Episode 151 - Closer Look: Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1 Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The Podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:24] Ellie: I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:25] David: And I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:27] Ellie: Today we're doing a new kind of episode. This is our first of this series and we're super excited to introduce it. David and I have decided to periodically, we're aiming for once every four episodes, do a deep dive into one particular text.

We know you guys love when we do things like this on our YouTube channel, and we thought that it would be really nice to also share that with the podcast. For us too, it's fun because this is what we do when we teach text. You know, we usually, rather than teaching a topic like we do on Overthink and synthesize various texts or aspects of a topic through different pieces of research, just focusing on one particular text.

And we're hoping that this offers a kind of gateway into some text that might otherwise be challenging to read on your own from two professors. Which isn't to say that we're always, you know, gonna be able to cover every angle of a text. In fact, we're never gonna be able to cover every angle of a text, but just sort of a intro style conversation to one particular book or article.

[00:01:34] David: Yeah. And we're gonna be calling, these episodes a Closer Look, so for our first Closer Look episode, we've selected Foucault's, the History of Sexuality, Volume One, which is a book that both of us have read. We have been readers of Fuco for a long time. I, as some of you might know, wrote my dissertation on Foucault back in the day.

[00:01:55] Ellie: Yes.

[00:01:56] David: But not on the sexuality stuff, sadly.

[00:01:58] Ellie: Yeah. And lemme just clear, right David, when you say we both have read it. We won't ever come to a closer look episode without having read the text. No, but I take you, I take you to mean that in the past we had already read it.

[00:02:09] David: Yeah. Previously,

[00:02:10] Ellie: multiple times in fact.

[00:02:11] David: Yeah. I mean, this is like the seventh time I read this book, at the very least.

[00:02:15] Ellie: Yeah. Whereas sometimes, like we might use it as an opportunity, read something that we haven't read before. Generally speaking, it will be things that we have read in the past and perhaps even teach regularly.

Yeah. This is one example of that.

[00:02:27] David: Yeah. And I think you've taught this right?

[00:02:29] Ellie: I teach it regularly.

[00:02:30] David: I certainly have, yeah. I have taught it as well along with the other books in the series. And so yeah, we're beginning with Foucault, who is a crowd favorite. And so we're excited to talk about this book, which is his interpretation of the history of sexuality in the west in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[00:02:48] Ellie: Yeah. And so as we get into it, this book was published in 1976. It is one of, in fact, four volumes. Three were published during Foucault's lifetime. The fourth has been published actually quite recently.

[00:03:00] David: Very recently, 2018, only think about that.

[00:03:04] Ellie: Yeah. And although Foucault has a number of extremely significant works, this is certainly among his most well known, in part because he has some very important articulations of power, which is a crucial concept in Foucault's work also, because he pushes against, at that time, standard view of the nature of sexuality.

And we'll get into those topics today. First, let's say a couple of things about who Foucault was. He's a French 20th century philosopher, and he was very important in his day, he kind of occupied the pinnacle of French intellectual life, especially after his election in 1969 to the prestigious Collège de France. And so it's interesting because I think he's extremely influential in contemporary academia, but not always specifically in philosophy, our discipline. Often outside of philosophy. But in his day in France, he was really welcomed into the most prestigious chair of philosophy.

[00:04:08] David: Yeah. No, and I'm glad that you said that because especially this book was extremely influential, for example, in gender studies, in media studies in English departments.

And so it's a book that certainly criss crosses a lot of disciplines that in the US sometimes, in North America, I would say, get differentiated differently than in Europe.

[00:04:28] Ellie: 'cause so much of philosophy here in the US is considered not philosophy because people are very interested in policing the boundaries of what our discipline is. And Foucault's arguments aren't standard from a sort of analytic philosophy perspective.

[00:04:41] David: Yeah. You know, like the very method that he uses for thinking about the history of sexuality, his genealogical approach to history really sets him apart from what we might identify as an analytic approach to philosophy that is characteristic of the Anglo world.

And that's a style that really focuses on analyzing concepts, giving very clear and concise arguments, but not so much on paying attention to the historical trajectory, for example, of phenomena, institutions concepts, or thinking about how their meaning has changed over time, which is precisely what he's interested in.

[00:05:15] Ellie: So I wanna say, you mentioned that this has had a massive impact in academia. I mentioned that as well. And I think you wouldn't have queer theory if you didn't have this book. And so before we get into the details of the book itself, just wanna kind of situate Foucault a little bit relative to queer theory and analysis of sexuality. So, Foucault born in 1927. He died in 1984. He was the first public intellectual to die of aids, and he was a gay man. But he had concerns about the gay liberation movement and especially the attachment to an idea of sexuality as the truth of who we are.

And so the emphasis on sexuality as an identity was something that he was actually pretty concerned with as part of what we would, you know, now call neoliberalism. And at the same time, he was deeply invested in justice for people with marginalized sexualities and also justice in general. He was quite politically active in prison abolition movements.

He frequently came to the US, especially to San Francisco, and was deeply engaged in the queer community in San Francisco.

[00:06:34] David: I'm following in his footsteps.

[00:06:37] Ellie: Yeah, you're following his footsteps. Yeah. And you know, philosophically speaking, I have some disagreements with Foucault, but it's impossible to overstate the importance of this text.

And so mainly what we're gonna be doing today is, as we mentioned earlier, introducing some key concepts of it. We won't be talking actually so much about the reception of it, so I just wanted to say like, you know, good. A quick thing about that here, that this is really foundational for queer theory and I'm just like, yeah.

