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).

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part two, repressive hypothesis, 2, perverse implantation

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 Two:  The Repressive Hypothesis; Chapter 2, The Perverse Implantation (pp. 36-49)

Foucault asks if all of these social controls and discourses were merely to reinforce procreation and take the pleasure out of sex?  He believes the answer to that is “yes” but he takes it a step further.  He asks if the purpose of the medicalizing and socializing (through psychiatry, pedagogy, and criminology) of the sex act and sexuality was “to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations:  in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative?” (p. 37).  In addition, Foucault notes that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been the age of “the implantation of perversions” and the initiation of “sexual heterogeneities” (p. 37).

Going back to the eighteenth century codes, Foucault notes three which governed sexual practices:  the canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law.  These codes delineated the “division between licit and illicit” (p. 37) sexual activity.  Marital relations were “saturated with prescriptions” (p. 37) and under constant surveillance.  “Breaking the rules of marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal measure of condemnation” (p. 38).  Homosexuality, infidelity, marriage without parental consent, and bestiality were all condemned equally.  “Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a juridical nature” (p. 38).  Hermaphrodites, for instance, were seen as criminals or “crime’s offspring” (p. 38).

Two changes occurred as a result of the explosion of discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth century:  a focus upon heterosexual monogamy and scrutiny of the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals.  The libertine of the past became the pervert of the present; unnatural; degenerate.  Perverts were akin to madmen and friendly with delinquents.  Foucault attempts to tie these changing attitudes back to repression and social control by addressing the forms of power that were exercised:

1.  “an entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the family milieu” (p. 42):  marriage was the best, adultery was wrong, masturbation and incest became of interest along with children’s sexuality

2.  “the homosexual was now a species” (p. 43):  sodomy had been considered a forbidden act, but now sodomy described a person or an identity, along with other so-called perversions

3.  “The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this” (p. 44):

The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus:  pleasure and power.  (p. 45)

4.  through heterosexual, socially sanctioned marriage, the family became the focus of all sexual activity:  “all this made the family, even when brought down to its smallest dimensions, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities” (p. 46)  leaving the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the consultation the site of “forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sexuality” (p. 46).

Nineteenth-century “bourgeois” society—and it is doubtless still with us—was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion….Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.  (p. 47)

The growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians.  It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures.  It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices.  But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures.  (p. 48)

Therefore, Foucault concludes, we must abandon the idea that “modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression” (p. 49) and understand that “it is the opposite that has become apparent…never have there existed more centers of power…never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere”  (p. 49).

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part two, repressive hypothesis, 1, discourse

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 Two:  The Repressive Hypothesis; Chapter 1, The Incitement to Discourse (pp. 17-35)

By the seventeenth century in France, censorship of sex and sexuality among bourgeois society initiated modern prudishness.  Foucault proposes, however, a “discursive explosion” (p. 17) through confession resulting in policing of statements and “a whole restrictive economy” accompanying the “social redistributions of the classical period” (p. 18).  “Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the sacrament of penance after the council of Trent” (p. 18) where new rules applied to the actual words used to describe the sex act.  “But while the language may have been refined, the scope of the confession—the confession of the flesh—continually increased” (p. 19).  “According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications…everything had to be told” (p. 19).  The flesh was (re)constructed as the “root of all evil” while also being the source of desire.  It was desire—thoughts, feelings, stirrings—which were considered sinful.  “Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul” (p. 20).  “This scheme of transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting” (p. 20).  In the seventeenth century it was the rule for every good Christian:  “you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse” (p. 21).  And then it could be censored or made acceptable by the clergy.

Western man had been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself.  (p. 23)

Foucault further elaborates upon this process.  “Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex” (p. 23), not only from a moral point of view, but from a rational one.  “Sex became a police matter” (p. 24) and “policing of sex…through useful and public discourses” (p. 25) became necessary.  Policing of sex arose along with several other techniques of power in the eighteenth century.  The idea of population became an economic and political problem.

…population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.  Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables:  birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.  (p. 25)

Sex became interesting in terms of birthrates, age of marriage, illegitimate births, frequency of sexual relations, fertility, and contraception.  If a country were to be rich and powerful, it had to be populated.  Therefore, a citizens’ “use of his sex” and “the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as a target of intervention” (p. 26).  Then Foucault drops the concluding bombshell:  “in time these new measures would become anchorage points for the different varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 26).  Sex became an issue between the state and the individual, including children.

