In the second text, I will consider possibly how his History of Sexuality can leave open questions about the modern culture and the modern sexual subject. Right at the outset, I would like to also acknowledge his theories as highly versatile and rich in addressing the ongoing phenomena and my essay should not be deemed at all as an attempt towards disapproving or degrading the core content of Foucault’s vision. Rather, what I am mainly contending against is the end outcome of his perspective.
I am troubled to see how humanities in general is unstoppably becoming a practice of endless elenchus towards increasingly establishing theories that are more likely to be applied and used by the forces which they aimed to criticize in first place. Unlike literature in its sense of
Les belles Lettres, which provides open spaces for both inward and outward reflections and interpretations, the ‘serious’ critical theories of culture very often end up content with a prescriptively detailed description of cultural status quo and leave their attempt to be only invincibly agreed upon by individuals in modern societies.
Because of the seeming invincibility of the modern scholarly ideas, new criteria are set to analyze culture and human’s life in general. Such is the case also with seminal works of Michel Foucault, where we are left to agree and close our eyes on what is being fed into ‘parallel realities’.
The paradoxes, I believe, have a fun and, at the same time, the most ‘authentic’ way to express themselves. Fun because they activate the puzzled human’s curiosity and authentic because their practice and their workings reflect the very nature of humans themselves. Throughout their history, humans have sought meaning of life. Their endeavors led, over generations again and again as long as history can reach, to new concepts of meaning but not of life, which is quite paradoxical as humans themselves are. Simply put: human > life > meaning > life > human. They (scholars) pronounce their findings in outstanding works with rigorous argumentation that makes their findings immovable and fixed under their names at a certain point of time in history and ultimately the chronology of such celebrated findings constitutes the history of a field. The sad thing is that in humanities there is always an endless open space for criticizing what has already been celebrated creating a sort of inconsistency in accepting the human achievements. Each achievement becomes a sort of criteria for further analysis. This is as relevant a case today as it has been and had been throughout the history of humans individually and socially. There is an everlasting omnipresent hunch that, by an angular change of perspective, new truth breaks into light. So, it may seem right and logical but only and exclusively when the matter in question is placed in the same light with the same ‘weight and value’ for everyone after interpretation. This uniformity in interpretations obviously cannot hold. This is long accepted that every human possesses an individual array of traits and capabilities which makes his view of the world unique.
However, inconsistency remains there because of a scientific and logical – and true – rejection of ‘anything-goes-thinking’. By studying culture or any other branches of humanities and seeking answers to major questions in a certain field, the pursuit on itself becomes so important that it would be disappointing, futile and not worthy of the time and energy put, if an answer is not found. If found, there will be other perspectives to prove it wrong or to make it a number on the list of possible human achievements in discovering the reality. In all these naturally paradoxical loops of obtaining more knowledge the ‘human’ is left out of the loop.
Michel Foucault’s description of how power works is superbly established in its articulation and logic and lends itself to criticism and analysis only to be either confirmed or generally accepted at many points. In a series of works, he charted the subjectification of humans in the modern culture and the internalization of social values as a functional mechanism operating on people in our time by decentralizing two important interconnected concepts: history and power. The history as is commonly understood, Foucault maintains, is not a linear flow of single chains of cause and effects, rather it is constituted by endless chains of causes and endless chains of effects which exert influence on each other in the process of their occurrences. The historical events that make up our attested and recorded history, are commonly thought to have happened neatly, directly and based on hierarchical schemes of causes and consequences, which Nietzsche had already rejected before Foucault as impossible and certainly not the case. In his work Order of Things, Foucault expressed how Nietzsche has been inspiring for him: ‘Nietzsche marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long while to dominate its advance’. With his method of genealogy of history, Nietzsche was able to see through the current state of affairs in his time and criticized the reason behind the prevalent meaning of human progress. Foucault, by adopting this method, developed it to explain the cultural influence of power relations on subjects and thus argued in depth for two major features of modern culture. First, in History of Sexuality, he argues that the modern sexual subject is the result of infinite small changes and factors and not the result of a single legal or socio-economic development and this is just an example of how in history events happen and become knowledge. Secondly, in Discipline and Power, Foucault talks of how human body is used as the battlefield of power operations and power struggles. These two elements are the main features to consider along with his Nietzschean genealogical method of observation.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault masterfully points out how the concept of punishment has changed dramatically since 17. century. He begins by describing the state measures which were taken to enforce and ensure a functional quarantine in a town against plague through violent threats and graphic admonishments. Foucault continues, then, to purposefully state the costly burden of such ways of controlling and manipulating people in a lock-down: “This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1994). Apart from this, elsewhere in Discipline and Punish we learn that part of the reason for which a drastic change in the disciplinary power relations was necessary, was the fact that the harsh physical and violent punishments became increasingly seen as valid for the executioner of the punishment because he was also seen in a position to commit a crime and thus could be equally guilty and worthy of punishment.
