overcome while masturbating], a woman of sixty-seven, becomes the first to reach orgasm under the dentists drill. (Mathews, 1993)6

One of the most provocative scenes reconnects masturbation to the context of religious counter-conduct:
On her knees inside a confessional booth in the Seville cathedral, a twenty-one-year-old woman is describing her compulsive habit of masturbation. As the priest absolves her, she stands up, raises her skirt, and reveals that at this very moment she is committing the sin she has confessed. (ibid.)

In citing these examples, of course I do not wish to incite you to take up again the gesture of Diogenes, but to be attentive to the substitution of counter-conduct with pathology and to resist the psychologization of conduct. If Diogenes is no longer our contemporary, Mathewss characters, the descendants of the cynics, at the least force us to think and at the most stimulate us to conduct ourselves differently. Indeed, an analogous problem arises whenever the notion of conduct is displaced from an ethical and political context and inserted into a scientific and epistemological framework. When the normativity of conduct is subordinated to and regulated by what Foucault calls a regime of veridiction, the pre-eminence of this regime restructures the very concepts of conduct/counter-conduct (Foucault, 2008).7 More specifically, when a regime of scientific veridiction provides the framework of intelligibility for conduct, this concept completely changes register, losing its ethical and political dimensions and becoming the object of scientific explanation. A clear example of this change of modality can be found in Foucaults discussion of the legal-psychiatric constitution of the

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dangerous individual in -Abnormal. Foucaults analysis of the emergence of the dangerous individual makes explicit reference to conduct (conduite), to behavior (compor`re de tre). But these interconnected notions, tement) and even to ways of being (manie like that of the dangerous individual itself, are, in this context, internal to the structures of the sciences humaines, and are used by Foucault in his historical reconstruction just as they were used by these practitioners of the human sciences, that is to say, without any independent ethical or political valence whatsoever. This emptying-out of the ethicalpolitical content of conduct via the priority of a regime of veridiction helps us to get a grip on a significant problem of interpretation that I cannot discuss in detail here, namely the absence of the notion of counter-conduct in The Birth of Biopolitics. In fact Foucault speaks about conduct many times in this course, but throughout his entire analysis of homo oeconomicus, the idea of counter-conduct never appears. I think that this problem of interpretation, concerning the relation between Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, can only be approached by keeping in mind the ambiguity of the very notion of conduct at one level an ethico-political activity and at another level a scientifico-epistemological object. In the context of the examination of neo-liberal homo oeconomicus, conduct is studied, following the economists themselves, only as a scientific and epistemological notion-object. In The Birth of Biopolitics conduct is always held within, always subordinated to, a regime of veridiction (that of economic conceptualization and explanation). And therefore conduct as ethical and political action is completely neutralized. The result is the conceptual disappearance of counter-conduct, the constitution and detachment of conduct as a scientific object from counter-conduct as a fully ethical and political activity. The armature of economic neo-liberalism, studied in The Birth of Biopolitics, cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality. What Foucault once named the struggles against subjection and for a new subjectivity could also be described as a struggle against a certain type of conduction and for another form of conduct (Foucault, 2001b: 10467). The Kantian question of who we are at this precise moment of history is inseparable from this question of our conduct (ibid.: 10501). To become other than what we are requires an ethics and politics of counter-conduct. Foucault arrived at the conclusion that:
Probably the principal objective today is not to discover but to refuse what we are. . . . We have to promote new forms of subjectivity while refusing the type of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries. (ibid.: 1051)

This double refusal and promotion is the domain of counter-conduct, a sphere of revolt that incites a process of productivity (Foucault, 2007: 200). Moreover, Foucault explicitly links this domain to his definition of the critical attitude, a political and moral attitude, a manner of thinking, that is a critique of the way in which our conduct is governed, a partner and adversary of the arts of governing (Foucault, 1990: 38). This critical