I wanted to pepper in a couple of biographical details about Foucault. We will also be, I think, having some conversation about like critical questions that emerge out of this text. And so we may have some opportunity to disagree with what Foucault says, but the primary purpose of this is to offer an introduction to some key ideas, certainly not at all of them, it is 150 page book, of the text, and we hope you enjoy it.

[00:07:32] David: Today we are talking about Michelle Foucault's, the History of Sexuality Volume One.

[00:07:36] Ellie: Why does Foucault reject the idea that sexuality has been repressed and is in need of liberation?

[00:07:41] David: How have confessions and other discourses produced the truth of sex?

[00:07:45] Ellie: And how does power function in sexuality and beyond?

[00:07:55] David: As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion and more subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:08:01] Ellie: Foucault begins this text with a common story and the story roughly goes as follows. We, that is people in his, time of writing of 1976 are the inheritors of the Victorian prudishness around sex.

We're inheritors of a 19th century picture of the heterosexual nuclear family, very bourgeois in origin where sex is acceptable only within the confines of marriage, behind closed doors between heterosexual adults. And it's something that has to be sort of treated with a kid glove. It's essentially taboo.

[00:08:40] David: Yeah. Well, he says it's limited to the bedroom, right? And so he is identifying this myth that we have, that we are constantly suffering from sexual repression. That's why, you know, the opening section of the book is called We Victorians, we're all Victorians in one way or another.

[00:08:55] Ellie: We other Victorians.

[00:08:56] David: Yeah, we other Victorians. And it makes a reference to the fact that we tend to think that we suffer from this prudishness, maybe because of Victorian sexual morals. Maybe he says also because we tend to think that capitalism transformed our sexuality so that it's only about reproduction. And so the only kind of sex that we can have or do or perform is in a very limited context in the heterosexual family bedroom and for very limited purposes, which is the reproduction of the workforce.

And that's something that all of us, even if we don't really think about sexuality all that much, or we are not familiar with the history of sexuality. We tend to agree with that narrative. That like, you know, like we are repressed, we are not having the kind of sex that we want to have because of the powers that be.

[00:09:44] Ellie: Yeah. And so the core of this story is that our sexual desires have been repressed. Sexuality itself has been repressed and therefore is in need of liberation And Foucault, writing this in 1976, kind of in the wake of the sexual revolution that starts in the 1960s, which they are in the middle of, there's like the 1960s influence of philosopher Herbert Marcuse's text Eros and Civilization, which articulates the idea that we need to liberate our sexual instincts.

There's also the influence of psychoanalysis, and Freudian psychoanalysis in particular, which suggests that we, you know, repression is sort of key to our psychological life in society. And so Foucault describes this story, this narrative, this myth, and he calls it the repressive hypothesis.

Now, some people read the first 10 pages of the book and think that Foucault is agreeing with the repressive hypothesis, agreeing with this narrative. But the first thing to note here is that he is not, in fact, the main target of his book is the Repressive Hypothesis.

[00:10:58] David: I'm so happy that you said that because every time I've taught this book, I have to budget the first 30 minutes of class to just, and it has to do partly with Foucault's writing style, where he sometimes like distances himself from something in a very subtle way. Yeah. He'll say things like,

[00:11:11] Ellie: which is also a very French thing to do.

[00:11:13] David: But he'll say things like, we might believe that X and then he'll go on to talk about X for like 10 pages. So you forget that it all started with like. We might believe that. And then he will, finally say, but in reality, something else is happening beneath the surface that we are not seeing. And that's what's happening with the repressive hypothesis. We love to say that we are repressed, but in reality that doesn't seem to be quite right.

It doesn't seem to be the right interpretation of our relationship to sexuality because one of the implications of the repressive hypothesis is that we relate to sexuality primarily through the mode of silence. Right. It's taboo. It's that which we cannot speak, but if you look at the 18th and the 19th centuries, and of course you can extend it into the 20th, and I would say even the 21st.

We talk about sex all the time.

[00:12:06] Ellie: Yeah. And we're talking about it sometimes in indirect ways. And so he says, we speak verbosely of our silence around sex. And one thing that I think about often here is, look at virtually any advertisement. There will be some sexual element to it, but that sexual element is pretty much never on the surface.

Right. There will be some erotic dimension to it, most often in the eroticization of women's bodies, but not always, of course. And whether it's through advertisements or music or our films and TV proclivities and so on and so forth, there is sexuality at work all the time. And Foucault says the repressive hypothesis, this idea that like, oh, we never talk about sex.

And the silence around sex speaks to a repression of it, and therefore, you know, we need to liberate it. It's appealing because it seems rebellious and transgressive, he suggests, it's like, oh wow, I'm so free, I'm so liberated. And he is like, well, you know, you're actually just partaking of this very same regime that you claim to be against.

[00:13:11] David: Well, and this is where Freud comes into the picture, because Foucault says, if you accept the repressive hypothesis, the idea that we are all sort of kept in check by this sexual Victorian morality, then you might be led to believe in what he calls the speaker's benefit. That anybody who speaks about sexuality is inherently subversive and inherently a radical like Freud.

Right. And we do have this view of Freud as somebody who just like threw away all the sexual prohibitions in the Victorian period around talking about sex. I mean, he's talking about masochism, sadism, sexual fantasy, sexual delusions. And we might think that Freud, by virtue of talking about sexuality so freely, is our path to liberation from Victorian morality.

