foucaultonsex

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Foucault – History of Sexuality

The Victorians pretending people don’t have bodies in the repressive hypothesis reminds me of Willet’s talk on the insulating effects of the ‘digital rhetoric’ surrounding biology today. If biology is about information, not bodies, it appears ‘virtual’ and, therefore, less amenable to critique. The Biotecnika project reviewed last week attempts to (re)embody the discourse surrounding biotechnology as a strategy to broaden the debate over biotech’s governance.

Contesting the myth of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault argues that it’s not that Victorians and others didn’t talk about sex; rather this talk got pushed into specific discourses. The discourse around sex proliferated, even if it appeared to be less ‘explicit.’ This ‘incitement to discourse’ produced a sexuality that was highly disciplined, becoming an object of scientific study and institutional regulation. I would argue that the ‘digital hypothesis’ about the discourse surrounding biotech is similarly flawed. The discourse is not actually limited to ‘bio as information.’ In fact there are rather excessive claims made about the benefits that bioinformatics could have for the treatment and enhancement of specific bodies.

In the 19th century, women’s bodies, as an object of scientific study, were put on display for medical students and others. La Charcot’s work at Salpetriere ‘was an enormous apparatus for observation, with its examinations, interrogations, and experiments, but it was also a machinery for incitement with its… hierarchy of personnel who kept watch, organized, provoked, monitored, and reported” (55-56). What was said and demonstrated by the patients was frequently deleted from the succession of dossiers (56). It is clear that gender was ‘at stake’ in this action. The prevailing power relations between male/doctor/psychiatrist and female/patient were not only reflected in this procedure, but also reinforced. Certainly there are male patients and female doctors, but I would argue that these roles are nonetheless gendered. The power hierarchy between male/female intersects with the power relationship of male/female. The patient’s knowledge (especially female patients) of her own body was subjugated at Salpetriere, and it this hierarchy of power persists today to a significant extent.

Power, for Foucault, is not about who gets to use the most ‘correct’ knowledge, but who is in a position to produce knowledge and decide what counts as knowledge. While there is always a multiplicity of ways of knowing, these ways are organized in a particular hierarchy. This hierarchy is not static, but constantly negotiated, reinforced, challenged.

One of Foucault’s ‘two great procedures for producing the truth of sex’ is //ars erotica//. In a sentence of typical Foucaultian length, he writes that “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” (57). (I am bracketing the context of the above paragraph – as a ‘masterful art’ that still has its own hierarchies – in order to make the points below on the embodied nature of the truth of sex produced through //ars erotica//.)

The embodied nature of the //ars erotica// is reminiscent of the way of knowing time for Kenyan distance runners, as interpreted by XXXX at the 4S conference this year. She argued that Kenyan runners measured their skill not in relation to absolute time, but by their relative position in space to other runners. Their heart bpm was not important; rather they //felt// further or closer to exhaustion and adjusted their running accordingly. XXXX implicitly argued that the Kenyan runner’s more embodied way of knowing their bodies was superior to the quantifiable scientistic knowledge that athletic scientists produced with myriad measuring instruments (some that were quite invasive for the athletes studied). “It works,” she said. “They win races.”

The disembodying of blood pressure, heart rate, ounces of sweat per mile, and countless other statistics from the athlete echoes the forced confession ‘wrung from the person’ and ‘extracted from the body’ (59). The call for an increased valuation of embodied or tacit knowledge turns up in much STS literature, including Deborah Heath’s writing on the ‘smart hands’ of lab technicians and Evelyn Fox Keller’s conception of a ‘feeling for the organism.’

So what’s to be done about this transformation of sex into discourse? Foucault, buggering Keller, might call it a ‘feeling for the orgasm.’ Foucault’s call for at attention to pleasure, from what I understand, might be taken up by individualist forms of anarchy. Contrasting with the ‘I won’t be free until everyone is free’ ideology, individualist anarchists (in my gross characterization) believe that when an individual seeks a more intense mode of existence and realizes a way of life that involves more spontaneity, overflowing conviviality, and excess pleasure, ripples of goodness will affect many more bodies. Instead of waiting for the revolution individualist anarchists continually seek the self-affirming moment of uprising.

In a way Foucault’s work would seem to resonate with individualist anarchy. He seems to counter notions of a simple ‘revolution’ when he writes: “let us not look for the headquarters that presides over [power’s] rationality; neither the cast which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes it function).” Yet this view of power as distributed also leads to a side-lining of the individual, and a focus on systems and hierarchies. So are we to give up on the revolution? After all, ‘revolutions’ do – fitting with their title – seem to historically come ‘full circle’ without much fundamental change.

This focus on being ‘stuck’ in the network of power (resistance does not exist outside the system of power relations) resonates with Derrida’s contention that ‘there is no (step?) outside the text.’ While Foucault writes of the diversity within the discourse, he is basically talking about the multiple strategies and techniques by which power operates in various arenas, not a dynamic stage of various contesting discourses. We have to work with(in) power/text because there’s no alternative. This is where scholarship on how to develop effective ‘counternarratives’ that can ‘stand in’ for dominant discourses can be a valuable tool (Ref. Roe?).

Alternatively, through a ‘politics of escape’ one can find ‘pirate utopias’ or ‘(temporary) autonomous zones’ to inhabit that are ‘hidden’ within dominant power structures (Bey). But for those deeply committed to causes of social justice (and not just their oen) this is at best a partial solution. (Although it certainly would be convenient to view communal hedonism as a political move that will send ‘freedom ripples’ through humanity.)

For Foucault, ‘agency’ is a part of ‘the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.’ It seems that the changes associated with who holds power are perhaps rather insignificant compared to the differences that could be achieved if the overarching hierarchy of power was disassembled or deconstructed. Yet while Foucault writes that power ‘follows’ agency, he ends up implying that power will just shuffle a bit when it is directly contested and end up more stable and stratified than ever. In that case, ‘play, whether sexual or overtly political, challenges society’s rules on a deeper and less predictable level, opening up greater possibilities of change’ (Fillingham, 151).

Fillingham quotes Foucault, speaking in 1971, to end her book: “We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tired of games and irony, it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put ‘in play,’ show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work” (151).

Foucault: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicitiy and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (157). And later: “The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance” (159).

Maybe more orgies (metaphorical… of course…) are needed if we are to ‘get’ (…away from?) gender/sexuality/patriarchy, etc, instead of analytically navigating an infinite series of discourses (that displace the same elsewhere?)? But would that be reinforcing sex-desire? Or rallying around bodies and pleasures? Gahh.