No More Learning

The concept of power will be discussed in more depth in other essays in this volume. For the moment let me say only that what Foucault offers with Discipline and Punish and others of his historical analyses is what might be called a positive rather than negative view of power. On this view, power works not by restraint but by creation. Power does not place a limit on our liberty; it makes us be certain kinds of people. It does so on two levels. First, it trains our bodies to be oriented toward particular kinds of behaviour. Second, and perhaps more important, it makes us think of ourselves in certain kinds of ways. For example, the profusion of psychological monitoring and intervention that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish creates a society in which people think of themselves as psychological beings. As a result, they consider
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their unhappiness as psychologically rooted and in need of psychologi- cal cure. Rather than questioning the character of the society in which they live, they instead question themselves. It is they rather than the social arrangements that must change. This, in turn, reinforces those social arrangements by deflecting any criticism of them back onto those who are dissatisfied. All problems become psychological rather than social or political in origin.
Power, in this case, works by what might be called constraint rather than restraint. But, like restraint, constraint works to limit one's options. By making someone into, say, a psychological being, it creates a conform- ity and blunts the possibility of either social resistance or experimenta- tion with other forms of living. Moreover, it does so more effectively than restraint would. When one is restrained, one still desires that which is forbidden. However, when one is constrained, one is moulded to desire only that which is considered appropriate to desire. One is not simply blocked from attaining what one wants; one does not even con- sider alternatives to what are presented as the available social options.
What does all this have to do with freedom? Recall the concept of metaphysical freedom. If we are metaphysically free, then we can control some of our thought and/or behaviour; we are not controlled by some force or another outside of us. What Foucault recounts in
Discipline and Punish is a force outside of us that is influencing how we think, how we act, and in fact who we are - at least at this point in our history. The difference between the force he describes and the forces that concern metaphysical freedom is that his are historical rather than metaphysical. He does not describe a type of force (God, the environ- ment, genes) that necessarily controls human thought and behaviour. He depicts a historically contingent set of practices that have come to have influence over our behaviour in this particular period. Because of this, there is no reason to believe that, if we understand our historical legacy, we cannot change it.
That is why Foucault says, in the citation above, that "so many things can be changed". He has the view, inherited from the Enlightenment, that so many people see him as rejecting: if we understand our situation then we have a chance at changing it. This perspective tacitly embraces the idea of metaphysical freedom, although it does not argue for it and it does not seek to establish its particular character or limits. One can see this idea when Foucault writes that,
One must observe that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which
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he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.
(1994: 12)
As can readily be seen, Foucault's approach to freedom as some- thing that concerns changing our present is politically inflected. This raises the question of what it has to do with political freedom. Politi- cal freedom, recall, is a matter of what liberties we are afforded in a particular society or social arrangement. One might say, at a first go, that Foucault describes ways in which particular societies and social arrangements impinge upon liberty. This would not be entirely mis- taken. Foucault does describe ways in which alternative ways of living are constrained by who we are made to be and how we are made to think about ourselves. However, there is something misleading about this way of putting things. It seems to presuppose a model of conceiving power and liberty that is not Foucault's model. In order to see this, we need to take a moment to describe that model.
For traditional liberal political theory, there is a tension between state power and liberty that must be balanced. If the state has too much power, then it unfairly curtails an individual's right to create one's life as one sees fit. On the other hand, if liberty is unbounded, then people themselves could interfere with one another's right to pursue a life of their choosing. Therefore, the role of liberal political theory is to figure out the particular balance between state power and liberty, the balance that will best avoid these two extremes. (Liberal political theory has other tasks as well; here we are looking only at its role vis-a-vis political freedom. ) On this view, state power is an external constraint placed upon individual liberty; the question is, how much and where should it be applied?
This is a view of power as negative, as restraint. As we have seen, however, Foucault's treatment of power in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere does not operate with a negative view of power. To be sure, he does not deny that negative power exists, and particularly at the level of the state. However, much of the way power operates, in his view, is not at the level of the state and its various repressive apparatuses, but closer to the ground. It inhabits our daily practices, moulding us into particular kinds of compliant beings.