But Foucault says, no, there is nothing more Victorian than Freud himself. Right? Like there is nothing more Victorian than talking about sex indirectly, but verbose. the best illustration of this may, maybe we can say need or incitation, 'cause he talks about the incitement to talk about sex is what he calls the Catholic pastoral in connection to religion, which is the expectation that a believer if you wanna be a good Christian, and you know, I grew up Catholic, so I'm intimately familiar with this pressure to confess.

That you have to go searching through the cabinets of your soul for the deepest, darkest sins, especially the sexual ones that you have committed. And then you have to externalize them to a priest in a confessional booth inside the church. So again, the priest believer relationship mirrors the analyst patient relationship.

Where there's the externalization of a sexual truth and it Foucault says, look, I'm not saying that there is zero repression, obviously even in religion, there is some repression and some Britishness around sex. But the underlying reality that Foucault is interested in is that even though in religion we expect people to speak indirectly about sex, there is this expectation that you have to talk to the priest about sex.

And so we see that with the role of confession where you end up having these almost very kinky sessions of, you know, revealing your secrets to a priest and somehow you're supposed to find the truth of who you are in that process of externalization.

[00:15:35] Ellie: Yeah. And so Foucault's question becomes not why are we repressed? That's a question that the repressive hypothesis asks, but instead, why do we say that we are repressed? So I wanna think a little bit about his doubts about the repressive hypothesis because his answer to why do we say that we are repressed is basically the rest of the entire book. Yeah. And so, you know, we'll be offering some direct and indirect answers to that in the rest of the episode.

So he offers three doubts towards the beginning of the text. I'm looking at page 10. So first is a historical question, which is. Is sexual repression truly an established fact? And his answer to that will be no. Partly for the reasons that you mentioned. This idea that confession a really core element of Catholicism, which is the form of Christianity most dominant, of course, in France, where Foucault is writing, essentially revolves around the confession of sexual sins.

Or maybe not essentially, but let's say in practice.

[00:16:39] David: Yeah, no, I think almost essentially for Foucault, because it is the primary mode of relating to the self.

[00:16:45] Ellie: Yeah. And then second, power doesn't work primarily through repression, but it works through production. And that he calls a historico-theoretical question. And then the third question is, is the discourse around sex meant to resist repression? Not in fact part of the thing it denounces by calling it repression and hence misrepresenting it.

And that he calls a historico-political question, right? So, and his answer to that will be yes. The discourse that is meant to resist repression is actually part of the very thing that it denounces by calling it repression. And his ultimate conclusion here is that sexuality is not some natural thing that is repressed.

Sexuality is produced through the very discourses that might seem to repress or silence it. Sexuality is a social construct produced by a certain sort of Christian and especially bourgeois framework.

[00:17:44] David: Yeah. By relations of power even more broadly. And I think there is a passage towards the end here where you're mentioning these three questions that I think captures the spirit of the book very well, where he says, look, the point is not to say yes to having sex or to sexuality, or to say, no, I stay away from it.

It's not about whether you embrace it or reject it, it's rather to come to an analysis of the discourses that generated. And so he says, what I want to do in this multi-volume project is situate sexuality as it exists in discourse and plays the discourse on sexuality in a larger field of other discourses that are sort of contemporaneous with it and that have relationships to it.

Which is why in the book he ends up talking not really so much about, like, the act of having sex necessarily as much as about discourses that help us construct sexuality historically. Discourses like psychiatry, like psychology, like really like the human sciences. And the institutions that they typically rely on.

Right. Like the prison, the education system, the clinic, so on and so forth.

[00:18:54] Ellie: Yeah. And this speaks to Foucault's understanding of not just like history and society, but phenomena that we take for granted. So one of the most important articulations that Foucault gives of his own method comes from his essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.

Not from this text, but different one where he talks about being interested in investigating that, which passes for being without history. And his method undergoes a number of changes throughout the course of his career. You mentioned genealogy. That's, you know, also the text that I just mentioned is an articulation of his genealogy.

There's also his archeology, and we're not gonna get into like a periodization of Foucault's different methodological approaches in this episode, but what I think we can absolutely say generally is that Foucault, there is no universalizable and eternal human nature. And so part of the problem with the repressive hypothesis is this idea that sexuality is like part of who we as humans are.

And even though psychoanalysis historicizes is a great deal, he certainly doesn't think that it goes far enough here. He thinks that in claiming that sexuality is the truth of who we are. We are universalizing and internalizing something that is actually the historical production of bourgeois society.

[00:20:12] David: Yeah. And for what it's worth, I do think psychoanalysis universalizes too much, right? It naturalizes and it forces us all to fit into a predetermined trajectory of development and sees any deviation from that sort of across time and place as inherently pathological. And so Foucault really wants us to think about how we are subjected or subjectivized, he placed on the double meaning of the word subject. Right. That we are subjected to certain regimes of power. And in doing so, you become a subject with a certain identity.

[00:20:45] Ellie: The famous assujettissement.

[00:20:47] David: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so he wants to do that in terms of sexuality, which means that sexuality, again, for him, in terms of definition, it's not.

Something that we have, it's something that sort of happens to us through discourse and discursive practices. At one point he says, we need to move away from this way of thinking about sexuality that is biological, and that is rooted in a theory of drives to seeing sexuality as a point of tension where relations of power get activated between men and women, between old people and young people, between teachers and students.

And so it brings into sort of the center of the discussion, the centrality of discourse, for Foucault, so much of his thinking is about how we talk about things and how that mode of talking constitutes the thing in question.