In secondary schools of the eighteenth century “the question of sex was a constant preoccupation” (p. 27).  “The sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth century—and quite apart from that of adolescents in general—a public problem” (p. 28).  Foucault brings these discourses on sex of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together through medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice, and social controls.  Each of these disciplines had something to say about the sexuality of individuals, of couples, of children, and of adolescents.

The Middle Ages had organized around the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance, a discourse that was markedly unitary.  In the course of recent centuries, this relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities which took form in demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism.  (p. 33)

Sex, the secret of modern societies, was spoken of constantly.

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, part one, we “other Victorians”

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 One:  We “Other Victorians” (pp. 3-13)

“At the beginning of the seventeenth century”, Foucault begins, “a certain frankness was still common, it would seem” (p. 3).  Sexual practices were not hidden, nor were gestures, discourses, or anatomies. Children were not hidden away from the illicit or open transgressions.  “But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie,” claims Foucault (p. 3).  Sexuality was moved into the home where the family “took custody of it” and appropriated it for reproduction.

The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law.  The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of secrecy.  (p. 3)

The parents bedroom became the “single locus of sexuality” (p. 3) and all other sexual activity was considered indecent.  Children were believed to have no sex and were forbidden to talk about it.  Repression of sexuality served the purposes of “modern puritanism” (p. 4) with its “triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence” (p. 5).  The “other Victorians” populated the brothel and the mental hospital, where the societal repression of sexuality was less manifest.

We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost:  nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required.  (p. 5)

Repression of sexuality in the seventeenth century coincides with the development of capitalism; “it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order” (p. 5).  Sex is “rigorously repressed…because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative” (p. 6).  However, there may be other reasons served by the repression hypothesis.

If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.  (p. 6)

Foucault adds, “we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive” (p. 6) when we speak of sex today even.

What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights….Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form—so familiar and important in the West—of preaching.  (p. 7)

Foucault wants to take on the question of “Why do we say that we are repressed?” (p. 9) and why do we “burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin” (p. 9).  Three doubts arise  concerning the repressive hypothesis:

1.  Is sexual repression an historical fact?

2.  Do the workings of power really belong to the category of repression?

3.  Are we really talking about repression or something else entirely?

Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it?  What were the effects of power generated by what was said?  What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them?  What knowledge was formed as a result of this linkage?  The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world.  (p. 11)

Foucault continues, “to search instead for instances of discursive production (which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions to circulate)” (p. 12), all techniques of power under the guidance of a “will to knowledge” which has constituted a science of sexuality.

Discipline and Punish, Part Four, the carceral, 3

Foucault, Michel.  (1995).  Discipline & Punish:  The birth of the prison.  [Trans. A. Sheridan, 1977.].  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

pp. 293-308, 3.  The carceral

Foucault marks January 22 1840 as the date representing the completion of the carceral system.  On that day Mettray penal colony was opened, “a private reformatory without walls for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents aged between 6 and 21” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettray_Penal_Colony).

Why Mettray?  Because it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour.  In it were to be found ‘cloister, prison, school, regiment.’  (p. 293)

Inmates were divided into families, which resembled an army unit.  “Roll call was taken three times a day” (p. 293).  Individuals worked in a workshop and went to school.  “Justice” was dispensed every day in the parlor with different types of punishment given based upon the severity of the offence.

The entire parapenal institution, which is created in order not to be a prison, culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters:  ‘God sees you.’  (p. 294)

Supervisors and foreman at Mettray were judge and jury, parents, technicians of behavior, models, and trainers.

Training was accompanied by permanent observation; a body of knowledge was being constantly built up from the everyday behaviour of the inmates; it was organized as an instrument of perpetual assessment.  (p. 294)

Foucault describes each inmate and the intention of the penal colony to produce:  “a soul to be known and a subjection to be maintained” (p. 295)

The modelling of the body produces a knowledge of the individual, the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes of behaviour and the acquisition of skills is inextricably linked with the establishment of power relations; strong, skilled agricultural workers are produced; in this very work, provided it is technically supervised, submissive subjects are produced and a dependable body of knowledge built up about them.  (p. 295)

What emerged from Mettray was a new type of supervision indicated by both knowledge and power “over individuals who resisted disciplinary normalization” (p. 296).

