Starting with Foucault by C G Prado

Author:C G Prado [Prado, C G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-05T18:30:00+00:00

In the second chapter of Part Four, "Method," we find the most positive and extended description of Foucauldian power given in The History of Sexuality. In particular, we find the definitional passage I quote from in Chapter 4's section on power. 69Given what was said in that section, it suffices here to reiterate the central point about the relational nature of power. In an interview Foucault stresses that he "hardly ever" speaks of power. He claims that when he speaks of power "it is always a short cut," a gloss on power relations or relationships of power. 70His aim is to underscore that power is wholly relational, that power is nothing over and above the "multiplicity of force relations." Force relations are the interactive juxtapositions of agents' actions to one another. They are not anything imposed from without. Force relations are "immanent in the sphere in which they operate and . . . constitute their own organization." 71Force relations are interrelated past and present actions or "comportments" that facilitate or inhibit ensuing actions or comportments. "[T]he process which . . . transforms, strengthens, or reverses" force relations is not anything external. As the magnet analogy used in Chapter 4 illustrates, what changes or cancels force relations is nothing outside them; it is alterations in the very actions that are their component elements. The past and present actions of two individuals in an interactive situation, together with the past and present actions of others, constitute a force relation between those two individuals. A new action by either individual or by others changes that force relation. This is how force relations are identical with "the strategies in which they take effect." The multiplicity of force relations is not a structure imposed on the actions of agents; it is the interactive totality of those actions. Nor are force relations independent of one another or related only in a mutually exclusive way. Some force relations sustain or enhance others. Power is also "the support which these force relations find in one another." 72

Chapter 3 of Part Four is titled "Domain" and focuses on four elements that Foucault describes as pivotal to the deployment of sexuality. The first is the "hysterization of women's bodies," or conception of women as "saturated with sexuality" and prone to a multitude of related infirmities. The

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second is the "pedagogization of children's sex," or conception of children as embryonic sexual beings requiring strict control to prevent the development of abnormality. The third is the "socialization of procreative behavior," or the setting up of the heterosexual couple as the fundamental societal unit. The fourth is the "psychiatrization of perverse pleasure," or categorization of abnormal sexual behavior. 73These elements amount to "the very production of sexuality." 74They contribute constitutively to the establishment of what then is perceived and disseminated as a definitive aspect of being human. Chapter 3 of Part Four also contains the gist of the socio-historical thesis of The History of Sexuality. That is the claim that these elements were produced by discourses initiated in the late seventeenth century.

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