To the extent that Foucault's writings capture a real mode of power's operation, we must modify the traditional liberal view of liberty. It can no longer simply be an issue of how much restraint can be placed on which kinds of actions. It must also concern how we have come to be
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who we are, and what we can do about it. Therefore, political liberty is not just a matter of being left to do what one pleases. It is also, and more pointedly, a matter of understanding how we have been moulded in ways that certain things please us rather than others. And beyond that, it is a matter of understanding what else might be available to us. We might put all this somewhat schematically by saying that political freedom no longer simply concerns what we might be free from, but more significantly what, given current constraints, we might be free for.
Foucault captures this idea in a citation that will also allow us to deepen our view of his conception of freedom:
I would like to say something about the functions of any diagno- sis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead ? by follow- ing lines of fragility in the present - in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i. e. a space of possible transformation. (1990c: 36)
Here we can see clearly the themes that we have isolated in Foucault's approach to freedom: constraint as a historical matter, the contingency of that constraint, and freedom as concrete rather than abstract. Moreo- ver, in using the phrase "a space of possible transformation", Foucault captures the idea that freedom is not simply a matter of being left alone but also a matter of re-making ourselves into what we would like to be: freedom for, not just freedom from. Based on this citation, we might define Foucault's concept of freedom as that which we can make of ourselves from within the parameters of a particular historical situation.
If we define freedom this way, we need to be careful to understand this definition of freedom the right way. First, we should not think that there is a pre-given set of things that we can make of ourselves in a given particular historical situation. It is not as though there is what we might call a "truth" of what we can become, and that once we understand our historical situation, we can discover that truth. Such a view would violate Foucault's project of historicizing those aspects of ourselves that we think of as permanent or unchangeable. It would reify our possibili- ties in what is in reality a fluid historical situation.
Second, and related, we should not assume that we can come fully to understand our historical situation. If who we are is the product of a complex interaction of practices, then at least aspects of the forces
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that shape us are likely to elude our comprehension. Discipline and Punish, for instance, is not an account of the whole of who we are. It is an account of only one aspect of who we are. The first volume of The History of'Sexuality is another, and the lecture series Foucault gave on governmentality (2007, 2008c) yet another. Moreover, who we are changes with the changes in our practices. So it is even more difficult to get a grasp on who we are at a particular moment. We always risk
understanding who we just were, rather than who are now.
The upshot of this is that, for Foucault, freedom is a matter of experimentation. To open up "a space of concrete freedom" is not to figure out who we might be and then go there; it is to try out different possibilities for our lives, different "possible transformations", to see where they might lead. To live freely is to experiment with oneself, not always knowing whether one is getting free of the forces that have moulded one, nor (and we will return to this in a moment) being sure of the effects of one's experimentation. It is to try to create a life from within a space of uncertainty, having some knowledge of how one has
been made to be.
Our situation, then, is this. If we construct histories like Foucault's,
histories which give us accounts of different aspects of the forces that have influenced us to be who we have become, then we have a partial knowledge of how we came to be that way. From there, we can decide which among those forces are acceptable to us, and which are, to use Foucault's term, intolerable. (Foucault's histories give accounts only of intolerable forces, since those are the ones we are most likely to want to change. ) In seeking to overcome the intolerable forces, we must experiment with who we might become, not knowing entirely whether we are indeed escaping them. That is something we can only find out later, after our experiments are under way. We are, then, neither help- less in the face of what moulds us nor certain of how and what we can do about it. We are somewhere in between. That is where our freedom lies, and indeed that is what our freedom is.