[00:21:41] Ellie: And that doesn't mean of course, that sexuality doesn't exist, but it means it exists as a historical construct rather than as some eternal thing. Let's talk about discourse and its role in sexuality.

[00:21:56] David: We've mentioned that Foucault rejects the repressive hypothesis on the grounds that we are not, in fact, as repressed as we think we are, or at least repression is not the primary mode by which we relate to sexuality. And the reason that he thinks that hypothesis is sort of empirically false is because since the 17th and 18th centuries, there has been a proliferation of discourses around sexuality.

So again, we keep talking about how we don't talk about sex as we can't stop blabbering about it. So his primary example for this, of course, is confession in religion in a Catholic country where this is an important practice for having the proper relationship to the divine. But Foucault gives a number of other examples of how sex has become something that we must talk about and that we feel a need to talk about as a society.

For example, he talks about how there is a very direct line that we can draw from the practices of confession that are central to Christianity and Catholicism to what he calls scandalous literature. So there was an explosion in the 19th century of really juicy, spicy, you know, accounts of sexual conquest and adventures.

[00:23:11] Ellie: Yeah. The libertines.

[00:23:13] David: The libertines, you know, the people who were the inheritors of the Marquis de Sade's approach to literature. And Foucault says even though we might not see them as related, in fact, we might see the practice of confession entirely opposed to this practice of publishing really juicy, kind of like hot lit, hot literature.

They share this need to talk about sex. Beyond that there.

[00:23:39] Ellie: Can I just say quick, something quick about that? 'cause there's a nice quote, I think on page 63 that talks about part of what this change meant. So the confession is that confessing of a sin, the rise of this autobiographical literature or other dimensions.

It's like here on the second half of page 63, he says, he's talking about the way that the confession lends itself to new ways of exploring the existing ones. So we can think about the autobiographical as you put it, hot lit as still confessional, but it's a different form of confession than what we do to the priest because he says it is no longer a question simply of saying what was done, the sexual act and how it was done, but of reconstructing in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that a ccompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it for the first time. No doubt a society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting of individual pleasure. So there's like this titillating quality of, don't just tell me what you did. Tell me about like

[00:24:41] David: the details.

[00:24:41] Ellie: Tell me the details, tell me your obsessions around it. The kind of like lead up to it, every single aspect of it. Just like a tell all essentially.

[00:24:49] David: Right. And that's because in Catholicism, part of the role of confession is to confess the sins of the flesh. And that's not just acts. It's really everything connected to your relationship to this forbidden fruit.

And so he uses the example of confession. But he also says there are other discourses that proliferate about sexuality outside of religion. He talks, for example, about political discourses that all hinge on sexuality discourses in what we now would call public health around population control. So you know, suddenly the state gets really interested in tracking how many people are married, how often they're having sex, how many children they're having.

As a way of thinking about the wellbeing of the population as a whole, that's a sexual discourse. Right? It's governments surveying, analyzing, cataloging information about people's relationship to sex. He talks about criminal justice. There is the rise of interest in things like crimes against nature minor indecencies, where suddenly it's also the law that's turning its gaze to the domain of sexuality in a new way, and with curiosity that wants to know more than what it can see.

He also talks about education how there is, you know, he talks about dormitories and the separation between boys and girls. Yeah. And how it's this sexually charged space, even though it tries to quote, unquote, protect children from sexuality. And finally, obviously he talks about medicine. The medicalization of sexual disorders and sexual pathologies, and the ways in which those then lead to entirely new identities of kinds of subjects who exist. Yeah. Like the hysteric or the ones.

[00:26:40] Ellie: Yeah. And let's get into the scientific discourses around this. I wanna just mention he talks about the necessity during this time period of transforming every desire into discourse. So any desire you have then suddenly needs to be transformed into discourse and there becomes a need to take sex into account.

And so it's as though like no aspect of human life is untouched by sex. And we need to admit that we need to, you know, own up to it. Right? And so there's a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex, he says not so much in the form of a general theory of sexuality. As in the form of analysis, stock taking, classification and specification.

And the reason that I wanted to mention that is because I think it provides a nice hinge point from the hot lit to the scientific discourses you mentioned, like population control and the education system and these other elements here. I think all of that is, you know, part of this idea that sex suddenly needs to be taken into account and also policed, not in the sense of being repressed or taboo, but in the sense of being regulated.

Okay, so science of sex. He says that our society is the only one, and again, ours being France in the 1970s, but we're the inheritors here. Our society is the only one to have produced a sciencia sexualis or a science of sex. And he distinguishes this from another form of producing the truth about Sex. And that is the procedure known as ars erotica.

So he distinguishes ars erotica from sciencia sexualis. And ars erotica is essentially a way of producing the truth about sex that involves learning about it from a master, a one-on-one relationship. He has, what do you, would you call this account of ars erotica orientalist, or No?

[00:28:36] David: No, I wouldn't necessarily call it that, but it does bring to mind something like the Kama Sutra. There's a focus on pleasure that is lived through practice. So, the discourse of ars erotica, well, it's not even a discourse, it's really a practice. It's a way of relating to sexuality where you get to discover the truth about sexuality by performing sex, by doing sex, by exploring, the vast domain of the sexual pleasure. And he says, that's not the culture that we live in. We don't have this relationship to sexuality, rather, we have this other one that Ellie just mentioned, which is sciencia sexualis, which is not about practice and pleasure, it's about knowledge and power. We relate to sexuality as something to be known, analyzed and controlled. And so here you see why the relationship to truth is so central, and also the focus on discourses.

