Notes on: Foucault, M.(1979)
The History of Sexuality, vol. 1.Guildford:
Allen Lane Press
[This is a
useful source for discussions of discourse and
power, the links between power and knowledge in
mobilizing fragment of discourse.It
also has the usual very flowery French style
with lots of illustration from literary figures,
which I have largely ignored or brutalized.Morris,
M. 1982 “A review of Michel Foucault’s La
Volonté de Savoir”. In Human
Sexual Relations, M.Brake
(ed.), 245—73. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books is
an excellent review.There
have been some good feminist critiques in Ramazanoglu and Fraser, and a general
critique in
DeCerteau focused on the
'evidence']
Part
one.The normal view is that sexuality has
been heavily repressed and only recently
liberated, but this is mistaken.It
is the other way around—a long history of
invitations to discourse about sex.This
is seen in examples such as prolific Victorian
pornography, including the amazingly detailed
daily account by ‘Walter’, in the development
of various confessionals, and in the emergence
of sexology (sex was discussed and depicted in
scientific terms in the West, and in artistic
forms in the East).
Part
two.We can see in Walter, de Sade and other
examples of this invitation to discourse, a
‘political, economic and technical invitation
to talk about sex’ (23).This
was combined with a desire for an
‘accounting’, linked to a concern with
population and procreation, and the perceived
need, obsession even, to control the sexual
activity of children.Speaking
openly about sex is a way of domesticating it,
and this was grasped early—in 1776, there was
a public demonstration of French adolescents
speaking of sexuality without shame or
embarrassment (29).At
the same time, there were legal campaigns to
restrict actual sex with underage people: so
we have a number of discourses at work, not
just legal regulation, but ‘efforts at
adjustment and retranscription…a
regulated and polymorphous invitation to
discourse’ (34).
It
was the apparently purely biological nature of
sex which was to be repressed and replaced
with a discursive dynamics.Sex
was seen ‘as a secret whose discovery is
imperative’ (35), needing to be forced into
the open by language.It’s
possible to see this in FreudoMarxist terms as
driven ultimately by a need for social
control, but if so, this happened through
multiplication not reduction, multiple
‘implantation’.For example, the replacement of the old
definite rigorous categories of perversion,
embodied in Christian law before the 18th
century, with a much more multiple and
‘scientific’ classification, shifts in the
terminology of the perverted in terms of the
physical and moral sources of their
deviations.
Discursive
power does more than just simply forbid.It
can wield different power mechanisms as well.For
example the crusade against children’s onanism
joins in a general demand for educational and
moral reform.This facilitated a general and
widespread control of the child, eternal
vigilance and policing even by its parents.More
explicitly, the discourses on perversions led
to whole new definitions of individuality: the
sodomite became not a permanent criminal but a
‘case’, with a history and a ‘singular
nature’, not possessed by ‘a perpetual sin’
(43).Discourse
provides these new definitions with reality
rather than just suppressing sexual activity.In
a way it solidifies the perversions by
classifying them.
These
new identities require talk, interrogation,
investigation and so on, as in the general
process of medicalization.There
is another odd relation between pleasure and
power revealed here—taking pleasure in the
power to classify on the one hand, and
pleasure and evading or resisting
classificatory power on the other.Power
serves to ‘anchor’ [solidify, realize] this
pleasure (45).
So
sexual discourses create lots of oppositions
and polarities, and do not just insist that
everything should be reduced to the norm of
heterosexuality.Families are seen as a network of
pleasures, a system of powers affecting
adults, children and servants.Discursive
power extends the form of sexuality and pushes
sexuality into more and more aspects of life.It
both produces perversions and confines them to
their proper physical and social space.
Part
three.The emergence of a science of sex
clearly shows the influence of values and
morals.Early
forms were openly medical and condemnatory,
connected to biological and racist world views
(54).Approaches
were very limited and confined, mechanisms of
misunderstanding (56).This
was partly because of the limits of definite
apparatuses used to force sexual disclosures.The
best example is the catholic confessional,
which is a technique for producing truth, but
a very limited one, having to follow definite
rules of procedure.Power
was marshalled to force the confessant, an
example of a power/knowledge nexus (60).Confession
is also a form of constructing the subject,
who has to submit to the rules for power of
the confessional [rather Althusserian here?].The
confessant is in the presence of an authority
who guides and prescribes, urges obstacles to
be overcome, and forgives only at the end.