Since we can only experiment without certainty as to the results of our experiments, we must always be vigilant. We do not know in advance where our experimentation will lead us. We might wind up either re-creating intolerable forces or creating new ones. Therefore, we cannot stop doing the kinds of histories Foucault engages in, nor resting content with his. The history of who we are is an ongoing project. Oth- erwise put, the effects of our freedom are as uncertain as our freedom itself. We must never assume that the "space of possible transforma- tions" we exploit will necessarily lead us to a better situation. Freedom is not the same thing as liberation. Whether our freedom is liberating or
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not is something that is not guaranteed to us. It can only be approached through experimentation and historically informed reflection.
In order to get a better understanding of Foucault's conception of freedom, it might be useful to contrast it with that of a French philoso- pher from the generation preceding Foucault's. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also has a notion of situated freedom, one in which we are free but not entirely free. Seeing the differences between the two conceptions of freedom may sharpen our grasp on Foucault's own approach.
Merleau-Ponty constructs his concept of freedom in contrast to that of his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's view of freedom is that we are radically free in the metaphysical sense. There is nothing that is not in our power to decide. Sartre, at least in his early works, rejects all notions of a psychoanalytic unconscious or hidden historical forces that make us be who we are. In pure existentialist fashion, Sartre posits that our choices are solely our own. We must take full responsibility for them. Merleau-Ponty does not embrace this radical view of freedom. For Merleau-Ponty, one of the forces that we cannot control but that makes us who we are is the body. Corporeality - which it is the core project of Merleau-Ponty to understand - gives us our first interactions with the world through perception, and our first understanding of the world. The living body, rather than being an inert substance through which sensations pass, is instead the source of our primal engagement with the world. We might be able to alter that engagement in certain ways, but our embodiment ensures that there will be aspects of our living over which we do not have complete control. There is a certain unconscious aspect to our lives that will always elude us, the aspect that runs through our corporeal interaction with the world. Further, as Merleau-Ponty points out, that interaction is not properly described in terms of a body on the one hand that interacts with a world on the other. It is more intimate than that. The interaction is instead better characterized as that of a body/world complex.
This position leads to a view of freedom far less radical than Sartre's. For Sartre, the body is simply an inert object manipulated by conscious- ness. If consciousness is unconstrained, then freedom of consciousness would be absolute. Sartre, of course, recognizes that consciousness is in some way embodied, so that even if one freely decides, say, to fly, that does not mean that one will actually be able to fly. But the decision itself is radically free. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of corporeality erases Sartre's radical distinction between mind and body. As Merleau-Ponty shows, the body already engages in perceptual interpretation before one consciously reflects on it. (He uses examples of visual illusions to make his point. Illusions are already seen as something before conscious
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reflection attempts to correct them. ) If this is true, then there is no radical freedom. Embodied creatures are constrained by their body/ world engagement. This does not mean that one cannot reflect on that engagement. But one always does so as an already embodied being.
The freedom of that reflection and of one's behaviour is, for Merleau- Ponty as for Foucault, a form of situated freedom.
We choose our world and the world chooses us . . . freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer . . . and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 454)
Our freedom is had within and through the constraints set by our bodies and our world. Those constraints can allow greater or lesser room for action: greater or lesser tolerance. But without bodies and historically given institutional frameworks, there would be no freedom, because there would be nothing through which (i. e. the body) to enact it and nothing about which (the world) it would concern.
There are ways in which Merleau-Ponty's conception of situated freedom is similar to Foucault's. Both of them acknowledge the impor- tance of our embodiment, and they recognize the body's exposure to the world and its practices. Moreover, in both approaches that expo- sure opens out on to limitations on one's freedom. What distinguishes them is the level of analysis on which these recognitions rest. Merleau- Ponty's situated freedom is a metaphysical freedom. He offers a general philosophical account of the human body in its intertwining with the world. That account shows how mind and body as well as body and world form a single whole. From that he derives the conclusion that, contra Sartre, all human freedom must be situated. There can be no radical freedom because there is no aspect of our being that can stand outside our encrustation into the world. All freedom is the freedom of an embodied consciousness embedded in the world and its history.
