Notes on understanding Foucault.

1. The BUMPERSTICKER about The History of Sexuality:

We are not, as a society, repressive about sex, and never have been. Instead, since the 17th century, we have been producing sex at a terrific rate. The ‘deployment of sexuality’ is the great social machinery that links up sexual practices with identities, through the categorizations of the medical institution; it is the apparatus that creates sex as the truth of our being, what must be ferreted out, understood, and, above all, confessed to others. The ‘deployment of sexuality’ operates through institutions (medicine and the family), through legal systems (penal codes classifying legal and illegal sexual behaviors), through cultural practices and interactions (media, schools, and social activities), and through social theories (psychoanalysis).

2. On Foucault’s method in The History of Sexuality:

The methodology in The History of Sexuality is GENEALOGY.

In his book The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault introduced ARCHEOLOGY as a method. This method is characterized by its distrust of continuity and the search for meaning in history. Dreyfus and Rabinow state that archeological analysis “shows that what seems like the continuous development of meaning is crossed by discontinuous discursive formations” (106). That means that traditional historians simply displace or ignore those incidents or discourses that don’t seem to fit with a model of continual development in history. Since the goal of traditional history is to tell a story that unifies all incidents into a coherent narrative, a violence is done to those elements to get them all to work together seamlessly. Archeology investigates the practices of historians (and other social scientists) that create meaning and shape discourse in particular ways; archeology as a methodology is aimed at understanding the meaning-making practices of those who create discourses, to demonstrate the rules of discourse that allow such meaning-making to happen. While in The History of Sexuality Foucault does not do archeological analysis, this approach continues to influence his work.

GENEALOGY is an analytic approach that is concerned less with the practices of social scientists in making meaning than with the relationship between discourse and practice in history itself. So if the archeologist is a theoretician who talks about how professional discourses work to make meaning, the genealogist looks at “historical developments” and the traditional stories told about them to rethink the historical record, from a position that is anti-historical. Dreyfus and Rabinow state, “The genealogist is a diagnostician who concentrates on the relations of power, knowledge, and the body in modern society” (105). In a sense, one could argue that Foucault tears apart traditional historical perspectives in order to demonstrate how the body comes to be the locus of various strategies of power and knowledge in the modern period. His “research question” is “how did the body come to be so significant in the way that modern societies distribute and activate their power relations?” He doesn’t answer the question of the origin of this formation as much as he demonstrates how the body functions in the power-knowledge nexus.

Genealogy involves an interest in surface, not depth. Dreyfus and Rabinow explain it this way: “as early as Plato’s Symposium, eros has seemed to our civilization to be a profound and mysterious force that only poets and prophets could illuminate, yet it is a force which contains the secret springs of human motivation. Likewise, throughout the nineteenth century sex was held to be the most profound key to the meaning of a vast range of practices. Seen geneaologically, this obsession with deep and hidden meaning becomes directly accessible to the observer, once he [sic] distances himself [sic] from the cultural belief in deep meaning” (107). Thus, “deepness” as a quality of important meanings turns out to be a cultural value, held in esteem through the experience of the confession (where “deep meanings” of one’s own experience are expressed to the priest, and absolved through his mediation). Foucault argues that rather than finding cultural meanings under layers, meanings are to be found in “surface practices.” So if we think about sex, and the examples in The History of Sexuality, we can say that the anti-masturbation campaigns of the 19th century thought of themselves as ferreting out the deeply hidden practices of self-gratification, but looked at in terms of their impact on the surface, they simply spread the discourses about sexuality further. They didn’t work to repress the practice of masturbation (although that was their intent), but disseminated information about it. We became, as a society, more invested in thinking about sex even as we went around saying that sex was around us too much.

Another quote from Dreyfus and Rabinow: “According to Foucault the task of the genealogist is to destroy the primacy of origins, of unchanging truths. He seeks to destroy the doctrines of development and progress. Having destroyed ideal significations and original truths, he looks to the play of wills. Subjection, domination, and combat are found everywhere he look. Whenever he hears talk of meaning and value, of virtue and goodness, he looks for strategies of domination” (108-9). You can see here why there is so much military rhetoric in The History of Sexuality. The idea here is that Foucault leaves aside the idea of universal values, goodness, and truth. Each of these things is produced discursively in a given historical period, and their meanings are secured through rather violent strategies having to do with how power operates.

3. Power/bio-power:

Power operates through bodies, as bio-power. Dreyfus and Rabinow write, “Foucault’s aim is to isolate, identify, and analyze the web of unequal relationships set up by political technologies which underlies and undercuts the theoretical equality posited by the law and political philosophers. Bio-power escapes from the representation of power as law and advances under its protection. . . . To understand power in its materiality, its day to day operation, we must go to the level of the micropractices, the political technologies in which our practices are formed” (185). Bio-power is a specific form of power the emerges in the modern period (post-18th century) as a part of the larger “technology” of modern societies. Bio-power is a dispersed form of power; rather than coming “from above” and organizing people through restriction and prohibition, bio-power gets us to regulate ourselves.

Think of bio-power this way: once medicine gets a handle on how to cure disease (which really only happens in the 20th century, with the development of antibiotics, chemotherapies, the understanding of hormones and the ability to synthesize them, etc.), there is a shift in emphasis from death to life in medicine. There is a tremendous focus in culture now on “health”; we are told everyday how to eat, sleep, exercise, and basically live our lives in order to extend them or avoid illness. From a traditional perspective, this is a positive development; medicine works to enhance people’s lives. From Foucault’s perspective, this development represents the enhancement of bio-power, as our daily practices must now include myriad micropractices aimed at illness-prevention. The flow of medical information about health is a regulatory discourse and a method of dividing people based on their health practices and outcomes. Unhealthy people become easy to blame for their illnesses within this paradigm, and the state is able to avoid its responsibility to clean up the environment, curb industrial pollution, insure a safe food supply, etc., since the primary emphasis of illness prevention is understood to be personal, in one’s own control. Personal regulation knits us all ever more firmly to the ideal of “progress” that modern society stands for; we stake our claim to be modern subjects in part through the specific practices we engage. “Exercise,” then, is a regulatory regime that keeps us focused on our bodies; the forms of bio-power in operation today not only work through our bodies, but keep us focused on our bodies as a locus of the truth of the person.

Source: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.