![]()
p.1
1 The gay science
Intimate experiments with the problem of HIV
| Hedonia: | Drink this. |
| Dale Arden: | What is it? |
| Hedonia: | It has no name. Many brave men died to bring it here from the Galaxy of Pleasure . . . |
| Dale Arden: | Will it make me forget? |
| Hedonia: | No, but it will make you not mind remembering |
(Flash Gordon, 1980, dir. M. Hodges)
p.2
The demon of Nietzsche’s Gay Science (2001, p. 194) steals into our loneliest loneliness with a speculative riddle that asks us what we might make of our lives were every moment to be repeated ad infinitum. The demon’s thought-experiment sparks a question that is daunting, ethical, practical and entirely worldly in its implications: what manner of relating to the events of the present might we devise that would enable us to bear the possibility of their infinite recurrence? This is an active and open question, and one that deserves many responses. But when it comes to the prospect of unbearable or unwanted sex, Universal Pictures’ Flash Gordon (Hodges 1980) proposes a partial antidote: a strange potion brought by brave men from the Galaxy of Pleasure, whose arduous voyage is said to have cost many of them their lives. The concubine Hedonia advises that the potion won’t knock you out or erase the dreaded experience so much as mediate it so that the prospect of remembering it will not seem so bad. Read alongside and against each other, these quivering scenes of anticipation and apprehension prefigure many of the questions and topics this book addresses. How should we engage a world that is at risk of closing in on people or completely shutting down, all because of the seemingly unbearable dangers, risks and apprehensions that persistently pervade sex even in the fourth decade of the HIV epidemic? What are the risks and benefits of different ways of apprehending and mediating sexual and other risky experiences? These questions require individual responses, but they also constitute practical, technical and public matters of concern: how should we (as people at risk, scientists, policy-makers, affected communities, sexual subjects and social actors) grasp the HIV epidemic and the relations through which the virus is transmitted? No one could ever hope to answer such questions once and for all. Instead, this book ventures a partial response to such matters in the hope of generating new interest in the question of how we might best attend to such problems and multiply our collective capacities for responsiveness.
This book is about the risks and pleasures of HIV science – its involvement in the production of situations it cannot anticipate, its capacity to reorganise social and material worlds. I investigate the encounter between HIV social science and the sexual practices of gay and other men who have sex with men in the urban centres of Australia over the past two decades with reference to comparable developments in Europe, the USA and Canada. Commonly regarded as birthplaces of modern gay identity, these locations persist as key sites of HIV prevalence among gay and other men who have sex with men (MSM). But they have also given rise to distinctive innovations in HIV prevention, education, research and care. Scientific conceptions of sexual risk have been transformed in their encounter with this population, just as this group’s sexual practices have been transformed in its encounter with HIV science. This book analyses some of the ways this has taken place to affirm the transformative potential of both science and sex.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, the behaviour of MSM has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the sociomedical sciences. But here I will approach this as more than just another instance of pervasive social control and surveillance. Certainly, the HIV policy field has relied upon the disciplinary practices of the human sciences in its efforts to control the spread of the epidemic. But these sciences are also among the principal ways in which those at risk learn to be affected by HIV. This raises a question whose significance I take to be no less critical than it is practical: what knowledge practices might best engage the relevant publics, move them and increase their powers and capacities for action?
p.3
As a gay man who started working in HIV social research in 1997 – the year the effectiveness of combination therapy was announced to the world – I do not claim to stand outside this history as some sort of detached or neutral observer. These events have transformed me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated at that time. I was diagnosed as HIV positive the year before. Whether I like it or not, this book will demonstrate some of the implications of the emotional and social situation of the researcher for the research process. The field of cultural studies has spent much time and effort reckoning with the risks and benefits of ‘acknowledging partiality and admitting one’s attraction to the culture under investigation’ (Gregg 2006, p. 142). But in this statement culture appears external to the subject investigating it. More often than not, I have found myself in the midst of things. Acknowledging one’s social and emotional location and how it shapes one’s research is beset with difficulties, but in this book I affirm the necessity of trying to do so. In this sense, this book can be situated as an exercise in cultural studies of science and sexuality: it presents a series of personal and social experiments with the problem of HIV.
Gay science
My title pays homage to ‘The Gay Science’, an interview with Michel Foucault that Jean Bitoux conducted in 1978, which also happened to be one of the first occasions Foucault discussed his homosexuality publicly (Foucault 2011; Halperin 2011). The interview sheds light on the sort of intervention Foucault hoped to make in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1984), the publication of which had met with confusion and perplexity on the part of sexual liberationists in France. Rather than trying to undermine activist efforts, Foucault insisted in this interview that his entrée into the history of sexuality was intended to effect a ‘change in the axis’ of the sexual liberation movements (2011, p. 388). In place of ‘sex-desire’, he had argued that ‘bodies and pleasures’ – ‘in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance’ – ought to form the rallying point against the regime of sexuality (Foucault 1984, p. 157). But what is the difference between ‘sex-desire’ and ‘bodies and pleasures’? In ‘The Gay Science’, Foucault explained his view that the liberationist enthusiasm for uncovering and liberating the truth of desire was likely to lead right back into the clutches of therapeutic power. Given the medical and psychological stranglehold on the theorisation of desire, the concept was all too prone to operate as:
p.4
(2011, p. 389)
To counter this situation, Foucault conceives pleasure in the following terms:
(2011, pp. 389–90)
The Gay Science takes inspiration from the idea of pleasure as an event, and uses it to propose a novel way of grasping the world-changing effects not only of pleasure, but also science and the government of risk. To do this, I draw from work in the fields of science and technology studies and the philosophy of science, where the concept of the event has been used to displace the sovereign assurance implicit in the notion of the scientific ‘discoverer’ (Whitehead & Sherburne 1981; Latour 1999; Stengers 2000; Fraser 2010; Michael 2012). An event directs attention to the transformations undergone by all the elements that enter into it, including the figure of the scientist or the human subject. In treating pleasure and science as similarly involved in processes of eventuation, I hope to engender more active forms of attention to the manner in which their constituent elements come together, their contingencies and the differences these make to worlds and lives.
