Simon Copland

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading The Occupy Handbook, edited by Janet Byrne. You can expect a review when I finish the piece, but given that it is actually just a collection of lots of small essays, I am going to do some posts on the pieces that stand out to me. 

Today I’m going to start with Arjun Appadurai’s piece, A Nation of Business Junkies. In A Nation of Business Junkies Arjun Appadurai takes a quick look at the nature of ‘business news’ in modern media. I think the best way to think about this is to think about the Finance Section in daily newscasts. For years, the Finance Section has been the way to present business news – in one clearly defined area at the end of the main news stories. There are similar sections in most forms of media – the business section in newspapers is another great example. Appadurai posits however that the Finance Section of the news is really a relic of the past. ‘Business news’, as he would describe it, has taken over to consume our entire news world view.

In 4 short pages Appadurai goes through different news agencies, indicating how business news, the news of company take overs, hirings and firings, economic policies etc. now dominates every section of our news coverage. As he explains:

“Business news was a specialised affair in the late 1960s, confined to a few magazines such as Money and Fortune, and to newspapers and TV reporters (not channels). Now it is hard to find anything but business as the topic of news in the media.”

What does this mean? Appadurai argues:

“…we were always told that the business of America is business. But now we are gradually moving to a society in which the business of American life is also business. Who are we now? We have become (in our fantasies) entrepreneurs, start-up heroes, small investors, consumers, homeowners, day traders, and a gallery of supporting business types, and no longer fathers, mothers, friends or neighbours. Our very citizenship is now defined by business whether we are winners or losers

It’s a piece like this makes me step back and realise how all-consuming capitalism has become. Look around now and everything you see is business. Now, of course, I understand, and agree that the news of people’s jobs and livelihoods is important. But business news has become so consuming that it is now how we define our lives. How much money do we have, how much profit are we making, how wealthy will we be at the end of our lives?

For me, I have to ask the question, isn’t there something more to life?

For Appadurai however, there is one other, potentially more important issue at stake. Appadurai argues that you would think that with all this knowledge and all this coverage, we would be able to start to investigate and question dodgy practices. The coverage would lead to to proper investigation where we can identify and stop events like the Global Financial Crisis. Not so though:

“The avalance of business knowledge and information dropping on the American middle class ought to have helped us predict – or avoid – the recent economic meltdown, based on crazy credit schemes, vulgar scams and lousy regulations. Instead it has made us business junkies, ready to be led like sheep to our own slaughter by Wall St, the big banks, and corrupt politicians.”

“The growing hegemony of business news and knowledge in the popular media over the past few decades has produced a collective silence of the lambs. It is time for a bleat or two.”

And this is a major consequence of modern capitalism. With the so called end of the great philosophical debates in the early nineties, and with the agreed assumption that capitalism is now the only answer, we seem have stopped really questioning any of its underlying assumptions. We are being bombarded with business news, but we are assuming that it is all natural – it is what has to happen for any system to work.

In doing so, we are being left in the dark when the system is failing – being led like sheep to our own slaughter.

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.

Every year, as my boyfriend James and I discuss how we’re going to vote in the Triple J Hottest 100, we have a faux-debate on some song that James thinks deserves to be in the 100, but I think has no chance. In the past it was Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’, Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, and this year, James was determined that Gangnam Style deserved to be number one.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever really been against these songs making the top 100 (James may disagree with me on that), but every year I’ve been certain that none of them would come close. Every year I have been right.

But this year, as I’ve reflected on the top 100, I’ve had to really think about why Gangnam Style didn’t make the list. In fact it wasn’t even on the list of voting options in the lead up to the countdown. It’s strange, because in many ways Gangnam Style is the exact sort of song that Triple J listeners may love. It’s extremely political, with the sort of politics many in Triple J would like, and if you think about it is quite musically innovative. Clearly the music video had a lot going for it too. Psy was even the sort of alternative artist (before he became famous) that Triple J listeners love. In fact, the only thing that made it ‘non-Triple J’ was its overt commercialism (although that was clearly never intended when the song was written) and international popularity.

In their book, “Nation of Rebels”, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter discuss the phenomenon that I think is largely behind the popularity (ironically) of Triple J, and the uniqueness of the Hottest 100 list; counter-cultural movements.

