Foucault's History Of Sexuality: Part I

Hello there!

Today I want to write the first part of the summary I made for Foucault's History of Sexuality. I think this book is a ground-breaking one and I want to render it understandable by each and every individual. So here I start. Please do not forget to comment your thoughts and open a discussion; all ideas welcomed!

Part One: We “Other Victorians”

Foucault begins the book with an account of the Victorian regime of sexuality which he takes to be still constitutive today. He talks about a shift in history regarding the discourse on sexuality: accordingly, while a much more “shameless discourse” coupled with a “quite lax” sexuality was the case at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Victorian bourgeoisie introduced sexual confinement, limiting the space of sexuality only to the realm of reproductive issues, hence turning it into a mere matter of parents’ bedroom (HS, p. 3). Therefore, anything related to sex coming out of the order of generation is silenced and no contrary example was recognised by the very fact that it was affirmed as nonexistent, having no right to exist (ibid., p 4). Such is what Foucault called “the hypocrisy of bourgeois societies”. He continued to call this seemingly multi-layered nature of bourgeois societies “hypocritical”; because Victorian bourgeoisie tried to silence what did not serve for the integrity of their own dominant discourses, they tried to ignore and wipe out anything that stand out against them. Later, he goes on describing how the repression of sexuality has become more and more intense in the last two hundred years and remarks that repression is the link between power, knowledge and sexuality (ibid., p. 5).

For my own reading, it is of great importance to highlight two sentences uttered by Foucault, which I take to be the key sentences of the text, in order to trace the main tenets of Foucault’s thought. The first one is where he says: “For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics” (ibid., p. 5). I believe it is the basic impetus of Foucault’s epistemology and it is what makes sense out of his statement of the objective of this book as to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains discourse on human sexuality in the West (ibid., p. 11). It is also what makes sense out of his outline of the doubts against the repressive hypothesis; for instance about the question he mentions regarding the historico-political character of his discourse against the repressive power mechanisms, he explicitly states that his aim is not to create a discourse which is free of all politics and merely involved in revealing the “mistakes” and “faults” of such doubts; he rather aims at putting them back within an economy of discourses belonging to a certain historicity (ibid., pp. 10-1). Therefore, the truths he is to reveal are the truths of certain power relations emerging at a certain historicity; he wants to maintain the historically important points and the theoretical problems; to explore the wills and intentions that support the economy of the repression of sexuality; and not only to ask “why are we repressed?” but also to seek why our repression has become a burden to us (ibid., pp. 8-9). Hence Foucault thinks that the affirmation of the facticity of repression itself is also a product of our own historicity, since it is made evident by the historical position that made this facticity possible.

This again takes us to where Foucault outlines his objective for this book. He says he wants to explore what kind of knowledge the linkage between sexuality and the polymorphous techniques of power creates, what supports this will to knowledge, the historical shapes that discursive production and the production of power-knowledge take, and what roles the positions, subjects, viewpoints, institutions play in the way sexuality was put in discourse, eventually constituting a science of sexuality (ibid., pp 11-3).

Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis / The Incitement to Discourse

He begins the chapter by talking about the emergence of a repressing discourse on sexuality. This immediately relates to the second sentence uttered by Foucault which I believe to be immensely decisive for the whole part (ibid., p. 27):
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

By this, we understand that it is not what is explicitly said in a discourse that determines the economy of the discursive formation; but it is indeed the very interplay of what is said and what is silenced. The dynamic activity of “the said” and “the silenced” makes the whole discursive realm possible. Hence, at the beginning of the chapter one, Foucault talks about the age of the repression of sexuality as subjugating the language and controlling sex at the level of speech, such as inscribing certain limitations on the use of words (ibid., p. 17). Such is the constitution of a “restrictive economy” by the use of a certain politics of language. Here, the important point Foucault points out is that the intensification of the repressive power also gave way to a proliferation and multiplication of discourses on sexuality since it causes an “institutional incitement to speak about it” (ibid., p. 18). He says the Catholic pastoral and the confession sessions of the date made it mandatory to describe the sexual activity to the slightest details. Although the language to be used was vastly refined, the puritanism of the Victorian discourse made it necessary to examine every small detail of the soul, the intentions, feelings and desires in order to be able to utter them in the confession, including the most intimate parts of sexual activity. The infinite number of pleasures, sensations and thoughts where mind and body meets has to be accounted in order to transform sex into discourse. It warns against taking any small detail to be trivial and recognises no room for obscurity. In this way, it censors the language as well as it aims to carry the complete sexual activity into the realm of discourse in order to reveal how desires form the human behaviour and what ways they use in order to disguise themselves (ibid., pp. 20-21). Foucault talks about an anonymous book named My Secret Life in which a man talks about every detail of his life dedicated to sexual activity with the idea “to recount the facts, just as they happened, insofar as I am able to recollect them; this is all that I can do” (ibid., p. 22). He says his objective is to educate young people and supports his situation by holding it to be a bundle of experience shared by thousands of men that have lived so far. Foucault holds him to be the most direct representative of the epoch as he reveals what is “in the heart of modern man for over two centuries” (ibid., p. 22).