Over time, the concept of corporeal punishment and visible disciplinary threats, Foucault argues, have vanished not away but into non-corporeal forms and are held in place through modern technologies of criminal justice which are principally employed “in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1994).
So, the punishment of the body has been transformed to target, in our time, the soul.
The major strategy in exercising power in our modern time, Foucault argues, is twofold in functioning: first to make punishment into a self-surveillance – and thus individualistic – and secondly, to make punishment run on general dichotomies such as good/bad, normal/abnormal, dangerous/harmless. The dynamics and workings of a constant self-surveillance instilled in individuals in a society, as Foucault stated, can be best illustrated by the architectural model of a panopticon by Jeremy Bentham, where an imaginary, (non-existing) ever-watching eye is believed to exert practical and purposed disciplinary influence on the individuals in a community. Therefore, through the power-inducing panoptical principle, and emphasizing binary attributes of actions by citizens, the modern culture has become irreversibly capable of reforming the values and mindsets of “docile bodies” into its strategically desired mold. It is here that I can put forward my contention that the same self-disciplinary power relations have always existed, through religions. The God or the Angels or the Judgement Day etc. all have always in the past been the ruling ever-watching eye of a contemporary panopticon. Thus, to keep the same power-relations in less visibly violent ways, the modernity and the emergence of the modern cultural thought has only redirected the attention from a holy concept working just as well on dichotomic relations to a secular concept of human civilization with enough logical reasoning fed onto the individuals to see the same old fear (of punishment) as necessary for progress and freedom. To say it in simpler words, the blind faith in science has created a new God. By ensuring a collective consensus that modern civilization would have fallen into chaos without scientific rationality, the same workings of power in history have come into force in new forms. The self-surveillance thus, effective in its functioning, becomes inherently paradoxical in both promising the annihilation of graphic corporeal punishment, suggesting a gentle move towards a more humane way of treating people and at the same time thrusting its constant presence for wreaking havoc on the soul of modern human which continues to exist stealthily and invisibly in disguise of a collective admiration of knowledge.
Later in History of Sexuality, Foucault maintains that sexuality as well as morals both have a history which, as mentioned above, is rather a genealogy than a linear history. He makes the claim that sexuality as we know today is the product of discursive power relations in the late 18. and 19. centuries to use methods and techniques to elicit confessions about individual desires. The Christian confessions at these time in the past gave way to modern conversations in psychiatric clinics. The confessions and the conversations have been, as Foucault states, the wellspring wherefrom discursive sexual categorizations and ‘specifications of individuals’ started to form. By bringing hidden secrets and desires into light and interpreting them, new labels such as ‘homosexuality’ were given to certain groups of people with specific desires and thus, names, categorically informed, came repeatedly over time to be employed as a firm point of reference to differentiate anyone belonging to such category and ultimately this label became chosen by the category members to refer to themselves in the recognition of a history of its use. In Will to knowledge, Foucault says how classification of perversions led to pluralization of sexual identities and specification of individuals and a new category of knowledge. The new labels for people considered perverts at a time became the tool for them to identify themselves with and to seek fellows and build a kind of community of resistance under the same label.