This is a book I read in 2009, so I can’t quote it off-hand, but at it simplest form Heath and Potter explore the growth of counter-cultural movements. They argue that these movements, ones that have aimed at separating themselves with ‘mainstream’ culture, have ended up being co-opted into a consumerist culture that they criticise. Looking at the birth of these counter-cultures, you can see how Triple J fits into this mould. It’s a radio station born for ‘young people’ and designed to showcase music that doesn’t make it into the mainstream. In doing so, Triple J has created its own Australian music ‘counter-culture’, one that rebels against the commercialisation of mainstream music, but in doing so creates its own commercial brand (see how many artists have started on Triple J and have gone to extreme commercial success).

Now, despite my concerns about the political effectiveness of counter-culture movements, I don’t have the problem with the existence of them. In fact, I am a big fan of Triple J and rarely listen to anything else. A diverse society in which people can express themselves in different ways is not a bad thing, and I thinking fighting against some of the bad things in mainstream culture is a good idea. The problem is that in the Triple J world, and the world of many other counter-cultures, we have seen a growth of cultural smugness.

In his chapter in the book Left Turn released last year Christos Tsiolkas described what he called The Toxicity of Smugness. In the piece, Tsiolkas discusses the use of the term ‘bogan’ in left-wing circles, and the smugness that surrounds the term:

“I think that just as the right-wing disavowel of the terminology of class is revealing of conservative politics…there is also something revealing about the evasions and fears of the bourgeois Left in the contempt for the ‘bogan’.   

Tsiolkas explains that this toxicity of smugness is leading to an isolation of the working class in the left, a world in which the bourgeois left is pushing the working-class out.

“The toxicity of progressive bourgeois smugness can be ascertained by how contemptuous is the language used to define the behaviour and expressions for working-class and welfare-class lives. And the danger of this smugness is clear in how few working-class and welfare-class voices are given space to articulate an alternative left politics to one founded either on identity politics or categories of morality.”

Going back to Triple J and our counter-cultures, it has become clear to me how pervasive the toxicity of smugness has become as part of these movements.

Counter-cultural ideas are, and should be designed as a way to rebel against the bad parts of mainstream culture – to provide an alternative. However, as an agent of the left, many of these movements have developed a smug shield to them – one in which anything considered ‘mainstream’, ‘commercial’ or ‘bogan’ is discounted off-hand no matter its quality. Of course there are exceptions to these rules (Apple products being the perfect example), but these only really happen when it suits the needs of the movement.

We can see this clearly with Gangnam Style. Doing some reading on Psy, I could imagine that he would fit nicely within the Triple J counterculture. But, because of some thought of betrayal due to commercialisation he wasn’t allowed in. The same has happened many times in Triple J. I clearly remember a time when people complained heavily that they played Kanye West’s “All of the Lights”. Apparently, even though people loved Kanye’s album, they hated that song because it featured Rihanna.

This smugness has of course lead to a level of isolation within progressive, counter-cultural movements. Of course counter-cultures are designed to separate themselves somewhat, and there is no problem with that, but the idea is to resist capitalism and modern culture, not judge everyone who likes things within that culture. Hell, we should even be able to accept that some parts of mainstream culture are great.

On reflection, I think Gangnam Style was hard done by. I may not have voted for it, and I don’t expect everyone else too, but I also don’t want a smug approach to it just because it is ‘popular’.

On Wednesday, the Katter Party’s Queensland Senate nominee, Bernard Gaynor, took to the tweets to both defend his colleague from Victoria, Tess Corbett (who had linked homosexuality with paedophilia), and to declare that he wouldn’t want a gay person teaching his kids. Here’s what Gaynor had to say:

23 January: Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
As a KAP senate nominee in Qld and former Party National General Secretary I fully support Tess Corbett. #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
I wouldn’t let a gay person teach my children and I am not afraid to say it #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
If we value free speech and democracy then we would respect the right of Christians to hold their views about right and wrong #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
Woah! Just said prayers & put kids 2 bed.Came back to find many ppl tweeting against parental discretion over teachers #goodluckwiththat

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
Parents should have discretion over who teaches their children #auspol

Yesterday morning, reacting the furore about what he said, Gaynor put out a press release to ‘clarify his comments’. In it he said that even Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard support parental choice, and that:

“This is not controversial. Any society with a basis in common sense would support parental responsibility.”

“It would be a sad day for Australia if its Christian population was prevented from freely practicing its religion.”

Gaynor has since been suspended from the Katter Party and therefore disqualified from the Queensland Senate spot. What’s ironic about the entire episode though, is that in essence Gaynor’s press release was right; in recent weeks Prime Minister Julia Gillard has shown a position very similar to Gaynor’s.