Foucault does not need to deny any of this. Neither, however, does he need to embrace it. His approach is constructed along a different register. His question is not the metaphysical one of what the nature of human freedom is. Rather, his question is the more political one of what freedom we might have under particular historical conditions, namely our historical conditions. The situated freedom he is interested in is not the freedom of one situated as a human body in the world; it is the freedom of our situation. In the citation above, Foucault empha- sizes that a diagnosis of the nature of the present must characterize that
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present in such a way as to show its fragility, its fractures. The fragility of the present is not due to humans' possession of metaphysical freedom, although, as we have seen, he does seem to assume some form of meta- physical freedom. It is due, rather, to the contingent structure of history.
History does not unfold according to a pre-given or transcendental framework. It is largely the product of dispersed practices that intersect with and influence one another in ways that cannot be predicted in advance and that conform to no transcendent pattern. (This does not mean that one cannot find patterns within history; it means that one can only see them after they have created themselves through the interac- tion of contingent practices. ) Situated freedom arises as a result of this contingency of history. The issue for one interested in one's freedom, then, is not the metaphysical question of who one is and where one's freedom lies, but rather the question of where one's particular history has deposited one, and how that history might be intervened upon. For Foucault, in short, situated freedom is a historical and political concept rather than a metaphysical one.
Foucault's approach to freedom, then, like the approach of many aspects of his work, is at once philosophical and historical. As a philo- sophically oriented concept, it takes history in a more sophisticated direction than most historians are capable of. As a historically inflected concept, it raises questions to traditional philosophical analyses. Foucault's writings ask to be read along both of these axes, each one in conversation with the other. If we allow ourselves to engage in this two-level conversation, we may become more aware not only of the particular philosophically inflected way in which we often view the world, but also of the historically contingent and malleable character of that way. In other words, we may come face to face with our freedom.
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SIX
a
Johanna Oksala
The critical impact of Michel Foucault's philosophy is not based on the explicit theories or judgements he makes, but rather on the approach that he adopts to analysing our present. While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempts to find among the apparent necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turns out to be contingent, historical and cultur- ally variable. Everything, especially those things that we are convinced do not have a history, is scrutinized.
This method is also utilized regarding Foucault's conception of the body. He does not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles. Yet his philosophical approach to it is distinctive. The body is central for understanding the influence of history and the mechanisms of modern power.
Its intertwinement with practices of power means that it has a central role in practices of resist- ance too: it is capable of displaying a dimension of freedom.
According to Foucault, we believe that the body obeys only the nec- essary and universal laws of physiology, and that history and culture have no influence on it. In reality, bodies are shaped by society: they are used and experienced in many different ways and their characteristics vary according to cultural practices. They are moulded by rhythms of work, eating habits and changing norms of beauty. They are concretely shaped by diet, exercise and medical interventions. In short, they too have a history.
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In his most widely read books, Discipline andPunish (1975) and The History ofSexuality, Volume I (1976), Foucault aims to bring the body into the focus of history by studying its connections with techniques and deployments of power. His understanding of the body is further elaborated in numerous interviews and articles. I will focus here on the central texts in which he discusses it in order to present a coherent and cohesive account of Foucault's understanding of the body, paying particular attention to its relationship to both power and freedom. In order to illustrate the body's relationship to power, I will discuss his analyses of the prison, as articulated in Discipline and Punish, and of sexuality, as articulated in Volume I of The History ofSexuality. In order to illustrate how the body is implicated in resistance and the practices of freedom, I again draw upon The History of Sexuality, as well as Foucault's analysis of the life of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. I conclude the chapter by discussing the ways in which Foucault's work has influenced emancipatory efforts by queer and feminist theorists.
It should be kept in mind that Foucault never intended his views on the body to form a unified theory. His genealogies are best understood as a toolbox, a flexible and varied methodological approach that draws from a multiplicity of sources and is applicable to a variety of questions. However, one of the key ideas that unites them is that genealogies are always crucially "histories of the body": they typically question all purely biological explanations of such complex areas of human behav- iour as sexuality, insanity or criminality.
