A Song Flung Up To Heaven, Maya Angelou (2002)

I believe this is the last of her autobiographies.  She returns from Ghana to the U.S.  Guy stays behind to finish college.  I recommend the final chapter (thirty-three) as a treatise on how we should look at ourselves carefully.  That’s all I have.

By the way, this is the first of her books that is not damaged.

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou (1986)

This is the 4th of 5 autobiographies Dr. Angelou wrote about her life.  I’ve enjoyed them all very much.  I have been appalled at the condition of each of these four books in my university library.  There are multiple copies of “I know why the caged bird sings” and every one of them is damaged.  I mentioned it to the librarians when I turned in the first two.  It made me so mad.

This book is about her time in West Africa—Ghana—to be exact.  Her son, Guy, finishes high school and starts college in this country where many African Americans have come to live, hoping for the freedom lacking in the United States.  In fact, W.E.B. Du Bois is in his nineties and living in Ghana during this time.  It is the 1960′s, and Du Bois had given up on the U.S. to make things right by former slaves.  Du Bois had given up on the U.S. apologizing or returning the plunder taken from generations of Africans during the Middle Passage.

What I did not know until I read this segment of Maya Angelou’s life is that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois passed away during the night of the first march on Washington.  Expatriates in Ghana had gathered to conduct their own candlelight vigil and march at midnight on August 27th, knowing that the actual march would begin at 7am Washington DC time (p. 123).  Shortly after midnight the word was passed around that Dr. Du Bois had died (p. 124).

We marched and sang thinking of home and the thousands who were marching in Washington, D.C., and many of us held in our minds a picture of the dapper little man, sporting a vandyke beard, perfectly groomed who earned a Harvard doctorate before the end of the 1800s and who said in 1994, ‘The problem with the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line’.  (p. 125)

Maya meets Malcolm X soon afterward on his African pilgrimage, but Malcolm’s leaving is hard on her and her friends.  “Malcolm’s presence had elevated us, but with his departure, we were what we had been before:  a little group of black folks, looking for a home” (p. 146).

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

I just finished this book while on retreat this week.  I finally learned for sure that Harrison William Shepherd is a fictional character along with his archivist, Mrs. Violet Brown.  Almost every other character is historically accurate.  In particular, Leo Davidovich Trotsky did emigrate to Mexico in the late 1920′s to escape Stalin’s death squads.  Mexico at the time was well known as a place where Communists were at least tolerated, even if Mexicans did not know the difference between Communism and social democracy.  Trotsky was a true Marxist and social democrat; something we know nothing about in the United States.  Which is the whole point of this book, I think.

Kingsolver is offering us an opportunity to learn more about the differences between communism (a failed form of governance), Marxism (an economic system), and social democracy (combines economics and governance).  I, myself, am a social democrat.  I believe that we should take the very best care of our citizens:  From each according to his ability and to each according to her need.  This feels very reasonable to me, and in a time when many Americans have lost their homes and their jobs, a necessary one.  However, we now have the top 1% of the top 1% in wealth running our country.  We have liars like Sarah Palin wanting to be President.  And we have a perfectly good President getting the crap beat out of him daily by the fundamentalist, Christian Right.

We have an educational system that is failing children most in need.  Of course, there are exceptions.  Yesterday on the second to the last “Oprah” from the United Center in Chicago, we saw 450 Morehouse men parade to the stage to thank Oprah Winfrey for her scholarship program.  I had no idea.  Considering the school to prison pipeline for Hispanic and Black men between the ages of 18 and 24, having 450 young black men graduate from Morehouse College is perhaps Oprah’s best kept secret.  I am so proud of her and of her scholarship recipients.  Put your money where your mouth is.

My hope is that (even a fictionalized) Harrison William Shepherd swam through the lacuna into a new life.  I can’t think of a better, more hopeful, more positive ending for a book and a life.

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part five, b

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Five:  Right of Death and Power over Life (pp. 135-159) (continued)

Foucault describes four “great lines of attack along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries” (p. 146) resulting in “a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” (p. 147):  the sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, birth controls, and the psychiatrization of perversions.  The blood relation was sacrosanct in the era of sovereignty; now, it is sex or sexuality that not only reproduces the species but the power to dominate.

The new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality.  Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations.  (p. 148)

Questions:

1.  Does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional?  (p. 151)

In other words, do we leave out the body or leave out sex in this analysis?  No.  In fact, Foucault seems to be saying that the power invested in bodies becomes a “history of bodies” (p. 152).

