On The Deployment Of Sexuality 485d3u

ARCHIE R. MAGARAO PHILOSOPHICAL SEMINAR: MICHEL FOUCAULT

September 9, 2009

On Foucault’s Deployment of Sexuality INTRODUCTION Michel Foucault with his book entitled The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction in its fourth part entitled The Deployment of Sexuality made mention of the four deployments namely objective, method, domain, and periodization. Over and above, what Michel Foucault stresses here is on how the power-knowledge relations transformed and became a faithful companion of the disciplinary apparatus. However, it is worth noticing that Foucault before writing the said segment in his book placed prior to it the third part under the title of Scientia Sexualis. In the preceding part of the book, Foucault points out how the ars erotica was converted into scientia sexualis or what we call in modern days as the sciences of sexuality. It is where these so called sciences of sexuality under the disguise of care became the road of bringing everything in submission to control. In other words, what was a free moving, dynamic-oriented and procedure-free ars erotica is now methodical; hence, as a science it is removed from all its privileges of being dynamic, free, and unprocedural. It is because what turns to be dynamic (or becoming in the philosophical terminology of the Ancient and Scholastic thinkers) is essentially out of control and can never be submitted to manipulation. Thus, if there is no control on certain stuff, surely there will also be no power over it. As Foucault says, “Let us consider things in broad historical perspective: breaking with the traditions of the ars erotica, our society has equipped itself with a scientia sexualis.1 But what might be a problem in the conversion of the art into a science is that as a science it controlled sexuality in order to manipulate and control people’s 1

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, (New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House, Inc., 1990), 67.

behavior for the benefit of the society, which as a result increases the power. The modern disciplinary society made use of the body as the means of control. What exactly this means is by suppressing the body via its sexuality there is an inverse proportionality towards the increase of power. In other words, the more that the body is suppressed or subjected to control, the more that power is increased. As a science the issue on sex became an abstraction; abstraction as a source of getting the truth. While in the case of the ars truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.2 Again, these conversion and transformation geared only towards increasing control and power. Hence, Michel Foucault is just implying that all these are in accord to the propagation and installment of power over and above every individual in the society. It is all about power relations which in its barest sense powerknowledge-relations. As for me it only means this: in knowing we control, in controlling we know. On the Deployment of Sexuality Among the four deployment of sexuality what really calls my critical attention is the method. Primarily, in the opening page of the section Michel Foucault discusses the concept on power and he even differentiated it from mechanisms and group institutions. He said that power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.3 From this point of view, Foucault ushered everyone to the point that at a certain 2 3

Ibid., 57. Ibid., 93.

extent the assertion of power transcends our awareness. As we once again hear him saying, power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.4 Foucault in the following pages of his book even made a further discussion of the concept of power as it became vividly clear that power is evidently embedded in relationships. Hence, I infer that for Michel Foucault relationship means no other than power. The building of relationships is directly proportional to power, leaving human beings conscious or unconscious of its operation. Furthermore, power, according to Foucault, is primarily mobile and nonegalitarian, that is, in the existence of inequality in a society the emergence of power is inevitable and invincible. In other words, the inequality in the society strengthens and empowers the authority of power relations. Moving much more ahead, he made mention that there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives.5 However, Foucault also stressed that when there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.6 Michel Foucault enumerated four rules namely the rule of immanence, rules of continual variations, rule of double conditioning, and rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses. But what calls my attention in the first mentioned rule by Foucault is the coming into the fore of the panopticon. In the creation of the so called “local centers” of power-knowledge as in the subjection of the self in confession, self-examination, interviews, which in general the mastery of the flesh, the person especially the child or I would say anyone else by being watched after by other individuals like teachers, nurses, etc. is really subjugated and forced to do a sort of self4

Ibid., 93. Ibid., 95. 6 Ibid., 95. 5

surveillance of ones behaviors in the end. For example, in schools, the giving out of examinations to students aims towards controlling the academic behavior of students that in the duration of the process the students will not be needing anymore any external factors to monitor their academic behaviors but that they will be able to internalize the monitoring by installing it within them making it a part of their selves. In this connection, at the early stage what serves as the panopticon are the teachers, nurses, parents and anyone whose attention are placed at any manifestations of the child’s or individual’s sexuality while during the later stage it gradually becomes the person himself/herself. Now, in the second rule, it is good to notice that in the surveillance of the child’s sexuality simultaneously the sexuality of the adults are also put into question, hence a variation occurs. In this situation then, the control, surveillance and the exercise of power-knowledge are not exhibited only upon the individual child but including also the people surrounding him or her. Somehow this concept gives a profound meaning to the local parlance that goes: “The child is the mirror of the people surrounding him or her”. In other words, the identity of the child is molded and constituted by individuals surrounding him, so, whoever be the child in his/her later years determines what kind of people did surround him/her during his/her developmental years. Through this reflexive aspect of the identity of the child to the adults surrounding him/her where the sexuality, as Foucault say, of the adults is also put into question. In the long run, it means that the scope of power is much even wider and covers everyone, which means everyone whether he or she likes it or not is subjugated. In this relation, one might ask, if one still has his/her freedom? Or is freedom after all an illusion and a mere play of words because whether one likes it or not the exercise of power over and above him/her is definitely not optional and excuses no one? The third rule of double conditioning urges me to inquire even further: in

