On Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: The Right to Sex, Dispositif, and the Construction of Sexuality

Introduction

Modern social convention holds that Western culture has been living through wide-scale institutional sexual repression since the seventeenth century. Governments, religious institutions, education systems, and medical associations have all had their part in this moral framework at one time or another. However, some critics disagree with this concept. In Michel Foucault's book, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault asserts the opposite: that as a culture, Western Society has not been repressed, but rather that a discourse of sex has been produced.

Analysis

According to Foucault, this discourse of sex began to be produced through Catholic procedures of confession and was co-opted by medical practices of examination and cataloging. Foucault said that:

Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself. (23)

It is apparent that Foucault is trying to formulate a theory on the existence and substance of sex and sexuality, which he is prefacing with this proposition that sex has not been repressed or censored. Foucalut has also noted that "there was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy. (23)" Having set forth a hypothesis, he begins to explain it.

Foucault described how medical science took control of sexual discourse from religious authorities. The qualities of "moral" and "immoral" had been established long ago by religious leaders and from these distinctions society created juridical controls. What was once (for example) an immorality based on sodomy laws, slowly became something that was institutionalized into a classification created by medical science: the homosexual, a being which deviated from heterosexual—or which deviated from the anthropologic norm. Foucault stressed that this new classification is created around the concepts of norm and abnormal rather than moral and immoral. Because this concept is created, it is not natural, but rather artificial:

What was involved, rather, was the very production of sexuality. Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (105-6)

In effect, what Foucault has established, is that sexuality itself is a power relation. It is one built between religious confession and medical listening techniques, one which applies the representation of "nature" to sex and sexuality. Foucault denied that there was any inherent truth or nature to sexuality. Rather, he believed it to be an artificial construct that could not be real or natural and that this could not be admitted without explaining the relations of power at work—which none of the institutions involved wanted to do.

It is these collective institutions (governments, religious institutions, education systems, medical associations, etc.) that have created this apparatus, or dispositif, about sex; it is they that establish the "norm" concerning sex. Remember also that the laws of society follow the prescribed set of norms, thus affirming the values implicit in the "norm." So as one examines the existence of sex in contemporary culture, Foucault reasoned that what one sees is this artificial construction of sex: created and maintained by the deployment of discourse. Strangely, this is a norm established by society through studying the abnormal: the sane is qualified by separating the mad, disease is studied to understand health, and the perverse is cataloged to descry the sexual norm. This implies a certain insincerity to the norm, one that is not established by what to do or be, but by what not to be or do.

Foucault also noted that the social machine deploying this discourse on sex is heterogeneous; despite the fact that the power-relation has a strategy, it is not intentional, nor is it a grand conspiracy. Even if aims are planned, there are other aims which are achieved independently through this machine. Foucault clearly stated that:

Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power . . . There is no single, all-encompassing strategy, valid for all of society and uniformly bearing on all the manifestations of sex. (103)

Rather, this dispositif, or apparatus, acts out in a power-relation which is not repressive, but productive, creating a discourse of sex, one which artificially creates a norm. The objective of this discourse is to convince one that he or she does have a sex; this creates a desire for sex—which is artificial.

Even the so called liberation movement, which asked people to rebel against the institutions that repressed them, to be free with their sexuality, were no better. They do not, in fact, rebel at all, but fit right into the apparatus, in endeavoring only to change the standards, not the discourse. Foucault argued that:

By creating the imaginary element that is 'sex,' the deployment of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: the desire for sex -- the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It constituted 'sex' itself as something desirable. And it is this desirability of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunction to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected --the dark shimmer of sex. (157)

Foucault argued that the way to defeat this apparatus of sex is not through "liberation" of sexual desires; that does not change the need for a norm: it merely replaces one standard for another, thus tying "liberation" directly to the specific discourse on sex. Such a movement continues to take what people believe to be private and makes it extremely public and related to politics. Foucault reasoned that, "[t]he rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures." Thus, only by destroying the norm and creating new inventions of bodies and pleasures can persons defeat this dispositif of sex.

So, then, one is left with the dilemma of sex and sexuality in contemporary culture. There is a plethora of philosophies and ideas around this power-relation, which due to its deployment has become a phenomena of sorts; it is this Trojan horse of discourse I wish to expose. While Foucault does not believe in a general state of truth circulating the nebulous praxises of sexualities, he does believe that each person knows his or her own personal truth. What still remains is to piece together the tapestry of the whole that Foucault has left undone; not to say that one should strive to fabricate a universal rule, but rather, just to take a step back and look at sex under the modes analyzed by Foucault and see what remains at its core.

The existence and rights of individuals to sex is still left undetermined. Foucault concerns himself with the how of a thing, claiming not to answer "why" or "the should." Yet, one sees Foucault answering the fault of the apparatus and the artificial construction of sex with his concept of "bodies and pleasures." It becomes apparent through this that he is suggesting a concept outside of what is and more towards what should. Or perhaps they are the same thing. If one looks closely, the should constitutes the is, and vice-versa, all one has to do is see it for what it really is.

Pragmatically, sex is something that all individuals eventually must concern themselves within contemporary western culture; naturally questions arise regarding it, even—as Foucault pointed out—starting at a young age:

Take the secondary schools of the eighteenth century, for example. On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex was a constant preoccupation. (27)

Even from a young age, people of Western culture have a concern with sex; this was true in the times Foucault studied, as well as currently. The dispositif of sexuality is as Foucault said, in the business of establishing and maintaining a norm. Or more specifically: "[t]he legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak. (3)" This, then, is the established norm. People have tried to change the norm, as with the so-called liberation theory, but for the most part, the above example is the standard.

Having defined the "norm," one can return to Foucault's concept of "bodies and pleasures" and the fact that sex constitutes a power relation:

Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement. (48)

The right to sex begins to play out in terms of responsibilities. In constructing the power relation of sex and deconstructing the myths of truth, deployment, and enigma, one is left with something that is not all that complex or devastating on the human condition, at least no more so than any other subject of being. The power relation of sex is one different, but intrinsically no more or less powerful to that of a platonic friendship; both are areas capable of pain and pleasure, betrayal and reward. One can be jealous of friendships, one can be jealous of lovers; one can hold a lover or hold a friend. The list can continue ad infinitum, but the point remains in the analogous existences of the two power-relations and is simply made clearer with these examples. It is a characteristic of the artificial construction of sex to overstress, overcomplicate, and wrap it in mystery, generally making it something more than it really is, something other than one mode of being which can be used to exercise power: to manipulate, twist, use or abuse, or reward as much as any other mode of being.

In inventing pleasures for their bodies, people must ignore (differentiated from oppose) the norm and do what feels good to them, not what they are conditioned to accept. The only rule that need necessarily exist is a Mill-type premise (to paraphrase) that one’s right to swing his or her fist ends where another person's face begins. In exercising the functions of the power-relation known as sex on bodies to bring pleasure, one needs only not bring about unwanted suffering to the other body involved; to do so would be a violation of individual rights.

Conclusion

Sex is a power-relation around which sexuality is constructed to control. Yet, sex can function in ways outside of the apparatus to bring pleasure to bodies and need not conform to any norm, nor should a norm even exist. Sex is no different than many other interpersonal functions and should not be singled out as any different or more crucial to human existence; it is simply a different variety of a mode of being. It is this "truth" that has been obfuscated by the dispositif of sex.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume I. New York, Vantage, 1978.