10 pages paper. Queer, Lesbian.

ENGL122N: Queer Aesthetics Notes: Michel Foucault: Abnormal ([1974-1975] 2003), with emphasis on Chapter 11

Even though "queer identity" is now routinely visible (and audible), as we saw in relation to any number of contemporary digital video works (The Internet's music video "Cocaine," or Perfume Genius' “Hood” or dating shows like MTV's Are you the One?), still the expression or depiction of sexual identity routinely incites questions, charges, allegations, anger, or concern in relation to "norms": what is normal behavior, and how it should appear, and how it should be distributed, and what it can and can, should or should not, communicate. Queer identity "goes viral", then, even as "queer actions" are still seen as "contagious" for legal or medical reasons. How does "normal" come to have legal and medical standards attached to it? If gender and sex difference and variegation are still not even clearly understood, how is it that some kinds of gender or sex variation are considered normal and others not? How do we even understand what is abnormal and what is normal sexually? How do we say that an individual is abnormal, as opposed to an event, an act, or a statement? Can an identity be abnormal, and if so, when did it become possible to diagnose personal identity as either normal or abnormal?

For Michel Foucault, one of the most influential 20th century historians of social institutions like the medical clinic or the prison, as well as of sexuality and subjectivity, abnormal sexuality depends (of course) on the prior diagnosis of an abnormal individual. Without standards of what is abnormal, you can't determine that someone fits those diagnostic criteria. What is abnormal, then, depends on knowledge about the body being formulated and categorized in relationship to medical or legal institutions. That sexuality can be claimed to be abnormal indicates that these criteria are historical, specific to certain times and places, even if they are globally influential. To say that this or that bodily action or behavior is abnormal means that knowledges about what is normal and what is not have been put in place by particular individuals, institutions, and authorities.

Thus, before “sexual” identity can be diagnosed as abnormal, the idea of an “abnormal individual” must already be established, but this idea and its definition arise in certain places and not others. Foucault sees the claim of “abnormality” as evidence of the way that medicine and law have interacted in Western, industrializing cultures, even as these cultures had imperial reach and far-flung colonies. Sexual abnormality, for Foucault, would finally be understood in relation to racial categorizations that produced racism, which also had legal and medical knowledges to validate it. The sexually “abnormal individual” then is someone who, committing some act which must be explained and accounted for before the legal authorities, calls for a medical knowledge to be invoked. And this knowledge is based on not only the acts of the individual, but what the individual can say, or can be made to say, about them. What is different about sexual categorization, then, is that ensuring that sexual norms are being upheld requires individuals to become witnesses of their own supposed transgressions, reifying individually and subjectively the overarching legal and medical categorizations that determine that the individual is abnormal. The invert, or deviant, or pervert, must disavow his or her own sex-gender variation as variation and instead avow it as inversion, deviance, or perversion. In order to be categorized as abnormal, the person thought guilty of sexual abnormality must in some way or another, confess what would otherwise be sexual variation as legal transgression or medical symptom.

Foucault argues in this chapter that constructions norm and abnormality in a diffuse network of social relations encompassing law and medicine are the basis for transformations in the way psychiatry understands its object. Key to these transformations are the growing psychiatrization of the child and of childhood, where ideas about “development” and “dysfunction” are increasingly understood in terms of instinct or illness that can be judged as normal or pathological, often in response to a family's fears of responsibility for its own childrens' acts. Thus, Sophie Adam is somehow implicated in Charles Jouy's sexual assult of her; he is found mentally incompent, but not legally responsible; she is placed in an asylum for reasons that don't seem entirely clear other than that Jouy's rape of her has demonstrated her to have experienced some problem of normal sexual development from which the village must be safeguarded. Meanwhile, Jouy himself is found to be an imbecile, based not on some invisible instinct towards aggression but on the basis of his physical characteristics, which Foucault suggests are nothing more than those of someone who was “the last of workers” - the person who would do the jobs others could afford to

reject, for one quarter of the pay along with a few necessities like clothes. Jouy's body, then, was mapped, compared (falsely) to presumptive bodily norms, and made a medical subject of. In the process, because of his imbecility, he could not be legally charged for rape (which in any case Sophie also seems to have been found partially responsible for, even if in only de facto terms). (approx. pp. 292 – 302). Meanwhile, psychiatry has become even more powerful on the basis of its ability to diagnose childhood and adulthood irrespective of manifestations of madness: as Foucault argues, the new psychiatry of the mid-nineteenth century no longer needs actual symptoms of madness if it can instead claim childhood itself as a model of norms and development for behavior (303). Taking childhood as a primary object of study allowed what Foucault calls the “generalization” of psychiatry, whereby it becomes a science of “behavioral and structural infantilism” (307). Making the appearance of illness and treatments specific to these symptoms secondary also allow the new psychiatry it to cohere with, and contribute to, and benefit from, other sciences like neurology and general biology (306): “Around 1850 – 1870, psychiatry gave up at once delirium, mental alienation, reference to the truth, and then illness” (308). Now it considers behavior on the basis of normative development mappable from the retroactive construction of the child forward to the developmental behavioral achievements or dysfunctions of the adult. Thus departing from any empirical basis and heading towards the diagnosis of hidden, unconscious behavior blocking or shoring up normative behavior, psychoanalysis is just a short step away, presumably.