2.  Is the power that is exercised through sexuality not directed specifically at sex?

Foucault claims that the idea of sex took place or developed within the different strategies of power (p. 152).

As sexuality was deployed, sex took on different meanings:  for instance, in hysterization of women, sex was defined as common to men and women, as belonging solely to men, and as an agitation to women by producing constant pregnancy.  In the sexualization of childhood, sex was present (as in the anatomy of the body), but absent (since the body was immature) but it was also present in that children engaged in sexual activity (masturbation), but deficient (in that there was no reproduction).  These four types of “sex” were existent alongside the idea that childhood sexual activity would lead to pathological repercussions later in life (p. 153).  Foucault sums up his account of the deployment of sexuality in the following way:

It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of teh various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity 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. (p. 157)

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part five, a

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Five:  Right of Death and Power over Life (pp. 135-159)

The power of life and death resided within the rights of the sovereignty; even going to war was a legitimate command by a monarch in order to protect the life and well-being of the state.  Soldiers died in the name of the king so that other citizens could live and in order to protect the king himself.  “The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing” (p. 136).  Foucault extends this statement by “the right to take life or let live” (p. 136).  What kind of power does sovereignty represent?

Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure:  of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.  (p. 136)

Since the classical age, however, the West has transformed the sovereign, juridical power into something else:  “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (p. 136).  In addition, “death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life” (p. 136).

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:  massacres have become vital.  (p. 137)

Besides war, there was the scaffold and in contemporary life, the death penalty.  “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order?” (p. 138).  “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (p. 138).  In this climate, therefore, suicide became a crime and an act of resistance.

It is not surprising that suicide—once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise—became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life.  (p. 139)

Two basic forms of power over life came into being in the seventeenth century:  (1) the disciplines and (2) their supervision.  “The body as a machine” or the “anatomo-politics of the human body” (p. 139) developed first followed by and in conjunction with “regulatory controls:  a bio-politics of the population” (p. 139).  “The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed” (p. 139).

During the classical period, there was a rapid deployment of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration.  (p. 140)

Foucault refers to these techniques of “subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” bio-power (p. 140).   In the eighteenth century these techniques of power were still separate but intertwined into the development of capitalism where “the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (p. 141).  Segregation and social hierarchization guaranteed “relations of domination and effects of hegemony” (p. 141).

A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.  We have entered a phase of juridical regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a whole continual and clamorous legislative activity:  these were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable.  (p. 144)

Thus bio-power was part of bio-history.

The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or “alienations,” the “right” to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this “right”—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty.  (p. 145)

Therefore, we begin to understand the role sex begins to play as a political issue.  On the one hand, subjugation of bodies meant determining certain norms around the sex act itself, while controlling population meant determining norms about reproduction, fertility, the family, and society.

It [sex] fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body.  (pp. 145-146)

Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.  It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations.  This is why in the nineteenth century sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences…it became the stamp of individuality….Spread out from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations.  (p. 146)

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part four, deployment, 4, periodization

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Four:  Deployment of Sexuality, Chapter 4, Periodization (pp. 115-131)

If we subscribe to repression hypothesis, there were two major periods:

a.  Seventeenth century:  prohibitions, promotion of adult marital sexuality, decency, concealment of the body, silence

b.  Twentieth century:  relative tolerance with regard to prenuptial or extramarital relations, taboos on the sexuality of children lifted, perverts somewhat accepted

However, Foucault suggests that we look at the chronology of subjugation and resistance:

1.  chronology of techniques:  penitential practices of medieval Christianity; obligatory, exhaustive and period confession required by the Lateran council and by asceticism, spiritual exercises, and mysticism from the sixteenth century forward; Reformation –>  Tridentine Catholicism  –>  Catholic and Protestant methods of examination of conscience and pastoral direction ( sixteenth through eighteenth centuries ); ( end of the eighteenth century ) pedagogy, medicine, and economics make sex not only a secular concern but a concern of the state, subject to surveillance, and demography

A visible continuity, therefore, but one that did not prevent a major transformation:  from that time on, the technology of sex was ordered in relation to the medical institution, the exigency of normality, and—instead of the question of death and everlasting punishment—the problem of life and illness.  The flesh was brought down to the level of the organism.  (p. 117)

mutation ( turn of the nineteenth century ):  1.  the medicine of sex set apart from the medicine of the body; “analysis of heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases, matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of ‘biological responsibility’ with regard to the species” (p. 118);