But the supervision of normality was firmly encased in a medicine or a psychiatry that provided it with a sort of ‘scientificity’; it was supported by a judicial apparatus which, directly or indirectly, gave it legal justification.  (p. 296)

Mettray was unique in that it housed minors and served as a parental authority.  And, Mettray was part of a system of incarceration that included colonies for poor abandoned children, almshouses for young females, and “factory-convents” (p. 298) where girl workers were confined and promised payment.  Foucault describes a “carceral archipelago” (p. 297) of the previously described prison-like institutions, but also including “charitable societies, moral improvement associations, organizations that handed out assistance and also practised surveillance, workers’ estates and lodging houses” (p. 298) which functioned as disciplinary mechanisms with “all too visible marks of the penitentiary system” (p. 298).

The penitentiary technique resulted in the following:

1.  The movement from offence as transgression of the law (actions) to include  “a slight departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm” (identity) (p. 298).

You will end up in the convict-ship, the slightest indiscipline seems to say; and the harshest of prisons says to the prisoners condemned to life:  I shall note the slightest irregularity in your conduct….it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly; it was this that haunted the school, the court, the asylum or the prison….Replacing the adversary of the sovereign, the social enemy was transformed into a deviant, who brought with him the multiple danger of disorder, crime and madness.  (p. 300)

2.  The creation of “disciplinary careers” (p. 300) from the outlaw to the prison supervisor.

“…an uncertain space that was for criminality a training ground and a region of refuge; there poverty, unemployment, pursued innocence, cunning, the struggle against the powerful, the refusal of obligations and laws, and organized crime all came together as chance and fortune would dictate; … There was a sort of disciplinary ‘training’, continuous and compelling, that had something of the pedagogical curriculum and something of the professional network.  (p. 300)

“The delinquent is an institutional product” (p. 301) in that a childhood spent in a reformatory produced the adult criminal sentenced to hard labour.

In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside of the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence.  (p. 301)

This reminds me of No Child Left Behind where students who begin to fail in elementary school are labeled, tracked, and by the very nature of standardized testing, coerced into a position of “left behind” if they are unable to conform to the White dominant learning style or to answer standardized questions from the White dominant point of view.  As students fail, they learn that everyone sees them as failures (behaviors determine identity).

3.  “But perhaps the most important effect of the carceral system and of its extension well beyond legal imprisonment is that it succeeds in making the power to punish natural and legitimate, in lowering at least the threshold of tolerance to penality” (p. 301) by playing justice and discipline against themselves (p. 302).

The carceral “naturalizes” the legal power to punish, as it “legalizes” the technical power to discipline (p. 303).

Foucault asks the question:  “how were people made to accept the power to punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so” (p. 303)?

It is highly probably that the great carceral continuum, which provides a communication between the power of discipline and the power of the law, and extends without interruption from the smallest coercions to the longest penal detention, constituted the technical and real, immediately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of the right to punish.  (p. 303)

4.  The carceral “permitted the emergence” of “a new form of law” — the norm (p. 304).  “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based” (p. 304).

The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power. (p. 304)

5.  “The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation” (p. 304).  “The carceral network constituted one of the armature of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible.  Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation” (p. 305).

6.  Therefore, the prison has been able to resist all efforts at reform.  Two primary processes are delineated by Foucault:  (1)  as crime networks grow larger and more global, the prison is needed even more; (2)  the growth of disciplinary networks and their interchange with penal apparatuses.

now, as medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, social work assume an ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment, the penal apparatus will be able, in turn, to become medicalized, psychologized, educationalized; and by the same token that turning-point represented by the prison becomes less useful when, through the gap between its penitentiary discourse and its effect of consolidating delinquency, it articulates the penal power and the disciplinary power.  (p. 306)

The result is  “the fabrication of the disciplinary individual” (p. 308).

Discipline and Punish, Part Four, prison, 2.2

Foucault, Michel.  (1995).  Discipline & Punish:  The birth of the prison.  [Trans. A. Sheridan, 1977.].  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.

pp. 257-292, 2.  Illegalities and delinquency (continued)

Foucault critiques the prison system in the following ways:

1. Prisons do not diminish the crime rate (p. 265).
2. Detention causes recidivism (p. 265).
3. The prison cannot fail to produce delinquents (p. 266).
4. The prison makes possible the organization of delinquents (p. 267).
5. The conditions to which free inmates are subjected necessarily condemn them to recidivism (p. 267).
6. The prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family into destitution (p. 268).

Similar results were found in the 1970’s which prompted Foucault to enumerate the “fundamental principles of the prison” (p. 268):

• The principle of correction (p. 269):  transformation of the prisoner’s behavior
• The principle of classification (p. 269):  distribution by criminality, age, mental attitude, technique of correction to be used, and stages of transformation
• The principle of the modulation of penalities (p. 269):  adjustments to the penalty are made based upon the individual
• The principle of work as obligation and right (p. 270):  “work must be one of the essential elements in the transformation and progressive socialization of convicts” (p. 269)
• The principle of penitentiary education (p. 270):  indispensable and obligatory
• The principle of the technical supervision of detention (p. 270):  supervision and administration by “a specialized staff possessing the moral qualities and technical abilities required of educators” (p. 270)
• The principle of auxiliary institutions (p. 270):  supervision and assistance “until the rehabilitation of the former prison is complete” (p. 270)

The carceral system contains four elements:  super-power, auxiliary knowledge, inverted efficiency, and utopian duplication (p. 271).

The carceral system combines in a single figure discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invincible utopias, programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency.  (p. 271)

Foucault points out, “If the law is supposed to define offences, if the function of the penal apparatus is to reduce them and if the prison is the instrument of this repression, then failure has to be admitted” (p. 271).  Alternatively, “one must be able to measure the effects of the penality of detention on the overall level of criminality” (pp. 271-272).  Yet this measure failed, and the only alternative was deportation.  Yet Foucault proposes to reverse the question:  What function is served by the failure of the prison?  The police report keeps track of the criminal and of crimes; in keeping track of illegal activities, there is a stratification of tolerance implied and practiced which serves the dominant culture or class.  In the Ancien Regime, crimes committed by individuals of different socio-economic class were tolerated side by side; at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, illegal activities began to encompass social, economic, and political conflict in addition to resistance to industrialization.  Foucault characterizes this development as “a whole peasant illegality” against the bourgeoisie, the landed property owners (p. 274).  Crime became a function of being poor and uneducated—even today we think of the delinquent in this way.

But why and how is the prison called upon to participate in the fabrication of a delinquency that it is supposed to combat? (p. 278)

1.  It is possible to supervise it (p. 278).

2.  It is possible to channel delinquency into less dangerous forms (p. 278).

3.  It (the less dangerous delinquent) may be useful in other ways (p. 278).

4.  It is possible to utilize the less dangerous delinquent as an agent of colonization for the dominant group (p. 279).

Two examples of how delinquent networks were used by the bourgeousie are prostitute networks and deportation to African colonies (p. 279).  In addition, by setting up prostitution, the puritan ethic could be maintained; sexual activity contrary to the dominant norms went underground.  Agents provocateurs, informers,  were in use before the nineteenth century, but police supervision made it possible to keep better track of such individuals.  The documentary system of arrest warrants, prison registers, court summaries, and card indexes contributed to the overall surveillance of the population and collaboration between the police and the prison (p. 282).

Police encroachment on justice and the force of inertia that the carceral institution opposes to justice are not new, nor are they the results of a sclerosis or of a gradual shift in power; it is a structural feature that characterizes punitive mechanisms in modern societies.  (p. 282)

In summary, the delinquent is a constructed identity, that can be manipulated, surveilled, rewarded, criminalized, penalized, or utilized by the dominant bourgeois social class.  Criminal acts, on the other hand, are behaviors for which there is law to address.  In moving from criminality (behaviors) to delinquency (identity) dominant groups are able to force public opinion to sway their way.  If you want to start a new movement or point of view, then you have to go up against the dominant group, and you will likely be considered a delinquent, even if you have behaved lawfully.