This week we are discussing History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (HSV1), pp. 81-102 and 151-159
We began, as usual, with our list of questions:
-relation of HSV1 to previous weeks (i.e., regarding 'the self')
-102: distinction between tactical productivity and strategical integration
-94-5: power relations as intentional but nonsubjective: rationality without 'headquarters', the anti-conspiracy-theorist model
-94: his analysis of power seems to replace this force of domination, cf. DP (Foucault seems to be uncutting his analysis; power seems to take the place of the 'cunning of history')
-on the contrary, if his analysis holds, then: what is resistance? how is it not totalizing?
-93-97 (esp. 93 and 95): "power is a moving substrate of force relations..."; is resistance just a form of power? why call it resistance?
-90: distinction between law and 'technology' as forms of governance
-152: bodies as central to the element of selfhood; what is the order of materiality that is 'the body'? (refer to passage on 155-6; sex and the body, similar to the body and the soul in DP)
There is a way in which MF uses very structuralist language (93: "If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded…”); we're just talking about force relations; 'war' and 'politics' are just two different strategies on this model. There may be tensions within this field of force relations, but there is no subjective control over the results of one's 'reform' efforts. Reform efforts, e.g., for prison reformers in DP, had unpredictably dominating effects. So, how can we say then that resistance is really possible? When you're talking about strategies and aims that are operating at the systemic level, doesn't it seem that any individual intervention is non-efficacious? What is the potential for the efficacy of the individual resistor?
Foucault's answer might be that to the extent that we operate within the juridico-discursive theory of power, we are unable to effect resistance, except by accident. In other words, the consolidation of the juridico-discursive theory of power after monarchical rule covers up the power mechanisms that can be more accurately described as constituting our contemporary subjectivity, i.e., disciplinary power and biopower. So resistance will proceed by finding nodes of tactical response, e.g., 'we are the 99%' is resisting, yet is proceeding by not formulating a coherent set of strategies (95-6: “…there is no single locus of great Refusal... there is a plurality of resistances…).
These questions arise: what is the status of theory as a result of MF's analysis? if there is no one to tell us what is the right way to resist, then how might we resist? Yet, at the same time, MF tells us that revolution occurs via 'the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible...' (96). This is the same way that state power is consolidated (96). So power relations in resistance operate in the same way as those that we would consider oppressive or dominating; what is similar to both is the fact that these are different strategies or tactics. Yet, Foucault will not tell us how to resist, i.e., will not give us a model for resistance as such; he will not give us a categorical imperative, only a 'conditional imperative' (as in STP, i.e., Security, Territory, and Population). This is a weakness. MF is not a normative theorist. Or is this a weakness? He continues to resist 'theory': so that we cannot, once and for all, give an account of 'resistance', or 'power', or 'sex.' He is moving away from the critique of ideology and the juridico-discursive theory of power. The Foucaultian analysis of power then gives us a general account of power relations without prescribing, once and for all, the ways in which we ought to proceed. Yet, he does offer this in HSV1: “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures’’ (157); and ‘’…we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality… were able to subject us... (159). This is still only a gesture. He says a bit more regarding this later (HSV2 and later works), but still doesn't develop a robust normative project. The upshot might be that the theorist is not going to be able to work in a way that is divorced from practitioners, i.e., the theorist is going to need to be engaged with the processes of resistance for the sake of noting nodes or resistance where they are already in process. The theorist cannot pronounce from on high where resistance ought to take place.
What does Foucault mean by 'desire' and 'pleasure'? For MF, 'desire' is bound up in Christian practices of self-renunciation, whereas to define 'pleasure,' he returns to the Greeks' notion of 'aphrodisia,' which is a concept in which there is no distinction made between desire and pleasure. The appeal that pleasure has for MF—which desire doesn't have—is that it leaves room for self-transformation: when one experiments with and multiplies practices of pleasure, then one might... what? 'Pleasure' as 'pre-discursive,' as in Freud? Not within the matrices of desire; not bound within juridico-discursive power? What if pleasure corresponds to the diffusion of power as in disciplinary power and biopower, whereas as desire corresponds to jurdico-discursive models of power? E.g., Butler's description of heteronormativity as performance precisely outlines the pleasure-discipline correspondence.
This leads us to the question of the body. If pleasure is not constituted by a lack, as in desire, then what status does pleasure have? Where is it located? Is it located in the 'brute body'? The brute body, though, would imply that in seeking or cultivating pleasure, we are seeking to discover our 'true selves.' This cannot be the case. Pleasure is, on the one hand, more expansive than 'sex,' and, on the other hand, Foucault's example of the Greeks is one in which practices of pleasure are thoroughly enculturated: pleasure as a set of practices. We are not 'liberating' ourselves, we are transforming ourselves. Thus, the Foucaultian inquiry into sexuality is a destabilization of our most dearly held tenets of self-identification. The upshot is that the exploration of our sexuality is not going to tell us about our true selves, will not liberate us. Instead, we can move to an economy of techniques, of acts in which, by moving from pleasure to pleasure, we can transform ourselves outside of a model of 'coming to know ourselves.' '[T]hrough a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality' (157), we can locate opportunities for resistance with respect to the ways in which we are constituted: sex is an example of a hidden truth of the self, whereas pleasures are acts, i.e., practices that constitute who we are rather than a gateway to the deep truth of the self.
Human beings don't seem to have an internal life, on this model. The soul is produced from the outside-in. In terms of an anthropology, there seems to be something left out. Perhaps there is an outside to discourse, one that is not a cognitive reality. This project cannot fully account for the human being; it is too superficial. Discussion regarding how discourse constitutes reality does not do justice to the fact that there might be things pertinent to selfhood that lie outside of rationality. He wants to say that he's not just doing ideology critique, not just giving a 'history of mentalities'; rather, he is trying to give a ‘‘'history of bodies' and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested” (151-2). This is not a merely ephemeral, specular, socially constituted body. In other words, he’s attempting to give us an account that includes human materiality, but does so in a way that does not relegate any aspect of the self or body to a hidden or pre-discursive space. But it seems that he would have to do something more methodologically innovative than frame this in terms of various rationalities of the body, i.e., a 'history of bodies' (152). This brings us to the question of rationality: MF claims that discourse is always tactical and rational (distinguishes between what makes sense and what doesn't make sense). To the extent that the material body is discursively constituted, this seems an impoverished notion of the self, one which doesn't allow for other forms of thinking. MF seems to want to get there, but a self within discourse is a merely speaking/knowing self.
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