It’s time for my final review of the History of Sexuality Volume One. After my first two reviews, looking at the Repressive Hypothesis and then Scientia Sexualis, it’s now time to finish off, with a look at Foucault’s final two final parts, the Deployment of Sexuality and The Right of Death and Power Over Life.
Let’s have a quick look at where we left off. In my first review, Foucault posited that despite a dominant narrative of a repressive hypothesis; one that sexuality has been subject to centuries of repression of discourse and censorship, we have in fact seen an explosion of discursive explosion. In my second review, looking at Scientia Sexualis, Foucault argues that this explosion of discourse has focused around an obsession to obtain sexual ‘truth’. This obsession has occurred through two means; first we have seen a ‘scientification of sex’, and second this ‘scientification’ has occurred through delving into the tradition of confession – we have created a science of sexual confession.
The Deployment of Sexuality builds on these ideas to directly ask the question, why do we want to find the truth of sex?
Now, before I start, I have to say that I have found writing this final review rather difficult. Simply put, I struggled a little more with the second half of Foucault’s piece. I think part of it was that as I said at the start of my reviews Foucault is difficult to get through, so as you power your way through it gets a little tiring. Second, and probably more importantly though, the first chapters are so important in my mind, that as we got to this section in some ways it seemed like the piece should have already finished. As I went back and looked though, I found that this second half was just as important and worth going through.
The Deployment of Sexuality is split into four sections, Objective, Method, Domain and Periodization. It’s going to be hard to cover each section in depth, so I am going to try and cover the overall thesis through running through the each chapter. Foucault starts this section by identifying his objective for the rest of the piece:
“The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less toward a “theory” of power than toward an “analytics” of power: that is toward a definition of the specific domain formed by the relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis.” (p. 82)
It thinking about this analytics of power, Foucault argues that Western societies have always framed power in terms of the law. Foucault rejects this basic thesis though, arguing that when it comes to sexuality, there is a different form of power at play. To understand this we need to understand what we mean by power, which is what Foucault tackles in Method.
In Method, Foucault argues that power does not mean the domination or or subjugation exerted on society by a Government or state through the law. Instead, he argues:
“It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” (p. 92)
In other words; “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere”. (p. 93). In developing an understanding of power in this way, Foucault argues that the question we must be asking therefore is:
“In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places (around the child’s body, apropos of women’s sex, in connection with practices restricting births, and so on), what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work?” (p. 97)
Investigating this question, in Domain section, Foucault looks at the local power relations at work, identifying four strategies. These are; a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization of children’s sex, a socialization of procreative behaviour and a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. (p. 104). As Foucault says:
“Four figures emerged from the preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century – four privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. Each of the correspond to one of these strategies which, each in its own way, invested and made use of the sex of women, children, and men.” (p.105)
Foucault argues that these four anchor points point to shift in Western society from relations of sex around a ‘deployment of alliance’; or systems of marriage, kinship ties and transmission of names and possessions, to a ‘deployment of sexuality’. The development of this new deployment of sexuality leads to a key hypothesis:
“We are compelled, then, to accept three or four hypotheses which run counter to the one on which the theme of a sexuality repressed by the modern forms of society is based: sexuality is tied to recent devices of power; it has been expanding at an increasing rate since the seventeenth century; the arrangement that has sustained it is not governed by reproduction; it has been linked from the outset with an intensification of the body – with its exploitation as an object of knowledge and an element in relations to power.” (p. 107)
Finally, Foucault examines how this ‘deployment of sexuality’ has occurred in a time in the last chapter, Periodization. Here, Foucault makes the key analysis that the new deployment of sexuality was not something imposed upon the working classes from the bourgeois, but rather something the bourgeois tried first. This was based on a desire by the bourgeois to obtain the knowledge of truth first, in particular to maximise life:
“The primary concern was not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that “ruled”.” (p.123)
This leaves us with the final thought: gaining the truth of sex was and is power in itself.
This leaves us with a very short section on the final part of Foucault’s piece, The Right of Death and Power Over Life. This is probably a good way to go, as in some ways this chapter feels a little tacked on to the end of Foucault’s piece (despite it’s interesting content). This chapter can be summarised simply; Foucault argues that our motivations over life and death have changed dramatically. In medieval times, he argues the state had a power over the “Right to Death” – death was something that could be given at will. Now, however, the state acts to provide a “Right to Life”, whether the management of population, or the management of humans health. This builds directly into a system of truth around sexuality and life; one in which the development of “truth” has allowed for the management of life.
So, how does one summarise Foucault? It’s really quite difficult and I’ve learnt through writing these pieces that it is very difficult to get your head around what is such a tiny piece. All I would say is read it. We will all take different things out of it, but it is definitely worth getting your head into.