More Notes on The History of Sexuality V.1 by Michel Foucault
Part three of The History of Sexuality turns to consider the Western European view of sexuality, which Foucault labels as “Scientia Sexualis.” However, the opposition used by Foucault seems deeply flawed— what he speaks of is the “procedure for producing the truth of sex,” which in the case of societies of China, Japan, India, Rome, and the Arabo-Moslem societies is described as “ars erotica,” to contrast them with the Western medical/theological view. This makes no sense to me. Who in their right mind would consider Muslim or Japanese views of sex as somehow more libratory? In Foucault’s view, these societies are closer to the truth of sex because “truth is drawn from pleasure itself” (57). Whose pleasure? Obviously, these societies pursue a patriarchal view of sex, and contain similar structures which disguise the power of sex, empowering women in some respects (The Tale of Genji comes to mind), but subjugating them in other ways. While the medical/theological view does seem vastly different, it seems to me that Foucault surrenders himself to wishful, “the grass is always greener” thinking when it comes to other societies. There are different closets for different societies, but most societies contain closets.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The section opens with the assumption (easily granted) that discourse about sex has multiplied since the eighteenth century, and that along with that discourse have come taboo and prohibitions. However, it is harder for me to grant that the discourse leading into the late nineteenth century was meant to conceal sex in order to avoid it, that is, until Freud (which so many seem to revere like a god) came along to save the day by bringing it out into the open. Foucault asserts that scientific discourse about sex was until then a strategy of evasion, a refusal to let sex speak for itself. I deeply disagree. There was a move to classify, at first, what was viewed as “natural” sex— from Linnaeus forward the effort was towards a taxonomy of “normal” sexuality in the natural arena. Darwin’s writing shows a difficulty in dealing with anything outside the heterosexual frame of reference, and only after Darwin (in my opinion) does the drive to catalogue perversion really pick up speed. I see Freud in that light, misdirected and perverse— the furthest thing from “open” dialogue about sexuality. But I’m in the minority there.
However, I would agree with Foucault’s assertion that in the nineteenth century, discourse on sex was split into two arenas: a biology of reproduction, and a medicine of sex which followed completely different rules. There seems to be little connection between the two. The medical approach is indeed “imbued with age-old delusions” and with “systematic blindness” (55). His observation that these early “scientific” explorations of sex formed a “theater of ritual crises, carefully staged with the help of ether or amyl nitrate” seems accurate to me. However, I would not divorce Freud from this charlatanism either. The Oedipal approach seems even more theatrical to me. None of these approaches seem to go anywhere near, as Foucault labels it, “the truth of sex”(57). After the celebration of other cultures I previously mentioned, Foucault moves back to the confessional. “Western man has become a confessing animal” (59).
Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of “trials” of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage. Whence too this new way of philosophizing; seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not simply in oneself— in some forgotten knowledge, on in a certain primal trace— but in the self examination which leads through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic certainties of consciousness. (59-60)
As you might expect from an archetypal lapsed Catholic, for Foucault, confession=bad. His central theory is that confession has become so deeply engrained in western society that rather than perceiving it as an exercise of power from the outside, we now view it as a “truth” pushing against us from the inside, demanding to get out. The “internal ruse” of confession has inverted our sense of power, where we see our compulsion to confess as an internal drive rather than a social conditioning to constantly and completely confess our transgressions. I find myself in deep disagreement with this; it seems to me that the theories of Pennebaker, in particular, make more sense— it expends energy to suppress troubling thoughts, and we feel a conscious sense of relief from worry when we share our internal states with others rather than hiding them. I don’t think the majority of the West feels any social compulsion to confess, in fact, as a gesture of weakness it is often frowned upon. However, I would deeply agree that sex is the favorite topic of confession.
