"To live well is to work well, to show a good activity." -Thomas Aquinas (original) (raw)

AWESOME STUDENT:

We talked in class about the newly instituted medieval practice of regular confession, and how every thought, every touch, had to be confessed as a sin (making sex or any sexual thoughts internalized and the object of deep self-scrutiny and analysis. Here, I instantly thought of Foucault's "A History of Sexuality." My critical theory professor went over this piece and I was just wondering if I understood it correctly. Also, I think you said that according to Foucault, sexuality didn't even exist up into a certain point in time. What was the specific date you mentioned?

NUTTY INSTRUCTOR:

You are right on target with what you're saying. Michel Foucault is perhaps the most important philosopher of the last fifty years. Though lots of academic hipster types will casually drop his name all the time, as it reading him were nothing to them, Foucualt is in fact notoriously difficult - difficult to read and even more difficult to talk about. It's very encouraging to see that you're beginning to make some sense of him. The key for Foucault is that he considers things we take for granted, to be normal and natural and universal, are in fact historical and cultural productions.

A key instance of this is sex. For instance: I mean, how could humans have invented sex, or so recently at that? I mean, haven't people been doing that for years? I mean, isn't that where babies come from? Well, it's totally understandable that someone would think that. For Foucault, our whole culture is set up to encourage us to think that. And at some essential biological level - though it will be Foucault's perverse pleasure to make everything complicated - yeah, people have always been doing something. But Foucault insists that everything we experience (think, do, say and feel) is intimately bound up with the language we use to talk about it and understand it. Further, words, for Foucault, do not exist or make sense in isolation but only as parts of a larger linguistic system which determines their significance.

What we see developing very steadily in the 12th and 13th centuries, and Foucault was fascinated by this, is not just a random array of new words, but a very extensive and precise vocabulary. This vocabulary doesn't simply names things we already know to exist but it veritably brings into existence things (body parts, actions, sensations) which had never existed until they were named.

This new vocabulary covers the entire body, maps its surface into distinct regions and organs, each of which is now given a proper name, form, function, object and purpose for which it has been designed. And a new concept of the soul; as a rational, end-directed activity; is brought into currency. The soul, or the very action of existing, operates to ensure that the various names, forms, functions, objects and purposes associated with the body are all coordinated amongst themselves in order to produce a generally and optimally functional total individual. After a key moment of recognition, that in which we recognize ourself to have a specific identity (i.e., black, straight, Jewish, male, husband, professional, etc.) it becomes our duty and life's work continually to reaffirm our basic identity, to more perfectly manifest that identity through the rational and (self)conscious adaptation of all our disposable means towards natural ends. This is an infinite process in which try constantly and consciously to perfect a set of 'natural' dispositions, or techniques, whose correct functioning depends, on a very fundamental level, on the fact we are entirely unconscious of performing them. Paradoxically, we must be totally conscious and totally unconscious at once. Which is virtually impossible, but not entire impossible. Because we see this kind of behavior take place all the time. The everyday word we use for it is 'fluency'.

In essence, all the restless urges of the body and contained and channelled through a highly specific rational vocabulary, in a way which is closely analogous to the process through which the restless urges of the mouth - which we read about in Augustine - are constrained and channeled, at the moment of language acquisition, and trained to take the form a specific language. Our ability to produce rational utterances as speaking adults, then, is determined by a prior processes of disciplining the mouth. From earliest childhood we are taught to make and recognized these sounds and sound combinations and not those. This process of making meaningful sounds can only function if it becomes so conditioned in us that it becomes entirely automatic, a second-nature. The surest way to fail as a speaker, as anybody has discovered at one time or another, is to become suddenly self-aware, conscious of fact that you are speaking while in the very act of speaking. But the more we speak, the more fluent we become; and the more we recognize ourselves to be fluent, the more we care about our fluency, and the more we work to develop of it even further. It's an addiction. This is something which is true of our ability with language, and the same is true of our ability with musical instruments or our ability to discern quality wines.

This process of training the mouth, or another other part of the body, so that it can function automatically, is what Foucault calls a Discipline. Foucault is famous, amongst other reasons, for arguing that our own very highly disciplined modern society, which is to say our own highly educated society, for all intents and purposes functions as one enormous prison. If we don't recognized ourselves to be under lock and shackled constantly, that is probably because we have proven ourselves to be so obedient that we no longer needs walls and warden; we have, in effect, become our own jailers. And the total process of performing constrained, channeled and rationally directed actions, is what Foucault calls a Discourse, precisely because in such activities the entire body has been set into action as if it were one comprehensive vocal apparatus. To be the Subject of a Discourse is to act out one's identity, to perform one's duty, as automatically and unselfconsciously as if one were engaged in a casual but passionate conversion, though here one would use not just ones mouth and ears but one's entire body.

And of course Foucault's contention is that beginning around 1215 we begin to think this way about our entire lives. Or at least most of us do. Because there will always be those individuals who, for whatever reason (physical, mental, emotional, social -though, for Foucault, there is hardly a difference between these categories) are fundamentally unable or unwilling to undergo the primary act of recognition through which one takes upon a fixed identity. Consequently, these people will be forever beyond the bounds of discipline. They will become the marginalized figures, the deviants, the heretics and saints, the "others" in terms of which normal society understands itself, precisely as "we" who are not "them".