Foucault, interviews, and interpretation

According to Foucault, if one analyzes discursive formations, one does not interpret: there is no hermeneutic since the object of analysis is not language but what he calls the statement. Or rather, one builds up the formation according to the registration of statements and the isolation of their required principles of dispersion and redistribution--because this is the case, there is no hermeneutic.
This requires us to reflect a little: no interpretation? Is this a correct description of his own method? Let's step back a bit and look at one instance in which interpretation is or is not at play in Foucault's work.
David Glover in a pretty recent issue of the journal New Formations (entitled "Foucault Talk") marvels at the immense patience of Foucault in his countless interviews on the topic of sex after the publication of his History of Sexuality: Foucault was asked any and every question as to what sex meant when it was precisely his contention in that history that sex only meant something within the domain of sexuality. Sex was not the essence of sexuality, it was the specific acts that built up a regularity of sexuality and channeled or distributed power. One gets the sense that Glover's wonder at the persistence of the thinker has as its flipside a wonder at the stupidity of especially Anglo-American interlocutors in these interviews. But, I would contend, this disdain of Glover's is misplaced, and perhaps is only an instance of that typical philosophic prejudice (which Foucault himself was constantly combating) that makes the discussion of sex acts, or acts related to this domain, less important or less worthy of a philosopher's time than the "doctrine" of the philosopher that he is "applying" in the interview. I would contend, that is, that people weren't asking the wrong questions with Foucault "patiently" avoiding the issue of sex--as if it was not worthy of his "system"--and, when he did answer, was only trying to get them to focus on what he "really" was about in his History: sexuality as a discourse, as a field of power, as a domain of subjectivation.
As you can see if you read his wonderful 1982 interview in Toronto centering on sex acts and S&M ("Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity"), the point is precisely that Foucault is able to bring acts related to sex or, more accurately, instances of pleasure, within the domain of sexuality that he is sketching in his History. In other words, the point of much of that interview is to try and include S&M as a particular instance of pleasure into the larger field of his recently published study--or at least set up a relationship between the study and S&M. The interviews therefore aren't tiresome misinterpretations of what Foucault is about, with Foucault responding only to correct an interlocutor who just is focused on sex acts, or thinks Foucault is some sex-god come down to tell him all sorts of interesting meanings he can find in sex, as Glover would make us think. The interviews are Foucault trying to articulate how sexuality bears upon sex acts and especially upon acts that have interesting relationships to sex like S&M. The result is that he is not responding only from within his wholly-constituted, solid, definite theoretical position (everyone wants a philosopher to talk from the standpoint of his philosophy: can one imagine Kant saying something not Kantian?), but a bit outside it--or rather, on the edge of it, in the area where it is being tested, where the his history of sexuality may only somewhat come in to the discussion. In short, he's not speaking entirely within the viewpoint of his "philosophy," precisely because that would be to use that philosophy (and especially that philosophy qua genealogy/archaeology/history) to interpret. So, what he does is suggest a particular connection, but then simply restate his central thesis in the book regarding sexuality.
Why would this be interpretation? Because it would extend the description that constitutes the analysis of a discursive formation and power into something that bears upon sex wherever it appears--in short, it would be to elevate history (finite empiricity, for Foucault) to the level of ontology (finite transcendence, for someone like Heidegger). This is due to how the analysis of discourse is not interpretation precisely because it merely describes the modality of the existence of statements--that is, fields of differences or relations by which a statement is the way it is: in short, it does not apply to any domain outside itself except by provoking the discursive analysis of other situations. So when someone asks Foucault about S&M, he does not try and immediately fit it within his analysis of sexuality--as if the analysis of a discourse could account for anything and everything like an ontology. Instead, he tries to lift the domain of this particular practice of pleasure to the level where it would play a role in a discursive formation, if allied with other statements. This formation, indeed, might turn out to be sexuality--but this has to be worked out a bit more.
In other words, S&M means too much when he is asked about it for him to comment from the perspective of his history of sexuality as it is already constituted: it is too much of a meaningful act. (We can see this in how we commonly refer to it precisely as something with a relationship to a "sex act" and not as a richer domain of pleasure on its own--not that, of course, it should relinquish any relationship with sex acts or sexuality.) Let me be clearer, for it is not that S&M must lose its meaning. Rather, it must become a richer historical fact in order for it to be analyzed within the domain of sexuality as it is constituted by Foucault--in short, it simply lies outside the sphere of the analysis he completes as a historian. But this is for essential, and not contingent, reasons--and it does not mean that S&M must be something that is "over with" (history is not simply what is in the past, for Foucault). The level of formation at which he is looking at sexuality in the History is simply not exactly right to get into S&M at any length--this is why he steps back from saying, in the interview, that S&M is something that can be immediately related to sexuality. But this is also why--and Glover cannot account for this--Foucault continues to analyze it there with his interviewer. What needs to be done, for Foucault, is to determine the limits and the context of S&M and try and find a level of formation where it could interact with other discourses or other disciplines, one of which may be sexuality. In short, Foucault tries to show the interviewer that S&M is not as much of a fact as he assumes it is: something immediately significant, something that, merely by virtue of its being an act or an event, has meaning. He is trying to show this interviewer that it perhaps is, qua act, also an instance or a statement governed by the rules of a discourse and the power that sustains and proliferates within it. Or, perhaps put better (why does a philosopher always have to seem like he is correcting his interviewer?), Foucault is, with the help of his interviewer, bringing S&M into the field where it can link up with discourses, where it can be seen as more mobile and also more delicate (it has finer and more determining limits)--that is, when it is precisely less of a phenomenon that needs to be interpreted and more of a non-phenomenon, an instance of representation, that has a specific mode of existence and a way of occurring in accordance with regularities.
This all means that Foucault is bringing S&M, with and not despite his interviewer, into the sphere where it will need no hermeneutic--there will need to be, insofar as history is concerned (that is, insofar as this does not exclude all sorts of other modes of analysis), only description of it. Of course, things get tricky as to how this precisely is done: indeed, there might be hermeneutic decisions to be made as to how to gain this descriptive perspective. But the goal is clear, and one doesn't have to start from this non-descriptive point of view anyway: one can just begin at the level of the analysis of statements, within that perspective.
I should also note that this also allows Foucault to comment as a person--that is, he can switch back and forth between the descriptive perspective and back into some more quirky comments sex acts he may personally enjoy or knows of others enjoying. In other words, Foucault might not be helping the interviewer, or letting the interviewer help him, at any of these occasions as well--for the simple reason that he does not really indicate when he is speaking descriptively or more personally. This creates many problems in reading an interview of Foucault, one of which Leo Bersani once, with amazing rigor and unbelievable accuracy, pointed out: at the same time as he could sound extreme or radical in his politics precisely via analyzing certain sex acts or certain dynamics of contemporary sexuality, and bringing both together, he could also be talking more descriptively, lodging the grounds for this togetherness elsewhere, in a history of sexuality that might have some bearing here. At the very worst, this allows Foucault to precisely make his own idiosyncratic pleasures sound radical--and gesture for proof not at the more interesting and wide ranging aspects of the history, but the bare fact that they are connected to a general project of the expansion and proliferation of pleasure. This makes acts with which his may be associated lose the political burden they have, unfortunately manifested most crudely in their typical production of white, male heterosexual revulsion: this results in him sometimes looking like he is saying that