Because in a way for Foucault, our obsession with talking about sexuality, whether it's the confession, whether it's in population control, whether it is in the education system with, you know, sex education classes, that's sort of how we do sex in our culture. That is our sexuality. Our sexuality. Like in modern language, if you ask Toko what's our sexual orientation as a culture could be like. Our sexual orientation is talking. Yeah. Like that's our sexual orientation. Yeah. Yeah. And so Ciencias Sexualis is not, um, specific to just the scientific discourses and the way that we tend to narrowly think about them, but it is generally speaking, the practice of confession.

[00:30:20] Ellie: And this idea, as you described it, of producing the truth around sex as like some kind of knowledge to be had abstractly ,generally, maybe as part of this like broader regime that is not about the experience of pleasure itself, but the experience of like a sort of reportage of that pleasure. That said, our scientific discourses around sex more narrowly understood whether it's through the biology of reproduction or through the kind of medicalization or psychiatrization of certain sexual practices, the invention of the pervert.

Those are very much part of this sciencia sexualis as well. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. He notes the hysterization of women's bodies is part of this. The idea that children have no sexuality and so they occupy this domain that is pure of sexuality and they need to be protected from the knowledge of sexuality.

The medicalization of the effects of confession. And so this idea that you're not confessing to a priest who's absolving you of your sins, but rather you're confessing to a medical professional who might get you castrated. Or, you know, recommend a lobotomy.

[00:31:30] David: Or who will give you a label, but then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy about who you are socially.

[00:31:34] Ellie: Yes. And that's also part of his issues with the kind of gay liberation movement of the 20th century is that it leans into labels and the homosexual as figure he notes is the production of 19th century medicalized discourse and therefore is something that we need to sort of be careful about claiming as like a label of liberation.

[00:31:56] David: Good. And so in thinking about how this act of confession becomes something that gets caught up with scientific discourse. 'cause that sounds counterintuitive, right? Confession is not scientific. And then a lot of these discourses like psychiatry and medicine, population control, they aim to be scientific and objective.

And Foucault is pointing out that there is a really interesting tension where the subjective and the, or the introspective and the objective are sort of entwining and giving rise to what in France are called the human sciences. In an American context, we refer to that as the social sciences, right?

Sociology, psychology. So there is something fundamentally confessional about those sciences, and he talks about the procedures by which this happens. One is the idea that everything is caused by sex. Sexuality is this diffused causality that can explain everything about a person. If you just manage to develop the right methods to analyze the original cause and effect relationship, whether that is you as a judge trying to figure out how somebody's sexuality led them to a crime, or whether you're a priest trying to figure out, you know, what the right absolution for a sin might be for the person in front of you.

The second really important connection or the thing that confession shares with the sciences is the medicalization Foucault says of the effects of confession. What he means by that is that we have this idea that the act of releasing the truth about our sexuality is cathartic, that it will cure us, that it will restore us in some way.

You can see that with, for example, the confession of sexual crimes in a courtroom. Like we think that you're a better person if you just confess your crime. We also think you're a better person if you just confess your sins. But we also think that you become a healthier adult if you quote unquote, confess to your analyst, therapist, psychologist.

And so in all of these cases, you see the same underlying mechanism at work, which is the trying to render scientific and objective a fundamentally introspective practice. Which is the looking within to reveal the truth.

[00:34:15] Ellie: And there is a tension, at least initially, historically speaking between the practices of confession and scientific discursivity. He talks about that on 65, there being a interference between the two, but eventually these get adapted to one another, albeit with difficulty. And so he suggests that there is an adaptation of the ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific discourse.

And David, I'm curious, I mentioned the label homosexual as you know, being something that Foucault, he's not a particularly prescriptive thinker. He's actually like very cautious about making prescriptions. But I think for that reason, he's also cautious about prescribing the adoption of labels as a liberatory practice. And if anything, I think like if we can say there's a sort of prescriptive undercurrent there, the prescription would be to at minimum, be careful around adopting labels. And he has some really interesting remarks on that in interviews as well. Curious what you think Foucault might say about the proliferation of labels in our present day? Oh my gosh, I just had a conversation. I'm teaching a non-monogamy unit in my intimate relationships course right now.

I had a student yesterday basically make the case that polyamory and monogamy are sexual orientations, and therefore if people express jealousy about a partner's attraction to another person and they have a monogamous orientation, then that's okay because that's part of their sexual orientation. We also have the proliferation around like labels around kinks and like all kinds of things today.

We're living in an age of more and more and more labels, and I think that's often framed as liberatory. What do you think Foucault would have to say about that?

[00:36:03] David: I, well, again, the point I think Foucault would say is the key is not say yes or no to the label, but understand that the label is already infused with power relations.

[00:36:14] Ellie: And it's part of the proliferation of discourse that I think can very easily fall prey to the myth of the repressive hypothesis, which is misguided.

[00:36:23] David: Yeah. Because if you think about the repressive hypothesis, just visually, it's the idea that there is power from the top down, holding something down and preventing a nature from expressing itself.

And so that means that if you think about monogamy or polyamory as sexual orientations and we do have a kind of naturalistic understanding of sexual orientation in our presence. Right? Like I was born that way. Then you are committed to a biologizing of these historically constituted categories, and the best way to understand how arbitrary that is, is to say, look, there have been a ton of categories, only some of which we have preserved and others not.

