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)