The Future Mapmakers
The attempt to define sexuality is to map out its various and even contradictory characteristics. However, the attempt to define sexuality is not where our efforts should lie; Instead of questioning what sexuality is we must instead ask ourselves why such emphasis is placed on defining it. Why Sexuality? Who is compelling us to feel like we must always keep up with the latest “definitions,” which institutions or mechanisms of power operate for the continual and perpetuating conditions to allow this process to be constantly appropriated and probably the most important question—is the arrival of The Definition, the “complete and perfect map of sexuality” at all important in the procedure of questioning? Would there ever be a finale, a climax in the search for defining sexuality? Or is the pursuit of the truth and the “Will to knowledge”—the proliferation of discourse and conversation, the generating of dialogue and controversy, the revealing of paradoxes, and the accommodating creation of authority ranging from medicine, science, psychology and even law to solidify and confirm the knowledge produced—the motivation we should attempt to understand? Is it the actual process of mapping sexuality—the creation of borders and boundaries—the core to understanding the power mechanisms behind it?
In the first three parts of his book The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that sexuality in the modern society is not a singular definition, and because of this trait it is not something that is “repressed,” as many suggest. Instead history shows the opposite, which Foucault states: “[power] is acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals…never have there existed more centers of power; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere” (Foucault 47). Sexuality is no longer Truth, instead the very characteristic of sexuality is the constant and ongoing process for creating its own reality, its own “truths.” Instead of ars erotica, where there is a special recipe of Truth and Sexuality passed through generations, Scientia Sexualis is the formation of truth through the power infrastructure that governs it, with mechanisms that “produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure, and generate power…the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge” (73).
Analogously, the mapping of sexuality (like the one we saw in class) is not only a continent, it is one full of countries, states, cities, and capitols. The continuing splintering of boundaries—and paradoxically the creation of new, smaller ones—is the very evidence that sexuality is neither contracting (repressed) nor expanding (liberated). The amount of land will always be the same. It is only the ways in which we divide the land, the discourse in defining sexuality that changes. Instead of merely one who analyzes the map, we are all now participants, compelled to always partake in the abstractions and categorizations of sexuality, confessing and confiding to the secrets it holds, and all the while, priding in our abilities as mapmakers.
Tags: Foucault, reading responses, Richard
February 7th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Richard,
Your use of the mapmaking metaphor is insightful as a gloss on power relations as described in the first parts of History of Sexuality. As you indicate, the history of maps of a given area shows the constant reshuffling of boundaries, naming of new territories and their corresponding significances for the populations who inhabit them, and increasing specification of the parts that make up the terrain. I might disagree with you that the amount of land remains the same, since imperial takeovers tend to claim new lands as part of the old one (hence New York, New Jersey, etc.), but that is a minor point in light of the way you aptly describe power relations as in flux and in production of knowledge.
For class, I’d like you to take up this theme of the pursuit of the truths of our sexuality in relation to the practice of confession, historically and more recently, and how that manifests itself in Scientia Sexualis, in contrast to Ars Erotica. See if you can create a chart for us that shows the key differences between the two forms as Foucault describes them and if you have any reservations about his conceptualization, that too is welcome.