The section quickly gestures at ancient Greece as an example of sex well utilized: sex was deeply connected with pedagogy, as many of Plato’s dialogues attest. For Foucault, this is a better way to deal with it. Sex should be connected with instruction, rather than confession. His emphasis on the ritual nature of confession is also deeply Catholic— in largely Protestant America, this seems misplaced. There are large elements of confessional behavior here, from Alcoholics Anonymous to the self-disclosing questionnaires one must fill out for just about everything— but they are hardly connected with ritual in every case. Mostly, I suspect it’s just habit— and societal confession is deeply ingrained with a sense of external pressure, external consequence, rather than the internal “will to truth” which he accuses the West of. However, the “lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic” (63) which Foucault describes is certainly present, and I think far more connected with his second hypothesis, glanced at only briefly:
By virtue of the power structure immanent in it, the confessional discourse cannot come from above, as in the ars erotica, through the sovereign will of a master, but rather from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or forgetfulness. What secrecy presupposes is not owing to the high price of what it has to say, or the low number of those who were worthy of its benefits, but to its obscure familiarity and its general baseness. Its veracity is not guaranteed by the lofty authority of its magestery, nor by the tradition it transmits, but by the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse between the one who speaks and what he is speaking about. (62)
It is the personal nature of the discourse which authorizes it; Foucault says very little about that. However slightly though, he alludes here to the possibility that it is not the Catholic tradition he constantly refers to which has created it, but the shift in perception of personal testimony which occurred simultaneously across the historic period he is considering. However, his breakdown of the power dynamic is astute— it is not the confessor that has the power in this situation, but the silent authority, which must listen and deal with the confession. It is a transfer of “confessed truth” which rises from below, rather than the exertion of an external coercion to solicit the confession from above. In Western society, we have “ordered sex’s difficult knowledge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but around the slow surfacing of confidential statements” (63). I suspect that it is that mechanism, of increasing personal disclosure (probably for emotional release rather than by church mechanism) which has caused the evolution of the differentiation of discourse which Foucault proposes. The creation of the medical/scientific discourse about sex is described as arising through:
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A clinical codification of the inducement to speak
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The postulate of a general and diffuse causality
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The principle of latency intrinsic to sexuality
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The method of interpretation
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The medicalization of the effects of confession
The first item is obviously tautological; sex becomes clinical through clinical discourse. The second, refers directly to the evolving idea that sex is the cause and effect of everything. Foucault sees the “latency” as a product of coercive confessional practices, where secrets need to be extracted from between the lines. However, I can see this as largely a descendent of wit as well, where the real game involved is in the extraction of meanings in discourse through intellectual activity. Discourse about everything has gone through long phases of indirectness; it isn’t just sex. It is, however, still a power game of sorts— only those with the “proper” skills can understand meanings latent in the discourse. The method of interpretation, once again, for Foucault is tied directly to the confessional power relation— the transfer of secrets must be interpreted to be useful, by the involvement of the outside agent. However, I can see this as also a part of our craving for complexity. Medicalization of the effects makes an institution out of dealing with that complexity, and generally ignores the effect of that power transfer. I do tend to believe that the analysts are usually sicker than the patients, taking on elements of every psychosis they treat. While I might disagree with his method of getting there, Foucault’s observations seem reasonable. The general hypothesis revealed near the end of this section is thought provoking:
The society that emerged in the nineteenth century— bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will— did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. (69)
I believe this is quite correct. Scientific discourse creates a mode of interrogation that reaches far beyond the booth of the confessional; personal confession, which had long been empowered and authorized (since the eighteenth century) becomes the new currency. However, we are vested in a society of interpreters that ferret out the latent meanings into new universalizing hypotheses.
Taken in this light, the discourse of sexuality becomes far less a case of those “repressive Victorians” doing violence to our previously free sexuality (I think Foucault is way off-base on that) but rather, as he puts it near the close of this section:
We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers. At issue is not a movement to push rude sex back into some obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that spreads it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure. (72)
In most ways, it strikes me that science is the priesthood with a far greater influence on Western society than the Catholic church. The will to confess is a mechanism that I do not see as artificial, as Foucault does, but rather an instrumental psychological drive which needs to be accounted for outside church ritual. Reading Judith Butler’s dissection of the chromosome controversy (“males” with XX chromosomes) reinforces the idea that there is a strong puritanical streak to science, which bends the facts to fit a socially accepted norm. I think Foucault is really on to something regarding the relations of power though— the power comes from below, rather than above. His ars erotica seems to me to be nothing more than wishful thinking, a longing for someone above who “knows” the truth of sex.