The category of homosexual emerged at some point. We kept it. Now there's a homosexual liberation movement, but there was also the category of the onus, which was like a child masturbator, where is my child onus Pride March? You know, like what month is that? Because I might need to show up because if we lived in a slightly different culture where that label had stuck around, then maybe we would identify people as essentially onunists in the same way that we today identify them as essentially trans, essentially lesbian, essentially heterosexual.

[00:37:37] Ellie: And again, that doesn't mean that there aren't lesbian, trans, homosexual, heterosexual people, right? Like this is the point about historical constructs or what we more commonly today call social constructs. It's not that they don't exist, but rather that they have a history, they're infused with power relations.

And therefore it also should be an open question for us to what extent we wanna attach to that.

[00:37:57] David: And I wanna say also that when we think that these new categories that emerge at particular moments in time capture the truth about who we are, such that we feel the need to use them to make ourselves legible to other people, we're still participating in that putting of sexuality into discourse that Foucault talks about, as well as sort of discovering our truth in sexuality.

Why is it that my truth about who I am lies in the people I have sex with and the kinds of sex that I have. Why don't we live in a society where it's some other dimension of human experience that captures my truth?

What if it was like athleticism? That is the truth of our experience, and then I have to come out to my parents as like mom and dad. I'm actually a soccer player, not a basketball player. Right? There is something arbitrary about those two associations, truth and sexuality, and then sexuality and discourse.

[00:38:55] Ellie: And that arbitrariness is also an invitation for us to consider who or what is attaching our truth to our sexuality serving.

We've just talked about the proliferation of discourse around sexuality and the way that it partakes of and produces a sciencia sexualis that Foucault thinks no society before ours has had, or before his has had. That said in distinguishing that from ars erotica, which he thinks like has been a regime or procedure for producing the truth about sex that has existed in other times and places.

He doesn't think that those two categories ultimately are entirely opposed because one thing I just wanna note is that he suggests that even though there's an opposition between sciencia sexualis and ars erotica, the ars erotica didn't disappear altogether from western civilization. And in fact, we can consider the possibility that since the 19th century, the sciencia sexualis has functioned to a certain extent as an ars erotica. What does that mean?

[00:40:08] David: Yeah, so that's, I think this is a really smart observation on Foucault's part, and he does have a bit of an oxidant versus orient framework for these. It's not as if in the orient they practice sex and pleasure through these master initiate relationships, and in the West we have this more analytic, discursive, scientific way of approaching sex.

It's rather that our scientific objective kind of detached approach to sex is our way of having sex. Like we find it erotic to talk about sex. And so we are performing sexuality in this scientific manner.

[00:40:53] Ellie: Yeah. In fact, he says, we've invented a different kind of pleasure. Pleasure in the truth of pleasure. And so the hot lit produces a pleasure. The strange pleasure even we could say of being psychiatrist. I was gonna say psychiatrist more. Medicalized

[00:41:11] David: psychologized.

[00:41:12] Ellie: Yeah. Psychiatrically labeled. Right. Like the pleasure and the truth of labels, I think is maybe one thing to think about.

[00:41:20] David: Yeah. And elsewhere, he points out that anytime you have power and desire, touching. Of course desire is going to reflect the influence of power, but power is going to reflect the influence of desire. So there is an eroticization of a certain power relation or dynamic. Which is why, I mean this kind of literally we get off on talking about sex via all these discourses available to us.

[00:41:49] Ellie: Absolutely. I think the time has come then David, to talk about power and as we get started in this portion of the discussion, I wanna note that we are likely not going to be thematizing the difference between sovereign power and biopower unless we like suddenly have more time than we thought we would have.

We've decided that even though that part of the discourse which comes up later in the book is really important, you know, in Foucault's work, we just may not have time to actually get into it. We mainly want to talk about how he's conceiving of power. I was gonna

[00:42:20] David: more generally

[00:42:20] Ellie: Yeah, I was gonna say generally speaking and then I'm like, maybe we even need to problematize that category of the general, but you know, in the sense that he's just talking about power, I think that's fine. And we're looking particularly at the passages on power in the middle of the book, in part four rather than part five, is where he articulates the difference between sovereign power and biopower.

So, okay. Let's kind of bring together what we've said about power so far 'cause we have mentioned it, you know, in a few places of the discussion. Power for Foucault is productive rather than repressive, and we tend to think about power as you put it earlier, David, as a sort of pushing down, right? That's the repressive model rather than as actually productive in the sense of like producing certain regimes, experiences, desires, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:43:11] David: And identities.

[00:43:12] Ellie: Yeah. And identities. Let's talk now about why somebody might think that power has that kind of pushing down repressive tendency and Foucault's alternative to that. Like what does it actually mean to say that power is productive?

[00:43:26] David: Good. So the top down version of power Foucault refers to as the juridical discursive model of power. And that's because if you think about the juridical system, like the law, that's sort of the image that we have of how power operates at all times. And there's a really important quote Foucault says, despite the differences in epoch and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy.

This idea that that power is centralized and it's top down like in a monarchy, in political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. And so we still think in terms of a center of power that holds, and from which all power emanates. It's almost like a trickle down theory of power.

Yeah. You know, like the reaganomics of Foucault.

[00:44:17] Ellie: Well actually I wouldn't say trickle. No, it's not trickle down. It's top down.

[00:44:21] David: Yeah. Well it trickles down. Yeah. It like comes down.

[00:44:23] Ellie: No, it's, but it no exercised from the top.