Confessional
techniques were widespread and became
transformed producing an interest in
explaining sexual acts.The
same techniques became solidified in
psychiatry, for example.This
needed a change in discourse away from
religious conceptions of the juridico – legal.This
happened following clinical codification of
symptoms and so on; a ‘postulate of general
and diffuse causality’ which saw sex as at the
bottom of every act and every malady, which
justifies an exhaustive examination; sex needs
to be forced into the open because it is
inherently obscure and elusive; there is a
need for interpretation not just forgiveness,
as in the Freudian process of transference;
there is a medicalization of effects so that
sexual pathologies can be cured.The
whole exercise needed complex discourses to
get at the truth.The
effort also led to suspicion and fear of the
effects of sexuality, which tended to be self
confirming.We can still see them in the notion of
the subject with an [unruly] Unconscious.Again,
there are pleasures for the analyst (including
the narrative pleasures of developing the true
discourse) (71).Once again, there is no underlying
mechanism of repression here, and these can be
seen as positive [as in constructive] results
of the mechanisms of power.
Part
four.There is a history of the will to truth
and what energises it.We
need some way of analyzing power which breaks
with the juridical and explains the
connections between power and desire.This
would overturn the argument that says there is
only a negative relation between power and
sex, that power blocks or bans; that power
attempts to order sex by rules; that power
prohibits, offering a choice between the
denial of self or suppression, an ‘alternative
between two nonexistences’ (84) [sounds a bit
like Irigaray’s suspicions here].This
corresponds to accounts of how censorship
works in various stages—sex does not exist, it
is not allowed to appear, it must remain
silent.Power
does not operate with a uniform approach at
all levels, it is not a combination of
legislative power and obedient subjects (85).This
notion of power is integral to legitimation,
however, and appears as the final limit set on
an otherwise free subject.[There
is a hint of connotations of freedom from, as
modern forms abolish feudal constraints, 87].
The legal basis of power actually was
confused, for example in terms of the role of
the monarch, and this led to complex forms
even though the old power/sovereignty model
remained.
Power
is not just exercised in institutions or by
particular groups, nor is it nonviolent
subjugation, nor a general system of
domination.It is rather a process, a system, or a
collection of struggles and force relations
crystallized in apparatuses.It
is omnipresent, found in every relation,
producing the notion of a ‘complex strategical
situation’ in which we can detect it.It
is not confined to one personal position, and
not exterior to other relationships.It
is directly productive.It
comes from below rather than from any binary
or basic [class] opposition.It
produces ‘major dominions… the
hegemonic effects that are sustained by all
these confrontations’ (94).
Power
relations are therefore intentional in that
they are imbued with calculation, but they are
not just tactical: they are connected to
theoretical systems.There
is always resistance, but this is still active
inside power, it is itself relational.There
is therefore a plurality of resistances,
distributed irregularly.These
can be codified and combined to produce a
revolutionary situation.[It
all sounds very much to me like a fancy French
version of good old ‘conflict theory’
associated with Dahrendorf and others, and
even hijacked by the gramscians: power is
everywhere, so politics is everywhere, and we
must all do our best to struggle.However,
if everything is saturated with power, we
can’t really prioritize, and we seem committed
to spending as much energy struggling over the
labelling on packets of seeds as we do going
on strike].
What
we should be studying is the power relations
at work in sex, how they have been deployed
and linked in terms of general discourses [or
moral panics as we normally call them], their
interconnections and crystallizations
especially those focused on women or children.In
particular, we should: start with local
centres of power/knowledge, such as relations
between confessors and penitents, or children
and parents; investigate distributions of
power/knowledge not as they appear in
individuals but as ‘matrices of
transformations’ [pretty much like
figurations]; examine links between local and
overall strategies and tactics, the ‘strategic
envelope’, how local figures assist the
maneuvers of larger bodies (100).We
need to see that ‘in discourse, power and
knowledge are joined together’ (100),
producing multiple discursive elements using
various strategies.Discourse
is both an instrument and an effect of power
(101).Discourses
transmit power but can also undermine it—so
that naming homosexuals aids the control of
them but also lets them speak.Power
is thus understood as mostly focused on
tactics, as a multiple and mobile field of
force relations (102), not just a matter of
juridical institutions or sovereignty.
Sexuality
is the transfer point for relations of power,
and this has produced different sorts of
sexual politics.Four basic ‘unities’ have been
especially important: the hysterization of
female bodies, seeing women as thoroughly
sexual with effects on their nerves; the
pedagogization of children’s sex, seeing
children as leading to control their dangerous
sexual potential, especially with onanism; the
socialisation of fertility with its effects on
population and society; the psychiatrization
of perverse pleasure and the development of
clinical analysis.Overall,
we have four figures: 'the hysterical female,
the masturbating child, the malthusian couple,
and the perverse adult', each one
‘corresponding to one of these strategies’
(105). The emergence of these figures show the
importance of historical constructs of
sexuality, instead of some continual campaign
to control a natural level of sexuality.
