Congregational Studies, Selection 13: Food part 3, or: Let me ramble about Foucault for a moment

From what theoretical perspective is a will-to-a-self-discipline-of-food best viewed? The theoretical underpinnings of Mary Douglas’s pioneering study of food in relation to religion and ritual, in which food events encode social order, have not gone unchallenged in other disciplines, yet her approach remains largely unchallenged within the discourse of “lived religion”; it is taken for granted that meals are “symbolic” acts and are thus able to be decoded according to some total system of symbols specific to a closed-off culture. But surely this approach will not suffice.

In attempting to find an explanation, I turn first to Michel Foucault, who touches on eating practices in his History of Sexuality. In a careful study of sexual politics in pre-Christian Greece, Foucault recognizes a preoccupation with the relationships between pleasure, health, life, and death that manifested itself in dietetic practices, or, “a matter of regimen aimed at regulating an activity that was recognized as being important for health.”[1]

In general, dietetics did not moderate pleasure in the spirit of any overarching moral judgment as to their “goodness” or “evilness”; instead, Foucault suggests that dietetics sought to “integrate it as fully as possible into the management of health and the life of the body” (p. 98). As such, dietetics was not exclusively or even mostly concerned with moderating sexual activity, but was an all-encompassing regimen for the moderation of food, drink, exercise, sleep, and so on. “Dietetics,” Foucault maintains, “was a strategic art in the sense that it ought to permit one to respond to circumstances in a reasonable, hence useful, manner” (p. 106). Such regimens, in other words, allowed the ancient Greeks to adapt to different situations by adjusting their behavior to fit both temporal and spatial circumstance.

Early regimens, Foucault notes with some surprise, were more concerned with food—“considered in terms of their peculiar qualities, and of the circumstances in which they were consumed” (p. 114)—than they were with sexual activity. This is in definite contrast to the portrait of early modern Europe that Foucault paints in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which bourgeois societies of the seventeenth century forward experience “a veritable discursive explosion” on the subject of sex, to the extent that sexuality, in contemporary society, becomes the primary means of self-identification.[2]

But if Foucault’s dietetic model is suggestive of a substantial epistemological shift toward sexuality as the basic means through which identity is self-discovered—or, as Deleuze puts it in his magisterial reading of Foucault, if a differential process has separated sexuality from the “alimentary” (or nutritive) concerns to become “the place in which the relation to oneself became enacted”[3]—where does this leave food? Since Foucault’s project is to trace the history of sexuality, he is only interested in food inasmuch as it intersects with sex and turns away from food in the second volume and only goes on to briefly reference diet in the third volume of The History. His dietetics of food thus remains more suggestive than explanatory.

NOTES

[1]
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1984]), 97-98. Hereafter, page numbers from this volume will be referenced parenthetically.

[2]
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978 [1976]), 17.

[3]
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 102.