* The “Repression Hypothesis”.
Features:
- Sexuality was confined into the home through the institution of conjugal family and the parents’ bedroom.
- Sexuality was conceived in terms of generation and reproduction.
- Repression tended to mute and dismiss sexuality.
- Repression tended to reintegrate a part of illegitimate sexualities in the circuits of profit in insularized and clandestine forms – the brothel, the mental hospital.
- Repression is connected and coincides with the development of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.
- Repression provides an incentive to talk about sexuality – the speaker’s benefit.
Three doubts about the “repressive hypothesis”:
- its historicity (is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?)
- its theoretical value (does it describe what it pretends to?)
- its political engagement (it is part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces)
Foucault’s intention is to put the “repressive hypothesis” back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century and to “define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world. 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 which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” (p.11) – sexuality as a “discursive fact”.
Things to look at:
- forms of power
- channels of power
- discourses
- instances of discursive production
- instances of the production of power
- instances of the propagation of knowledge. (pp.11-12)
Instead of repression, one sees a veritable discursive explosion around and apropos of sex. p.17
It tells the history of sexuality as being marked by two ruptures:
- the advent of prohibitions (the seventeenth century).
- relative tolerance toward prenuptial and extramarital relations (the twentieth century) p. 115
Techniques of repression originate in the penitential practices of medieval Christianity.
* The “Discursive Explosion Hypothesis”.
Features:
- an institutional incitement to speak about it.
- a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about.
- based on the model of confession – detailization, examination.
- the transformation of sex into discourse has been borrowed from the ascetic and monastic settings.
- optimization and valorization of discourses on sex.
- the building of an enormous apparatus for producing discourse about sex.
- political, economic, and technical incentives to talk about sex in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of quantitative or causal studies.
- sex become a feature to be administered, a “police matter”
- policing sex: the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses.
- the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.
- the future of a society becomes connected to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex.
- the emergence of the sexuality of children and adolescents.
- the proliferation and dispersion of discursive centers.
- the construction of a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative.
- the solidification of the sexual mosaic.
- the construction of devices to provoke sex.
- the establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.
Centers that produced discourses on sex:
- medicine
- psychiatry
- criminal justice
- social controls
- demography
- biology
- psychology
- ethics
- pedagogy
- political criticism.
General lines of evolution:
Up to the end of the 18-th century, sexual practices were governed by three major explicit codes:
- canonical law
- the Christian pastoral
- civil law.
“They determined, each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit. They were all centered on matrimonial relations: the marital obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one complied with it, the requirements and violences that accompanied it, the useless or unwarranted caresses for which it was a pretext, its fecundity or the way one went about making it sterile, the moments when one demanded it (dangerous periods of pregnancy or breast-feeding, forbidden times of Lent or abstinence), its frequency or infrequency, and so on.” (p. 37) – the legitimate alliance.
This system underwent two main modifications:
- a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy…It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter.
- into the light came the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. (p.38) – peripheral sexualities. The rise of sexual normality and abnormality.
Two great systems conceived by the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires. (pp.39-40).
Incorporation of sex into the Power field involved four operations:
1. penetration, expansion and proliferation of power into sex.
2. incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals.
3. perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.
4. the construction of devices of sexual saturation, networks of pleasures and power linked together (the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the consultation).
The science of sex was a science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm.” (p.53)
Throughout the nineteenth century sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation. p.54
Two historical procedures for producing the truth of sex:
- ars erotica
-scientia sexualis.
The confession becomes one of the principal techniques for producing truth. “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 confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; 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 impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses–or is forced to confess.” (p.59)
The confession is transformed into science through:
1. a clinical codification of the inducement to speak.
2. the postulate of a general and diffuse causality.
3. the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality.
4. the method of interpretation.
5. the medicalization of the effects of confession. (pp.65-67)
Sexuality is the correlative of the discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis. The history of sexuality must be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses. (p.69)
The objective of the inquiry is to move toward an analytics of power – toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. (p.82)
* The “juridico-discursive” representation of power and sex.
Features:
- The negative relation. It never establishes any connection between power and sex that is not negative: rejection, exclusion, refusal, blockage, concealment, or mask.
- The insistence of the rule. Power is essentially what dictates its law to sex.
- The cycle of prohibition: thou shall not go near, thou shall not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and secrecy.
- The logic of censorship. This interdiction is thought to take three forms: 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. (pp.83-84)
Mechanics of juridico-discursive power:
- poor in resources,
- sparing of its methods,
- monotonous in the tactics it utilizes,
- incapable of invention, and
- seemingly doomed always to repeat itself.