[00:44:24] David: Yeah. So it's more active because trickle down makes it seem like it just falls. Yeah.

[00:44:28] Ellie: There's no trickle.

[00:44:28] David: Yeah. And so this is like a jet coming down.

[00:44:31] Ellie: I mean, I was thinking maybe more like a sword, but, okay.

[00:44:35] David: No, but as far as your question goes as to why we think of power in this way. There are two reasons. One is because at some points it kind of has seemed like that. You know that there were kings.

And we have moved away from that. But even back day, Foucault will say it was much more complicated than that. But the image is easy to understand. But secondarily, the reason we think about it is because that's how power itself wants us to think about it. He says, power conceals its own strategies and mechanisms of operation in order to render itself more palatable to all of us.

And of course, it's easier to live in a society filled with power relations if we think that power is just like over there. Like in the courtroom. Or over there in the Oval Office. As opposed to thinking about power as Foucault wants us to think about it as infusing every aspect of our social lives.

 Part of the problem here is that if you think about sex in this simplified top-down manner. You'll also think about liberation in a simplified way. As just I talk about sex, I come out, I'm free, and that doesn't actually lead to the kind of liberation that people think it will.

[00:45:52] Ellie: This brings to mind for me, a question that people often have when they read Foucault is, well then what do we do if I just like simply decide not to come out, then I'm not being true to myself.

Even if you say that being true to yourself is a production or is a product of this power regime, et cetera, it doesn't mean that I don't feel like I have certain desires that are key to the truth of who I am. And even if I were to resist the coming out narrative by just like moving the other direction and denying that I have a sexuality at all, society's still gonna ask me.

It's still gonna wanna figure out the truth. It's gonna insist that I tell the truth of who I am, even if I don't feel that there is a truth to who I am. So I think like a very common response that people have to this text and to Foucault's work in general is well then what do I do?

[00:46:43] David: So I don't have a good answer is the short quick take on it. Because as you mentioned, Foucault is not particularly prescriptive. And so there is no recipe for liberation that's gonna tell you , these are the steps that you have to do in order to achieve sexual wholeness or sexual freedom or sexual liberation. But I do think that he seems to believe that once we become aware of the game of power, that we are always playing, we might be able to make new moves within the field of that game that might give us a different mode of relating to ourselves at the very least. And maybe that's a super qualified model of liberation where it's not about stepping outside of power and being free of power. He doesn't think that's possible.

[00:47:27] Ellie: That's not possible.

[00:47:28] David: Yeah. Like you can't be untouched by power because it's diffused, it's heterogeneous, it is what constitutes the social field. And I think what he would recommend is becoming aware of the techniques by which power operates. And he says the new methods of power, it means that it works not by right, but by technique, not by law, but by normalization.

Not by punishment, but by control. All of these he says, are methods that are employed at all levels and that go beyond just the state and its apparatus. So maybe becoming aware of just how immersed we are, empower can give us some liberation seems really strong, but it might give us some agency to move within this large house of power.

[00:48:19] Ellie: Yeah. Because if he's saying that power exists in every possible form in our society, producing our identities, our desires, our experiences, not to mention like our social institutions and stuff, that also means that it's not confined to only particular people. It means that, to put it reductively, everyone has access to it.

And I will say I don't think that is necessarily super helpful. I think that Foucault is too general and vague about power. And so I do fall on the side of the critics who say that he's not careful enough in his account of power and like the idea of productive power kind of purports to explain everything, but doesn't actually explain very much.

Let me say just a little bit more about how he does define power. Let's put flesh on this concept so that criticism doesn't seem premature or unfair. First off, what power is not, it's not only that it's not repressive, but it is also

[00:49:21] David: what page are you on?

[00:49:21] Ellie: Also, I'm on page 92. It is also not a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure subservience.

It's not a mode of subjugation and it's not a general system of domination exerted by one group over another. Right. And so I think those are actually, maybe always, those are ways of thinking about the juri mode of power. Yes. But maybe just like a little bit more specific

[00:49:43] David: and just very quickly elsewhere, he also says it's not just prohibition, it's not just censorship. And it's not just rules.

[00:49:50] Ellie: Yes. And so then what is it this he articulates on 92 93. First, it is a multiplicity of force relations that are imminent to a particular sphere. And that constitute their organization. So there's like, you know, these forced relations, so relational theory of power, I think first and foremost, relations happening within a specific sphere.

[00:50:11] David: Horizontal rather than vertical.

[00:50:12] Ellie: Good, good. Second, it is the process that transforms through ceaseless struggles and confrontations strengthens or reverses these force relations. Right. And so there are processes of movement in different directions and movement, internal movements of transformation of the relational forces themselves.

[00:50:32] David: Yeah. So this is what we might call the dynamicity of power. So power is not just static and always in the same kind of top down or oppress or oppressed relationship. Yeah. Power you, you can think it almost like a magma that is bubbling up. And sometimes it changes in particular areas over the course of time, so, it's in flux.

[00:50:50] Ellie: Yeah. I said relational forces, I meant forced relations. And I think on that point I would just maybe press against the magma analogy only in the sense that magma is like some single thing that has different expressions and he is talking about it as a multiplicity of force relations.

So there's not some singular entity of power

[00:51:08] David: Can you give better a metaphor than magma?

[00:51:12] Ellie: Oh man. I'm like,

[00:51:13] David: it's a quantum field.

[00:51:15] Ellie: Yeah. We need some more metaphors, Foucault. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think multiple relations is like that to me. Forced relations. So like think about maybe different forces in a force field.

