“It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has “It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game.”
Foucault does not shy away from pointing out our vague or hypocritical observations about sex, which we make only to titillate the conversation by further stigmatising (and therefore eroticising) the ‘problem’ of sex.
But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. 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. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming of freedom.
By making it into something subconscious, pathological, and surprisingly often incestuous; by normalising certain sexualities, and marginalising others; or by encouraging incessant discourses about sexuality, and silencing the rest.
Rather than (reductively) “break down” the relationship between sex and power — or power *over* sex — as I expected him to do, Foucault impressed me by taking an unexpected and far more difficult route of stopping and starting at every imaginable point of nuance in the discourse of sexuality: where repression is expression, and weakness is strength, and silence is vocally insistent.
But this was not the plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results.
One interesting aspect of my reading experience was to notice that many of the processes of social control Foucault distinguishes as functions of the technologising of sexuality, has been flipped on its head, but still for similar economic goals. For example, much of these processes are with the objection of a surplus of population, as though human beings are goods. For example, the banning and stigmatising of contraception would encourage and instil the concept of sex as a procreative technology. However, today, there are arguments to be made about the encouragement of contraceptives for population control — specifically, to reduce the population, and deter the family in favour of the labour industry. There is also the pathologising of sexualities — but this time, instead of negatively stigmatised sexual ‘abnormalities’, the concept of pathology is positively and – ahem – pathologically normalised — almost in similar fashion to how the Christian concept of confession made sex talk simultaneously and incessant and repressive…There is also the economic benefit of medicalising sex, which can be seen again, today, within the “market” of and for birth control. (And maybe there is something to be said about the idea of a “gatekeeping” of sex from the “proletariat” by the “bourgeoisie” if we think about the sexual habits of our political, economic, and cultural celebrities…).
The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.
But although I observe a shift away from Foucault’s sexual-social, sexual-political, sexual-economic reality, that is not to say his and our presents are inconsistent. Rather, they are in fundamental continuity to each other, and perhaps all of this is in true Foucaultian fashion, where power is non-stagnant and is essentially reversible.
What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they cosigned sex to a shadow of existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
It was interesting to see the influence of Bataille on Foucault’s exposure to the maybe scandalising moral/practical/intellectual approaches to controlling sex, where repression has certain pleasurable consequences. It was also interesting to see the influence of Freud, who Foucault seems to grapple with in his broader criticisms of psychoanalysis as a medicalising and pathologising manipulation of sexuality. Foucault also suggests that psychoanalysis’s insistence on placing the foundation of both healthy and unhealthy sexuality within the family, makes its structure simultaneously hypersexual while sexually secretive.
There are some aspects of Foucault’s analysis where I found him unwilling to question himself. For example, I wondered what kinds of questions would come if Foucault moved away from Christianity as the muzzle of the West and considered in all religions the suspiciousness and subversiveness of sexuality. I wondered also how Foucualt could honestly believe that the “Christian West” was the most sexually repressive of societies, especially with his historical references to a culture of torture & confession. It surprised me to notice Fouacult’s failure to acknowledge, among all the disparities he identified between different groups and their sexualities, that simply between male and female sexuality. And it troubled me that even with his persistent concern about a stigmatisation of children’s sexuality, he failed to talk about and reflect on children’s relationship towards sexuality and more about the sexual attitudes of adults towards children. For example, there is a case he references where a man is caught having had sexual relations with a “little girl”. He calls the public condemnation of this man a melodramtic sensationalization of this case of pedophilia (Foucault does not use this term, and I’m not sure if he uses this term at all throughout the book). Here, he hardly seems to consider the little girl as a part of this equation, which obviously explains his dismissiveness towards the case. And besides, something tells me that if Foucault were to humanise the little girl, she would be less a victim of the male paedophile and more a victim of a sexually stigmatising “Christian West”. This, I have a problem with.
But even with that being said, I look forward to reading the subsequent volumes to Foucault’s history of sexuality. The fearlessness and ambition of Foucault’s style of analysis has enabled me to finally begin to answer the questions about power and sexuality that I have been asking for years.
More than old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise: its presupposed proximities; it proceeded through explanation and insistent observation; it required and exchange of discourse, through questions that exported admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense sensations. The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this. Imbedded in bodies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddities of sex relied on a technology of health and pathology. And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicalised object, one had to try and detect it—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom—in the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behaviour. The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies. Caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatising troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure. This produced a twofold effect: an impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further; the intensity of the confession renewed the questioner’s curiosity; the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encircled it. But so many pressing questions singularized the pleasures felt by the one who had to reply. They were fixed by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they received. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that carried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered....more
sophie esther
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