Presentation: Patrick Mooney, Foucault's History of Sexuality, vol. 1, part III

Patrick Mooney
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
19 January 2016

Overview

Foucault supposes that he has convinced his readers of the two major points from the second part of essay: (1) that, contrary to the image of a gloomy Victorian sexual repression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has in fact been an incitement to discourse about sex during that time (II.i): Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; [...] since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; [...] this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself (23); and (2) that, during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the monogamous heterosexual (married) couple has been increasingly specified as normative (II.ii), which has two primary effects that interest Foucault: power-knowledge mechanisms have been created and put in place to produce this specification in a strengthened way, and a taxonomy of deviant sexualities has been constructed.

Along the way, Foucault has done at least two other things that are noteworthy for our purposes: First, he has sketched out a theory of power as constituting itself in and being constituted by knowledge: those in power are those who benefit from, and get to set the terms of, what is understood at many levels, including medical expertise. Second, he has been laying the foundations for an argument that will not become fully explicit until the last section of the book: his critique of the management of biological life itself as an object of governance in the modern period.

In part three, Foucault moves along to critique what he expects is a reservation that many readers might still have about his claim: the reservation that there really is something natural underneath it all that corresponds to what we call sexuality, and that, despite the multiplication of discourses on the topic and the way in which discourse itself sets the boundaries of desires and specifies the possible objects of those desires and the nature of the subject that relates to them, it is just that all of this talk is a kind of evasion from this fundamental truth. In order to perform this critique, Foucault looks closely at the rules by which discourse about sex is structured during the time in question and at the operations of the mechanisms of power that define what sex and sexuality really are.

Foucault will end the chapter with a general working hypothesis that sums up the first half of the book and prepares the way for the second half:

The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery of producing truth discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portent reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us; a general signification, a universal secret, and omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends. (69)

Some notes on the critique of knowledge

Until Freud at least, the discourse on sex—the discourse of scholars and theoreticians—never ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about. We could take all these things that were said, the painstaking precautions and detailed analyses, as so many procedures mean to evade the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex. And the mere fact that one claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of a science is in itself significant. This was in fact a science 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. It was by the same token a science subordinated in the main to the imperatives or a morality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of the medial norm. Claiming to speak the truth, it stirred up people's fears; to the least oscillations of sexuality, it ascribed an imaginary dynasty of evils destined to be passed on for generations; it declared the furtive customs of the timid, and the most solitary of petty manias, dangerous for the whole society; strange pleasures, it warned, would eventually result in nothing short of death: that if the individuals, generations, the species itself.

It thus became associated with an insistent and indiscreet medical practice, glibly proclaiming its aversions, quick to run to the rescue of law and public opinion, more servile with respect to the powers of order than amenable to the requirements of truth. Involuntarily naïve in the best of cases, more often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire pornography of the mobid, which was characteristic of the fin de siècle society. In France, doctors like Garnier, Poullet, and Ladoucette were its unglorified scribes and Rollinat its poet. But beyond these troubled pleasures, it assumed other powers; it set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal affliction and combining them with the new themes of asepsis, and the great evolutionist myths with the recent institutions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigor and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized populations. In the name of a biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon. It grounded them in truth. (53–54)

It is as if a fundamental resistance blocked he development of a rationally formed discourse concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects. A disparity of this sort would indicate that the aim of such a discourse was not to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence. Underlying the difference between the physiology of reproduction and the medical theories of sexuality, we would have to see something other and something more than an uneven scientific development or a disparity in the forms of rationality; the one would partake of that immense will to knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scientific discourse in the West, whereas the other would derive from a stubborn will to nonknowledge. (55)

Example: Charcot's Salpêtrière as a machine for producing knowledge, and its hypocrisy: 55–56. The important thing, in this affair, is not that these men shut their eyes or stopped their ears, or that they were mistaken; it is rather that they constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment. The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth. (56)

Some terminology

rules of formation (p. 54)

Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, [...] a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformation), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation—thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as science, ideology, theory, or domain of objectivity. The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division. (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (38; part 1, ch. 2) (1969)

ars erotica

One of two ways of linking sex and truth: not the one that Western society has chosen.

