THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS

Foucault identifies a conventional “enlightened” view of sexuality:

Publicly they were superprudes, pretended sex didn’t exist, that people didn’t have bodies. This was part, by the way, of their campaign against women. They taught the “proper” women that sex wasn’t any fun, and that they should think of something else, like cleaning the kitchen, when their husbands did want to try to procreate.

So what we’ve needed since then is to be able to talk about sex openly—that’s the only way to cure the sickness. Papa Freud was the first person to explain all this, and ever since we’ve been trying as hard as we can to be honest and open and healthy about sex, to throw away the evil restrictions of the dirty-minded men who control the world. Every time we talk about sex we are heroically throwing off our chains, and the sexual revolution is the first step towards any other revolution.

But once again, Foucault claims there is something wrong with this picture that we are all so ready to accept.

“Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.”

He does not doubt that in “everyday speech,” talk about sex was restricted. What he primarily maintains is that discourses about sex proliferated. Suddenly sex became an object of scientific study, and of careful regulation by many institutions—schools, barracks, prisons, hospitals, and madhouses, among others. All of these discourses are part of the major Western procedure for producing the truth of sex, for defining sex and its cultural meanings, which he calls a scientia sexualis.

Scientific discourse on human sexuality lagged far behind what was known about plant and animal reproduction. Two distinct ways of understanding sex existed simultaneously: a biology of reproduction, which developed in parallel with the other sciences, and a medicine of sexuality, which diverged from all other science, went nowhere, nursed bizarre fears, and was distinctly non-rational.

A concrete example of the strangeness of the scientia sexualis is Charcot's work at Salpetriere, the center of French treatment of hysteria in the late 19th century, where Freud got his training. The primarily female patients were put on display for visitors. As Charcot explained each case, the patient would “spontaneously” strike odd, often very sexual poses, which Charcot would describe as “passionate” symptoms of hysteria. A patient's attack could be provoked by a doctor's touching “the region of her ovaries” with a “baton”. Perpetually incited to symbolic sexual display, the patients were whisked out of sight if their poses got too specific.

Freud greatly admired all this, and did not completely leave it behind.

These are just two examples of the medical, scientific knowledge of sex, that already looks to us not just misguided and wrong, but absolutely crazy and perverse. How will our own sexual science look in fifty years?

Such a science of sex developed as a form of power—a psychiatrist somehow has power over a patient simply by sitting and listening.

“The new methods of power are not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.”

As we began to see in Discipline & Punish, right and wrong, good and sin, get translated, but only too directly, into normal and pathological.

This new form of power is much more subtle than our traditional notion. It is thus much easier to overlook, and much harder to resist.

“In the Renaissance, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts... The 19th century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.... The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” From this idea we get this book's most striking claim—that the homosexual and homosexuality were invented in the 19th century.

LOCALIZED POWER. Power is not hierarchical, flowing from the top down, but everywhere local. The president cannot dictate family values (though some of them do try) instead, patterns of power established within families interact with patterns of power in institutions and throughout the social body.

But this idea of power is objected to by many scholars, particularly some historians. They insist that we have to look for “agency.” Who are the people exercising this power, creating this system of power? Why are they doing it? Grand schemes are all very well, but history always boils down to individual people doing things. Foucault describes some enormous conspiracy theory, but never tells us who the conspirators could possibly be, or what they got out of it.

I believe this is a very fundamental misinterpretation, but Foucault makes it easy to misinterpret.

That certainly sounds like someone is carefully plotting and scheming to gain control of people's sexuality.

“But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the head-quarters that presides over its 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).”

oucault does not in any way explain his way out of this paradox; he merely asserts it. He is not interested in the individual and individual will. He would say that our society became focused on the individual at the same time that it became a normalizing society, and perhaps the individual, individual rights, is the alibi of power.

If there is no one in charge of power, no one to blame, is there any way to resist power?

Yes, but resistance does not exist outside of the system of power relations. lt is, instead, inherently part of the relation. In modern-day normalizing power relations, this tends very much to isolate and individuate resistance into a series of “special cases” which do not allow generalization.

To understand this notion, think of the patients in the back ward of a modern-day mental institution. These people's lives are very tightly controlled. Can they resist? Of course, and they do all the time. But does anyone they see acknowledge that resistance as a rebellion against a power system that has defined them as abnormal and taken control of their lives, that lets them go only if they will live up to society's idea of normality?

Doctors and nurses will hear all of these statements not as political resistance, but as “uncooperative behavior,” part of what justifies locking these people up in the first place. Only acceptance of the power system and its terms will get them defined as normal, and thus get them released.

But Foucault did not see the system as always operating the same way everywhere. The scientia sexualis might reign supreme in Europe and the U.S., but Foucault sees a very different procedure, an ars erotica, in China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arab-Muslim societies.

Foucault turns to such alternatives to the scientia sexualis in his next few years. The first volume of The History of Sexuality talks mostly about the last two centuries. Volumes II and III, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are quite unexpectedly about Greece and Rome.

There has also been some controversy surounding Foucault's involvement in sadomasochism. He enjoyed the leather-bar scene In San Francisco, where some clubs specialize in ritualized forms of sadomasochism known to the community simply as S/M.

Foucault did not believe that involvement in S/M revealed deep subconscious tendencies towards cruelty and violence. Instead he saw S/M as a game, a way of playing and experimenting with the nature of power.

“On this point the S/M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course there are roles, but everybody knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. It is an acting out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure.”

S/M was about pleasure for Foucault, but pleasure and politics were never fully separable. This concept of play and transformation helps him solve the trap of being always inside power relations. Scientific discourse may have defined us in terms of our sexuality, and we may be unable to unthink these definitions, to step outside them. Our world may be a back ward we cannot escape. But that does not mean we are simply powerless.

Large political parties and organizations for reform do more to stabilize power relations than to change them. Play, whether sexual or overtly political, challenges society's rules on a deeper and less predictable level, opening up greater possibilities of change.

In 1971 Foucault reflected on the political turmoil of the ‘60a in terms that reflected his personal life, his politics, and his scholarly work, bringing all these strands together: “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.”