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

When it comes to the writings of Foucault, his numerous use of the same word is not to confuse his audience but to orient them in way that he can use this lone word to emphasize the multiplicity of it’s meaning in the English language.  His use of the word “knowledge” is just one example allowing us to subscribe to the many discourses throughout his first volume of: The History of Sexuality, an Introduction.  Knowledge is said to be a general awareness or possession of information, facts, ideas, truths, or principles learned throughout time or familiarities/understandings gained through experience/study.  Foucault’s use of knowledge is to allocate other such terms like awareness, consciousness, enlightenment, education, science, familiarity and even carnal to promote further exploration for the discourses in which he questions.

Knowledge creates power, education provides for the opportunity for knowledge, but sex is still controversial.  According to Foucault, “what sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless, this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.”(Pg. 7)  Meaning, we crave this fantastic illusion of pleasure and satisfaction in private but how we activate it publicly has a negative discretion allowing for the fall of our own sexuality.  To say “sex is free,” holds regulations on society, being it economically, physically, and even mentally.  “On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars erotica.  In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret: I have in mind the confession.” (Pg. 58)  The confession promotes the idea of always having to tell someone else of an act worth being judge by an outside party.  The acknowledgement of a certain scenario promotes power over an individual victim.  Ars Erotica is kept in secret; it beholds passion, obsession, desire and an element of fantasy, western civilization does not believe in this, sex must be learned, acknowledged, kept track of and in some circumstances frowned upon.  What Foucault is trying to teach us, is that our knowledge of sex and sexuality should be embraced; it owns us as much as we claim it, our own personally binary creating us as individuals.

Foucault strongly believes that both adults and children have sex.  Figuratively and physically, a child becomes aware of sexuality at a young age, and as the knowledge about sex is obtained therefore allows for them to participate in this discourse at an older age.  Foucault provides an example of this when, “speaking about children’s sex including educators, physicians, administrators, and parents to speak of it, or speaking to them about it, causing the children themselves to talk about it, and enclosing them in a web of discourses which sometimes address them, sometimes speak about them, or impose canonical bits of knowledge on them or use them as a basis for constructing a science that is beyond their grasp-all this together enables us to link an intensification of the interventions of power to a multiplication of discourse.” (Pg.30)  Proving that once something is learned, it can be practiced.  Disagreements in cultural aspects are created in the pursuit over knowledge which in lies falsifications, difficulties and assumptions that are not always apparent.  Foucault describes it best in one example as, “underlying the difference between` the physiology of reproduction and the medical theories of sexuality, we would have to see something other and something more then an uneven scientific development of a disparity in the forms of knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scientific discourse in the West, where as the other would derive from a stubborn will to nonknowledge.” (Pg. 55)  His use of knowledge clearly states as an informative tool with recognition for those who know, who are to know, and those who refuse to know.

“In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulate as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.  Moreover this knowledge must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from within and amplify its effects.  In this way, there is formed a knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtues by being divulged.” (Pg. 57)  A perfect example into the realm of ars erotica, an act as sensually stimulating as sexuality or sex itself, kept in secret, forbidden for outsider to become aware of their actions, makes the routine that much more orgasmic.  To confess an action such as this allows for judgment and ridicule from a power we inlay in a person of trust in thus ruining the eroticism of a well kept secret.  Knowledge in this instance is on a need to know basis, if shared with society it looses its power discourse and becomes way too familiar for the individual to enjoy or partake in. 

Foucault holds true to the discourses he’s made throughout part three of the book, he leaves it in a way that provides a positive inspiration towards change and a new way of thinking, if we want to.  “The postulate I started out with, and would like to hold to as long as possible, is that these deployments of power and knowledge, of truth and pleasures, so unlike those of repression, are not necessarily secondary and derivative; and further, that repression is not in any case fundamental and overriding.  We need to take these mechanisms seriously, therefore, and reverse the defection of our analysis: rather then assuming a generally acknowledged repression, and an ignorance measured against what we are suppose to know, we must begin with these positive mechanisms, insofar as they produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure, and generate power; we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation, and try to discover how the related facts of interdiction or concealment are distributed with respect to them.  In short, we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this well to knowledge.  As far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to constitute the “political economy” of a will to knowledge.” (Pg. 73)  Foucault uses these discourses as tactics; he wants us to think further then we think for ourselves, only to imagine things might be different then how we first perceive them.  If we can find the root of a discourse and look beyond its appeal, we can change its root of power in thus destroying our own institutions of embedded discourses.  “It is not when the truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)