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thos, and no such e thos is effective without a permaattitude is part of a philosophical e nent exercise of counter-conduct (Foucault, 2001k: 1387, 1390, 1396). One of Foucaults most disquieting acclamations of counter-conduct is his discussion in favor of suicide, against the humiliations, the hypocrisies, the dubious procedures to which one constrains the conduct of suicide (Foucault, 2001l: 777). Shouldnt we instead prepare ourselves with all the care, the intensity, and the ardor that we desire, a patient preparation, without respite, without inevitability either that will shed light on all ones life (ibid.: 77889):
Im in favor of a true cultural combat in order to teach people again that there is no conduct that is more beautiful, that, consequently, deserves to be considered with as much attention as suicide. One should work on ones suicide all ones life. (Foucault, 2001m: 1076)

The government of conduct with respect to death, which extends to the appalling banality of the behavior of funeral homes, compellingly diminishes the force of any critical attitude, as if death must extinguish every effort of imagination (Foucault, 2001l: 779). And here Foucaults imagination is itself a form of counter-conduct, a vision of
. . . the possibility of places without geography or schedule where one would enter in order to try to find, in the midst of the most ridiculous scenery, with nameless partners, opportunities to die free of all identity: one would have an indeterminate time there, seconds, weeks, perhaps months, until, with an imperious self-evidence, the opportunity presented itself that one would immediately recognize one could not miss: it would have the form without form of pleasure, absolutely simple. (ibid.: 779)

In his book Suicidios ejemplares, the magnificent Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas speaks of his favorite character who gave himself a worthy death and did it in a daring way as a protest for so much stupidity and in the fullness of passion since he did not wish to be dissolved obscurely with the flowing of the years (Vila-Matas, 1994: 11). These phrases, a daring way, a protest, the fullness of passion, the will not to be dissolved obscurely are expressions, marks of counter-conduct. Vila-Matass description is almost a response to a question posed by Foucault:
It seems that life is fragile in the human species and death certain. Why must we make of this certainty a matter of chance, that takes on, by its sudden or inevitable character, the air of a punishment? (Foucault, 2001l: 778)

To encounter death in a passive and impotent way as a punishment or to confront death with a passionate protest if we do not want the end of our life to be governed in the first way, we have to create a counter-conduct, what Vila-Matas calls the only possible fullness, suicidal fullness (Vila-Matas, 1994: 23). The ethical and political impact of counter-conduct is also at the heart of Foucaults last courses, concerned with the practice of parrhesia, and is especially prominent in his discussion of the apex of philosophical counter-conduct, namely Cynic parrhesia and the Cynic way of life. The Cynic discourse that challenged all of the dependencies on social

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institutions, the Cynic recourse to scandalous behavior that called into question collective habits and standards of decency, Cynic courage in the face of danger all of this parrhesiastic conduct could not but result in the association of this behavior with dog-like conduct: the noble philosophers of Greece, who usually comprised an elite group, almost always disregarded the Cynics (Foucault, 2001n: 122).8 Cynic provocation stands as an emblem of the risks and the intensities of counter-conduct. In an interview from 1971, speaking of the relationship between his work and what students are trying to do, Foucault concludes:
What I am trying to do is to understand the implicit systems that determine, without our ever being aware of it, our most familiar conduct. . . . We have to unmask our rituals and make them appear as what they are: purely arbitrary things linked to our bourgeois mode of life. It is good and this is the true theater to transcend them in the mode of a game, in a playful and ironic mode; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice-versa). One should put into play, exhibit, transform and overturn the systems that peacefully order us. As for me, that is what I am trying to do in my work.9 (Foucault, 2001o: 10601)

Politically and ethically, counter-conduct is the invention of a new philosophical concept. If counter-conduct at the end of life can be decisively shocking, we should not underestimate its more everyday occasions throughout the course of ones early life. Notwithstanding the cultural diversity of conduct, one of the most universal and dispiriting memories of every childs life is the constant exclamation of adults: behave yourself. Let us hope that it is an admonition that we can still learn to combat. Notes
A shorter version of this article was published as the introduction to the paperback edition of `ge de France. 1977Michel Foucaults Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Colle 1978. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Material from this introduction is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The longer version published here was written in Italian, and I was therefore confronted by the unpleasant task of translating myself from Italian back into English. Although English is no longer the language in which I most often write, I have done everything in my power to sound like the native English-language speaker that I am. Versions of this text were given as lectures in Italy, France and the United States, and I am especially grateful to my students at the University of Pisa for their interest in and discussions of this material. 1. I have very slightly modified Graham Burchells more elegant translation of the end of this sentence in order to make it as literal as possible. 2. Translation slightly modified. 3. The second quoted phrase appears on p. 198 of the French edition of Security, Territory, Population. 4. Although this essay was first published in 1982, there is compelling internal evidence that parts of it were written several years earlier. 5. See the chapter on Mill in Cavell (2004), as well as Donatelli (2007). 6. The book is unpaginated.

