...
Show More
Reassessed, in light of re-reading Gender Trouble: Author lays down the gauntlet against received wisdom that sexual liberty was destroyed by “the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie” (3), wherein “silence became the rule,” “a single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space,” and “proper demeanor avoided contact with other bodies and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech” (id.). In this system of “taboo, nonexistence, and silence” (5), there was surreptitious transfer of “pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted” (4). Author raises doubts against this ‘repressive hypothesis,’ with a purpose of defining “the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality” (11), taking care to “account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions that prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said” (id.).
In order for the bourgeois to “gain mastery over [sex], in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (17). Despite these imperatives, “when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformation […] one sees a veritable discursive explosion” regarding sex, even with an “expurgation” of “authorized vocabulary” (id.).
Foucault’s primary model of the “proliferation of discourses” (18) is the “nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages” (id.), wherein the detail “believed indispensable for the confession” included: “description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure” (19). Though the 17th century may have stepped back from the level of detail, “the language may have been refined,” confession’s extent increased, “the confession of the flesh,” inclusive of “thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul” (id.). “Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent” (20). Author regards this period as laying down an “injunction” (id.) of “telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex” (id.). This is a “scheme for transforming sex into discourse” and had been the province of “ascetic and monastic” persons (id.), here generalized as an “obligation” and a Christian “imperative” (21): “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (id.). (This process is to be parodied in de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it is noted. (id.))
Through the generalized prescription to produce discursive products regarding sex, it became “not something to be judged,” but rather “a thing one administered” (24), a matter for biopolitical management, a “police matter” (id.), an “economic and political problem of population” (25). The transformation “went from ritual lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bachelors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as a target for intervention” (26).
Different institutional mechanisms arose, such as “discursive orthopedics” (29) as a pedagogy, and the “sexual perversions” (30), handled by medicine and law—even inspections for “degenerescence of anatomy” (31)—a “kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Contrary to a great repression, “sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” “a singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse” (33).
Part of the project may have been to “expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction” (36), a straightforward part of the natalist biopolitical interest. The expulsion involved “prohibitions […] of a juridical nature” (38): “For a long time hermaphrodites [sic] were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (id.). Non-heteronormative desire and conduct “was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). (Coke’s comments in the Institutes regarding ‘lepers of the soul’ come to mind here.) Other species were made of “all those minor perverts” of the 19th century:
The most interesting conceptual distinction drawn herein is ars erotica v. scientia sexualis. In what might be a generalized model of ‘science’ as such, the science of sex “was in fact made up of evasions since, given its inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations” (53). This science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of amorality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of a medical norm” (id.), which is the process described in Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, incidentally.
Science produced “an entire pornography of the morbid” (54), and was “incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction […] and a medicine of sex” (id.). In the “continuous incitement to discourse and to truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding operated […] an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment” (56). In distinction to the science is the ars erotica of ancient societies, wherein “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice,” closely held as secrets to be transmitted by masters to students (57). We have the scientia sexualis, “a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58), rooted in the confession. I recall sex education in school in 5th grade, and it really didn’t involve the confession, but it simply laid out the operability of pregnancy and then tried to scare the fuck out of all of us with images of sexually transmitted infections. There was no instruction in the praxis of sex—I had to be instructed viscerally, for instance, in manual stimulation by an eager master later in life. Quite a bit on the permutations here, including how the scientia sexualis might react back and become the ars erotica of our society.
Text thereafter traces the ‘deployment’ of the knowledge-power sex system. Its objective is usefully summed up as “where there is desire, the power relation is already present” (81). Some readers get very annoyed with his proclamation that “there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting the very thing which one attempts to counter it with” (82). The explanation is nuanced: “the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as constituting it” (89). He wants moreover to “construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90), and to “rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty” (id.). Plain that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93). Resistance is accordingly “never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). The deployment of sexuality therefore has four rules as its ‘method’: immanence (“no exteriority” (98)), continual variations (“the pattern of the modifications […] relations of power-knowledge are not static forms” (99)), double conditioning (“two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic) […] the family does not duplicate society” (99-100)), and tactical polyvalence of discourses (“discourse as a series of discontinuous segments […] a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (100)).
The ‘domain’ of the deployment is further differentiated into four institutional loci: “hysterization of women’s bodies,” “pedagogization of children’s sex,” “socialization of procreative behavior,” and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (104 ff.). All of this is periodized along a discontinuous chronology, showing ruptures in the 17th and then again in the 20th century, insofar as their development was not triumphant march of progressively unfolding awesome (see 115 ff.).
The final section shifts gears to more obviously biopolitical concerns, how “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (135). Notes a political dream of genocide (137), to go with the dreams of the leper and plague and panopticon in Discipline & Punish. Transformations in power noted as a shift from sanguinity to sexuality (147). A “faustian pact”: “to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself” (156). Plenty more here, especially for readers of Agamben.
Underlying all of Foucault’s work is the fiction of the “individual,” even while he works to critique the ideology of the ‘subject,’ such as, for instance, in the proclamation that “It was essential that the state knew what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it” (26). Huh? Some work to be done here, I think.
One of the more interesting notes was the tracking of sexual norms as class-bound, inhering in the aristocracy and only later escaping the country club and the debutante ball to infect the rest of the world. Much like the early affliction of Christianity on Europe (see The Barbarian Conversion), the ruling class was transformed first and only thereafter using the regular ideological state apparatus remade the world in its image. Basic German Ideology Marxism there.
Recommended for demographers on the eve of the revolution, those who say that there are class sexualities, and readers under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire.
my 3* review from 2011, recalling it as read from 1997: "a good book to read in a public café, wherein meatheads of any gender might discern the title and proclaim, as happened to me, that "y'all don't need no books for that because I can teachy'all." I can affirm that, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, a meathead is worth a thousand books."