I’m not saying that Julia Gillard believes there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia, and I’m pretty sure she would find Corbett’s views as repulsive as anyone else. But Gaynor’s position and argument was one based around religious freedom; that as a Christian man he should have the right to choose who teaches his children based on his religious beliefs. For him, that means no gays near his kids.

It sounds strangely familiar. In fact, it was just last week that Julia Gillard was reported to have actively reassured religious groups, and in particular the Australian Christian Lobby, that their legal rights to discriminate against homosexuals would not be encroached upon. Gillard told these groups that under the new Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, religious organisations would retain their right to discriminate against those who might cause “injury to religious sensitivities.” (It was this bill that Corbett was being asked about when she made her statements). It has been specifically clarified that members of the GLBT community can fall under this grouping.

What does that mean? It means that religious schools and organisations will be able to continue to discriminate against teachers and staff, refusing to hire or being able to fire someone because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans*. It also means that religious schools would continue to be able to block the enrolment of students because of their sexual orientation.

Whilst this may not be a broad-scale policy that Gaynor seemed to be advocating, one that allows parents to block LGBT teachers supervising their kids wherever they send their students, the principle is pretty much the same. It is a policy cloaked under the guise of religious freedom, which allows religious institutions to discriminate against GLBT people based on their sexuality and their gender identity.

And whilst Gillard clearly wouldn’t stop LGBT people teaching her children (if she had them), and whilst she doesn’t believe there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia, her policies are supporting, and even encouraging, those who do to discriminate at will. She has become an enabler of people like Corbett and Gaynor; an enabler of discrimination.

When you think about it this way, you can see that there is really little difference between the two; the bigot and the enabler. In fact, I have to ask myself who is worse? Because the bigot can only flourish as those around enable their behaviour. And in recent weeks, it’s Julia Gillard who has become the enabler of bigots all around the country.

As bushfires ravaged Australia over the past weeks, journalists from around the world have started to tune in. A couple of weeks ago Guardian columnist George Monbiot took his turn, discussing not only our heatwaves, but our Opposition Leader’s response to climate change. Here is what he had to say:

“I wonder what Tony Abbott will say about the record heatwave now ravaging his county. The Australian opposition leader has repeatedly questioned the science and impacts of climate change.”

“So far Abbott has commented, as far as I can tell, only on the fires: “Our thoughts are with the people and the communities across the country who are impacted by the bushfires,” he says. Quite right too, but it’s time his thoughts also extended to the question of why this is happening and how Australian politicians should respond. He says he’s currently on standby with his local fire brigade, but his opposition to effective action on climate change is likely to contribute to even more extreme events in the future, this looks like the most cynical kind of stunt politics.”

This piece really made me take a step back. It’s not just that it’s an interesting critique on Abbott’s ongoing climate denial and the Coalition’s climate policies, but it’s also one that is clearly needed. It has filled a void that Australian journalism, which has refused to challenge Abbott or the Coalition on their climate denial, has left wide open.

Let’s take a look for example at the exact quotes that Monbiot points out. One of Tony Abbott’s most famous climate quotes is when he said on Lateline:

“the science is highly contentious, to say the least…If man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn’t there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph?”

It’s a pretty striking interview, and it’s not the only Abbott has questioned mainstream climate science (see the climate change is crap statement, and this quote from an event in Western Australia last year).

Despite this however, when looking back over his time as Opposition Leader, his climate denial has only really hit mainstream media consciousness a couple of times. There was the direct response to the climate change is crap statement, the time when a video surfaced of Abbott both denying climate change on breath and then advocating a carbon tax in the next (although the discussion here was more around the carbon tax quote than the climate denial quote), and when Julia Gillard took aim in Question Time in 2011 (although this ended up in a discussion over the word ‘denial’). Compare this to the amount of analysis over Julia Gillard’s ‘there will be no carbon tax under a Government I lead’ statement and you will see that time and time again Abbott gets a free ride.

At it’s not just Abbott, it’s the entire Coalition. For example, with Abbott on leave recently, Acting Opposition Leader Warren Truss filled the void, declaring that it was “too simplistic” to link climate change with the recent heatwaves. Despite the science which is now starting to show evidence that would challenge Truss directly on this view, very few in the media actively questioned his statements. It took an academic from the Australian National University, Phil Gibbons, to do some research on Truss’ other statement that the bushfires would result in more CO2 emissions than our coal power planets, finding that he was clearly wrong.

