Foucault's work has often been attacked as nihilistic and despairing. His histories are seen to be interesting or even compelling, but, ultimately, exasperating. He argues that we create delinquents and a criminal milieu with our prisons and our paroles; he tells us that, from the Catholic confessional to the psychiatrist's couch, we have produced ourselves as beings with a sexuality that must be explored and managed; he tells us that in our asylums, our prisons, our schools, our workplaces, and even our homes, we subject ourselves to practices of surveillence, classification and differentiation that manufacture the identities we have to recognize in ourselves and which others have to see in us, but he does not tell us what we should do.