Book Review: Michel Foucault's "The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I"

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I've read bits and pieces of this from readers as well as excerpts for courses. This is the first I've read it from beginning to end. Overall, Foucault attempts to make three very broad points. The first is that there was never any sexual repression in the Victorian age to present. In fact, the exact opposite happened. Instead of forcing various sexualities underground to the point of non-existence, Victorian culture produced these sexualities through discourse. They talked about what hadn't before been talked about: "If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression" (6). Within this broad argument against repression, Foucault lays out three inner arguments:

One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall term the ‘repressive hypothesis.’ First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? . . . Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? . . . A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it ‘repression’? (10)

The first two he answers in the negative. A perfect example of the social construction of sexuality, as opposed to the social repression of an already existent sexuality, can be found in the medicalization of sex. Here is a perfect example of how physicians and psychiatrists helped to "expose" what had before not even existed:

So too were all those minor perverts . . . entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles, and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fir them into. The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality . . . (43)

Foucault spends a good deal of time focusing on confession and penance within the Christian traditional as an important discursive act that constituted sexuality in the 17th-19th centuries. It is through this pivot that Foucault shifts to his second major exploration -- that of power. Confession and power are intimately linked, as he shows by stating that "the confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile . . . (61-62). For me, it is the section on power that is the most interesting. For Foucault, power is not something that is possessed and disposed of. It is something that exists in relationships. All parties can act out power, but there is often a dissymmetry of power. When that dissymmetry is consistently lop-sided, oppression results. It is also on power where Foucault is most easily understood. A series of aphorisms prove the point:

Power’s condition of possibility . . . must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty . . .

[What makes power possible is] the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.

[Power] is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society (93).

Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.

Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix—no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body (94).

What is also important about discourse in power is that the hegemonic theme can often be turned against it. Power often has an amorphous motivation which can easily flip and become counter-hegemonic. Foucault illustrates the repression of homosexuality as an example:

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified (101).

Last of Foucault's major point is an abstract exploration of what he would come to call bio-politics. Here he refers to sex not for its desire or passion, but rather for its reproductive and economic ends. The state came to view reproduction as an economic technique. From this comes to focus on demography as well as the attempt to confine sex to reproductive ends. For more on this side of sexuality, I highly recommend the College de France lecture series "The Birth of Biopolitics."

Who Decides the American Dream?

Now that we are 3+ years removed from the beginning of this financial mess, and with each set of data a recovery seems underway, many are starting to turn to the job of finding out just what happened and how to prevent it in the future. At the heart of this debate is homeownership and the perennial question "Who decides who gets to own a home?" Dig a little deeper and the question is "Who decides who decides who gets a home?"

Many point to the GSEs (Fred and Fan Mae) as being the responsible parties in subprime loans. They follow that one step further to the goals laid down by George W and Bill Clinton to boost homeownership which then gets backtracked to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. There is still an underlying question that isn't addressed by these causes though. The GSEs, Bill and George, and the CRA were merely trying to increase homeownership of those people who could afford a home but simply didn't qualify for a "conforming" mortgage as laid out by banks.

The above causes contributed to innovations such as 3% down mortgages and piggy-back loans which both served to counter the 20% down rule of conforming loans (I don't want to touch on 0 down loans as they seem barely justifiable even in highly specific cases). Russ Roberts lays out some good ideas in "Gambling With Other People's Money":

The opportunity to borrow money with a 3 percent down payment has three effects on the housing market: 

• It allows people who normally wouldn’t have accumulated a sufficient down payment to buy a house. 

• It encourages homeowners to bid on larger, more expensive houses rather than cheaper ones. 

• It encourages prospective buyers to bid more than a house is currently worth if the house is expected to appreciate in value

The first of the three points above is the whole point of the changes to conforming loans. The other two points are interesting but would take me way too long to comment on.

 Now we have a working class family that makes $40k a year with both parents working who want to buy a $120k house able to put down under $4000 instead of $24,000. Quite a difference. Assuming they can make the monthly payments, is there any reason they should not have the 3% mortgage available to them?