Docile bodies
In an early and definitive article on his genealogical method, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault follows Nietzsche in insisting that the task of genealogy is to focus on the body. Nietzsche had attacked phi- losophy for its denial of the materiality and vitality of the body, for its pretentious metaphysics that deals only with abstractions such as values, reason and the soul. Genealogy must be "a curative science", charting the long and winding history of metaphysical concepts in the material- ity of bodies (Foucault 1984b: 90). Rather than contemplating what is understood as high and noble, genealogy will focus on the things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies (ibid. : 89). Foucault writes polemically that the philosopher needs the genealogy of the body to "exorcise the shadow of his soul" (ibid. : 8 0) .
In this text Foucault also presents his most extreme formulations of the body as completely shaped by history and culture. He seems to
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deny that there is anything universal and ahistorical about it that could be understood as its stable and fixed core : "nothing in man - not even his body ? is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men" (ibid. : 8 7) .
Foucault's aim i n this discussion o f Nietzsche's conception o f the body as a historical construct is not to develop some kind of extreme social constructivist theory of the body, however. He does not con- sider the body here as an object of a theory, but rather as essential to his genealogy in two different ways. The first is political or ethical: Foucault wants to use genealogy to study the history of the very things we believe do not have a history. As Gary Gutting writes, "whereas much traditional history tries to show that where we are is inevitable, given the causes revealed by its account, Foucault's histories aim to show the contingency - and hence surpassability - of what history has given us"(1994: 10). Foucault'spointisthusnottoargueforanextremeview of the body as a cultural construction, but to place under suspicion and subject to further scrutiny all claims of its immutable being: essences, foundations and constants.
The second way in which the body is essential to Foucault's geneal- ogy is methodological: he wants to bring the body into the focus of history and study history through it. Foucault's genealogy is methodo- logically distinct in that it criticizes the idea of power operating by the ideological manipulation of minds: the idea that those in power are trying to brainwash people into believing things that are not true. Foucault's aim is to show the inadequacy of such a conception of power by revealing the material manipulation of bodies.
Foucault's illustration of how power operates through the manipu- lation of bodies is done in a powerful manner in his first major work of the genealogical period, Discipline and Punish. The book charts the genealogy of the modern prison institution and brings under scrutiny the connection between power and the body by analysing the ways in which the bodies of prisoners are consciously manipulated. It also demonstrates effectively Foucault's idea of the essential intertwinement of body and power: bodies are not given, natural objects, but assume their shape and characteristics in cultural practices of power, including punitive practices.
Discipline is a historically specific technology of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body both docile and useful. Bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were subjected to new kinds of discipline in order to make them more use- ful for mass production and at the same time easier to control. The
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functions, movements and capabilities of these bodies were broken down into narrow segments, analysed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective way. The human body became a machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated and improved. Foucault argues that in the seventeenth century a soldier, for example, still learnt his profession for the most part in actual fighting in which he proved his natural strength and inherent courage. But by the eighteenth century a soldier had become a fighting machine, something that could be constructed through correct training. Foucault tells us:
The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it . . . It defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies. (1979: 138)
Hence, a novel aspect o f modern disciplinary power i s that i t i s not external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon. It differs from earlier forms of bodily manipulation, which were violent and often performative: public tortures, slavery and hanging, for instance. Disciplinary power does not subject the body to extreme violence, it is not external or spectacular. It does not mutilate or coerce its target, but through detailed training reconstructs the body to produce new kinds of gestures, habits and skills. It focuses on details, on single movements, on their timing and rapidity. It organizes bodies in space and schedules their every action for maximum effect. This is done in factories, schools, hospitals and prisons through fixed and minutely detailed rules, con- stant surveillance and frequent examinations and check-ups. Bodies are classified according to their best possible performance, their size, age and sex. Unlike older forms of bodily coercion, disciplinary power does not destroy the body, but reconstructs it. Individuals literally incorpo- rate the objectives of power, which become part of their own being: actions, aims and habits.