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7. The idea of regime of veridiction is central to Foucaults The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault, 2008); see especially the lectures of 10 and 17 January 1979. This notion is introduced in Foucault (2001j). 8. For Foucaults detailed discussion of the Cynics, see Foucault (2001n: 11533) and his final course at the Colle ` ge de France (Foucault, 2009). 9. I am indebted to Daniele Lorenzini for reminding me of this passage.

Bibliograpghy
Berdu n, L. (2007) Il nostro sesso. Come farlo bene. Rome: Cooper. The original Spanish edition was published in 2004. Cavell, S. (2004) Cities of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donatelli, P. (2007) Introduzione a Mill. Rome and Bari: Laterza. , vol. 1, La Volonte de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1976) Histoire de la sexualite , vol. 2, LUsage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1984) Histoire de la sexualite te Foucault, M. (1990) Quest-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufkla rung], Bulletin de la socie franc aise de philosophie (avriljuin): 3563 (39). crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, pp. Foucault, M. (2001a) Non au sexe roi, in Dits et e 25669. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, Foucault, M. (2001b) Le sujet et le pouvoir, in Dits et e pp. 104162. ` propos de la ge Foucault, M. (2001c) A ne alogie de le thique: un aperc u du travail en cours, in crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 142850. Dits et e crits, Foucault, M. (2001d) Le thique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberte , in Dits et e vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 152748. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Foucault, M. (2001e) Entretien avec M. Foucault, in Dits et e Paris: Gallimard, pp. 110514. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Foucault, M. (2001f) De lamitie comme mode de vie, in Dits et e Gallimard, pp. 9826. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Foucault, M. (2001g) Choix sexuel, acte sexuel, in Dits et e Gallimard, pp. 113954. Foucault, M. (2001h) Le triomphe social du plaisir sexuel: une conversation avec Michel crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 112733. Foucault, in Dits et e Foucault, M. (2001i) Michel Foucault, une interview: sexe, pouvoir et la politique de lidentite , crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 155465. in Dits et e crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Foucault, M. (2001j) Table ronde du 20 mai 1978, in Dits et e Gallimard, pp. 83953. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Foucault, M. (2001k) Quest-ce que les Lumie ` res?, in Dits et e Gallimard, pp. 138197. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Paris: Gallimard, Foucault, M. (2001l) Un plaisir si simple, in Dits et e pp. 7779. crits, vol. II, 19761988. Foucault, M. (2001m) Conversation avec Werner Schroeter, in Dits et e Paris: Gallimard, pp. 10709. Foucault, M. (2001n) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). crits, vol. I, 19541975. Foucault, M. (2001o) Conversation avec Michel Foucault, in Dits et e Paris: Gallimard, pp. 105061.

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`ge de France, 19741975. New York: Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal: Lectures at the Colle Picador. Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. rite . Paris: Seuil. Foucault, M. (2009) Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: le courage de la ve Mathews, H. (1993) Singular Pleasures. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Mill, J. S. M. (1977) On Liberty, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XVIII, ed. J. M. Robson. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. moignages. Paris: Librairie Ge Paquet, L., ed. (1992) Les Cyniques grecs. Fragments et te ne rale Franc aise. Vila-Matas, E. (1994) Suicidi esempleri. Palermo: Sellerio. The original Spanish edition was published in 1991.

Biographical note
Arnold I. Davidson is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Professor of the History of Political Philosophy at the University of Pisa. He is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality and co-author of a book of conversations with Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness. He is also the coeditor of the standard French anthology of Michel Foucaults writings, Michel Foucault. Philosophie, and is the series editor of the Englishlanguage edition of the 13 volumes of Foucaults courses at the Colle ` ge de France.

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