In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul. Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from within and amplify its effects. In this way, there is formed a knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged. Consequently, the relationship to the master who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he, working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the disciple's progress with unfailing skill and severity. The effects of this masterful art, which are consierably more generous than the spareness of its prescriptions would lead one to imagine, are aid to transfigure the one fortunate enough to receive its privileges; an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits, the elixir of life, the exile of death and its threats. (57–58)

In Greece, truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to another; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning. (61)

scientia sexualis

On the face of it, at least, our civilization possess no ars erotia. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opoosed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret: I have in mind the confession. (58)

The technique of confession

Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth. (58)

The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confessions one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and trouble; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be imposible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is forced to confess. (59)

A confessional metamorphosis in literature: 59. We'll be talking about confessional poetry soon.

Confession as an identity constructor: The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this. (60)

Imagine how exorbitant must have seemed the order given to all Christians at the beginning of the thirteenth century, to kneel at least once a year and confess to all their transgressions, without omitting a single one. (60)

From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite particular way, one confessed? (61)

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modification in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. (61–62)

with the rise of Protestantism, the Counter Reformation, eighteenth-century pedagogy, and nineteenth-century medicine, it [confession] gradually lost its ritualistic and exclusive localization; it spread; it has been employed in a whole series of relationships: children and parents, students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and experts. (62)

Confession as the technique of producing true discourse about sex: 62–65.

The secular confession

how did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual confession come to be constituted in scientific terms? (65)

1. Through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak. (65)
2. Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality. (65–66)
3. Through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality. (66)
4. Through the method of interpretation. (66–67)
5. Through the medicalization of the effects of confession. (67)

Sexuality and identity

Beginning in the sixteenth century, this rite gradually detached itself from the sacrament of penance, and via the guidance of souls and the direction of conscience—the ars artium—emigraded toward pedagogy, relationships between adults and children, family relations, medicine, and psychiatry. In any case, nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone into the making off a complex machinery of producing true discourses on sex: a deployment that spans a wide segment of history in that it connects the ancient injunction of confession to clinical listening methods. It is this deployment that enables something called sexuality to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures.

Sexuality: the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis. The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distored by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to a the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce the truth. Situated at the point of intersection of a technique of confession and a scientific discursivity, where certain major mechanisms had to be found for adapting them to one another (the listening technique, the postulate of causality, the principle of latency, the rule of interpretation, the imperative of medicalization), sexuality was defined as being by nature: a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions; a field of meanings to decipher; the site of processes concealed by specific mechanisms; a focus of indefinite causal relations; and an obscure speech (parole) that had to be ferreted out and listened to. (68)

And so, in this question of sex (in both senses: as interrogation and problematization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of rationality), two processes emerge, the one always conditioning the other: we demand that sex speak the truth (but since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness. We tell its truth by deciphering what it tell us about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part of it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved, over several centuries a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him, determine him perhaps, but above all causes him to be ignorant of himself. (69–70)

But the postulate I started out with and would like to hold to as long as possible, in that these deployments of power and knowledge, of truth and pleasures, so unlike those of repression, are not necessarily secondary and derivative; and further, that repression is not in any case fundamental and overriding. We need to take these mechanisms seriously, therefore, and reverse the direction of our analysis: rather than assuming a generally acknowledged repression, and an ignorance measured against what we are supposed to know, we must being with these positive mechanisms, insofar as they produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure, and generate power; we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation, and try to discover how the related facts of interdiction or concealment are distributed with respect to them. (72–73)

Discussion questions

1. In what ways do you take Foucault's History of Sexuality to be a work of theory? What are the relevant features that make it such a work (or prevent it from being one)?
   • In what sense(s) and to what extents do you see this as being an analysis? A creative project?
2. In what ways do we read the truths of sex? Of sexuality? How are they connected to our notions of identity?
3. Besides discourse (as Foucault describes it), what else goes into the construction of notions of identity?

References