The same lack of scrutiny can also be said of the Coalition’s climate policies. For example, a study in June last year showed that if enacted, the Coalition’s climate policy would cost taxpayers $24 billion. Despite this however, no one could ever claim that the Coalition’s climate policies have received anywhere near the level of scrutiny it deserves.

I’m not saying that it is the job of journalists to go and find scientific papers and debunk every pseudo-scientific statement from every politician. In fact, given that it is not current policy, I even understand that the Coalition’s climate position may not get as much scrutiny as the Governments.

But, just once, we need journalists who can ask the questions – people who can ask where Tony Abbott gets his facts from, people who ask academics what the reality is, people who can probe to see whether the Coalition’s policy is going to work.

Climate change is the defining issue of this century. Given the impact it is and will have, we need journalism that will actually question what one of our major parties is saying and doing on the issue. Australian journalism has failed so badly though that we now have to rely on a British columnist to do the work for us.

A recent article in the New York Times, Can forgiveness play a role in the criminal justice system?, has recently brought out some discussion about the nature of our justice system.

The article is based around the story of Conor McBride, who, when he was 19 shot and killed his girlfriend Ann in a fit of rage. The article goes through how Conor, his family, and Ann’s family, the Grosmaires went through a process of mutual grieving, and then forgiveness in the aftermath of the murder. I’ll let you read the story and article yourself, as there is no way I could do it justice in this post (be prepared to take a little time, and potentially shed a few tears – but it’s worth it).

One of the most interesting elements of this piece outside the story itself, is the way in which the McBride’s and the Grosmaires used a process called “restorative justice” to deal with the crime. The author, Vera Tirunik, describes it like this:

Most modern justice systems focus on a crime, a lawbreaker and a punishment. But a concept called “restorative justice” considers harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on making amends. And it allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be heard and participate. In this country, restorative justice takes a number of forms, but perhaps the most prominent is restorative-justice diversion. There are not many of these programs — a few exist on the margins of the justice system in communities like Baltimore, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. — but, according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2007, they have been effective at reducing recidivism. Typically, a facilitator meets separately with the accused and the victim, and if both are willing to meet face to face without animosity and the offender is deemed willing and able to complete restitution, then the case shifts out of the adversarial legal system and into a parallel restorative-justice process. All parties — the offender, victim, facilitator and law enforcement — come together in a forum sometimes called a restorative-community conference. Each person speaks, one at a time and without interruption, about the crime and its effects, and the participants come to a consensus about how to repair the harm done.

The methods are mostly applied in less serious crimes, like property offenses in which the wrong can be clearly righted — stolen property returned, vandalized material replaced. The processes are designed to be flexible enough to handle violent crime like assault, but they are rarely used in those situations. And no one I spoke to had ever heard of restorative justice applied for anything as serious as murder.

Reading this really made me think about the role punishment, and forgiveness plays in our justice system. There are obviously many goals behind our justice system; punishment for offenders, retribution and maybe closure for those who have had a crime committed against them and in the end ‘rehabilitation’ for those who have committed a crime.

In reading this article however (noting it is based in the US, and Australia would be different), it becomes really easy to start to question how good we are at achieving any of these goals, even at the most basic level. Our system almost seems to be devoid of any sort of emotional healing for anyone involved in the process. It is based on rationality – we collect the ‘facts’ about a crime and then, based largely on decisions taken outside of the specific instance, we dictate a punishment.

In doing so we remove emotions, and people, from the justice process. It stops victims and criminals from being able to tell their story, it takes away the capacity for there to be any emotional retribution or healing, and it gets rid of any chance we would ever have at forgiveness for a crime. In the end this eliminates the final goal of justice system – that of ‘rehabilitation’. Instead of finding ways to forgive people, we spend all our time punishing them, casting them as criminals for the rest of their life, never letting them back into a world of ‘non-criminality’.

In the end we have to ask ourselves, what happened to our ability to forgive? When did we get so angry, so focused on punishing everyone who has ever done something wrong to the maximum of our ability? Maybe the Grosmaires and McBrides could be an inspiration. If, even for such a horrible crime, they could find away to forgive, and eventually to heal, then we could do so too.

Today I’m moving on to the second part of my review of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. In this post I am going to be focusing on what is only 20 pages of Foucault’s piece, but what are probably the most important, his chapter titled Scientia Sexualis.

Before we start, let’s just recap of where we left off: the repressive hypothesis. In my last review we saw a challenge from Foucault; one where he called on us to question what he called the ‘repressive hypothesis’, or the argument that we live in an age of sexual repression and censorship. Foucault argues that in fact, that we have seen an explosion of sexual discourse over the past centuries.