In prisons, for example, disciplinary technologies subject prisoners by manipulating and materially inscribing their bodies. Their bodies are separated from others in practices of classification and examination, but also concretely and spatially. They are manipulated through exer- cise regimes, diet and strict time schedules. These processes of power
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operate through the bodies of prisoners, but they are also essentially objectifying: through processes of classification and examination the individual is given a social and a personal identity. He or she becomes a delinquent, a person with a distinct identity. Disciplinary power thus constitutes delinquents through concrete bodily manipulation and dis- cursive objectification. These two dimensions strengthen each other. On the one hand, concrete bodily manipulation made discursive objec- tification possible, resulting in the birth of sciences such as criminology and criminal psychiatry. The development of these sciences, on the other hand, helped the development and rationalization of disciplinary technologies in prisons. The two dimensions furthermore link together effectively through normalization. Scientific discourses produce truths that function as the norm : they tell us what is the normal fat percentage, cholesterol count or number of sexual partners for a certain sex and age group, for example. Modern power operates through the internaliza- tion of these norms. We modify our behaviour in an endless attempt to approximate the normal, and in this process become certain kinds of subjects.
This process of normalization is illustrated in Discipline and Punish in which Foucault analyses the strategies used by disciplinary power for the subjection of criminals. Where prisoners are concerned, disci- plinary power does not aim at repressing their interests or desires, but rather at reconstructing these desires as normal. This is not done by the ideological manipulation of their minds, but on and through their bodies. The aim of disciplinary techniques is to inscribe the norms of the society in the bodies of criminals by subjecting them to recon- structed patterns of behaviour. The prisoners must subject themselves to power to the extent that its aims become their own inner meaning of normal. Foucault formulates this complete subjection poetically by turning around the old philosophical and religious idea that the body is the prison of the soul:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. ''A soul" inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (Ibid. : 30. )
The "soul" of the prisoner - that which is supposed to be the most authentic part of him and, therefore, a key to his emancipation - is in fact an effect of the subjection of his body.
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Sexual bodies
Foucault's next major work, The History ofSexuality, Volume I, the- matizes the body through the question of sexuality. It puts forward his famous account of the discursive constitution of sexuality. Although the book is a historical study of the emergence of modern sexuality in the nineteenth century, Foucault's criticism targets contemporary conceptions of sexuality as well. The prevalent views in the West on sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s held that there was a natural and healthy sexuality that all human beings shared simply by virtue of being human, and this sexuality was presently repressed by cultural prohibitions and conventions such as bourgeois morality and capital- ist socioeconomic structures. Because it was essential to have an active and free sexuality, repressed sexuality was the cause of various neu- roses. The popular discourse on sexuality thus fervently argued for sexual liberation: we had to liberate our true sexuality from the repres- sive mechanisms of power.
Foucault challenges this view by showing how our conceptions and experiences of sexuality are in fact always the result of specific cultural conventions and mechanisms of power and could not exist independ- ently of them. Sexuality, like delinquency, only exists in a society. The mission to liberate our repressed sexuality is thus fundamentally mis- guided because there is no authentic or natural sexuality to liberate. To free oneself from one set of norms only meant adopting different norms in their stead, and that could turn out to be just as normalizing. Foucault wrote mockingly that the irony in the deployment of sexuality is "in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance" (1990a: 159).
In order to challenge the accepted relationship between sexuality and repressive power Foucault had to reconceive the nature of power. His major claim is that power is not essentially repressive; in fact, it is productive. It does not operate by repressing and prohibiting the true and authentic expressions of a natural sexuality. Instead it produces, through cultural normative practices and scientific discourses, the ways in which we experience and conceive of our sexuality.