The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century.  (p. 118)

“perversion-heredity-degenerescence formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex” (p. 118);

Psychiatry, to be sure, but also jurisprudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the surveillance of dangerous or endangered children, all functioned for a long time on the basis of “degenerescence” and the heredity-perversion system.  An entire social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent form of a state-directed racism, furnished this technology of sex with a formidable power and far-reaching consequences.  (p. 119)

2.  the history of the spread of the techniques:  sexual controls were not directed at the poorer classes, but applied “in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes” (p. 120); likewise, “family as an agency of control and a point of sexual saturation” (p. 120) starting with the “idle” woman (p. 121) and then to the adolescent, especially the schoolboy (p. 121);

But what about the working classes?  At the end of the eighteenth century, birth control; mid-eighteenth century, political control and economic regulation of the urban poor; end of nineteenth century, juridical & medical control of perversions.  Foucault concludes that rather than repression or restriction, the “ruling classes” “tried it on themselves” first (p. 122). Foucault asks, “Was this a new avatar of that bourgeois asceticism described so many times in connection with the Reformation, the new work ethic, and the rise of capitalism?”  (p. 122), but concludes that “it was a question of techniques for maximizing life” (p. 123).  “The primary concern was not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ‘ruled’” (p. 123) and “the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another” (p. 123).

…we can assert on the contrary that it provided itself with a body to be cared for, protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would retain its differential value; and this, by equipping itself with—among other resources—a technology of sex….This class must be seen as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race:  the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex on its body, the endogamy of sex and the body.  (pp. 123-124)

Foucault concludes, “we must say that there is a bourgeois sexuality, and that there are class sexualities.  Or rather, that sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects” (p. 127).  Through psychoanalysis, for instance, incest was expressed through discourse, but the social control of incest was administered differently for the bourgeois than the working class.

An entire politics for the protection of children or the placing of “endangered” minors under guardianship had as its partial objective their withdrawal from families that were suspected—through lack of space, dubious proximity, a history of debauchery, antisocial “primitiveness,” or degenerescence—of practicing incest.  Whereas the deployment of sexuality had been intensifying affective relations and physical proximity since the eighteenth century, and although there had occurred a perpetual incitement to incest in the bourgeois family, the regime of sexuality applied to the lower classes on the contrary involved the exclusion of incestuous practices or at least their displacement into another form.  At a time when incest was being hunted out as a conduct, psychoanalysis was busy revealing it as a desire and alleviating—for those who suffered from the desire—the severity which repressed it.  (pp. 129-130)

Foucault describes “an archaeology of psychoanalysis”:  a mechanism for attaching sexuality to the system of alliance; an adversarial position to the theory of degenerescence; a differentiating factor in the technology of sex; using confession to life psychical repression; and telling the truth linked to the challenging of taboos (p. 130).

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part four, deployment, 3, domain

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Four:  Deployment of Sexuality, Chapter 3, Domain (pp. 103-114)

Foucault proposes that sex is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (p. 103).  Starting in the eighteenth century, four strategies of knowledge and power centered on sex.

1.  hysterization of women’s bodies (p. 104) (for instance, the mother as “nervous woman”)

2.  pedagogization of children’s sex (p. 104) (for instance, nearly two centuries of “war” again masturbation)

3.  socialization of procreative behavior (p. 104) (for instance, fertility vs birth-control practices)

4.  psychiatrization of perverse pleasure (p. 105) (for instance, any practices that did not result in conception were considered pathological)

From these strategies emerged four “privileged objects of knowledge:”  “the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult” (p. 105).  Two systems emerged, according to Foucault, in Western societies starting in the eighteenth century:  a deployment of alliance and the deployment of sexuality.

The deployment of alliance

a system of marriage, fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions; could not be relied upon through economic processes or through political power

a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit; its chief objectives is to reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law

important:  a link between partners and statutes; linked to economy through transmission or circulation of wealth; homeostasis of the social body; privileged link with the law and “reproduction”

The deployment of sexuality

superimposed upon the deployment of alliance without supplanting it

mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power; engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control

important:  sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, nature of impressions; linked to economy through numerous and subtle relays, primarily the body; proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way

Four hypotheses present themselves as a result of these deployments that are counter to the repression hypothesis:

a.  sexuality is tied to recent devices of power

b.  sexuality has been expanding at an increasing rate since the seventeenth century

c.  sexuality is not governed by reproduction

d.  sexuality is linked with the intensification of the body and its exploitation as an object of knowledge and an element in relations of power

Foucault makes clear that the deployment of sexuality has not replaced the deployment of alliance, but that one day it might.  However, the deployment of sexuality was constructed from the deployment of alliance.  “First, the practice of penance, then that of the examination of conscience and spiritual direction, was the formative nucleus” (p. 107).

