Michel Foucault

Form and Power

Dan Beer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351198011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

"This is a study of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault's 1976 work ""La Volonte de Savoir"". Dan Beer aims to uncover a network of ideas and linguistic patterns beneath the surface of the text. Through close textual analysis he addresses the issue of language and its effects on the world we inhabit. The book covers a range of references from the forgotten narratives of 19th-century European psychiatry, examining the scope of confessional literature, to the heated debates that surround Foucault's language and ideas."

Chapter 1
Ars Erotica and Scientia Sexualis

Ars Erotica

La Volonté de savoir is in part designed to provide a preliminary insight into Foucault's views on the historical development of sexual thinking. Foucault traces an increasingly discursive attitude to sexuality and the body, contrasting the ancient form of what he terms the ars erotica with what he refers to as the modern scientia sexualis. His representation of the ars erotica is of a lost and beautiful form of sexuality, once common in many societies:

D'un côté, les sociétés—et elles ont été nombreuses: la Chine, le Japon, l'Inde, Rome, les sociétés arabo-musulmanes—qui se sont dotées d'une ars erotica. Dans l'art érotique, la vérité est extraite du plaisir lui-même, pris comme pratique et recueilli comnie expérience; ce n'est pas par rapport à une loi absolue du permis et du défendu, ce n'est point par référence à un critère d'utilité, que le plaisir est pris en compte; mais, d'abord et avant tout par rapport à lui-même, il y est à connaître comme plaisir, donc selon son intensité, sa qualité spécifique, sa durée, ses révérberations dans le corps et l'âme.¹

Foucault describes a self-enclosed formation, where pleasure is a given, induced and received 'par rapport à lui-même'. He contrasts this system with systems reliant on 'une loi absolue du permis et du défendu'. As the ars erotica is primarily a physical phenomenon, communicated from body to body, it is largely free of the discursive order that is to be found in formations such as the law, with their reliance on division, regulation and interdiction.

The effects of the ars erotica are beautiful and transfiguring:

De cet art magistral, les effets, bien plus généreux que ne le laisserait supposer la sécheresse de ses recettes, doivent transfigurer celui sur qui il fait tomber ses privilèges: maîtrise absolue du corps, jouissance unique, oubli du temps et des limites, élixir de lorigue vie, exil de la mort et de ses menaces.²

Those who are fortunate enough to experience the benefits of the ars erotica are able to achieve a state of harmony within themselves, resembling that to be found in the ars erotica itself. Time, space, even mortality, no longer maintain their hold on the beneficiaries of the ars erotica. Foucault's language conveys a sense of the full immensity and extremity of the effects of this formation. Moving inwards, from an initial description of the societies in which, according to Foucault, the ars erotica once existed, through a detailing of its workings, Foucault arrives at a final assessment of its effects on, and within, the individuals who experience its removal of all limits. The ars erotica transcends even the limits of those discourses that try to describe it. 'Bien plus généreux que ne le laisserait supposer la sécheresse de ses recettes', it defies all order, whether linguistic, temporal, physical, moral or legal.

Paradoxically, Foucault's description of this unlimited entity itself relies to some extent on rigid temporal and geographical divisions. Foucault contrasts the ars erotica with what he refers to as the scientia sexualis, a seemingly unique feature of contemporary western societies: 'Notre civilisation, en première approche du moins, n'a pas d'ars erotica. En revanche, elle est la seule, sans doute, à pratiquer une scientia sexualis.' The oppressive use of confession, 'une forme de pouvoir-savoir rigoureusement opposée à l'art des initiations et au secret magistral', has become a dominant feature of the workings of the scientia sexualis since the Middle Ages.³

According to this account, the predominance of sensuous ancient eastern societies has been overtaken by the increasing importance of cerebral modern western ones. This is a seductive idea. But it does not account for phenomena such as China's early scientific development. The temporal and geographical leap made by Foucault does not adequately explain why a phenomenon such as the scientia sexualis, which apparently occurred exclusively in the West, should have led to the disappearance of the eastern ars erotica. It remains unclear whether China, Japan, India, or the Arab and Muslim societies that Foucault refers to—countries where confession, and particularly psychiatric forms of confession, have not had the impact that they have had in Europe or North America—still practise any form of ars erotica today.

Foucault's depiction of the ars erotica is of a primarily physical formation. However, he does also make reference to ancient discourses: the unsourced 'recettes' he mentions. The unwritten aspects of what Foucault describes are, of course, by their nature, impossible to verify. But the written word remains telling. I shall now examine a renowned, discourse-based account of sexuality. Though it is not mentioned directly by Foucault in La Volonté de savoir, it was written in the Indian society that he lists among the centres of the ars erotica. It cannot be seen to represent everything to which Foucault is referring. But, in revealing patterns of thought of a fascinating complexity, it both validates some of Foucault's claims, yet casts doubt on others.