Foucault’s distinction between pleasure and desire can be understood as a sophisticated intervention into given arrangements of knowledge and power and the disciplinary operation of the human sciences. It tackles conventional assumptions about who should get to define erotic experience and make authoritative determinations about individuals on this basis (i.e. medical experts or the subjects in question?). Promoting ‘the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance’ requires at least some degree of interest and engagement with the situations, attachments and trajectories of particular bodies and more: it constitutes these bodies as sources of expertise and political/pragmatic possibility (Foucault 1984, p. 157). The tradition of HIV social science that informs much of my work in this field has focused on the social pragmatics of pleasure rather than the psychology of desire. I believe Foucault’s distinction between desire and pleasure provides a basis for differentiating between different modes of sexuality and drug research and assessing their disciplinary implications (Race 2008). Rather than pathologising desires to typecast and administer individuals, this book promotes a more pragmatic, situated and speculative approach to the experience of bodies and pleasures with the aim of staving off some of the more deterministic effects of both the behavioural sciences and identity politics.
p.5
The title of Bitoux’s interview pays homage, in turn, to Nietzsche’s philosophical work The Gay Science (2001), a book of poems and aphorisms whose key provocation is that science has never been about truth but is rightly grounded in the passions of the body – ‘the passion of the knowledge seeker is a very erotic drive’, as Babich puts it (2006, p. 102). Nietzsche’s Gay Science expresses an opposition to the nineteenth-century ideals of a positivist, measuring science that many modern empiricists may find alarming. It is nonetheless dedicated to the notion of science as a practice of fearless questioning; thus the question of method becomes a central problem. Nietzsche hoped to devise an affirmative style of thought that could make sense of painful experiences of the body – illness, suffering, disappointment, misrecognition and death – to enact a transmutation of shame in the activity of thought. ‘To what extent can truth endure incorporation?’ Nietzsche asks. ‘That is the question, that is the experiment’ (2001, p. 112) – a pertinent question for HIV prevention, if ever there was one.
‘A “gay” science, emphasizing light and laughter, has well-known risks’, Babich observes, for ‘success in the parodic art of laughter seems to block the seriousness of science’ (2006, p. 97). Indeed, Nietzsche’s contemporaries balked at his project: ‘“Gay” it may be, but it is certainly not “science”’, they reportedly objected (cited in Babich 2006, p. 97). But those who dismiss the applicability of Nietzsche’s argument to the practices of modern science may be writing his work off a little too hastily. The Gay Science conceived science as both an ascetic and empirical practice to promote the profoundly serious endeavour of playing or experimenting with yourself in your own thinking, ‘varying the effects of health, illness, convalescence, or the persistence of illness and pain on thought itself’, as Babich puts it (2006, p. 99). Rather than denying bodily experience, Nietzsche promotes an approach to knowledge that would acknowledge and affirm such experiences. ‘Something as fundamental as our erotic attachment to life . . . is at issue’ in this work (Pippin 2000, p. 142).
Problems as intimate experiments
The connections between the passionate science promoted by Nietzsche and Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality have yet to be explored in sufficient detail, but one key to these connections might be found in Foucault’s concept of problematisation. Foucault first deployed the concept to refer to the ‘ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought’ (cited in Rabinow 2005, p. 43). As an analytic approach, the term is most familiar among governmentality scholars, who take the analysis of problematisations to enable a ‘freeing up’ of possibilities, since it allows one to imagine how a given problem-situation might be otherwise enacted on the basis of a different set of perceptions, framings and practices (Rabinow 2005, p. 43). Many of the chapters in this book draw on this approach to wrestle with given ways of understanding certain problems in the field of HIV and make proposals about how they might be formulated or enacted otherwise. However, problematisation remains a rather disembodied affair within much of the governmentality scholarship, and this aspect obstructs exploration of some of the more radical implications of this approach. It is striking that Foucault elaborates his understanding of problematisation towards the end of his life, in the midst of undertaking genealogical research on the history of sexuality, for example. From the opening pages of The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History of Sexuality, it is clear Foucault regards this ‘exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’ as a form of ascesis in terms that resonate with Nietzsche’s emphasis on playing or experimenting with the body (1990, p. 9). In his introduction to the volume, Foucault asks, ‘what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness, and not, in one way or another . . . in the knower’s straying afield of himself?’ (1990, p. 8). The emphasis here on straying afield of the self suggests an approach to knowledge and research grounded in experiences of curiosity and pleasure, motivated by the need to think and feel otherwise. This emphasis recalls Foucault’s remarks in a number of late interviews about the creative possibilities of sex, drugs and pleasure which he illustrated with reference to the experimental cultures of gay life he encountered in the late 1970s (Foucault 1997a, 1997b, 2011). In these interviews, Foucault discusses the possibilities of self-overcoming through experimenting with bodies and pleasures and the possibili...