Was this push for higher homeownership rates simply identified with revisions to conformity rules on mortgages? Were banks (especially the GSEs) pressured to give more loans not only with less money down, but to people less likely to be able to pay? Part of this question addresses how the banks decided who was "worthy" of a loan. Whether upper-middle class families play the credit rating game better, or whether the rules to the credit rating game are biased towards the upper-middle class, I don't know. I do know that if you look at just credit scores, you will get some glaring disparities between the results and the actual thing you're trying to measure -- the credit worthiness of an individual. So the GSEs came up with some new ways to determine credit worthiness. Some of them were probably very good. Some of them ended up being pretty bad. No/low documentation mortgages and 0 down mortgages are glaringly bad. Looking at more than just credit rating is pretty darn good.

Now in 2011 we have some people trying to say the "American Dream" of homeownership isn't even all that great. A soon to be released article attempts to show that homeownership compared to renting isn't even beneficial financially: Second Thoughts on the American Dream. This premise seems awfully specious to me. I'll have to reserve judgement until the whole article is published though. And hope there aren't too many math problems in it. Owning a home isn't for everyone. And it's certainly not a right. I agree. But for whom is it for then? If one looks at the homeownership rates by income level, it seems pretty obvious that homeownership is a benefit. Homeownership rates go up as income goes up. This seems pretty damning evidence for this article.

At the end of all of this, who "deserves" a house? Who decides who deserves a house? Are the rules we make concerning mortgages, conformation, percent down, credit-worthiness, etc. effective at limiting homeownership to those who can afford it? Or are they constructed in a way that prohibits some from buying a home that otherwise could afford it?

James Burke is Awesome

This Foucault class got me thinking about James Burke again and his series "Connections." I saw this back when I was in High School and it was running on TLC (back when TLC had LEARNING shows -- go figure). Burke's view of history is very similar to Foucault's -- there are so many seemingly random events that come together in history that there is no way to portray history on a linear timeline, much less any way to accurately predict what might happen in the future. Here's a link to it in case anyone is interested in learning more about the series. It's a DVD set and a book. Connections

I'm going to use two quotes from the first episode in my paper on the financial crisis. Burke's illustration of the technological trap can be expanded by Foucault's notion of "technology" where it isn't related only to scientific advancements, but also social, structural, power, etc. advancements that work on us. Anyways, the quotes:

And as the years of the 20^th century have gone by, the things we take for granted have multiplied way beyond the ability of any individual to understand in a lifetime. The things around us, the man-made inventions we provide ourselves with, are like a vast network each part of which is interdependent with all the others . . .. Change anything in that network and the effects spread like ripples in a pond. And all the things in that network have become so specialized that only the people involved in making them understand them.

Yea, welcome to post-modernism!

And the technological trap:

This is one of the more perfect examples of the of the kind of technological trap that we set for ourselves: the lift, the elevator; I mean, what is this? It's a steel box with some buttons in it and maybe a trapdoor for emergency. But whoever looks that close except when this happens [lights go out]: Where is it? And even in this situation, closed in, with an escape route that we can't handle, we behave like many of those New Yorkers did: we strike a light and we look around to see how badly things are. And, if we find in this case an emergency button, absolutely great; we sit back, and we wait for help to come. We wait for technology to come back and save our lives, because it's inconceivable that it won't isn't it? I mean if you admit that, you've got to admit that every single day of your life, in some form or other, you unconsciously walk yourself into a technology trap, because that's the only way to live in the modern world. 

Mike Foxtrot Takes on Wall Street's Charlie Foxtrot

Still working on my Foucault paper. It'll attempt to be a Foucaultian analysis of the subprime financial meltdown. Here's a brief summary. Stay tuned for more!

The neoliberalism beginning in the late 70s and gaining steam in the Reagan/Thatcher years was a technology of power that boasted of increased freedom but which actually increased subjection. The deregulation of neoliberalism, a prima facie reading of which would yield increased egalitarianism, actually resulted in increased income polarization. This came to manifest itself in the technological trap of the subprime financial crisis.