The sexual body is an essential component of this process. In a much- quoted passage Foucault writes:
We must not make the mistake of thinking that sex is an auton- omous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized
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by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures. (Ibid. : 155)
Foucault thus claims that sex is an essential element in the strategy through which power holds a grip on our bodies. But what exactly does Foucault mean by sex in this passage? The French word sexe is ambiguous because it can refer to the categories of male and female in the sense of sex organs ? anatomy and biology that differentiates males from females - or it can refer to a natural function, a biological founda- tion or principle in the body that belongs in common to both men and women, or to the activity of having sex. This ambiguity is essential for Foucault's argument, however, because he attempts to show that rather than being a natural entity, "sex" in fact refers to a completely arbitrary and illusory unity of disparate elements.
Foucault begins his discussion of sex in the end of The History of' Sexuality by anticipating an objection. He invents an imaginary oppo- nent who claims that his history of sexuality only manages to argue for the cultural construction of sexuality because he evades "the bio- logically established existence of sexual functions for the benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but secondary, and ultimately superficial" (ibid. : 15 0-5 1 ) . The imaginary critic thus raises a question about a natural and necessary foundation of sexuality in the body: even if the manifestations of sexuality are culturally constructed and vari- able, there must nevertheless be a biological foundation in the body, a pre-cultural, embodied givenness which cannot be bent at will. There must be something purely natural - biological organs, functions and instincts - that causes the culturally varied manifestations of sexuality.
Foucault responds to his opponent by, first, denying that his analysis of sexuality implies "the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional" (ibid. : 151). On the contrary, what is needed is an analysis, which would overcome the biology/culture distinction (ibid. : 152). The aim of his genealogical histories is precisely to show how history and bodies are bound together in complex ways in the development of modern forms of power such as disciplinary power. He explicitly argues that his analysis of sexuality as a discursive construct does not deny the materiality of the body and the biologically established exist- ence of sexual functions (ibid. : 150-5 1). The purpose of his study is, in fact, to show:
how deployments of power are directly connected to the body - to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleas- ures; . . . what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis
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in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another . . . but are bound together in an increasingly com- plex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envisage a "history of mentalities" that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been per- ceived and given meaning and value; but a "history of the bodies" and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (Ibid. : 15 1-2)
Foucault thus accepts that ontologically there is some kind of mate- riality: there are such things in the world as bodies, organs, somatic locations, functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations and pleasures. What he does deny, however, is that this materiality corre- sponds to the idea of sex in an unproblematic way. In other words, there is no natural or necessary referent for the notion of sex. In scientific discourses on sexuality the notion of sex came to refer to something that in reality did not exist as a natural unity at all. It was a pseudo-scientific object like hysteria or monomania, which we now think refer to purely fictitious unities of disparate symptoms. The term sex is then placed inside inverted commas in Foucault's text because it becomes suspect. He brackets the accepted meaning of the notion in order to be able to study its genealogy: how the idea of "sex" took form in the different strategies of power, and what role it played in them.
Foucault notes three theoretical benefits that the idea of sex pro- duced: it made it possible to group together different kinds of elements - anatomical features, behavioural patterns and fantasies, for example - and make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle of explanation for different forms of sexuality. Second, the idea of sex gave the sciences of sexuality a proximity to biological sciences of reproduction, which functioned as a guarantee of their quasi-scientificity. Third, because sex was something biological and natural, power could only appear as something external to it.
Foucault, in contrast, refutes the idea that sex is a given, biological foundation and as such the "other" with respect to power. For him, the idea of a natural and foundational sex is a normative, historical construct that functions as an important anchorage point for power. Foucault's aim in analysing the sexual body is to study how the scien- tific idea of "sex" took form in the different strategies of power, and what role it played in them. The idea that "sex" is the scientific foun- dation, the true, causal origin of one's gender identity, sexual identity and sexual desire makes it possible to effectively normalize sexual and
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gendered behaviour. Through scientific knowledge about one's true sex it is possible to evaluate, pathologize and correct one's sexual and gendered behaviour by viewing it as either "normal" or "abnormal".
