Foucault

Hello all-- as I was reading Judy Butler, I thought that maybe a more clear understanding of Foucault might be helpful. I know some of you were in poststructuralism with David Hoy, a great class to begin deciphering Foucaultian lexicon. Anyways, I took a summer class with Andrew Delunas--"Philosophical Perspectives on Sexuality." I thought that maybe this short paper would be useful in understanding Foucault and Butler's notion of producing gender and performativity a bit more. I'm sure I've misinterpreted Foucault at some points in my paper, but maybe it will help make the general concepts a bit more clear.

Foucault, unlike Hegel, does not believe history can be classified in a linear or progressive way. Our world is not classified by Kantian categories of understanding; there is no fixed human nature. Foucault’s objective in these writings is to search for instances of discourse production; he wants to write a history on these discourses and their transformations.

In “The Incitement Discourse,” he begins by explaining the beginning of the 17th century as an era where frankness in sexual discourse became common. There was little need for secrecy concerning sexual practices. The codes were coarse and obscene compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a period when “bodies made a display of themselves,” writes Foucault (18).

Sexuality became much more confined soon after. With capitalist expansion, the rise of new technology, absolute institutions, and regularization highly influenced and controlled populations. Before the era of disciplinary power and bio-power, sovereign power reigned. Death was made a spectacle; the sovereign maintained power through fear. He had the right to make die or let live. With capitalist expansion, the rise of new institutions took over and a new power developed. This power was now concerned with making live or letting die—power was maintained through the promise to keep citizens alive and well. Rather than making death a public spectacle, death became a secret—something hidden away and not spoken about. Death became the power limit—a private aspect of existence. With the development of disciplinary and bio-power, fostering life became the muscle behind these new forms of control. Guaranteeing the population safety from disease, war, etc., guaranteed life; power was now power amongst rather than power over.

With these new institutions, sex was also viewed in a different light. Regularization and normalization were key factors in controlling and repressing individual’s sex lives. Sexuality was confined to the bedroom and labeled as a practice of performing the serious function of reproduction. Sterility was tainted as terribly abnormal; it was driven out, denied, and reduced to silence since it was believed to have no right to existence. Silence was the characteristic feature of this repression—it was a sentence to disappear. The brothel and the mental hospital became the only places for tolerance, while everywhere else “modern Puritanism” rested its edict on nonexistence of sexuality through silence. Foucault wants to question this history. He says that we have been informed that repression has been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classic age and freeing ourselves from it comes at a cost. There must come a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, and an irruption of speech. He denounces Freud’s conformism; the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis do not hold the answers we seek.

The sexual cause is associated with the political cause, he argues. “If sex is repressed…condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression” (6). Foucault continues to write about how this is the only civilization who pays people to listen. We pay the psychoanalyst to listen to abnormal sexual secrets—it is evident that we place a market value on sex and the discourse of sex. What is important, argues Foucault, is not the economic factor, rather the existence of this sexual discourse. It is a “revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come…” (7). This discourse of sex arises only out of the repression that inspires silence.

Foucault continues discussing this discourse, bringing confession into the story. Sex itself is changed into a discourse by confessing one’s wrong doings and desires. In medieval confessions, one would tell the priest all the dirty details of their sins. Soon, discretion was advised with increasing emphasis, but the “confession of the flesh” continually increased (19). With people confessing their sins of the flesh, sex was transformed into a polymorphous set of discourses. It was shifted from the act itself to the stirrings of desire. Confession was an ideal for every good Christian and self-examination was a key factor—“discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and soul…under the authority of language” (20).

Foucault says that our society speaks verbosely about its own silence—it denounces the same powers it exercises. Foucault wants to know what sustains and supports these powers; he wants to know why we think we’re repressed; he wants to know why we burden ourselves so much today with so much guilt for once having made sex a sin. This blameworthy belief, he posits, may have disastrous consequences.

Foucault has doubts concerning the “repressive hypothesis”—he asks: “…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 repression?...[and] Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces by calling it repression?” (10). Foucault introduces these doubts in order to be contrary to that which he outlined previously. He wants to know why sexuality is so widely discussed, who the actors are in speaking of it, the links formed between these discourses, and what knowledge we form from these discourses.

In “Right of Death and Power Over Life” Foucault speaks of the discourse of sexuality as a discourse which falls outside counter-conduct. The deployment of sexuality creates an imaginary element which is sex (like the liberal sex paradigm)—this imaginary element creates a desire in people: a desire to have sex, access sex, discover sex, liberate sex, articulate sex, and so on. This desirability makes us believe that we are affirming the rights of our sex against the power establishment which is believed to silence it, but all we are really doing to fastening ourselves even tighter to the deployment of sexuality. He writes later, “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be a sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure” (157). Foucault thinks we need to stop talking about sex and have a discourse between bodies and pleasure.