[00:51:25] David: Yeah. I don't know.

[00:51:26] Ellie: Okay. Then third or next, he says it's the support that these force relations find in one another, such that they either form a kind of chain or system. And I think that's where we can start to see like institutions emerge or on the other hand kind of isolate from one another. So like the force relations in opposition to one another.

And then finally the strategies in which these take effect in law, hegemony, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:51:53] David: You can see why this is not a hyper precise theory of power. Yeah.

[00:51:58] Ellie: What? That wasn't extraordinarily lucid and everybody now understands what Foucault means by power based on me like reviewing this passage.

[00:52:06] David: So I have to say that I am much more open to this definition because think about how hard it is to define power in a way that captures all the expressions of power in our lives. Again, if we move away from the notion that power is centralized in the head of the king, that it always is uniform, that it expresses itself in a top down way. If that's your definition of power, then yeah, it might be easier to define.

But once you accept that, that's not really the only way in which power can manifest itself. You have no choice but to move to this kind of like diffuse magma, energy forces, quantum field account of power. One thing that I do like about Foucault and also helps us think about the question of liberation. Is because power is dynamic for him.

I'm gonna stick with my magma metaphor. Sorry Ellie.

[00:52:58] Ellie: You don't wanna go with force field instead?

[00:53:00] David: Yeah. No, because the magma will actually visualize the point I'm going to make within the field of power. As you pointed out, there are sometimes these sudden reversals and so.

Just that there is a plurality,

[00:53:11] Ellie: well, actually, honestly, magmas not, not worse than force. Field Force. I'm like thinking about like a field of different forces. I just like FactCheck myself. That's not really what a force field is. So yeah, just force field was worse because I can't even articulate what a force field is.

Yikes. This is what happens to, we try and come up with ad hoc metaphors, proceed with my qualification about magma.

[00:53:31] David: Yeah. So because power is dynamic and performs these auto reversals sort of by its own logic over time, it means that just as there is power everywhere, you might also find the possibility of resistance everywhere.

In the most unexpected of places. Yeah. And this is what he calls in page 96, the plurality of resistances, each of them a special case, resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable, others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerned, rampant or violent. And so resistance is just. diffused and decentralized as power itself.

And what I like about that is that it tells us that just as there is no one way to express power, there is no one way to fight against it. And so if you take this to the sexual liberation movement or to, the feminist, liberation movement, there are many ways of fighting patriarchy, of fighting normative heterosexuality other than, what we think of as like the typical resistance, which is like to embrace X, Y, or Z identity, maybe the refusal to embrace that identity can be a form of resisting existing discourses, about sexuality.

[00:54:45] Ellie: Okay. And here however, is where I still bump up against a concern with Foucault's theory of power. And I think it's actually partly because I think even though, technically speaking, given that Fuco talks about power as a multiplicity of force relations, I don't think the magma example is right.

I think the magma example is generally right because I think he actually, without admitting it, gives us a homogenous view of power. And I'm by no means original in this critique of Foucault. It's a critique of Foucault that many Foucauldians have defended against. They think this critique is wrong, but it's a critique that we find coming out of certain feminist critics of Foucault and others, which is that Foucault ultimately ends up making power into a sort of master figure, almost like God or like Spirit in Hagel.

Because when we talk about power as producing, we give it a sort of intentionality or agency. And he does say that power is intentional, although it's non-subjective. And my main concern in his account of power is precisely that. I do think it actually has like a fundamentally age gentle, almost god-like role.

And in that sense it's actually not, as opposed to the juridical model of power as he thinks it is, he's inverting the juridical model of power, moving from a power that exerts force from above to power. He says explicitly power comes from below. And I do think it has like this kind of homogenous and even consolidated quality to it in spite of his protestations to the contrary, because of the way that he talks about it, he so often uses it as the subject of a sentence that has that like ascribes, some sort of agency to power.

[00:56:33] David: I mean, he does say things like power hides itself. Power does its own reversals. Like power does X, Y, or Z, maybe I belong to the group of Foucauldians who want to defend Foucault against this criticism because for me that's just a manner of writing that doesn't quite tell us something substantive about his views about power itself.

I think the argument that his view of power as hyper diffused maybe is not good enough to helping us identify places in the network where power does get concentrated, right? Like power is not applied or it doesn't get expressed equally everywhere with the same intensity and with the same function. So maybe we want a little bit more differentiation in that regard. But maybe we just see this differently.

[00:57:22] Ellie: Well, we might also want more differentiation in the sense of different types of power, because even though he talks about it as multiplicity, or he says as multiplicity, he doesn't actually really talk about it as a multiplicity. And so one point of critique that Nancy Frazier has famously leveled against Foucault is that the lack of a normative framework here, and the lack of a distinction between oppressive and liberating forms of power, right?

It's just like, oh, you know, express your power in like resisting the repressive hypothesis. Whether that takes the form of resisting, like a naive understanding that buys into the repressive hypothesis or that resists a more informed understanding of the way that the repressive hypothesis is wrong is like, well, it's just actually the same kind of power.

So that's like the homogeneity point. It's, it's like ultimately a claim about the lack of a normative framework for distinguishing between different forms of power

[00:58:11] David: that I do think is a better criticism on power.

[00:58:14] Ellie: Well, maybe we can end there. Thanks so much for joining us. For those of you who are subscribers, stick around. We have our extended episode where we'll be getting into the topic of children's sexuality and Foucault's, perhaps most controversial example in this text.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.