Chapter Two of Society Must be Defended

I just think this is a good quote:

"Third, methodological precaution: Do not regard power as a phenomenon of mass and homogeneous domination--the domination of one individual over others, of one group over others, or of one class over others; keep it clearly in mind that unless we are looking at it from a great height and from a very great distance, power is not something that is divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Power must, I think, be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that functions only when it is part of a chain It is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands of some, and it is never appropriated in the way that wealth of a commodity can be appropriated. Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them." (29)

Thus Foucault urges us not to conceive of the individual as some autonomous atomized figure, but to instead discuss this individual as an effect of power, constituted by and it and simultaneously the vessel for its exercise. The position of a "great height" from which one could conceivably see power is presumably fictive (Indeed, this links up most directly with the Deleuze and Guattari I've been reading lately, in which seeing networks of power would be possible only from a peak or mountain that thought itself capable of looking down on a plateau).

Once More Into the HOS Vol. 1 Breach, Dear Friends!

We're reading this for my queer rhetorics class. I'm going to post various and sundry meandering thoughts about this text as I read it today.

Part One: We "Other Victorians"

Text begins with section dedicated to outlining a taken for granted understanding of sexuality as a thing which has been represeed by modern developments. An understanding of sexuality as an object of manipulation and operation, and prohibition is contrasted with repression. Prohibition serves to stop actions from taking place, while repression indicates that there are a series of charges and obsessions which are simply redirected. And about this Foucault asks:

"Could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure with reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued" (5).

This to me reads as a mortar lobbed at those reading the fallout of a post-68 politics as a call to arms for a more universal and powerful rebellion against instituted powers. The result of a repressive thesis is an understanding of the source of repression must have been appropriately strong to suppress something inimical about human being, and, moreover, that the proper solution is to enable conditions for this human spirit of some sort to rise up in all its glory and power.

And this repressive hypothesis has the effect of turning an ordinary and everyday behavior into something transgressive--if power has operated by repressing sexuality, merely talking about sexuality is enough to constitute a trangression of sorts. Thus all the criticism of psychoanalysis--a means of "transgressively" disclosing the secrets that speak a deep and infinite validation of the existence of some notion of sexuality within, repressed and quashed by a nasty apparatus. This hushed speaking of sex hints at a future utopia wherein "liberation and manifold pleasures" will be free for all. What seems important throughout is that sexuality is a sort of object which much be liberated from the chains in which it is embedded. As this is the sedimented common sense of the matter, Foucault argues, his whole book might read as somewhat mad.

Foucault is out to trace the history of how we have come to believe in this repression. Why has sex been made into a sin? And what of repression, if its explanatory power is of such magnitude that it becomes an all encompassing tautology we are incapable of opposing on the basis of fact and argument?

Thus three meta doubts about repression: Is this repression a historically established fact? Is power always repressive, or at least primarily repressive? And finally, is critical analysis of repression itself a break or a continuation of the set of power relations that enabled repression's supposed effects to continue to reproduce themselves? And by connection, Foucault plans to investigate the ways in which sex comes to be an object which is said to have forces exerted upon it, even as it as a notion colonizes the individual in an internalized and controlling fashion, mutually constituting itself through a series of discourses and practices marked and mapped by discourse.

He is not out to say that the history of prohibition does not contain truths--rather, we should not take that one story as the only and proper one, for granted. Historical facts will be used to reduce the monolithic force of the repressive hypothesis.

More later.