In order for the bourgeois to “gain mastery over [sex], in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (17). Despite these imperatives, “when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformation […] one sees a veritable discursive explosion” regarding sex, even with an “expurgation” of “authorized vocabulary” (id.).
Foucault’s primary model of the “proliferation of discourses” (18) is the “nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages” (id.), wherein the detail “believed indispensable for the confession” included: “description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure” (19). Though the 17th century may have stepped back from the level of detail, “the language may have been refined,” confession’s extent increased, “the confession of the flesh,” inclusive of “thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul” (id.). “Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent” (20). Author regards this period as laying down an “injunction” (id.) of “telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex” (id.). This is a “scheme for transforming sex into discourse” and had been the province of “ascetic and monastic” persons (id.), here generalized as an “obligation” and a Christian “imperative” (21): “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (id.). (This process is to be parodied in de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, it is noted. (id.))
Through the generalized prescription to produce discursive products regarding sex, it became “not something to be judged,” but rather “a thing one administered” (24), a matter for biopolitical management, a “police matter” (id.), an “economic and political problem of population” (25). The transformation “went from ritual lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bachelors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as a target for intervention” (26).
Different institutional mechanisms arose, such as “discursive orthopedics” (29) as a pedagogy, and the “sexual perversions” (30), handled by medicine and law—even inspections for “degenerescence of anatomy” (31)—a “kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Contrary to a great repression, “sex was driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence,” “a singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse” (33).
Part of the project may have been to “expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction” (36), a straightforward part of the natalist biopolitical interest. The expulsion involved “prohibitions […] of a juridical nature” (38): “For a long time hermaphrodites [sic] were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (id.). Non-heteronormative desire and conduct “was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). (Coke’s comments in the Institutes regarding ‘lepers of the soul’ come to mind here.) Other species were made of “all those minor perverts” of the 19th century:
Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fit them into. (id.)Perhaps an aporia in the argument there, if the system produces them but can’t fit them anywhere? (The reference to ‘heresy’ no doubt reinforces the connection to Coke.)
The most interesting conceptual distinction drawn herein is ars erotica v. scientia sexualis. In what might be a generalized model of ‘science’ as such, the science of sex “was in fact made up of evasions since, given its inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations” (53). This science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of amorality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of a medical norm” (id.), which is the process described in Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, incidentally.
Science produced “an entire pornography of the morbid” (54), and was “incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction […] and a medicine of sex” (id.). In the “continuous incitement to discourse and to truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding operated […] an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment” (56). In distinction to the science is the ars erotica of ancient societies, wherein “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice,” closely held as secrets to be transmitted by masters to students (57). We have the scientia sexualis, “a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58), rooted in the confession. I recall sex education in school in 5th grade, and it really didn’t involve the confession, but it simply laid out the operability of pregnancy and then tried to scare the fuck out of all of us with images of sexually transmitted infections. There was no instruction in the praxis of sex—I had to be instructed viscerally, for instance, in manual stimulation by an eager master later in life. Quite a bit on the permutations here, including how the scientia sexualis might react back and become the ars erotica of our society.
Text thereafter traces the ‘deployment’ of the knowledge-power sex system. Its objective is usefully summed up as “where there is desire, the power relation is already present” (81). Some readers get very annoyed with his proclamation that “there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting the very thing which one attempts to counter it with” (82). The explanation is nuanced: “the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as constituting it” (89). He wants moreover to “construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90), and to “rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty” (id.). Plain that “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93). Resistance is accordingly “never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). The deployment of sexuality therefore has four rules as its ‘method’: immanence (“no exteriority” (98)), continual variations (“the pattern of the modifications […] relations of power-knowledge are not static forms” (99)), double conditioning (“two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic) […] the family does not duplicate society” (99-100)), and tactical polyvalence of discourses (“discourse as a series of discontinuous segments […] a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (100)).
The ‘domain’ of the deployment is further differentiated into four institutional loci: “hysterization of women’s bodies,” “pedagogization of children’s sex,” “socialization of procreative behavior,” and the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (104 ff.). All of this is periodized along a discontinuous chronology, showing ruptures in the 17th and then again in the 20th century, insofar as their development was not triumphant march of progressively unfolding awesome (see 115 ff.).
The final section shifts gears to more obviously biopolitical concerns, how “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (135). Notes a political dream of genocide (137), to go with the dreams of the leper and plague and panopticon in Discipline & Punish. Transformations in power noted as a shift from sanguinity to sexuality (147). A “faustian pact”: “to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself” (156). Plenty more here, especially for readers of Agamben.
Underlying all of Foucault’s work is the fiction of the “individual,” even while he works to critique the ideology of the ‘subject,’ such as, for instance, in the proclamation that “It was essential that the state knew what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it” (26). Huh? Some work to be done here, I think.
One of the more interesting notes was the tracking of sexual norms as class-bound, inhering in the aristocracy and only later escaping the country club and the debutante ball to infect the rest of the world. Much like the early affliction of Christianity on Europe (see The Barbarian Conversion), the ruling class was transformed first and only thereafter using the regular ideological state apparatus remade the world in its image. Basic German Ideology Marxism there.
Recommended for demographers on the eve of the revolution, those who say that there are class sexualities, and readers under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire.
my 3* review from 2011, recalling it as read from 1997: "a good book to read in a public café, wherein meatheads of any gender might discern the title and proclaim, as happened to me, that "y'all don't need no books for that because I can teachy'all." I can affirm that, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, a meathead is worth a thousand books."