The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana is memorable for the lengthy and diverse forms of classification with which it details sexual (and other) behaviours. The Kama Sutra encompasses and allows for a wide range of sexual diversity. Behaviour ranging from kissing to scratching, biting and striking is mentioned, without being overtly problematized. However, the prohibitions and exclusions of the society in which this work was formulated remain apparent. Kama is regulated according to caste:

The practice of Kama with women of the higher castes, and with those previously enjoyed by others, even though they be of the same caste, is prohibited. But the practice of Kama with women of the lower castes, with women excommunicated from their own caste, with public women, and with women twice married, is neither enjoined nor prohibited. The object of practising Kama with such women is pleasure only.⁴

The Kama Sutra operates through various forms of classification. In the above example, these appear straightforwardly restrictive. Elsewhere, though, the form and content of the categorization at work in the Kama Sutra is likely to seem strange and illogical to the contemporary reader. Among 'the sixty-four practices that form a part of the Kama Shastra' (the skills that females were expected to learn), for example, the Kama Sutra lists the following:

Making parrots, flowers, tufts, tassels, bunches, bosses, knobs, etc., out of yarn or thread

Solution of riddles, enigmas, covert speeches, verbal puzzles and enigmatical questions

[...]

Practice with sword, single stick, quarter staff and bow and arrow
Drawing inferences, reasoning or inferring
Carpentry, or the work of a carpenter
Architecture, or the art of building
Knowledge about gold and silver coins, and jewels and gems
Chemistry and mineralogy
Colouring jewels, gems and beads

Knowledge of mines and quarries

Gardening; knowledge of treating the diseases of trees and plants, of nourishing them, and determining their ages

Art of cock fighting, quail fighting and ram fighting

Art of teaching parrots and starlings to speak.⁵

This sort of list, so alien to our way of thinking, closely resembles the one cited by Foucault as an inspiration for Les Mots et les choses (1966):

Ce livre a son lieu de naissance dans un texte de Borges. [...] Ce texte cite 'une certaine encyclopédic chinoise' où il est écrit que 'les animaux se divisent en: a) appartenant à l'Empereur, b) embaurnés, c) apprivoisés, d) cochons de kit, e) sirènes, f) fabuleux, g) chiens en liberté, h) inclus dans la présente classification, i) qui s'agitent comme des fous, j) innombrables, k) dessinés avec un pinceau très fin en poils de chameau, l) et caetera, m) qui viennent de casser la cruche, n) qui de loin semblent des rnouches'. Dans l'émerveillement de cette taxinomie, ce qu'on rejoint d'un bond, ce qui, à la faveur de l'apologue, nous est indiqué comme le charme exotique d'une autre pensée, c'est la limite de la nôtre: l'impossibilité nue de penser cela.⁶

The list provided in the Kama Sutra does not have quite this distinctive irregularity: every element in it is, after all, a specific skill. There is no sudden summary of the other elements in this list as if such a summary were itself a new element in the list ('inclus dans la présente classification'), nor any vague and mysterious 'et caetera'. But, like the list recounted by Borges, the Kama Shastra reveals 'la limite de [notre pensée]: l'impossibilité nue de penser cela'. In what modern discourse could the art of teaching parrots to speak be listed entirely seriously alongside military skill?

Foucaalt is interested above all in showing the reader that formations we think of as natural actually have specific historical origins. They have been constructed, and then accepted, to a degree where we cannot imagine a world without them. As he explains in the 1982 interview with Rux Martin, 'Truth, Power, Self':

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are a part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are a part of their landscape—that people think are universal—are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.⁷

Bearing out the approach expounded by Foucault in this interview, the appeal of the list discussed in Les Mots et les chases results precisely from its difference from contemporary ways of thinking. To the modern reader, it may appear completely incomprehensible and unjustifiably disordered. But the disconcerting effect of reading such a passage serves to draw attention to the constraints placed on our imaginations by the rules and forms of the accepted order that underpins the societies in which we now live. Likewise, certain of the values and attitudes towards both moral and discursive order that sustain the narrative of the Kama Sutra also challenge the preconceptions of the contemporary reader. They reveal that the existing order in any given society has no essential meaning or worth, that it is constructed and open to change. As such, the work corroborates Foucault's claims. Yet the Kama Sutra also works through categorization and division (according, for example, to caste), and so simultaneously defies Foucault's vision of an ars erotica entirely distinct from the scientia sexualis it preceded.

Foucault was later to admit that his apparent suggestion that the ars erotica is absent in any form from contemporary western societies was misguided. In the 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert L. Dreyfus, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', Foucault says of La Volonté de savoir that 'one of the numerous points where I was wrong in that book was what I said about this ars erotica. I should have opposed our science of sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture.'⁸

Foucault indicates that it is possible that a contemporary equivalent of the ars erotica exists. In response to this suggestion, I shall now examine a work of nineteenth-century North European literature, which, because of its influence on the thinking of at least one proponent of nineteenth-century psychiatry, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, appears to transcend Foucault's firm division of the ars erotica from the scientia sexualis. The work is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870).

The reader of Venus in Furs is at certain points presented with rigid regional divisions, similar to those described in Foucault's account of the ars erotica and the scientia sexuatis. For the narrator of Venus in Furs, Italy contrasts with Northern Europe:

It is a different world, this one we are in now—a gay, sensuous, smiling world. The landscape, too, has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours. It is a long way off to the last white villas scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn't a spot that isn't bright with sunlight. The people are less serious than we; perhaps they think less, but they all look as though they were happy.⁹

Regional ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Ars Erotica and Scientia Sexualis
• 2 Confessions, Silences, Unwritten Histories
• 3 Blood and 'Sex' Societies
• 4 Power's Forms and Movements
• 5 Power and the Individual
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index