…the questions posed had to do with the commerce allowed or forbidden (adultery, extramarital relations, relations with a person prohibited by blood or statute, the legitimate or illegitimate character of the act of sexual congress; then, coinciding with the new pastoral and its application in seminaries, secondary schools, and convents, there was a gradual progression away from the problematic of relations toward a problematic of “flesh,” that is, of the body, sensation, the nature of pleasure, the more secret forms of enjoyment or acquiescence.  “Sexuality” was taking shape, born of a technology of power that was originally focused on alliance.  (p. 108)

The family was the site of the deployment of alliance in the eighteenth century, while contemporary families “anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support” (p. 108).  “The family is the interchange of sexuality and alliance” (p. 108).  Foucault then discusses incest as belonging to the family and within the family, since the family is the site of sexuality.  He believes it could be no other way.

If one considers the threshold of all culture to be prohibited incest, then sexuality has been, from the dawn of time, under the sway of law and right.  By devoting so much effort to an endless reworking of the transcultural theory of the incest taboo, anthropology has proved worthy of the whole modern deployment of sexuality and the theoretical discourses it generates.  (p. 109-110)

Timeline since the seventeenth century:

deployment of sexuality developing on the fringes of familial institutions (conscience and pedagogy)

becomes focused on the family (psychologized and psychiatrized)

producing the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother;

and the impotent, sadistic, perverse husband;

or the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child;

and the young homosexual who rejects marriage or neglects his wife.  (p. 110)

These [personages] were the combined figures of an alliance gone bad and an abnormal sexuality; they were the means by which the disturbing factors of the latter were brought into the former; and yet they also provided an opportunity for the alliance system to assert its prerogatives in the order of sexuality.  (p. 111)

As a result, “the family, the keystone of alliance” was seen as “the germ of all the misfortunes of sex” (p. 111).

And lo and behold, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the family engaged in searching out the slightest traces of sexuality in its midst, wrenching from itself the most difficult confessions, soliciting an audience with everyone who might know something about the matter, and opening itself unreservedly to endless examination.  (p. 111)

Foucault concludes that the politics of sex produced sexuality, rather than repressing sex (p. 114).

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part four, deployment, 2, method

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Four:  Deployment of Sexuality, Chapter 2, Method (pp. 92-102)

Foucault defines power in multiple ways.  He starts with what it is not.  It is not hierarchical, it is not the law, it is not juridical, it is not over—however, it is intricately embedded in social hegemonies.  “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere….it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (p. 93).  Foucault makes five propositions about power:

1.  power is not acquired, seized, or shared

2.  power is not exterior, but within economic processes, knowledge relationships, and sexual relations

3.  power comes from below

4.  power relations are intentional and nonsubjective, also calculated

5.  where there is power, there are multiple resistances (adversaries, targets, supports)

In applying these propositions to the discourses on sex, Foucault describes four rules to follow:

1.  Rule of immanence (p. 98):  I think what is meant here is that sexuality is inherent within each of us and cannot be studied outside of the individual.  Sexuality does not exist outside of the body, shall we say.

…the body of the child, under surveillance, surrounded in his cradle, his bed, or his room by an entire watch-drew of parents, nurses, servants, educators, and doctors, all attentive to the least manifestations of his sex, has constituted, particularly since the eighteenth century, another “local center” of power-knowledge.  (p. 98)

2.  Rules of continual variations (p. 99):  Foucault envisions sexuality as a matrix of power-knowledges. “The nineteenth-century grouping made up of the father, the mother, the educator, and the doctor, around the child and his sex, was subjected to constant modifications, continual shifts” (p. 99)

3.  Rule of double conditioning (p. 99):  “No ‘local center,’ no ‘pattern of transformation’ could function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy” (p. 99).

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” (p. 100).

4.  Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses (p. 100):  “Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.  In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance” (p. 101).  In relation to sodomy, Foucault explains that in the eighteenth century sodomists were burned, while also being tolerated within the military.

There is no question that the appearance in the nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity;” but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse:  homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.  (p. 101)

In summary, effects of domination began to be produced not through the law or prohibition or sovereignty.  Force relationships, which had previously “found expression in war, in every form of warfare” in Western societies, “became invested” in political power.

