Q minus A

[this is from a while back, and I didn't clean it up really. but still. ]

[summary]

In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Foucault sets out to critique the idea that, he argues, has dominated the understanding of the modern [1700-present] history of sex: the "repressive hypothesis," which holds that sexuality was more or less freely spoken and enacted before a repressive moral regime set in during the 18th century, eventually achieving its height with the Victorian era. The hypothesis further involves the notion that, starting with Freudian psychoanalysis and continuing with progressively more radical sexual revolts throughout the twentieth century, the great repression is finally being lifted, leading society to radical freedom.

Against this notion, Foucault argues that modernity has in fact been accompanied by the proliferation of medical, psychological, legal, confessional, and other discourses of sexuality. Instead of simply restricting and regulating sexuality, Foucault claims, these discourses have in fact produced it, in many new forms: "Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities" (37).The categories of perversion, and so "perversions" themselves, were created in the course of the modern period.

There was never a natural sexuality waiting to be repressed, but only bodies and pleasures, which came to be configured into a regime of sexuality by connecting sex with interiority and truth, i.e. subjectivation.

[task]

For Foucault, the point is not to discover the truth, or the ideological fiction, inherent in the way that sex is spoken about, but "to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse" (11)

[the body]

In describing one of the origins of the discourses of sexuality, the post-Reformation confession manuals, Foucault writes: "Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. 20

I am really intrigued by this formulation. Foucault seems to be saying that sexuality is traced out 'in the flesh' by the operation of the confessional discourse in relation to sins, i.e. mental/subjective conditions/actions. Sin lies in a necessary proximity to the "flesh", which the language of confession exposes as the otherwise silent "unbroken nervure", lines and structures of force underlying the mental-spiritual condition of sin. The concept of sin quilts word and flesh, rendering the latter accessible and malleable.

on a biopolitical scale, "...the deployment of sexuality is linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body—the body that produces and consumes" (107). That is, the interest of government in controlling a productive and consuming population necessitates or is in part located in practices of knowledge and control of sexuality.

Against my own prejudiced understanding, Foucault emphasizes that "the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures..." (151-2). He is pursuing not a "history of mentalities," but a 'history of bodies".

[power-knowledge-pleasure]

"There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure," Foucault writes (44). Is this similar to the "eroticizing" effects of male dominance in MacKinnon? In any case, for Foucault, power is not a negative force, taking things away, regulating existing bodies and conditions; power is productive, not simply of new categories, but also of subjectivities and pleasures. The pleasure of power itself and the pleasure of evading its operations form "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45). "Resistance" is necessarily immanent to power on a large scale; however, the immanent possibility of a new configuration of power and pleasure generally remains hard to localize, and even harder to voluntarily bring into effect.

Power 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" (93); it is "a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (93). Power is ubiquitous, local, and concrete. It permeates all relations, is immanent to them. On the matter of scale, Foucault suggests that the small social unit (the nuclear family) is neither the pattern for, nor a reproduction of large-scale social structures, but that small and large scale units are subject to "double conditioning". Local actors' tactical decisions align with, conform to, or alter larger strategic movement of power.

[confession]

The place of the individual subjectivity in this dynamic is guaranteed by the omnipresent practice of confession:

"One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is forced to confess" (59)

For F., the "science of sex" developing in the nineteenth century grows from the earlier practice of confession, and not from the larger domain of the natural sciences. Confession necessarily implies the individual's affirmation of the relations of power, his or her reinsription in them: "The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power" (59). One always confesses to being held by power, proclaiming individuality through its relation to power.

[governmentality]

For Foucault, sex enters into the domain of power in part because states, in their transition to modernity, come to act and be understood as the guardians of populations, no longer of peoples and subjects (25). Thus sex, understood as a private activity, simultaneously comes to be permeated with the concern of the state for its survival and prosperity; sex acts become nationalized. Medical sciences, in their advisory role to the state as the caretaker of populations, "ma[ke] a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple" (41). Non-reproductive sex therefore becomes subversive of the state, even as the growing science of sex seeks to both naturalize and treat "perversions".

Posted by abradox at 2:08 PM 1 comments  

Unlike Descartes earlier, and unlike the later Hartley, Locke is not concerned with the anatomical location or operation of the mind and the senses. Insisting rather that we cannot know the true physical-anatomical structure underlying human consciousness and perception, Locke develops a description of the operation of the mind, the senses, and language in relation to a largely unknowable physical world.

After refuting the belief in the existence of innate ideas in the first book, Locke turns to an extended account of the way the mind takes in and develops its relation to “simple ideas,” by which he means individual sensory data which, composed together, produce our perception of objects in the world. Proclaiming that “all knowledge comes from Experience” (59), he develops an account in which the mind, originally empty, comes to engage fully with the world and with itself through sensation and reflection. Initially, the mind learns to group together simple ideas in the exterior world into coherent objects and its awareness of itself into thoughts; eventually, it synthesizes complex ideas composed of large numbers of simple ones, and establishes connections between them. The mind, unless it or the senses are significantly damaged, cannot help taking in ideas from the world, and developing in response to them. However,

There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us, and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so. (87)

Locke believes that our perception of the world, including the simple ideas which form the building blocks of all thought, are not a true representation of reality, but merely the effects of an unknown physical reality on the specific apparatuses of human perception. He insists that every creature’s senses are not arbitrary, being adapted to its way of life; they are a necessary and convenient way of relating to the world whose reality remains unknown and unknowable.

[intuition, reason, revelation] All ways of understanding have to do, for Locke, with determining the relations between ideas. The simple ideas being naturally given and unalterable, it is generally relations between complex ideas that occupy the human mind. In ascertaining whether two ideas are or are not related, whether as identities, relations, cause-and-effect, etc., the mind has three routes: intuition, which works instantly and without fail, where it is a matter of comparing clear ideas with clear distinctions between them; reason, which helps to determine the relation between two ideas the connections between which need to be traced out and illuminated first, and revelation, which covers the relations of ideas which are not to be understood any other way, and comes directly from God. Locke does not exactly privilege either of the three; though he argues that revelation ought to trump reason, it is impossible without reason to know whether any particular authoritative statement is a revelation or not.

[PAIN] The crucial way in which perception, as well as the larger structure of the mind including memory, is connected to the species’ survival lies in the significance of pain in the formation of earliest memories: “Attention and repetition help much to the fixing of any ideas in the memory; but those which naturally at first make the deepest and most lasting impression, are those which are accompanied with pleasure or pain” (97). In the beginning of life, pain performs the function later turned over to reason, of guiding the actions of the organism in the world with the goal of staying alive.

Generally speaking, all sensation is accompanied by the simple ideas of pleasure or pain, in various degrees. From the earliest age, pain and pleasure point out naturally the actions which will most benefit the creature, forming the basis of our ideas of good and evil.

An interesting by-product of Locke’s focus on the mind is his insistence on the lack of a difference between bodily and mental pains: both in fact are present in the mind, with different source-attributions.

Locke discusses the passions under the headings of pleasure and pain, calling them “the hinges on which our passions turn...” (161). Curiously, the passions for him bear no necessary relation to the body, as evidenced by the example of blushing, which not always and not in all people accompanies shame. The passions are essentially different positional-temporal-logical relations to pain and pleasure and their causes, good and evil. Passions are also largely solipsistic, not requiring, with the exception of envy and anger, the presence of another human. Of all the passions, only desire seems to interest JLo in depth.

[WILL] The will is not an agency, but a faculty=ability of the mind to direct its inner and outer (bodily) actions. It is determined by DESIRE, which Locke equates with uneasiness in the absence of an acknowledged good. The "good" referenced may be either natural or learned/acquired, though for many, the satisfaction of basic desires for bodily subsistence takes up the majority of their time and efforts. No good is pursued unless desired, i.e. unless its absence is experienced as an uneasiness, which is the main engine of human action.

[style] I must mention that Locke is possibly the snarkiest thinker I have read so far. Exerpts from his letters in response to the Bishop of Worcester's refutations are at times painfully funny, anticipating (I think) Laurence Sterne's narrative style.

Posted by abradox at 10:49 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, associationism, automatism, bourgeois, capitalism, education, life, Locke, philosophy, psychosomatics, religion, science, society

Hi everyone;  I just finished The Jungle, and I know for a fact that Megan has already read this one.  Let's open a discussion!

