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.
In other words, sexuality is not science. Sexuality is ideology.
That is, since Foucault is a philosopher, ideology in the philosophical sense of the word. Not just a way of understanding reality, but a way of ordering and structuring the social reality around you.
To defend this idea, Foucault discusses sexuality from a broad historical perspective, and documents its transformation from what he calls “ars erotica” (that is, the ancient, largely Eastern perception of sex as an art form) to what he calls “scientia sexualis” (that is, the modern, largely Western perception of sex as a science).
Let us consider things in broad historical perspective: breaking with the traditions of the ars erotica, our society has equipped itself with a scientia sexualis. To be more precise, it has pursued the task of producing true discourses concerning sex, and this by adapting -- not without difficulty -- the ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific discourse.
Foucault will spend a lot of time talking about confession -- about how in the old world it was the primary mechanism for talking about sex in a socially acceptable way, and how, in the new world, that has been transformed by giants like Freud and Kinsey into the realm of science.
Paradoxically, the scientia sexualis that emerged in the nineteenth century kept as its nucleus the singular ritual of obligatory and exhaustive confession, which in the Christian West was the first technique for producing the truth of sex. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this rite gradually detached itself from the sacrament of penance, and via the guidance of souls and the direction of conscience -- the ars artium -- emigrated toward pedagogy, relationships between adults and children, family relations, medicine, and psychiatry. In any case, nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone into the making of a complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex: a deployment that spans a wide segment of history in that it connects the ancient injunction of confession to clinical listening methods. It is this deployment that enables something called “sexuality” to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures.
This can be confusing, because his ultimate argument is that sexuality is not science but ideology. So, in other words, “science” may believe that it has discovered the psychologies and pathologies of the human sexual animal, but in fact, it is “ideology” that has constructed them. For example:
Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century -- four privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. Each of them correspond to one of these strategies which, each in its own way, invested and made use of the sex of women, children, and men.
If Foucault’s premise is to be accepted, these “privileged objects of knowledge” are no more real than the other constructions of other ideologies. We believe them to be real because they are part of how we have decided to construct and make sense of the social reality that surrounds us. But without our constant philosophical support -- expressed and actualized through a scientific subterfuge -- they will fade and vanish under any real scrutiny.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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