The resistance, thus, being from the bottom and within the community, lies in stark contrast to the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectics or the Marxian critique of class oppression which claimed that proletariat are being unilaterally oppressed by the bourgeoisie. This brings back Foucault’s assertion that Power is polyvocal and works in many directions. What functioned for Nietzsche by the term power became knowledge for Foucault, a concept that itself was a product of power – and which was accepted by both thinkers. For Nietzsche, as recorded in his Notes (1888), knowledge was ‘only interpretation’: “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations”. Foucault, in the same way, maintains that knowledge is the product of a polyvalent power-driven discourse.
Thus, it is quite evident how Foucault is so close in his descriptions to Nietzschean thought.
What is important is that, where Nietzsche refused to give credit to veracity and authenticity of categories of knowledge because of genealogic power relations, Foucault seems to have accepted such veracity and authenticity; and indeed, established that on a logical ground.
Therefore, this discursive making of sexual categories/identities is itself based on the notion of it being a discourse. From names and labels to discourses well over their recognitions unto modern knowledge there is a counterintuitive compulsion of thought. As Lisa Downing, in her Introduction to Michel Foucault states: “As soon as we engage with the discourse, we are faced with the temptation of trying to prove our own truth position, of becoming a little bit too zealous and enjoying it a bit too much. For even though it critiques what it describes, Foucault’s account of the history of sexuality is to some extent, inevitably, also a discourse about sexuality” (Downing, 2008). This discourse, then from a French background with a Christian history is to account for the history of sexuality of all humans from different countries and regions and different religious and cultural ties.
The inconsistency which I see here – and one so superficially attended – is a unilateral description of how a French/Western/Foucauldian history of sexuality looks like. Even if this history is valid and well-established for the whole western idea of sexuality, it will pave the way to a unidirectional standardization of a global history of sexuality which can be again paradoxical to the polyvocal Foucauldian dynamics of power and somewhat against the discourse-based creation of Nietzschean interpretations.
Highlighting cultural indecision of masses of people in developing modern ideas based on historical interrelations of power emanating from plural points is perfectly illustrated by genealogically charged view of Foucault, but the question remains: How is this view of power and history going to offer a practical side for the individuals inside the cultural ‘system’?
Had it not been agreed that a divergence of critical theory of culture from the purely philosophical descriptions should make bridges between theory and practice? Now, which practical purpose can this view serve except falling in servitude of the institutional authorities of power in economy and politics to manipulate the ‘docility of the bodies’ which Foucault has drawn attention to. Unlike Nietzsche and Marx and probably other thinkers before the birth of scientific critical theory schools of culture who thought and then concluded with a possible ‘way out’ for humans, the modern thinkers in humanities feel subconsciously obliged to be only concerned with promoting an eternal imprisonment of the thought and reducing the modern human individuals into docile subjects ready to be delivered to systematic mechanisms of power to work on their efficiency and their roles as individuals. Nietzsche talked of the possibility of individual transcendence.
Marx talked of the possibility of overthrowal of bourgeoisie for the majority in position of oppression. Then we come to see modern thinkers who work hard to describe the formation of the modern culture in various lights
only to end up saying there is no possibility of getting off of this train.
Just as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lacan and Althusser who after having dexterously and skillfully developed truly amazing analyses of the culture, concluded implicitly or explicitly that there is no possibility for participants of the modern culture to live otherwise, Foucault implies a kind of helplessness of modern individuals maintaining that since modern culture trains the docile bodies of its subjects through disciplinary power relations, the “revolution or overthrowal are not adequate or appropriate means of resistance to the exercise of peculiarly modern techniques of control” (Downing, 2008). This take on humanities and cultural studies has become so prevalent that what is in the end felt is just a praising of a genius thought on itself.
Nobody seems to care for the practicality and the service a thought so beautifully presented should offer to living modern individuals. A perfectly well thought descriptive view might be a beautiful narrative, an aspect of human life, but might as well ‘not’ be of the solution.
Reason today calls ‘description’ progress.