Creo que esta lectura, aunque no he tenido el placer de leerme los tres tomos completos, incluso con solo el primer tomo te abre las puertas hacia otra vision de la sexualidad que no habia contemplado, al menos no de esta manera. Creo que esta lectura es de gran necesidad en el mundo de hoy donde todavia la sexualidad es vista como un tabu y donde se discrimina a otras personas por su sexualidad.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The History of Sexuality
Background Info:
From Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, 1991
Foucault rejects the equation of reason, emancipation, and progress of modern theory and argues that an interface between modern forms of power and knowledge has served to create new forms of domination. His project is to write a ''critique of our historical era,'' to write about subjects that seem natural but that are contingent on sociohistorical constructs of power and domination. Systematizing methods of study produce reductive social and historical analyses; knowledge is perspectival in nature, requiring multiple viewpoints to interpret a heterogeneous reality. Modern theories see knowledge as neutral and objective (positivism) or emancipatory (Marxism), but Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is indissociable from regimes of power. Power is ''a multiple and mobile field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination are produced.'' It is plural, fragmentary, differentiated, indeterminate, and historically and spatially specific. He rejects the idea that power is anchored in macrostructures or ruling classes and is repressive in nature. Power is dispersed, indeterminate, heteromorphous, subjectless, and productive, constituting individuals' bodies and identities. It operates through the hegemony of norms, political technologies, and the shaping of the body and soul. In this book, Foucault argues that power operates not through the repression of sex, but through he discursive production of sexuality and subjects who have a ''sexual nature.''
Part I: We ''Other Victorians''
Repression is a sentence to disappear, an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such subjects. Repression has been seen as the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age and nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required to free ourselves from it. If sex is repressed, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.
It has been argued that repression coincides with the development of capitalism. Sex is repressed because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. However, according to Foucault, the essential thing is not the economic factor, but the existence of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, and the promise of a new felicity are linked together. Foucault's objective is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality.
Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis
Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse
The 17th C was an ''age of repression.'' But since that time there has been a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex. Christianity played a large role in this by emphasizing the importance of confession and of verbalizing sexual matters. In the 18th C, sex became a ''police'' matter, not in the repression of disorder, but in an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces. It was deemed necessary to regulate sex through useful and public discourses. These discourses on sex did not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as a means of its exercise. Mechanisms in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice incited, extracted, distributed, and institutionalized sexual discourse. A wide dispersion of devices were invented for speaking about it, for having it spoken about, for inducing itself to speak, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it. Rather than massive censorship, there has been a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.
Chapter 2: The Perverse Implantation
Has increased discourse been aimed at constituting a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative? Foucault doesn't know if this is the ultimate objective. But reduction has not been the means employed for achieving it. The 19th and 20th C have been an age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ''perversions.'' the discursive explosion of the 18th and 19th C led to an emphasis on heterosexual monogamy and a scrutiny of ''unnatural'' forms of sexual behavior. These polymorphous conducts were drawn out, revealed, isolated, and incorporated by multifarious power devices. The growth of perversions is the product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.
Part III: Scientia Sexualis
While there has been a proliferation of discourse on sex and an increase of awareness of a multiplication of sexual conducts, it nonetheless seems that by speaking of it so much, one was simply trying to conceal it: a screen discourse, a dispersion-avoidance. One also claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of science, a science subordinated to the imperative of a morality whose division it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm.
Throughout the 19th C sex has been incorporated into two distinct order of knowledge: a biology of reproduction and a medicine of sex. There was no real exchange between them, no reciprocal structuration. This disparity indicates that there was no aim to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence.
Historically there have been two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. Many societies endowed themselves with ars erotica (erotic art), whereby truth is drawn from pleasure itself. Western society, however, has scientia sexualis, procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power found in confession. In confession, the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks, but in the one who questions and listens.
How did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual confession come to be constituted in scientific terms?
through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak
through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality
through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality
through the method of interpretation
through the medicalization of the effects of confession
Thus, 19th C society 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. It set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. It created a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure.
*** A hypothesis of a power of repression exerted by our society on sex for economic reasons is inadequate for explaining the proliferation of discourse, the solidification of the sexual mosaic, and the production of confessions and an establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.
Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality
Chapter 1: Objective
The aim of this inquiry is to move less toward a ''theory'' of power than toward an ''analytics'' of power, i.e., toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. This analytics can be constituted only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation of power called ''juridico-discursive.'' This power is characterized by the negative relations between power and sex, the insistence of the rule, the cycle of prohibition, the logic of censorship, and the uniformity of the apparatus. Foucault wants to get rid of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. Instead he wants to advance toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material - the history of sexuality.
Chapter 2: Method
The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. Power must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization. Power's condition of possibility is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
Propositions of Power:
Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relationships of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic, knowledge, sexual), but are immanent in the latter. They re not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, whenever they come into play. Power comes from below (I'm not quite sure what he means by this); i.e., there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations. Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. They re imbued with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. Where there is power, there is resistance and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
One must analyze the mechanisms of power in the sphere of force relations. As far as sex is concerned, the important question, then, is: In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places, what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work? We must immerse the expanding of production of discourses on sex in the field of multiple and mobile power relations. There are four rules to follow in order to carry this out: Rule of immanence: one cannot assume that there exists only a certain sphere in sexuality to be studies. instead, one must start an inquiry with the ''local centers'' of power-knowledge. Rule of continual variation: Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are ''matrices of transformations.''
Rule of double conditioning: No ''local center'' or ''pattern of transformation'' could function if it did not eventually enter into an overall strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if it did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving as its prop and anchor point. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses: There exists a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a point of resistance, and a starting point for an opposing strategy.
Chapter 3: Domain
Sexuality is a dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young and old, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, and an administration and population. Since the 18th C there have developed four strategic unities which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge-power centering on sex:
a hysterization of women's bodies
a pedagogization of children's sex
a socialization of procreative behavior
a psychiatrization of perverse behavior
These strategies led to the production of sexuality. Relations of sex thus gave rise to two systems: the deployment of alliance (marriage, kinship, etc.) and the deployment of sexuality. The deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power. The deployment of alliance aims to produce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control. The deployment of sexuality was constructed on the basis of a deployment of alliance. The family is the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality, and it conveys the economics of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance. Because of this interchange, the family became a major factor of sexualizatio
Chapter 4: Periodization
The chronology of the techniques relating to sex (i.e., in the fields of medicine, pedagogy, and demography) do not coincide with the hypothesis of a great repressive phase of sexuality in the 17th century. Rather there was a perpetual inventiveness, a steady growth of methods and procedures. In addition, it seems that the deployment of sexuality was not established as a principle of limitation of the pleasures of others by the ruling classes. Rather the first deployment of sexuality occurred within these upper classes. This is because the primary concern was not repression of the sexuality of the classes to be exploited, but rather the vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ruled. It was a question of techniques for maximizing life. What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through the enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self. Sexuality then is originally, historically bourgeois, and in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects.
Part V: Right of Death and Power Over Life
Over time the ancient right to take life or let life was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Starting in the 17th C, the power over live evolved in two basic forms: an anatomo-politics of the human body (the body as a machine) and a bio-politics of the population (regulatory controls on the species body). Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. The politics of sex revolved around the fours issues outlined in chapter 3 because they were at the juncture of the ''body'' and the ''population.'' Thus sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death. The blood relation long remained an important element in the mechanism of power; but slowly the symbolics of blood have been replaced with an analytics of sexuality. The mechanisms of power are addressed to the body and to life.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario