Like I stated in class Wednesday, the parts of this week's reading I was most taken with were Foucault's takes on the causes of why Victorian Puritanism came to be. Moreover, I was piqued at the the lasting effects that Foucault insists derived from this and the means by which modernity claimed to have solved these issues while (for Foucault) not really fixing anything. Foucault, as it would appear through his text, doesn't really seem to think that anything at all is being repressed, but rather that sexuality is basically being sterilized and pigeonholed into teleological digressions.
First, there is the part where Foucault makes the implicit claim towards this reification of sexuality. Foucault says that "there emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct" (26). OK, so basically he is up in arms about this. There "emerged"? That diction alone seems to show that a criticism of sexual conduct did not exist prior to this period. He continues to say that this analysis sought directly to locate the "boundary line of the biological and the economic domains" (ibid). Reading more through this section, it seems apparent to me that Foucault is really not happy about this. It seems to him that sexuality, as part of the body and the body's interaction with others, should not be something that can be empirically rendered.
As we know from the Butler reading, Foucault views the body as the source of everything for people, not a disembodied mind, or soul. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, says that the "soul is the prison of the body." To the post-structuralist Foucault, I would take this to mean that Foucault believes the only prohibition to the choices that we make are those that represent the historicity and situation we inhabit. Foucault, in my opinion is then equating the concept of an exterior presence influencing the self (read body, here), the soul, with the social, historical and situational factors that render so much of the existence that the self endures.
Then I would say that this matters to our readings in the connection that, in a society (a situation) where everything one does is a relational choice, that restricting the literal body in terms of sexuality, or even labeling and sterilizing it, is a means of the "soul" constricting the "body." In a bizarre way.
As a final note, Hegel said in one of his biggest (and I mean important and also just way too long) books The Philosophy of Right, there is no such thing as a subject that doesn't have something else, object or another subject, in relation to it. Subjectivity, the self-in-itself (to get all annoying and Heideggerian), only exists as a relation that allows it to be subjective.
Really lucid and complicated post, Clyve. You make me wonder whether I should have assigned Discipline and Punish in parts as well, which is great (so , class, if any of you reading this want to engage/ discuss D&P, I’m in. Game on).
ReplyDeleteI wondered, as I read and re-read your post, if it’s not really repression that F doesn’t think is occurring, but rather the FREEDOM from repression once repression is named and acknowledged that isn’t occurring. For sterilizing/pigeonholing is a type of repression, yes? Even if the repression is part of what renders ourselves as selves.
What is so great about the passage you cite in D&P, and what got me thinking, is the way in which the term “soul” situates what we normally think of as external powers into the interior/core of the person. To me, this is central to F’s obsession w/ body and power complexes. The idea of the soul repressing the body in F is directly linked to subjecthood—the production of the “subject”—the act of “subjecting” (something I think we forget about when we think of subject/object binary, and which your Heieggerian-sim points toward, is this idea that not only is the subject constituted only in relation but that this means that power works on “subjecthood” and subjects it to certain boundaries (rather than seeing it as the powerful opposite of disempowered objecthood)). So, whereas the king’s “double body” is created through both the self that will live and die and the self that must exceed these organic bounds to rule intangibly beyond one “life,” the subject’s double body—the excess its double harnesses in the “soul”—is made up of the powers that work on it, create it, make it what it is, but which cannot be thought of as exterior/prior to its existence.
To push your idea further (and now because I’ve gotten excited about this), in connection w/ Butler, this might be what allows us to return to question some of the power attributed to masculinity and patriarchy in the oppositional systems we typically construct. For if the “soul” of the man—the “present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body”—functions as a constraint imposed from the very core of the self, even those in the most socially privileged state are still help prisoner. Yes? “Subjectivity” is always also “to be subjected.”
Wonderful, exciting stuff here. Keep it coming!