Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Emily

Fashioning the Body

October 12, 2007

Technology. Today the word connotes concepts like progress, advancement, science, and engineering. The Oxford English Dictionary adds "a study of practical, industrial arts." In The History of Sexuality: Vol I, Foucault's utilization of 'technology' certainly evokes 'practical' and 'industrial', but in a more complicated and abstract way, inextricably linked to power, the bourgeois, and bodies. One could say that Foucault's technology is the covert operation of power with unseen effects and agenda. The unseen effects and the fact that technology is the means which produce an effect; this is what Foucault refers to as 'positive' technology. Throughout The History of Sexuality: Vol I, Foucault makes use of 'technology' implicit through his use of related vocabulary; mechanisms, techniques, and devices are all terminals through with technology passes to produce an effect. Upon a careful study, one finds that technology also reflects a biased agenda or strategic aim within a power relationship. According to Foucault, the bourgeoisie used technologies of power, of sex, and of medicalization to maintain their dominant class position by controlling bodies from the inside out.

To begin, one must first familiarize one's self with Foucault's use of "power." Foucault has his own definition or model of power, one that differs from the common understanding of power. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault expressly compares his model to the "common representation of power" which is based on laws, prohibition, the marking of boundaries, and limitations (82). The common model of power is one that is negative, that takes away options, places restrictions upon society through laws. In particular, it is commonly argued that power represses sexuality and silences it. Foucault argues that this is not so. On the contrary, he declares that Western sexuality permeates through every action, every person, and especially in discourses across the board. This permeation is due to the technology of power that is not simply action, force by the state or other institutions (as the old, non-Foucauldian model of power would have us believe), but power works through techniques that operate in every person and on every level of society (93).

One of the most compelling evidences for Foucault's model of positive power technologies is his debunking of the common representation of power. The latter he sees as a blindfold, a self-affirming decoy that perpetuates the idea that power is inherent in laws and governing. This leads him to suggest that in his model of power, "power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its abilities to hide its own mechanisms" (86). I return to a phrase in the introduction of this essay, pressing that technology is the "covert operation" of power.

With the advent of the bourgeois in the eighteenth century and since then, power has been exercised in illicit, hidden ways to push its own agenda. Foucault stresses that the technology of power is practically invisible in comparison to the common representation of power. "The new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus" (89), italics mine. Again, here power is a method, not an institution or law.

Power works in a positive way through mechanisms, not a negative way through restrictions. Furthermore, he insists that a study of history must abandon the old model of power based on laws and prohibition; instead, we must analyze history with a new lens, a lens that shows power to be a set of highly industrial and highly covert operations. By highly industrial, I reiterate that power is positive, productive through technologies.

The technology of sex is a central concept in The History of Sexuality. Foucault demonstrates the positive technology of sex, building from his model of power. "Let us assume in turn that a somewhat careful scrutiny will show that power in modern societies has not in fact governed sexuality through law and sovereignty; let us suppose that historical analysis has revealed the presence of a veritable 'technology' of sex, one that is much more complex and above all much more positive than the mere effect of a 'defense' could be [...]" (90). A common interpretation of modern sexuality is that it is repressed, that the state and other institutions restrict sexuality; Foucault says this is inaccurate and incomplete. There has been, rather, a technology that incites discourse, knowledge, and is part of power relationships. "Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century—bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will—did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it" (69).

Foucault exposes the power relations that deploy a technology of sex to be the bourgeois of the eighteenth century and its self-affirming agenda. In particular, the deployment of sexuality as a concept and a technology that ultimately put bodies under surveillance and regulation. The primary concern for its elite class survival was based on bodies. The technology of sex is linked to the proliferation of the bourgeois bodies; indeed, the explosion of medicine and awareness of health and bodies was a self-defense applied and created by the elite class. Certain developments such as reliance of the economy on a healthy population caused the bourgeois to extend medicalization to the working class. As gracious as this gesture may seem, this then becomes a "technology of control" requiring the working class body to be constantly surveyed by institutions, "public hygiene, institutions of relief and insurance, the general medicalization of the population, in short, an entire administrative and technical machinery" (126). Here, the public health services are devices with which the dominant power controls the exploited class through a veil.

Foucault refers to the phenomenon of medicine and obsession over bodies as the "entry of life into history" (141). This technology is still positive in that it produces the effect of normalization, "because a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms" (144). To bring up the old, defeated model of power that relies on laws, Foucault argues that power exercised through "norms" as a result of the medicalization of modern society. Stated more bluntly, "A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power based on life" (144).

The bourgeois and the mechanisms of medicalization ultimately show an insidious, classist, biased agenda that Foucault illustrates. "Spread out from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating population" (146). By regulating the population, Foucault does not mean anything innocent. In fact, the bourgeois initiated and proliferated eugenics and the concept of the perverse, "the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century" (118). Technology, hidden and exercised within a power relation, is positive. To illustrate the grasp that technologies have on us, I end with a quote about the technology of confession, which Foucault considers a crux in the development of the technology of power, sex, and medicine. "The obligation to confess is now so relayed through so many different points, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us" (60), italics mine. Technology, the drop in the bucket within power relations, produces an effect that reaches, permeates, until it diffuses enough to become accepted as normal.