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part four, deployment, 1, objective

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Four:  Deployment of Sexuality (pp. 77-80)

Foucault seems to ask the following questions in this introductory section to Part Four of his first treatise on sexuality

Can we know sex?, or

Does sex know us?, and

Why is sex kept secret?

Foucault proposes a will to knowledge with the truth about sex being pleasure-knowledge.

Chapter One:  The Objective (pp. 81-91)

Foucault repeats his conclusion that “the history of the last centuries in Western societies did not manifest the movement of a power that was essentially repressive” (p. 81).  Foucault intends to move from a theory of power to analytics of power.  He describes the theory of repression and the law of desire as juridico-discursive.  It’s principal features are as follows:

a.  negative relations between power and sex:  rejection, exclusion, refusal, concealment

b.  a binary system of power determines its relationship with the law:  ilicit or licit, permitted or forbidden

c.  the law of prohibition is all that power needs to suppress sex:  thou shalt not’s

d.  censorship is the result of power in play:  not permitted, prevented, denying

e.  uniform power at all levels

it operates according to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship:  from state to family, from prince to father, from the tribunal to the small change of everyday punishments, from agencies of social domination to the structure that constitute the subject himself, one finds a general form of power, varying in scale alone.  (p. 85)

This power is “anti-energy” and “juridical” where “all the modes of domination, submission, and subjugation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience” (p. 85).  As a result, Foucault proposes that “we must … conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king” (p. 91).

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part three, scientia sexualis

Foucault, M.  (1990/1978/1976).  The history of sexuality:  Volume 1, an introduction.  Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

Part Three:  Scientia Sexualis (pp. 53-73)

The discourse around sex was a diversion from speaking of sex, more concerned with “aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations” (p. 53).  Add in morality and the scientification of sex produced a medical norm.  What was not “normal” was “evil” and destined to eliminate the human species.  Yet, what was normal sex?  Nobody wanted to say.  Foucault explains that “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).  “It is as if a fundamental resistance blocked the development of a rationally formed discourse concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects”  (p. 55).

Foucault reviews the historical “procedures for producing the truth of sex” (p. 57).  “China, Japan, India, Rome, and the Arabo-Moslem societies—endowed themselves with an ars erotica … drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience” (p. 57).  Traditionally this art or knowledge is kept secret; the knowledge is passed on by experience—a master initiates a student.  Foucault explains that “our civilization possesses no ars erotica” (p. 58).

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 opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret:  I have in mind the confession.  (p. 58)

Western societies, since the Middle Ages, established confession “as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (p. 58).  Penance was codified in the Lateran Council of 1215, and as a result, confessional techniques developed.  “One confesses—or is forced to confess” (p. 59).

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.   (p. 60)

From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession.  (p. 61)

Foucault further elaborates that “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” (p. 61).  In this passage Foucault is referring to pederasty, where young boys were brought into the household of an educated man.  Usually the man was married with children.  The boys were from poor families and with no prospects of increasing their standing in Greek society.  The cost of learning and of increasing one’s standing was sexual relations with the older man.  St. Paul refers to this practice in Romans; passages that are included in the “texts of terror” against modern-day homosexuality.  The problem with modern interpretations is that pederasty is a power relation between non-equals.  Pederasty is not consensual sex between adults or even between adolescents.

However, we can also interpret Foucault’s passage in another way:  he is saying that sexual practices were transmitted from the older man to the young boy, and that Foucault considers this a form of knowledge, similar to the ars erotica.  The confession, on the other hand, forced individuals to tell what might or could have remained secret.  In the telling, the truth of  sex was subjected to judgment and punishment.  How did sexual confession become “constituted in scientific terms?”  (p. 65).

1.  Confession was combined with the examination.

2.  Confession included telling everything and ascribing to sexuality all causes.

3.  Confession must be forced since sexual truth wanted to be hidden.

4.  Confession must be subjected to interpretation.

5.  Confession must be medicalized.

Foucault summarizes the development in the West of the science of sex.  Confession was gradually detached from the sacrament of penance starting in the sixteenth century.  Confession became about “guidance of souls and the direction of conscience” including “pedagogy, relationships between adults and children, family relations, medicine and psychiatry” (p. 68) resulting in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial—society’s determination to “formulate the uniform truth of sex” (p. 69).  While sex was regarded with great suspicion, knowledge of sex was not repressed.  Foucault promises next to “attempt to constitute the ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge” (p. 73).