Foucault says that it is not possible to relate the repressive hypothesis only to a law of prohibition precisely because it produces entirely different effects on the discourse on sexuality. Thus, the censor on sex indeed resulted in a greater diversification and intensification of the desire to talk about sex. He holds, the eighteenth century nests not a “new mentality” on sexuality but a different power mechanism that operates on the discourses regarding sexuality. Accordingly, the economic, political and technical background of the era necessitated to turn the discourse on sex into something crucial by attributing rationality to it (ibid., p. 23-4). With this, speaking of sex is inscribed into a certain system of utility which makes sexuality something to be administered. He exemplifies the situation by pointing out the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem whose core indeed depended on sexual activity. Foucault calls this situation “a policing of sex”, related to the ordering of the forces of society instead of mere repression of disorder (ibid., p. 25). This historical edge is now where the sexual conduct of the population turns into an object of scientific study and intervention, producing knowledge with the data of the rates of birth and death, matters of marriage, frequency of sexual relations, fertility and every other detail of sexual life that it can make use of. With this, sexuality turns into a reified object of economic and political relations which primarily exist between the state and the individual (ibid., p. 26).

At this point, Foucault exemplifies the interplay of what is said and what is silenced with a reference to the secondary schools in the eighteenth century where the question of sex was one of the basic tenets of daily life although it was not explicitly uttered. He says that the architecture of the schools, the space of classes and dormitories, the shape of tables, or punishments, responsibilities and such, were all entirely determined according to the sexual discourse of the era relating to children. Child sexuality was such an intense matter that medical advices, literature, opinions, observations, experiments, outlines and plans yielded many dimensions on the transformation of adolescent sexuality into the discursive field. Such was the way a canonical and rational discourse on sex was transferred to children. Foucault mentions a festival where some school children, in front of public, answer all the questions that require sex education, perfectly in compliance with the discursive inscription they are put into. It turns out to be a great example for the way the discursive web produces knowledge and constructs a science that articulates around power relations (ibid., pp. 29-30). This power-knowledge is indeed the link that Foucault seeks between the intensification of intervention in the sexual conduct and the multiplication of sexual discourses despite of and thanks to the repressing laws of eighteenth century discourse on sexuality.

Foucault goes on mentioning other locus for the production of the discourses on sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as medicine, psychiatry, criminology and jurisdiction. He repeats the same point that the increasing awareness on the “dangers” of sex aroused an increasing incitement for talking about sex (ibid., p. 31). He gives the example of a “sexual” incidence between a villager adult and a little girl in which the man later becomes the target of collective intolerance but more importantly, he turns into an object of medicine with a study of his anatomy, including his brainpan and facial bone structure, and of clinical interrogation with a close-up in his desires, thoughts, inclinations, sensations, pleasures etc. Foucault holds this as a case of society’s “machinery for speechifying, analyzing and investigating” (ibid., p. 32). Accordingly, this case was no different than the case of the Englishman writing his sexual life in immense detail, because in either case sex has to be inscribed in language through the use of words.

Hence, the discourses on sex are in no way apart from power but they are indeed the means of its exercise. He is careful to stress upon the fact that his analysis does not reveal a discourse but a multiplicity of discourses operating at diverse levels, under the effects of different power mechanisms (ibid., p. 33). This way, the moral theology and the rules of confession sessions in the Middle Ages are diversified and transformed into other shapes. It is not possible to understand this transformation in terms of a continuity; rather it is a product of historical dissemination and diversification of the centers that produce the repression. Foucault himself summarises this compactly (ibid., p. 34):

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.

He finishes the chapter by taking our attention on the danger of seeing sexuality outside discursive realm. The idea that “sexuality is reachable only by breaking of a secret” is problematical for it repeats the Christian pastoral that presents sexuality as the “disquieting enigma” (ibid., p. 35). The point to remember is the character of the modern societies which makes sexuality the subject matter of an endless speech while trying to maintain it as the secret.

The next part is on its way, and thank you for reading!