So, how has this explosion of sexual discourse occurred? Let’s start at the back of this chapter to get our answer. Foucault argues that what we’ve seen is the development of what he calls scientia sexualis – or what I would call the scientification of sex. Scientia sexualis is a scientific discourse around sex focused around obtaining sexual ‘truth’.

“Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. 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.” (p. 69)

So how did we develop this scientific ‘truth’ of sex? Foucault argues that societies have historically done this in two ways. First, is the mode used largely in Arabo-Moslem societies, China, India, Japan and Rome; ars erotica:

“In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated in experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and forbidden, nor by reference to the criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experience as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.” (p.57)

In the Western World however, scientia sexualis is focused around the method of confession. Foucault argues that since the Middle Ages, confession has been a major tool used in the West as a means to reveal the ‘truth’. This ritual of discourse is one which unfolds in a very distinct power relationship, one in which the confessor has some authority above them that requires the confession. The confession however, also provides a sense of purification for the confessor – it absolves them of their sins. In that sense therefore, confession is a bottom-up process – one in which the confessor is the instigator through coming to the confessional booth.

Scientia sexualis was the movement where confession moved from the confessional booth in church, into the scientific and medical world, into the world of psychiatry. It was here that these confessions began to be noted, taken down, codified, and used to develop an understanding of scientific truth. Foucault argues that this was a momentous time:

“It was a time when the most singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves, a discourse which had to model itself after that which spoke, not of sin and salvation, but of bodies and life processes-the discourse of science. It was enough to make one’s voice tremble, for an improbable thing was taking shape: a confessional science, a science which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its object what was unmentionable but admitted nonetheless.” (p.64)

Sexual confession therefore became a practice of science. Science began inducing confessions through codifying an inducement to speak in clinical practice, creating causality (often negative) between people’s sexual practices and the events in their lives, forcing out something that was inherently hidden, scientifically interpreting what was and wasn’t said, and through medicalising the effects of confession (p. 65 – 67).

With science at its base, the discourse around sex now therefore took on two distinct orders of knowledge; biology and medicine. If we think about this clearly, you can easily see this today. Our discourse around sex is focused on the medical and biological – how can we improve our sexual performance, what sort of drugs can we take to do this, what is medically wrong with people who engage in ‘perverse sex’?

This scientification of sex went well beyond this discourse however. As Foucault explains:

“But beyond these troubled pleasures, it assumed other powers; it set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal affliction and combining them with the new themes of asepsis, and the great evolutionist myth with the recent institutions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigour and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardised populations. In the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon. It grounded them in “truth.” (p.54)

What we see therefore is a great is a twofold process; one in which the new discourse of sexuality, scientia sexualis, forces sexual confession through scientific practices, and a second which then transforms these confessions into the ‘truth’ around sex – a truth which often has much meaning and impact beyond someone simply knowing people’s sexual practices.

And this is where we return to our original repressive hypothesis. Whilst we have seen an explosion of sexual discourse – this does not mean a lack of sexual repression. It is just that this repression is now framed in a scientific manner – it is framed in ‘truth’. If we think about it in that way, it is in fact much more terrifying than the original repressive hypothesis Foucault posited.

This video has been doing the rounds quite heavily recently. The piece is a lecture from Mark Lynas to the Oxford Farming Conference on the 3rd of January about genetic engineering (GE).

In the speech, Lynas describes his journey from being an anti-GE campaigner, to a fervent supporter. The story is actually quite common; one in which the ‘science’ convinces Mark to switch from anti to pro-GE. After discussing this transition, Lynas  goes in to heavily rip into the environment movement. He effectively argues that the movement is willingly allowing people to starve as they fight for an illogical ideological position advocating for ‘natural food’.

Now, I have to say that I am not anti-GE. I am probably like Lynas was a number of years ago – I simply haven’t read enough about it to create an informed opinion. And, even as an environmentalist, I have been willing to come out against anti-GE campaigns, including the destruction of GE crops by Greenpeace activists in 2011.

Despite this, like so much of the discussion round GE, I find Lynas’ speech really frustrating, almost infuriating. I think it is the epitome of the problematic way many, particularly environmentalists and those on the left, treat science in our society.

Lynas’ argument is based almost solely on the support of ‘science’. He argues that as he got engaged on climate change, he saw a contradiction between his ‘pro-science’ climate campaigning, and his ‘anti-science’ GE campaigning. As he said:

“For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change.”

“Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because it is marketed by the big auto companies?”

It is in making this comparison that Lynas makes a massive mistake. Supporting one stream of science does not mean we have to support another. Science is a broad field, with many different streams looking at a range of different areas.

Let’s take a look at climate change and GE for example. The science behind these two things are very different, and this distinction is extremely important. Climate science is about discovering and reporting an effect humans are having on our world. GE however, is a form of science that is trying to solve a problem (whether that problem is not enough profits for big companies, or global food shortages). It is a science that is creating new things – new technologies for our world.

In blindly supporting GE science therefore – to say that we have to support it because it is ‘science’ – we are not only supporting the GE , but we are also promoting science as the key way to deal with the problems we face. This is vastly different to supporting climate change, which is more about backing scientists up when they say they’ve discovered something about the world.

The problem with this is that science doesn’t take into account many of the social, economic and power realities of our world. For example, when it comes to agriculture, many of our problems don’t stem from a lack of food, but rather from inequitable distribution of food. Power relations in our world are leading to a situation where poor people in the third world are starving, whilst the wealthy have far too much food and are wasting significant amounts of it. GE science doesn’t deal with this in any way and we invest money in as much GE technology as we like, but it still isn’t going to solve this problem.

Building on to this, science often then builds into these power structures, creating solutions focused wholly at those with power and not those without power. Whilst I have to believe many of the stories of how GE has helped impoverished people that Lynas points out, there is often another side to the coin; one in which scientific research, funded by large companies, is focused to benefit (or in other words to make more profits) those who are already doing well. Whilst this may have some ‘trickle down’ effects it is not science that is inherently designed to help impoverished people. If we want to challenge these social issues therefore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with opposing a scientific field that builds into these power structures.

Does that make GE a bad thing? Not necessarily. Clearly technology development has to be part of the mix of the solutions we need to fix food security issues. But, we also need to have a much more nuanced, and serious discussion to this debate. Science is only one part of the mix, and sometimes we may want to decide that the scientific solutions available don’t fit with our desired goals. It is perfectly reasonable to say we don’t want to use, nor want to spend money, on what science has provided at this point.

But what seems to have happened is that we have now created a world in which we say ‘it’s scientific’ so therefore it must be the solution. Ironically, we’ve started to worship science, just as many others worship the religion that we often deride.

This could be okay if science was an encompassing ideology, one that tool into account the social, economic and power realities in our world. But science doesn’t do that – it is just one part of our current system. Living solely by this is not a healthy approach.

Did you see this image over the past week? If you haven’t, and don’t know what it is, this is the Bureau of Meterology’s forecasting map for last Tuesday. Last week, temperatures in Australia got so hot that the Bureau had to add another colour to the map – the strange light purple in the middle of South Australia.

In an odd way this looks like some strange art. In a way it is beautiful – the different colours merging together to creating this apex in the middle of the country.

Yet, when you started to look a little deeper, and think about what this represents, it will probably take your breath away.

This map, this art, doesn’t just represent one hot day in Australia. It represents so much more than that. This is, literally, an almost artistic representation of everything we are doing to our planet. This is a representation of the fact that we have now gotten to the point where we are literally changing the climate map. Our actions, and our actions alone, are literally changing the shape of our climate – WE are causing more extreme weather, sea level rises, heatwaves. It’s us.

No matter which way you look at it, this map is a big f#$king deal.

Yet, despite everything it represents, I don’t think this map, this thought that we are actually changing our climate, is getting the treatment it deserves. Instead of stopping a nation, and creating an outcry of demands for action, the Bureau’s new map was just another story on the news. It was almost hum ho. Somehow the idea that we are literally changing the climate in which we live has become a regular news story – something we just absorb in everyday life.

And it’s not as if this is because we can’t figure out what to do, or even figure out who is causing it. We know how this is happening. We can even figure out who it is who is changing out map. It is the fossil fuel companies – the Gina Rinehardts, Clive Palmers, Nathan Tinklers of the world, who are changing our maps. Yet for some reason, we treat this story, we treat them, as if it is something normal – as if they are regular protagonists in a story of competing priorities. But they’re not – we’re not. This is not a normal development, one that can just fit into a news story; one where we need to debate the different priorities until we come to a solution. This is much bigger than that.

Let’s take a step back. Let’s think about what we’re doing. We are actively changing our climate. In fact, there are a small number of individuals and companies who are changing our climate.

This is a big fucking deal.