The Discursive Journey of Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure: The Key Lessons from Michel Foucault's the History of Sexuality

The 21st Century of the civilization is the after-effect of all too proliferations of Rights; the pleasure of invoking rights, the pleasure of talking rights, and stimulative discourse has reached to its highest culmination as the "methodological individualism" (David Hume) is reigning the order and disorder of the day, whereas the rhetoric of right is more meaningful and substantial in discourse rather than in reality. The civil society, the champion moralists, and the master writers of our age, are struggling in a webnet of progressive classical theorists, mimicking and simulating the traditional slogans of liberation and resistance; but liberation from what? and freedom from whom? 

They are, in fact, confused about who are their enemies? If they find none, they like to produce one, blame one, shift their responsibilities, the moral and immoral culpability. They are the champions of morality; but they didn't touch the structural problems, just pass away alongside and beneath the culture of "atomic individualism", and "mass consumerism" (Adorno and Horkheimer). They formulate the idea of the theories of transcendental justice, at the cost of the formulation of a vast domain of injustices, which are produced in the "order of things".Their burden of morality is unbearable, hypocritical, and repressive. 

When Michel Foucault started to work on the History of Sexuality, the European Society was quite a different landscape to live in, nonetheless, the Victorian morality was the substratum of the culture, law, medicine, and the discourse on madness, etc. In 17th century of the Europe, there was a prevalent repressive hypothesis that the Sex was repressed in that culture, it was silenced, coerced, concealed, sanitized in the practices of institutions, in the systemization of language, prohibited through the technology of law and power, institutionalized the order of sex in the family and the disorder of perverseness, brothels found its place as a part of marginality in the nuclei of family, the normal order of pleasure and procreation. 

Michel Foucault was quite aware about all too mobile and proliferated discourses, which produced the "deployment of sexuality", underneath the "deployment of alliance" in form of family. He used his genealogical method, developed in Archeology of Knowledge, to extract the marginal discourse, which was hidden there in the mainstream discourse of the Puritanism, what Christianity, be it Catholicism or Protestantism, brought into the play with the method of  Confession. In 1215, Lateran Council started to publish confessions of sin; for the Human's society had awe-inspiring zeal to confess the sin, to confess the deviance, to confess the normal and abnormal sexuality. From St. Augustine to J.J. Rousseau, the literary tradition of the confession found its chief place in the mainstream discourse of the literary and philosophical world. The 17th century of the European civilization did not repress the sex, as claimed by Michel Foucault, rather proliferated the whole range of discourse on sexuality, and in later centuries, the "scientia sexualis" (Science of Sex) emerged, unlike "ars erotica" (Art of Sex), which was prevalent in Greece and Indian Civilization, in which the master used to deliver the sermon on sex. Sex, in those ancient civilizations was a way of life, a reflection of pleasure and happiness. In the 18th century of the Europe, the sexuality was liberated from the Christian traditions, to produce the whole range of scientific discourse, an object for medicine, jurisprudence, clinical, and therapeutic discourses. Law as a tool was used to classify; what is licit and illicit, the prohibited degree for the marriage, the grounds and the pre-conditions for the marriage and divorce, and the purpose was attached to it as procreation, the order of sex was naturalized as per the nature and against the nature, venereal diseases were recognized, heredity and communicable diseases were introduced into the discourse of sexuality. The sexual pathology was attached to the blood, and a discursive genealogy was traced out to search the pervert, deviant, and hysterical being in the lineage of family, so as to castigate and institutionalize the order of sex, and to keep the deviant as an object, for the supervision and discursive care. 

In the 19th century of the Europe, Sexuality emerged as a distinct discipline, divorced from the medicine, the Pyscho-analytical tradition, in 20th century, led by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, etc., normalized and abnormalized the sex in a knowledge-power relationship between doctors and patients, though successfully dismantled the genealogical discourse of pervert, so as to humanize the clinical discourse; the modernity produced a vast archive of "speaking sexuality" within the juridico-discursive domain of power and knowledge. The "petition to know", "the will to knowledge", and the "truth in Sex and truth of sex" do not remain limited to normal and abnormal sexuality, rather it entered into the discourse of "biopower" in the 20th century of the Europe. In the domain of biopower, life was subjected to microscopic and macroscopic powers, the power of surveillance and the regulatory power on the populations, gender, and the policy of Eugenics to produce the higher race, which was used by Hitler, as a new method to shape the biological and racial discourse. Life, in that sense, was expunged from the Biology to enter into a political and economic discourse, whereas life does not remain life as such, but as a strategic tool in order to produce and to remain within the scattered relationships of power, knowledge, and the discursive pleasure. The 20th century of the Europe was not inspired with the traditional aspect of sovereignty, whereas the monarch had authority to kill its subject in the larger public interest, rather its interest was to optimize life, preserve and regulate it, to sanitize it, so as to make it as an efficient labour power, to create "useful but docile body". Power was no longer conceived merely as a prohibitory power, or negative power, authored by monarch, rather the constructive or positive power in form of law, custom, tradition, institutional patterns, conventions and behaviours, family relationship, etc. Power emerged as mobile, diffused, and transient forms, in nature of order and resistance, the non-conventional dots of power, shifted from the centre of circle, which governed and controlled every bit of professional and social relationships. It was not simply a matter of discourse like what is being said, rather who is saying was considered to be the most important aspect of discourse. The "technology of power" witnessed two parallel discourses in the progress, the "deployment of alliance" in sense of organized family; the order of sex, and the whole range of the "deployment of sexuality"; the order or disorder of sexuality, which produced, in a way, the "masturbated child, hysterical women, perverted adult, and the Malthusian couples for the sake of population control". In the nuclei of family, the incest relationship became the order of the day, though it was silenced in the mainstream discourse on the deployment of alliance; the institutionalized brothels became the mirror of the production of normal and abnormal sexuality. The commodified sex became a replacement of aristocratic blood, it was, in fact, the truth of new homo sapiens, and their zeal to change the life energies into an order, and to exclude the vast practices of sexual practices as its deviance; pleasure and pathology, marriage and brothel, or normal and pervert were dichotomized in a power-knowledge relationship. Earlier, this transformation took place in the big aristocratic families, because they had privilege to consult the psychiatrist or doctors, but in the 19th and 20th century of the Europe, it became a paradigm for the poor and marginalized as well, to embrace the order of sex and the disorder of sexuality. The discursive pleasure of power and truth was hidden beneath the science of flesh, which was proliferated as a normal and abnormal sexuality.

The recovery of society from the discursive mentality is not apparently visible in our age. All too discourse on body and over body is the fulcrum of modernity, in which, right to have sexual autonomy has been recognized, and has become the juridical discourse all around the globe, but beneath the juridico-discursive apparatus, the whole ranges of the sexual repressions have been concealed and normalized. Sex is still a taboo in psychic reality. It cannot be addressed at the level of pathology. Its structural arche-type needs to be investigated. All we need is, not to formalize, normalize, or systemize the order of sex, and the disorder of sexuality. Let it be the expression of life energy, a pleasure of its own, a desire of nature, which cannot be teleologically attached to procreation. We, "the other Victorians", must retrieve life from the trap of power, knowledge, and pleasure. After all bliss is not at all discursive, may be, pleasure is!