My very very long synopses & a few thoughts are available here:

http://margaretfinkberman.blogspot.com/2010/12/jungle-part-1.html
http://margaretfinkberman.blogspot.com/2010/12/jungle-parts-2.html

The things that I'm thinking about (other than the HOLY YIKES of the book's expose-- I'm a nice tractable reader with appropriate responses) are the kind of socialism as a vision for political change or what-could-be-otherwise being presented by the book.  This imagining of what-could-be-otherwise is delivered mostly as dialogue speeches--but that kind of move is something I'm interested in in a more general way.  This one kind of didn't feel terribly effective; perhaps kind of like the dissatisfaction we felt with Eve Sedgwick's account of reparative reading-- paranoid reading sure isn't great, but what would be the other thing?

Darwinian thought is very very much present to me in this book, too, which would make sense for the period-- any thoughts there?    I'm curious to hear what you guys took away from this novel!

Posted by margaretlouise at 11:22 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, capitalism, cities, modernity, novels

[this is from a while ago, and not quite finished, but I am posting anyway, just to move on]

In Sade’s Justine, the eponymous young heroine, known as Therese for most of the tale, suffers more or less creative moral and sexual depredations of an almost endless cast of highway robbers, perverted monks, thieves, landowners, counterfeiters, and officials, most of whom have enormous penises and a fondness for anal sex. Almost pathologically virtuous from birth, Therese/Justine refuses to stray from her attachment to Christian virtues, even as this attachment repeatedly leads her into the hands of depraved libertines (she rescues three or four of her tormentors from death, only to find herself imprisoned and abused by them). Her apparent virtue incites the libertines whom she serves not only to abuse her sexually, but also to lecture her on the vanity and uselessness of her attachment to virtue. Thus almost every episode includes a lengthy tract on the productive/creative nature of crime, the uselessness and inexistence of God, the state of nature and of natural desires, etc.

Most of the narration is framed as the story of her life told by Therese to two wealthy lovers, Madame de Larsange and Monsieur de Corville, as she stops at an inn on her way to her undeserved execution for murder, arson, and theft. In her narration, Therese does not spare the titillating and/or revolting details, though she asks her auditors several times if they wouldn’t rather avoid hearing them. Madame de Larsange is in fact Justine’s sister Juliette, who upon the death of their parents took the opposite course from Justine’s and went deliberately into prostitution, libertinage, and murder, earning riches and a title in the process. After Justine’s story is told, her sister’s influential lover secures her release; however, she dies after being struck by lightning in the abrupt finale, triggering Juliette’s complete repentance.

The point I’d like to pause over is the role of the conventional Sentimental scenarios and expectations in the novel. Justine is the victim of a natural piety and a belief in the universal sentimental foundation of human character which underlies and redeems even the most hardened criminal. The novel works explicitly against earlier notions of character, present in novels and philosophy alike, that asserted, for example, that even criminals recognize the necessity of justice to sociality by holding to an honor code among themselves.

In Justine, libertines claim to be driven and limited by nothing other than their self-interest, defined as the search for maximum pleasure. More often than not, they succeed not only in enjoying the bodies of others in arbitrary and harmful ways with total impunity, but also in attaining money, security, and status – that is, there is no separation necessary between long-term and short-term “pleasures” that define Weberian Protestant-capitalist “prudence” and Freud’s “reality principle”.

I would need to know much more to even try a hypothesis, but I would be interested in connecting this “imprudent,” unbound self-interest with the history of both capitalism and sentiment. A common view of the period (I think this is a common view. I might easily be wrong) sees the emergence of sentimentalist discourse as in part the creation of a new mode of public behavior amenable to the fluid exchanges and mutual dependencies of the market. For example, David Solkin, in Painting for Money, reads Shaftesbury’s praise of familial virtues as models for public behavior as the reconfiguration of the values guiding public life, from “republican” austerity and duty to familiarity and sociability. Now following this very tenuous thread, what Sade seems to be dramatizing is the untrammeled and terrifying desires unleashed upon the figure of the perfect, virtuous, high-bourgeois sentimentalist by a range of figures, most of whom are, or were once, titled noblemen. I may be exaggerating this trend, but if I remember correctly, even such third estate figures as the sadistic (!) doctor who kills his own daughter for the sake of science eventually rise to be doctors to the king, i.e. “transcend” their origins.

