Classically, among the reasons we rein in our sex drives is not to have the world become a cauldron of sexual jealousy. What can be more divisive of a community than to have it become a Peyton Place? (For you younger folks, that's a reference to a "scandalous" novel from the 1950s, by Grace Metalious, in which the denizens of a supposedly staid suburban community were secretly sleeping with one another.)
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| Michel Foucault |
Foucault said au contraire. According to Modules on Foucault II (which I'll refer to as "MoF II") in refuting the "repressive hypothesis" Foucault held that all the so-called "repression" actually transmuted into "a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex — specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward."
(Another common assumption Foucault disputed was that we each have a fixed personal "identity." For him, identity was free-floating, "more of a performance given to the world," according to this web page. I disagree. I think the most basic parts of our identity, once they're established, never change. See The Structure of Personal Identity. I don't, however, mean this fatalistically. People can change what they are. They just can't change who they are.)
At any rate, Foucault didn't much believe in a fixed anything. Instead, he believed in the applications of "power" that are signified most especially by and through our "discourses." These applications of power, these discourses of ours, shift. They're in flux over time. So it makes no sense to Foucault to ask how much power so-and-so has, as if power were an intrinsic part of that person's self. Rather, ask how one is presently using power — claiming it, principally by means of one's discourses.
So the "discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward" with respect to sex has really been the history of a sort of changing power relationship manifested as much by all that is said and written — our discourses — as by what we actually do.
MoF II says, "Far from silence, we witness 'an institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail'."
I assume that by "agencies of power" Foucault means all such agencies, not just governmental ones. For example, the popular media. (I recently was exposed in an auto shop waiting room to a Maury Povich TV show where the fun revolved around learning which of an endless procession of male possibilities was the actual, DNA-tested father of a woman's child.)
Still, even if government was not always intentionally front and center in bringing on all the back-and-forth about sex, "the effect of all this rational discourse about sex was the increasing encroachment of state law into the realm of private desire: 'one had to speak of [sex] as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered'." Anyone care to discuss whether gay marriage ought to be legal?
I interpret all this as meaning that (whatever does or does not go on between the sheets these days) we all have this compulsion to communicate about sex. Talk about it. Hash out its rights and wrongs. Condemn those who don't agree or don't live up (or down) to our standards.
Not to mention, we have this urge to confess what we do, supposedly in private — not just to a priest (in that kind of power relationship) but right up there on the national TV screen to Maury or Dr. Phil or whoever.
I'm against all this. That was really my main point in an earlier post, Hooray for Hypocrisy!. In it, I complained of (a) people today being mainly interested in self-gratification and (b) people being not the least bit hypocritical about admitting (a).
I won't try to argue the self-gratification point here. But the idea that people are not the least bit reticent to talk about or otherwise communicate (tattoos, visible bra straps, navel exposure) their sexual attitudes goes right along with Foucault. It's as if his comments (he died in 1984) have been amplified through a cultural megaphone in the last two decades.
I basically don't get it. I admit that. Why all the incessant harping on sex, which used to be something done behind closed doors and never advertised — or so I thought?
MoF II says, "Our continual call to speak of sexuality in the present age (on television, in popular music, etc.) is, therefore, not significantly different from the ways state power imposed its regulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: through the continual demand for discourse."
OK, I sort of see that ... as long as Foucault was not trying to say that state power has been applied in such a way as intentionally to turn up the volume on sex talk. To me, since you never turn on C-SPAN and hear Congresspersons urging more, uh, congress, it would seem to be the exact opposite. The state and other institutions of formal power (say, the office responsible for implementing the Hollywood Production Code of yore) would seem to have tried their mightiest to quash all the sex talk (if movies, rap, etc., qualify as talk).
To me, all the present sex talk represents an insurgency against these erstwhile agencies of censorship. It's as if people in general have claimed their power by using the topic of sex basically as a wedge issue in the requisite discourses.
MoF II goes on: "Foucault also argues that censorship is not the primary form through which power is exercised; rather it is the incitement to speak about one's sexuality (to experts of various sorts) in order better to regulate it."
That would seem to confirm what I just said. If power is now being expressed via "incitement" rather than its opposite, censorship, then where is this incitement coming from?
From the very institutions of power that ostensibly try to stifle sex, Foucault says, in what seems to me quite a subtle point.
(I note in passing, by the way, that "to speak about sexuality to experts of various sorts" is an umbrella phrase that covers what goes on in the confessional as well as what goes on on national TV.)
My "hypocrisy" post made it clear (I hope) that I'm big on silence when it comes to sex. Foucault had this to say about silence about sex, according to MoF II:
Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.... There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Well, if silence is itself a discourse, what isn't a discourse? I worry about philosophers who start using a word like "discourse" to describe a category of thought and eventually lead you to believe that nothing is not in that category, even stuff that would seem to be its direct opposite.
But that's not really what's going on here, in Foucault's discourse. Foucault's point was really that enforced silence really just encourages prolixity:
Foucault gives the example of eighteenth-century secondary schools. Sex was not supposed to be spoken of in such institutions; however, for this very reason, one can read the preoccupation with sexuality in all aspects of such schools: "The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories..., the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods — all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children."
But isn't that just a rewording of the classic complaint about regimes of sexual repression: that the really foster resistance? They function like the command "Don't think of an elephant!" to produce the exact opposite state of affairs.
No, I don't want people to be forced to stop all the sex talk. I just wish they'd abandon it on their own. Maybe if there was a return to sexual mystery, not so many men would need to spend their money on Viagra.
Plus, maybe if we were voluntarily mum about sex, we'd be able to gin up a jealousy-free zone for the furtherance of the spirit of solidarity in our society.
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