- it is a power that only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no;
- in no condition to produce, capable only of posting limits, it is basically anti-energy.
- finally, it is a power whose model is essentially juridical, centered on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos.
- all the modes of domination, submission, and subjugation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience. (p.85)
It imposed itself as agency of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation by establishing a principle that would temper all other powers and distributing them according to boundaries and fixed hierarchy.
Its main belief is that law has to be the very form of power and that power always had to be exercised in the form of law.
Foucault: “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king…We shall try 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…We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king. ” (pp.88-91)
* Foucault’s conception of power.
Features:
- the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization;
- as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them;
- as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another;
- and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies;
- the omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another;
- power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere;
- power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (pp.92-93)
- politics and war as two different strategies for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations. (p.93)
- power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the inter-play of nonegalitarian and mobile relations;
- relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play;
- power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix;
- power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed;
- where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations;
- resistances are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. (pp.94-96)
Four cautionary prescriptions when studying production of discourses on sex:
1. Rule of immanence. One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mechanisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or ideological requirements of power. If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object; and conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was because techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse were capable of investing it.
2. Rules of continual variations. We must seek rather the pattern of the modifications which the relationships of force imply by the very nature of their process. Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are “matrices of transformations.
3. Rule of double conditioning. (family and society) Thus the father in the family is not the “representative” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family. But the family organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great “maneuvers” employed for the Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms.
4. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses. We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. (pp.98-101)
Domains of power, mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex.
Four strategic unities:
1. A hysterization of women’s bodies.
2. A pedagogization of children’s sex.
3. A socialization of procreative behavior.
4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.
Bio-politics facilitated the penetration of power at every level of the social body.
“The rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them.” (p.141)
Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, four privileged objects of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. (p.105) - forms of deployment of sexuality.
Two different and contrary systems of deployments and their differencies:
Deployment of alliance;
- built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit;
- has as one of its chief objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them;
- what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite statutes;
- is firmly tied to the economy due to the role it can play in the transmission or circulation of wealth;
- the deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the social body, which it has the function of maintaining; whence its privileged link with the law; whence too the fact that the important phase for it is “reproduction.”
- operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power;
- engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control;
- concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however tenuous or imperceptible these may be;
- is linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body–the body that produces and consumes;
- 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.” (pp.106-107)
Deployment of sexuality developed along two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children axis. (p. 108)
Family:
- its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support;
- it is the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it conveys the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance. (p.108)
- since the seventeenth century family absorbs sexuality and its alien, and even perilous effects for the deployment of alliance. (p.110)
Sexuality as a historical construct. (p.105) Sexuality was taking shape, born of a technology of power that was originally focused on alliance. (p. 108) Sexuality gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. Sex as an imaginary element. (pp.155-156)
Historical Periodization:
- in the nineteenth century the technology of sex was ordered in relation to the medical institution, the exigency of normality and the problem of life and ilness;
- the medicine of sex was isolated from the medicine of the body, it isolated a sexual “instinct” capable of presenting constitutive anomalies, acquired derivations, infirmities, or pathological processes. (p.117)
- an inverse class relationship – the most rigorous techniques were formed and applied with the greatest intensity, “in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes”. (p.120) They first tried it on themselves. (p.122) The Bourgeoisie employed biological, medical and eugenic percepts in order to maximize life; it converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality. (pp. 123-124)
- lower classes were penetrated by mechanism of sexualization in three successive stages: a) the problem of birth control, b) the organization of the “conventional family” and c) the development of the juridical and medical control of perversion. (pp.121-122)
There is a bourgeois sexuality, and there are class sexualities. (p.127)
* Right of Death and Power over Life
Power now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. (p.137) Power operates now by administrating bodies and calculating management of life. (p.140)
Capital punishment is still maintained by invoking the monstrosity of the criminal and the danger he poses on the health of the living social organism.
Power has assigned itself the task of administering life into two basic forms:
- centered on the body as a machine, “its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls”;
- centered on the species body, “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.” (p. 139)
Biopower as a fundamental element in the development of capitalism: the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.
Biological existence as political problem.
In the eighteenth century life of the human species “entered into the order of knowledge and power” (p.141-142). Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (p.143)
The rise of the normalizing society – centered on norms (a continuum of apparatuses: medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory rather than on law. (p.144) We, on the other hand, are in a society of “sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality”: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. (p.147)
“at the juncture of the “body” and the “population,” sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death.” (p. 147)
The new principle of politics is the substitution of blood with sex/sexuality. (“from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality” – p.148).