Interrelation Between Foucauldian Concepts of Sexuality and Confession - Essay Example

A Critical Analysis of the interrelation between Foucauldian Concepts of “Sexuality and Confession” Whereas ‘Confession’ is a key to understanding Foucault’s “social disciplinary theory of power and body politics”, sexuality is central to confession because of its relation with the science of body. For Foucault, since sexuality is the ultimate truth about human body, confession to those of the social authority on this truth rather liberate the self from the body by individuating and subjecting it to the overruling power. Confession demands a set of prerequisites and conditionals that essentially encourage the person to acknowledge the truth about his or her body in front of the confessor as the representative of the social authority. Therefore, at the subconscious level of mind, the person learns through confession to acknowledge the social institutions (that boost up one another and that are interrelated with each other), in other words, the society as the power over his or her life, while learning to view body as an object that needs to be reigned carefully and to remain in continual vigilance. (Reich, 1966: 35-37) According to Foucault, how confession is related to sexuality essentially involves learning about the truth of human body or what Foucault calls the science of sexuality (‘scientia sexualis’). Indeed Foucault’s concepts of ‘confession and sexuality’ are indispensably interwoven with his “theory of social discipline” in the sense that his theory considers the physicality or the organic existence of body –a seat of needs and appetite- as a subject of politics and power. Foucault assumes that confession comprises “all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himself” (Foucault, 1980: 110). Confession produces subjectivity through the authority of speech about sex. Indeed confession and sexuality are related with each other through a power-subject relationship. (Tambling, 1990: 49) When sexuality represents body as a subject to power, confession plays a dual role in power mechanism. Not only has it provided power with the scope to exercise control over the body by informing power of the self-willed, honest and spontaneous truth about human body, but also it assists the confessor over the subject of confession, sex, by distancing it as an object to be discussed. Foucault believes that confession plays “a central role in the order of civil and religious powers…The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power [and has become] one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (Foucault, 1990: 58). In the very first place, the obligation to confess itself is the sign of power’s influence on the individual, as Foucault writes about it: “the obligation to confess…is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to use that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface” (Foucault, 1990: 60). This urge of an individual to confess evolves his or her discomfort under the panoptic gaze of power. Smart (1995: 88) explains Foucault’s concept of panoptic as following: The Panopticon was to function as an apparatus of power by virtue of the field of visibility in which individuals were to be located, each in their respective places ... for a centralized and unseen observer. In this schema subjects were to be individualized in their own space, to be visible, and to be conscious of their potentiality constant and continuous visibility. (Foucault, 1975: 88) By confessing the confessor becomes affected in two ways: first, he or she becomes a part of power’s panoptic gaze, which imposes constant surveillance on sex, by internalizing it more; second, the confessor reaffirms his or her identity in term of power relations, since sex holds the truth of one’s identity in secret: “sex is what hold [truth about body] in darkness” (Foucault, 1990: 77). Foucault believes that sex is to be explored as the unique focus of confession, as he says, “Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key….Sex, the explanation for everything.” (Foucault, 1990: 78) Foucauldian concept of power crucially pivots on body as a “seat of hunger and appetite” that needs to be trained and disciplined in order to upgrade to the “docile body”, an active role player in power mechanism. (Minson, 1987: 46-49) Through confession the confessor reorients him or her in power which is to be “understood…as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (Foucault, 1990: 92). Body as a seat of needs and appetites serves the sociopolitical authority as an object that can produce the person, a part of the power and that can be subjected to the social authority as well as social disciplines through subjugation, threats and torture by the external forces and power. In fact, for Foucault, ‘body’ has always been in the center of the attention of any forms of power or authority because body is easily accessible and manageable by controlling its various organic needs, as referring to Foucault’s obsession with the physicality of human being, Peter Erlandson (2005: 62-3) says, “Foucault stresses that as well as studying the body as a seat of ‘needs and appetites’ and other ‘biological events’ in the social sciences, the politics of the body also needs to be studied”. Unlike other body matters, since sexuality or a person’s sexual appetite are carefully kept in private, confession as a socio-religious institution appears to the most powerful invention that encourage the person to learn about the truth of body while subjugating him or her to the authority on his or her own (Reich, 1966: 35-37). Foucault explains the functionality of confession: Unlike the ars erotica, confessional discourse does not come from above "through the sovereign will of the master" but instead from below. On the other hand, the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks, but in the one who listens, says nothing, and questions. Then, this discourse of truth takes effect, "not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom it is wrested" (Novak, 2003:1). Foucault’s analysis of sexuality from a historical perspective necessarily elaborates that confession serves as an apparatus for the agencies of power to convert desire into discourse in order to gain control over the person’s body. Opposing the conventional “Repression Hypothesis”, Foucault argues that sexuality has not been repressed by the rigor of control in the Victorian society; rather repression of sex in the Seventeenth Century was the nation’s attempt to regenerate sexuality through the medium of language: “under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of…by a discourse that aimed to allow it not obscurity, no respite” (Foucault, 1990: 20) In support of his argument, Foucault differentiates between the sexualities of the Seventeenth Century and the Eighteenth Century and shows: whereas in the