The
argument is linked to notions of ‘alliances’,
for example where formal marriages were
replaced by those based on sexuality—these two
options can be contrasted in terms of
‘juridico – legal relations and polymorphous
power relations’ (106).The
latter emphasizes the body that produces and
consumes these relations: this is not just the
reproduction of the dominant group, but a more
general social programme.The
modern family anchors and supports sexuality,
it is the meeting point of alliance and
sexuality (108), it develops sexuality,
excites it, and invites discourse about
it—initially obsessed with incest.This
conception is supported by doctors and
psychiatrists who have produced notions of
pathological types of husband and wife,
helping to explain and resolve the conflict
between alliance and sexuality.Again,
the confessional mechanism is important, for
example in sexual science [brilliant examples
in the Masters and Johnson laboratories – in
Brake ibid] [or family counselling].Individuals
have been extracted from families and then
‘cured’ by being made compatible with them.In
France at least, the parent child relation was
at the heart of sexuality, clearly linked to
social control and the shift to the body.Social
control clearly related to the need for a
labour force managed in late capitalism
through the politics of sex [pretty standard
Freud/Marx then?]
There
were two ‘ruptures’ in the history of
sexuality, however, one in the 17th
century (greater prohibitions) and one in the
20th (relative tolerance).This
is still not the old repressive hypothesis
though because there were multiple datings and
sequences.This history is connected with changes
in racism and eugenics, where the perversions
initially resulted from a flawed ancestry, and
this turned into more demographic themes later
(118). Freud’s liberating side is apparent
since he also opposed genetic theories.
It
was the sexuality of young working class men
that was seen as particularly in need of
control.Family controls developed first in
bourgeois or aristocratic families, and this
spread to the working classes in a number of
complex articulations: there is ‘no unitary
sexual politics’ (122).The
ruling classes restricted themselves first
through an ‘intensification of the body’
(123), stressing health, vigour, self
affirmation, and ordering of life itself.Sex
here was seen as the essence of the body,
responsible for its dangers and future (124).Sexuality
for the bourgeois is the equivalent of blood
for the aristocracy [further discussed 145-50
as an important symbol, appearing for example
in Nazism].Again this is not all negative, but
provided a ‘dynamic racism of expansion…The
“spontaneous philosophy” of the bourgeoisie
is…not
as idealistic or castrating as is commonly
thought’ (125).There was an indifference to the bodies
of the other classes initially, but then an
interest in reforming legislation, focused on
proletarian bodies with themes of health and
education and so on. Sexuality was ‘foisted’
on to the proletariat, and met with an initial
refusal to accept bourgeois ‘garrulous
sexuality’.
The
repressive parts were actually found more in
the politics.Psychoanalysis was a comfort for the
bourgeoisie, for example allowing them to
represent their incestuous desires in
discourse.There was legal repression for others,
including the development of child welfare.These
policies show a mixture of repression and
tolerance at the same time, according to which
different classes are the target.Similarly,
psychoanalysis
is both liberating and repressive. Sexual
liberation as a grand strategy is doomed to
failure, since the shifts in sexual politics
have only been tactical: campaigns against
repression have simply been incorporated into
the history of its deployment (131).
Part
five.The power over life and death is
invested in the sovereign, who took life or
let people live, power as the right of seizure
or deduction.Power shifted to emphasize life and the
role of society in enhancing it—for example
the concept of total war saw the very survival
of society at stake.Sovereign
power
shifted to concern itself with [demanding]
deaths in war or rather than death on the
scaffold.Even the death penalty was latterly
seen as entirely negative, in terms of
withdrawing life.This
emphasis on life produces a fear of death
which we have today.
Power
over life itself focuses on the poles of both
the individual body and the species body or
population.We see the development of disciplines
to foster both and the growth of
administrative systems accordingly.Control
is an essential prerequisite for capitalism,
‘via investment of the body, its valorization
and the distributive management of the forces
[affecting it]’ (141).This
tendency is more important instead of, say,
Weber’s protestant ethic in the development of
capitalism.Once nature had been subdued, bodies
had to be controlled and this became the focus
of developing power and knowledge.Norms
replaced laws, and this was an extension of
power, based on ‘the basic needs’, involving
claims well beyond the law.
Sex
is important for both poles, and this raised
many possibilities for surveillance and power,
including micro power exerted on the body.This
is biopower [which looks suspiciously
reductionist here, for example in having the
major role in explaining Nazism].Ideologies
only ‘revitalise types of political power’
(149).All
this ends by being grounded in the body.Sex
becomes an anchorage, although sex involves
more than just bodies [with further
reductionism of economics and politics to
sexual economy and politics?154f].Sex
is a ‘unique signifier and universal
signified’ (154).
We
see sex as life itself.We
like to assert it against power but it is an
effect of the deployment of power.Sexuality
is not simply real, but is an historical
formation.For this reason, we should not invest
resistance in sex but in ‘bodies and
pleasures’ more generally.The
irony is that the development of sex/power is
seen as crucial to human liberation