Foucault, History of Sexuality
Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the seventeenth century? Here, one of France’s greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.
Foucault, Michel. “We ‘Other Victorians’” pp1-13, “Objective” pp. 81-91 and “Method” pp. 92-102 In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990.
READING NOTES
- Other Victorians
- “the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality,” “serious function of reproduction,” “utilitarian and fertile,” “Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection,”
- “coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”
- “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.”
- mutually reinforcing
- “Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostenta tiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?”
- “We must not be surprised, then, if the effects of liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to manifest themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its mission”
- “Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? […] Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re pression? […] Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”?”
- “Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this linkage?”
- “disengage my analysis from the privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances of discursive production (which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions to circulate);”
- Objective
- “By constantly referring to positive technologies of power, you are playing a double game where you hope to win on all counts; you confuse your adversaries by appearing to take the weaker position, and, discussing repression alone, you would have us believe, wrongly, that you have rid yourself of the problem of law; and yet you keep the essential practical consequence of the principle of power-as-law, namely the fact that there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.”
- The negative relation, the insistence of the rule (binary system, sex is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law), the cycle of prohibition (do not appear if you do not want to disappear), the logic of censorship (affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists), the uniformity of the apparatus (power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels)
- general theme that power represses sex and the idea that the law constitutes desire, “anti-energy”
- “this critique of law [criticisms of lineage from monarchic institutions] is still carried out on the assumption that, ideally and by nature, power must be exer cised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness.”
- “if it is true that the juridical system was useful for representing, albeit in a nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily around deduction (prelevement) and death, it is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.”
- “We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
- “does this example—which can only be considered a privileged one, since power seemed in this instance, more than anywhere else, to function as prohibition —not compel one to discover principles for analyzing power which do not derive from the system of right and the form- of law? Hence it is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of Copied under power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material. We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power with out the king.”
- notes from module
- critical lense on western practices
- object of study comprised of instinct to know in v specific ways
- how is knowledge concieved and how does it to expand in multiple feilds?
- how do institutions become sites of knowledge to construct subjects in order to govern ex. discipline and punish, prisons reflect other spaces.
- power shifting, disappearing, reappearing, Productive not value/moral judgement ie good/beneficial but that it multiplies from many points.
- power as social configurations that enable complex+dynamic forces that enable power+resistance (loop)
- fouclaut + deleuze + guattari, thinking+writing at moment where frued+marx dominated critical thinking, f+d+g forged alternative to f+m.
- power is everywhere not just in law. how is power formed in relations? how to analyse such relations at micro level?
- p 83, you are always already trapped
- sexualit is way to demonstrate how power operates in contested domains which are dominated by false notion of repression. Power is tied to heteropatriarchy + regulation of disobedient racialized bodies… familiar discourse.
- Diguise power and sex as negative relation, blocking and masking. Limitation of undrstanding power – rules as laws. In religious context, prohitiory laws. Identifying what isn’t permitted, imposing ways to prevent = silence. Uniformity of apparatus of power/ law, power from top, legistation vs obedience. This is reduction of power, does not take into account of waht is not spoken. Stems from western histories of monarchy, law replaces king. Contemporary example – Government/settler/otherwise, sustains power, toppling systems would undo dynamics of power, this is top down understanding of power that does not take into account that power does not always come from above.
- p 89, dominant understanding of power is localized in law + rely on codes that are observerable. p 90 – “We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
- power has not governed sexuality to laws
- “power must be understood as multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate, and which constitute their own organization”
- struggles, confrontations, transformations, belong to a chain or a system
- visualize power as a rhizome, unclear where power emerges
- power is excerised “from innumerable points,” not static, part of mobile relations, power is temporal, it grows in relation. not outside relation (deleuze, immanance). Binary between rulers+ruled, blurry, does not encompass hower power is constant changing. Revolts+refusals are not final, they reemerge. Plurality of resistances, each special case. Can only exist in strategic filed of power relations (p 96).
- web of relations that become common (disicipline child’s body through repetition ie family, doctor, school), national body politic (Manning) = dispersions of power (Foucault)
- (video clip) power is a relation, to govern “one’s behaviour can be determined according to strategies by using a number of tatics,” govermentality hasn’t ceased