order to stop the exercise and emergence of power are we then licensed enough to cut off all relationships, since power exhibits in relationships? But this notion somehow sounds antithetical. The removal and cutting off of all relationships would only mean a total detachment and solipsism. Surely, no man can live like an island, that is, totally alone. As Aristotle would say, “Man is a social animal”. Nevertheless, how can one escape from the dominion and grip of power, if man wants to be totally free at all? On the other hand, the fourth rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses made mention of the significance of discourse in establishing and ening together both power and knowledge. Foucault in relation to the notion of discourse said that discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.7 He even defined discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable.8 This notion on the discourse was taken from the traditional technique of confession utilized by the Roman Catholic Church from which Foucault found a strong assessment of power-knowledge relations. Moreover, in the discourse, truth is being extracted and the process of extracting the truth through it places both the inquirer and the inquired at the mercy of the conversation. In this relation, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher who established the Philosophical Hermeneutics and a thinker prior to Foucault, had thought the same thing as Foucault did when it comes to how powerful and strategical the discourse in determining and obtaining the truth. Furthermore, Gadamer noted that as far as language9 is concerned, the actual subject of the play (here 7

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 100. 9 Language is a pre-given variable in any discourse or conversation and it is the only medium of communication in a conversation. 8

conversation/discourse is liken to a play by Gadamer) is obviously not the subjectivity of an individual who among other activities also plays, but instead the play itself.

10

In other words, relating the notion of Gadamer to

the issue of discourse of Foucault, both the inquirer and the inquired are totally absorbed by the discourse due to the phenomenon that the discourse takes priority over the subjects within the dialogue. Ultimately, Foucault stresses that it was in the relationship of the psychiatrist to the child that the sexuality of adults (especially those who are surrounding the child as commonly practiced in the procedure of Developmental Psychology) themselves are called into question.11 Moreover, the case of care here that emerges between the relationship of the child and the people surrounding him or her is always an opportunity of control. For the psychiatrist, teachers, parents, etc. might be giving out the impression that they care for the growth of the child but what really lurks behind is the goal of controlling the person envisioning in him/her the becoming of a “docile body”. Hence, it is the same thing with the seminary where psychology is employed intensively, individual consultation of the seminarians is done regularly by the superior of the seminary, etc. all is set for a singular vision, that is, to produce a docile body in the disguise of an ideal priest. Consequently, once the docile body is reached then the self-monitoring and self-surveillance takes into , hence, the goal of establishing the invisible panopticon is triumphantly achieved. This dominion of power to the body (as what we nowadays call the science of the body) denotes not only the inevitable nature of the powerknowledge relations but more to that is the pervasiveness of the assertion of power upon everybody.

10

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1988), 93. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, (New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House, Inc., 1990), 99. 11

CONCLUSION Knowledge as what Foucault says when linked to power not only assumes the authority of the truth but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, becomes true. Knowledge once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations.12 What are these telling us is that the different modern bodies of knowledge regarding sexuality, that is, the sciences of sexuality such as psychoanalysis, definitely have a close relation with the power structures of the modern society and so are main contenders for the genealogical analysis. That there is not only a control being exercised through others’ knowledge of the individual person but that there is also a control through the individuals’ knowledge of themselves. It is just paraphrasing the ancient philosophical maxim that upon having the right knowledge of the object there is the possibility of control, in other words, knowing means controlling. Thus, individuals internalized the norms laid down by the sciences of sexuality and monitor themselves in an effort to conform to these norms. This simply means that they are not only controlled as object of the disciplinary apparatus but simultaneously they become a self-monitoring, selfscrutinizing, and self-forming subjects. Moreover, the existence and domination of power turns omnipresent because it is constantly reproduced in every relationship. Power comes from everywhere as Foucault pinned it out. Thus, its domination over human beings makes it invincible for whether we like it or not we are automatically subjected to it. As long as we move and live in the society, the assertion of power-knowledge relations will never 12

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London: Tavistock, 1977), 27.

cease haunting us. Definitely, it starts externally but eventually it penetrates the realm of the internal and leaves everyone out of guard and devoid of any privilege of choosing. On the other hand, resistance is completely incapable of defeating the reign of power-knowledge relations. Whether one is educated or not, sane or insane, still one must submit to the lordship of power-knowledge relations. Those who are insane might perhaps be thinking that their insanity provides them the license to escape from the grip of power-knowledge relations but not at all. It is because the more that they are denied of their sanity, the more that they are being confined within the grip of it via the issuance of control over their abnormal behavioral condition armored with the hope of normalizing whatever abnormal behavior they have. Even if one is uneducated like those who live in the cave, still by the fact that they live in a cave already means that their behavior is regulated. Isn’t it that the cave already serves as their own panopticon and nature, on the other hand, is but another panopticon which commands them to regulate their behavior according to its own natural processes? More so if one is properly sane and excessively intelligent, still he/she is not excused from the dominion of power-knowledge relations. There is actually no point of resisting against the authority of power-knowledge relations as I see it. Nevertheless, only in death where the person gets rid of the power-knowledge relations because death means only one thing: the end of all relationships. At this point somehow, the notion of freedom is no other than a mere perspective. It is a kind of perspective which one establishes in an existence where the ability to choose as a fundamental character of freedom does not exist and amounts to no effect. It also seems for me that resistance after all is a metaphorical word we use in language. On the other hand, the reality of inequality aggravates the dominion of the power-knowledge relations. Hence, I would say that man’s endowment of knowledge is a grace

and at the same time a curse. Because with the firm relationship of power and knowledge, knowledge only means power and power only means knowledge. Lastly, I will reecho what was noted earlier, “In knowing you control, in controlling you know.”