the revulsion, it turns out, is all a big mistake: what we're really up to is pluralism and diversity, and getting buggered is just one moment in the practice of those laudable humanistic virtues. Foucault could be especially perverse about all this: challenging, provoking, and yet, in spite of is radical intentions, somewhat appeasing in his emphases.
-in "Is the Rectum a Grave?"

I would argue though, with what I imagine would be Bersani's aggreement, that Foucault only does this occasionally (though more than one might think)--and that anyway what is most important is that even the confusion he produces here cannot be profitably read if one looks at it as a mere deviation from his grand "philosophy," as Glover seems to do. If anything it indicates only the opposite--and in turn shows how especially amenable the philosophical gesture of appealing to established doctrines or systems is to fostering (though Glover is way far from engaging in this) precisely that humanistic revulsion. However, my point here was to carve out a space in between, I guess, the personal and the philosophical where Foucault is working--it seems to me--most of the time in these amazing interviews. This presupposes the fact that interpretation, for him, is something we can indeed dispense with if we think hard enough and look at discourse in the right way. Foucault is clear about all this in the following, with which we will end this post:

The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: it does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were "really" saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain, the proliferation of thoughts, images, or fantasies that inhabit them; but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence, what it means to them to have come into existence, to have left traces, and perhaps to remain there, awaiting the moment when they might be of use once more; what it means to them to have appeared when and where they did--they and no others. From this point of view, there is no such thing as a latent statement: for what one is concerned with is a fact of language.
-The Archaeology of Knowledge, 109

Or, in the French (somewhat too literally translated into the English above, except for the last clause, which is much more ambiguous in the original):

L'analyse énonciative est donc une analyse historique, mais qui se tient hors de toute interprétation: aux choses dites, elle ne demande pas ce qu'elles cachent, ce qui s'était dit en elles et malgré elles le non-dit qu'elles recouverent, le foisonnement de pensées, d'images ou de fantasmes qui les habitent; mais au contraire sur quel mode elles existent, ce que c'est pour elles d'avoir été manifestées, d'avoir laissé des traces et peut-être de demeurer là, pour une réutilisation éventuelle; ce que c'est pour elles d'être apparues--et nulle autre à leur place. De ce point de vue, on ne reconnaît pas d'énoncé latent: car ce à qui on s'adresse, c'est à la patence du langage effectif.
-L'archéologie du savoir, 143-4