Bodies, pleasures and freedom
Foucault's analysis of power attempts to describe the historical limits that are imposed on us, but it is also an experiment with the possibility of modifying and crossing them: relations of power always incorpo- rate relations of resistance and points of recalcitrance. We cannot step outside the networks of power that circumscribe our experience, but there is always a possibility for thinking and being otherwise within them. To be free does not mean that everything is possible, but neither is the present way of thinking and being a necessity. Freedom refers to the contingency of structures and limits - including the limits of our present field of experience.
This is also true about sexual experiences. Foucault does not view the sexual body only as a docile and passive object of dominant discourses and techniques of power. It also represents the possibility of resistance against such discourses and techniques. In an important passage of The History ofSexuality, Foucault writes:
We m u s t n o t t h i n k t h a t b y s a y i n g y e s t o s e x , o n e s a y s n o t o p o w e r ; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim - through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality - to counter the grip of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplic- ity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (1990a: 157)
What Foucault suggests in this paragraph is that it is in the body that the seeds for subverting the normalizing aims of power are sown. The body is a locus of resistance and freedom (see also Foucault 1980a: 56). The body is never completely docile and its experiences can never be wholly reduced to normative, discursive determinants. The sexual body is always discursive in the sense that it is an object of scientific discourses and disciplinary technologies. Nevertheless, it is also a body acting in the world and experiencing pleasure. And a distinction must be drawn between discourse and experience, even if we accept that language
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forms the necessary limits of our experience and thought. Even if we believe that it is only possible to experience something that we have words for and that language makes intelligible for us, the experience itself is still not reducible to language.
The ontological distinction between experience and discourse - the experience of something and the linguistic description or explanation of this experience ? is crucial for understanding the resistance of the body. The body represents a dimension of freedom in the sense that its expe- riences are never wholly reducible to the discursive order: embodied experiences and language are imperfectly aligned because experience sometimes exceeds language and sometimes it is completely inarticulate. Bodies are capable of multiplying, distorting and overflowing their dis- cursive determinants and of opening up new and surprising possibilities that can be articulated in new ways.
While The History of Sexuality, Volume I already suggests the possibility of understanding bodies and pleasures as a locus of resist- ance, the book that followed it in 1977, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs o{ a Nineteenth-Century French Her- maphrodite, is equally important for understanding Foucault's view of the resistance of the body. Herculine Barbin was a hermaphrodite who lived at the end of the nineteenth century, at the time when scientific theories about sex and sexuality were gaining prominence. She was designated as female at birth, but grew up with an ambiguous aware- ness of her bodily uniqueness. As an adult she decided to confess her anatomical particularity to a priest and as a consequence was scientifi- cally reclassified as a man by doctors. She/he was incapable of adapting her/himself to the new identity, however, and committed suicide at the age of thirty. She/he left behind memoirs recounting his/her tragic story, which Foucault discovered in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene. He edited them and they were published together with the medical and legal documents related to the case as well as an introduction written by him.
The way the book is compiled is significant. It effectively juxtaposes Herculine's memoirs and thus the first-person, lived account of the hermaphrodite body with the third-person, legal and medical accounts of it. It is clear that Herculine's own account cannot be understood as the authentic or authoritative description of her embodiment as it is clearly shaped by the narrative conventions as well as the cultural conceptions of hermaphrodites of her time. But neither can the third- person legal accounts and medical diagnosis be accepted as the "true" account. The tragedy of Herculine's experience is exactly the result of the fissures and disjunctures - as well as the necessary correspondence
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and overlapping - between the subject's experience of his or her body and the dominant scientific and legal discourses on its true sex.
The form of the book, not just its content, is thus highly significant for Foucault's attempts to show that while our embodiment is never independent of dominant discourses and practices of power, it is not reducible to them either. Bodies always assume meaning through a complex process in which competing discourses, conceptualizations and practices intertwine with private sensations, pleasures and pains.
How to use Foucauldian bodies?
As noted earlier, Foucault conceived of his books as toolboxes that readers could rummage through to find a tool they needed to think and act with. It is therefore pertinent to conclude by asking how his conception of the body has been and can be appropriated by contem- porary thinkers attempting to understand and change current ways of living our sexuality.