Posted by abradox at 2:13 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, bourgeois, democracy, determinism, discipline, economics, education, evil, novels, passion, philosophy, pleasure, politics, religion, science, sex, society, sovereignty, the body

...if the [theoretical] observation emboldens us to explore the world, cut it up in new and different ways, and learn what new and useful relationships can result, then the observation is of use and interest; but it is not interesting to the extent that it leads only to materially unattended theoretical restatements of itself. (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 192-3)

from Samuel R. Delany's book on Times Square, which I liked so much I might write it up later, here, though it is not on my lists. The book is great for an exploration of a once-thriving and mundanely utopian urban culture, as well as for its forceful argument about the (material, socio-economic, cultural, political) conditions necessary for cities to live up to their potential for human flourishing. Incidentally, all the labels for this post apply to the book—that in itself seems like a good advert.

Posted by abradox at 8:47 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 20th century American, affect, cities, contagion, democracy, determinism, economics, grad school, life, passion, pleasure, politics, postmodernism, sex, society, the body, the polis, theory

"...man comprehends not in his knowledge or power all past or future things: his thoughts are but of yesterday, and he knows not what tomorrow will bring forth. What is once past he can never recall; and what is yet to come he cannot make present" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 139).

Posted by abradox at 6:27 PM 0 comments  

Labels: 18th century, human finitude, life, Locke, philosophy

[apologies that this is rough & tumble & hardly refined.  still getting started.  : )]
I've finally gotten through Emerson's "Self-Reliance."  The familiar messages are against conformity, against imitation, anti-society but pro-Man.  cf "Self-reliance is [conformity's] aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." [I'm including this quote because it's explicitly anti-label/type/"identity"] The lecture is largely in the imperative and kind of jumps around to the same message (variations on a theme).  It was an essay that turned me off on a number of fronts but also really intrigued me as being sort of a kindred spirit to certain thoughts that I'm having.  Namely, he is so aphoristic and despite his claims that class and societal virtues like a continental education and travel arent' worth a sniff, he's so so so elitist.  So it's really soaring language about destinies and being true-- but there's this (obvi) radical individualism and political libertarianism that is quite frankly really off-putting ("are these my poor?").  He critiques society as being a "joint-stock company" in which everyone puts aside his own interests for the collective one-- so what seems to be a critique of capitalist-style publicness is SO darn capitalist (every man for himself)-- neoliberallike, even.  So okay, having the "do I like him or not?" stuff out of the way, he is making a lot of interesting claims for what makes one who one is, and how that "identity" interfaces with societal categories or "communities of opinion"; part of his commitment to radical individualism is a rejection of the notion that one must decide or act consistently over time (i.e. that one's actions/decisions would fit into a coherent pattern or type).  Rather, he says, we should aspire to "neutrality,"confronting the situation anew each time and frankly think, intuit, and perceive, making the "necessary" choice without any external influence shaping our action/decision (it's a fantasy, oh yes).  So rules, duty, custom, precedence, etc. are all enemies to the man who wants to be a man.  Temporally, this is a modus operandi that is located firmly in the present: something like "take every moment as it comes"-- he likens memory to a dead corpse we carry around with us, yeesh.  He's saying this about memory insofar as it encumbers our present conduct. [note: his account is self-consciously shocking, I think, in asking us to sever all ties that may encumber our being ourself-- including familial ties.  kind of buddhist this way]

But okay, right, the desire to cast off behavior that is performed according to a template, by saying we must be radically what we are (and we are what we are), his thought has a special affinity to attempts to get away from personhood understood through identity categories.  The transcendentalism comes in with the paradoxical belief that in being radically myself, I am like everyone--in that everyone enacts and is the presence of the divine on earth.  Secularized, one might liken this to a conceptualization of everyone as life worth protecting (one of the axioms of, say, human rights).  [there are a lot of problems with the human rights paradigm but that's another post].

So yeah, this vision of idiosyncratic "identity" is what I want to add to my repertoire of ways to think about people.  One of the metaphors he uses is the rose-- a rose is a rose, and another rose isn't better at being a rose than the first.  It's a desire to evacuate value from being oneself.  And for humans, it actually, I would argue, wants to close the gap between being and potentiality; it is very much possible to be all that you can be by being WHAT you are; that is, it's not a beyond-one's-reach telos where you need to "live up to" your "best" self.  It's about immanence, ironically enough, rather than striving/self-cultivation, as a lot of the classical ethics are.  Be true ("authentic"), not good.  This is of course a singularly American desire, esp when he's scorning European aesthetic judgments-- don't try to be as refined as Europe, America.  Be America.  Do you.

Or something.

Posted by margaretlouise at 9:46 AM 1 comments  

Labels: 19th century, american renaissance, democracy, education, life, society, transcendentalism