'Sexuality,' 'Biopower' and the 'Society of Normalization'

Reading Foucault, one perhaps feels a certain claustrophobia with the notion of ‘living within language.’ Or even its (language’s…) mere ‘subject,’ inscribed upon by discourses developed elsewhere—governmental rationalities, likely—often wielded by others, like a weapon of sorts. This is how I imagine Foucault feeling, and in a way, then, he was his own advocate, critically analyzing ‘the society of normalization’.

And yet there cannot ever be an ‘escaping from power’. Only perhaps a greater awareness of its history and constellations—its discourses and rationalities—in this case, as concerns the human sciences and concomitant ‘expert’ knowledges of pleasure and desire. We may fairly ask: is to show the construction of something like (the discourse of) ‘sexuality’ also to make its dismantling imperative? Probably not, I think. But it does place a certain onus, I would also think, on those who would perpetuate certain exclusionary discourses. The case of the simple-minded farmhand, for example, does seem to pose very uncomfortable questions here.

Foucault should make us consider the notion of emancipation, since I (perhaps in ignorance) take this to be, in broad outline, his project. Yet if we begin from the premise that the idea of ‘absolute freedom’ is probably meaningless, what the hell is emancipation? (Which is to say: What should we make of this word?—How should we employ/deploy it?) Is it anarchy? Or just living more like a bonobo? I suppose emancipation could be conceived of (minimally) as the minimization of exclusions through constant critical reflection (reflexivity?) on the price paid in any classificatory scheme—any act of naming.

To offer an example from an area I’ve researched a bit--drug policy, which may be marginally less uncomfortable for some to discuss, than, say, rape—Foucault’s History of Sexuality has been drawn upon by researchers who argue against the ‘pathologization’ of ‘users’. They often do this from a less punitive, more ‘health-based’ (biopolitical?) ‘harm reduction’ perspective—while critiquing certain practices of harm reduction itself. Foucault’s analytics have helped here, also, to show how the discourse of the (neo)liberal subject ‘has a problem with pleasure,’ with ‘unruly bodies,’ so that the consumptive behavior of ‘users’ cannot be spoken of with reference to (legitimate) pleasure, thereby making the behavior appear rather confusing or inexplicable. This helps account, for instance, for certain radical disconnects between the discourse of ‘controllers’ and ‘users’, while highlighting how certain harm reducing practices already circulate amongst users—in their words—which are enthusiastically passed along to others, as a cultural practice. (It may also be worth noting here that drug control generally, it seems to me, might be seen also as a product of biopower, concerned first largely with maintaining the ‘purity’ of white societies from Oriental pollution (e.g. via laws prohibiting the smoking of opium), and later more generally with the overall health of populations.)

We might say that Foucault entreats us to think critically about the human sciences and their relations to ‘governmental rationalities’—namely biopolitics—and to be less squeamish about pleasure. None of this seems to help, though, in trying to provide an answer to Namalie’s question about rape. Does considering male rape make a difference here? And our question may also be posed differently: Why might we not be better off in thinking about these dreadful practices more in terms of violence than in terms of sexuality?

While I hope that we all might agree that Foucault’s analytics are cogent and useful (for a recent application in IR, see perhaps Neumann and Sending’s 2010 book Governing the Global Polity), they also may be by turns confounding in their potential implications. While he may make us a bit less comfortable in our ‘linguistic homes’, though, at least he doesn’t seem as bad on this respect as someone like his fellow countryman Lacan, for whom language, apparently, was in the post-Freud era no less than ‘torture-house.’ Like much inquiry, then, our final question may be: How well must/can we know ourselves? Our research projects may, then, always be a certain, subsequent, praxis. Unless ‘knowing oneself’ is a largely empty notion.