seventeenth century “codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax”, sexuality was “carefully confined; it moved into the home” in the 19th century (Foucault, 1990: 3). Repression on sexuality, in Victorian society, “operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence” (Foucault, 1990: 4). Indeed Foucault points out that repression brings sex into discourse by enabling one to talk about it and speaking about sex incites the speaker to feel him or her, to a certain extent, outside the reach of power (Foucault, 1990: 6). Yet the nascent discourses, that later proliferated extensively, on sexuality assisted the speakers of sexuality to objectify sex by socializing and assimilating the body into the existing power mechanisms. From this very effort to transform desire into discourse, the kernel of the act of confession grows and gain power over sex. Foucault’s “confession”, to a great extent, differs from the religious concept of confession. While Christianity approaches confession from a dogmatic perspective, Foucault applies the same functionality of confession in a wider range of social discipline. “to acknowledge faults, to recognise temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others…The truth obligations of faith and self are linked together. This link permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge.” (Foucault, 1988: 40) The urge to confess sexual or other types of transgression forms the basis of Christian confession; on the other hand, Foucault assumes that transgression in modern society needs to be viewed as any phenomenon in general that is devoid of truth. Foucauldian confession involves producing the truth rather than discovering it, though the demarcation between the two often tends to remain obscure because of their epistemological definition of truth. Truth as a natural constant is a subject to discovery that ultimately falls upon the shoulder of scientific, whereas the act of producing the truth entirely remains a subject to the confessor’s sole perception. Therefore, Foucauldian confession appears as an act of self-discovery and an act that puts the confessor in a continuous struggle to decipher his or her self and to produce discourse on the findings. Confession as individuals’ effort of discovering the self has been perpetuated other power mechanisms of modern society, as Foucault notes: "We have since become an extraordinarily confessing society. Confession has spread its effects far and wide: in the judicial system, in medicine, in pedagogy, in familial relations, in amorous relationships, in everyday life and in the most solemn rituals; crimes are confessed, sins are confessed, thoughts and desires are confessed, one's past and one's dreams are confessed, one's childhood is confessed; one's diseases and problems are confessed;..." (Foucault, 1990: 59) Foucault’s analysis of confession from a historical perspective asserts that sexuality, more correctly, discourses on sexuality -the ironical effect of the Victorian society’s careful repression on sex- lies at the heart of confession as a general term irrespective of its religious aroma. In return, sexuality begins to make its own place in discourse while being multiplied and partitioned in the nineteenth century, as Foucault says, “the nineteenth century has been the "age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ‘perversions” (Foucault, 1990: 37). Again he says, “By discovering it multiplied, partitioned off, and specified precisely where one had placed it, what one was seeking essentially was simply to conceal sex” (Foucault, 1990: 53). Foucault claims that such multiplication and partitioning were the direct effects of confession that contributes to the individuals’ knowledge and self-awareness about sex. In support of his argument, he claims that throughout the whole 17th century, repression on sex as well as confession contributed to the social authority’s knowledge and awareness of the plausibility of multiple and partitioned sexuality, such as homosexuality, sodomy, incest, children’s sexuality, etc, outside the domain of society acknowledged sexuality of marriage. Sexual offenses were “divided between infractions against the legislation (morality) and offenses against the regularity of a natural function” (Novak, 2003:1). The awareness and the knowledge about the truth of sex, which were derived from confession, encourage the different power mechanisms such as medicine, pedagogy, and the law to keep sex under continuous surveillance to prevent illegitimate sexualities, while giving the religious or natural sexualities “an analytical, visible, and permanent” (Foucault, 1990: 44) institutional appearance by incorporating them into the power mechanism. According to Foucault, though confession in the 19th century western society was more of a religious ritual that demands the individual to seek deliverance from secret sins: mostly sexual perversions, in modern society it -shredding its religious apparel to a great extent and still retaining the same functionality- has been applied in all the sectors that are concerned with the production of truth about body and sex. In this regard, Nicholas Seon (2011: 180) says, “Although the practice of sacramental confession has dwindled along with active membership of the Catholic church, new confessional practices have proliferated in modern times”. Meanwhile, confession was no longer sacramental outside the arena of Catholic Church. In this regard, Jennifer Novak notes, “as time has passed, it has spread and been employed in many different relationships, including pedagogy, family relationships, medicine, and psychiatry” (Novak, 2003:1). References Erlandson, P. 2005. The Body Disciplined: Rewriting Teaching Competence and the Doctrine of Reflection, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No. 4, .Foucault, M. 1975. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. 1975 Foucault, M. 1980. Truth and Power. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, (pp. 109-133. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.) Technologies of the self. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Press. Foucault, M. 1990. The history of sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books Minson, J. 1987. Genealogies of Power: Nietzsche, Foucault and Donzelot and the Eccentricities of Ethics. London: MacMillan. Novak, J. 2000. A Review of "The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction" by Michel Foucault. Retrieved March 03, 2012 from http://www.comm.umn.edu/Foucault/hos.html Reich, T. 1966. The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment. New York, Wiley. Sheon, N. 2011. Confession and Sexuality. Retrieved March 03, 2012 from http://www.managingdesire.org/5.pdf Smart, B. 1995. Michel Foucault, London: Routledge. Tambling, J. 1990. Confession: Sexuality, Sin and the Subject. New York: St. Martins Press. Read More