In this process, psychiatry and psychological sciences will come to rely on a practice of confession. Ultimately, these practices of legal and medical confession grew, says Foucault, out of the ways that various different branches of Christian pastoral practice allowed for sins to be dismissed or repented. The remission of sin by the individual depends historically on the possibility of “confession.” Psychiatry would transform spiritual, legal, or medical confession by making diagnoses and cures available and effective on the basis of re-interpreting the confessions of the psychiatric patient herself.

This kind of power by which a network of discourse changes plays out, then, on the body, where by pleasure circulates or floats through social contexts, and it requires certain kinds of knowledges that map or remap the relations of instinct and its mechanisms, economies of pleasure, and development or dysfunction (imbecility, etc.) (305): it is "biopolitical" and works through figures of knowledge, or "epistemes."

“Episteme”; a figure of knowledge as produced in historical periods; “biopolitics” rises from a prior “anatomo-politics”; anatomo-politics has to do with the power of a sovereign (king or queen etc.) over the bodies of their subjects; biopolitics arises out of anatomo-politics but has to do with the power that a nation-state invests in the lives of its citizens or national residents. This characterization of different modes of power that arise historically is a different way of looking at the transformation from states dominated by (usually religiously-affiliated) aristocracies to "modern" states where state leadership is a matter of some form of representative politics or authoritarian dictatorship. It was a controversial idea: for Foucault, similar mechanisms of biopower can be seen operating in both "representational democracies" and dictatorships alike.

In Abnormal, Foucault argues that sexual abnormality becomes apparent in relation to three institutional “discourses” which rise or fall in relation to one another, operating together or diverging over long periods of historical time. These three discourses are those of:

1. the sacred and the spiritual, in the form of the church, providing the roots of confession. 2. power and the law, given in the form of the judiciary and penal systems, providing

frameworks for punishment. 3. and truth and knowledge of the body, given in the form of medical knowledge; providing the

ability to say what is good conduct in relation to standards of health.

Religion, law, medicine: discourses of confession, punishment, and health all interact to provide a determination of abnormal individuals, and any determinations of abnormal individuals all also present the need for some idea, however inconsistent, of sexual abnormality to become operative.

Explaining the convergence of psychiatry and the judicial system, Foucault claims that these mechanisms began to function together, in a decisive way, in the middle of the 19th century for Western nation-states.

On what basis does this interThe judiciary system is a system of power, a power mechanism built around punishing. The psychiatric discipline is a mechanism of knowledge, built around constructing knowledges of how people recognize their own behavior and conduct, and how they see that conduct. These “mechanisms” as he calls them would be not simply institutions on the one hand and ideologies on the other, but modes of producing truth in relation to bodies. So, Foucault says, (138) “the power mechanism -- the penal system with its need for knowledge” and “the knowledge mechanism – psychiatry with its need for power” became conjoined.locking come to happen? These two systems relate to one another on the question of “instinct,” which they have in common. In the earlier 18th and 19th centuries, the treatment of social disorder had been based around ideas of particular acts which were alien to the person who committed them, and from the common social consensus in which people lived. Still earlier, states had confronted crimes which constituted transgression against god or royalty. But in the mid-19th century, states began to be faced with monstrous acts of murder that were no longer transgressive for any particular reason or any particular symbolic value. He describes the Henriette Cornier case, in which a neighbor murders a child, and says that it was only “an idea” which brought her to this act. Faced with such apparently motiveless yet horrifying, murderous acts, psychiatry began to expand its power, not only analyzing the fact of someone’s crime in relation to what would be either a rational regime of behavior commonly understood, or the value of life as given by god or king, and now began to analyze the “nature” of the criminal’s crime in relation to their identity as a person: they are now thought to have possessed some instinct for crime, and that supposed propensity for crime now would be pathologized and studied on the basis of a life-long identity developing, unseen, out of instinct, from the time of childhood, and manifesting as crime. In this way, psychiatry begins to discover the roots of madness and criminality in childhood, and in so doing expands the fields of what it can study and the knowledge it can produce; it lends these new epistemological procedures and potentials to the penal system, which in turn lends power to psychiatric medicine, so that the system of punishment can gain the legitimacy of the truth that psychiatry can produce on the basis of its discovery of biological, developmental instinct. (138 – 163)

As a result, by 1875, three emergent frames of reference for psychiatry become clear. This period is approximately the time when studies of homosexuality, as such, appear – Westphal undertakes the first study of sexual “inverts” as a medical problem in Germany in 1870; the masochist is diagnosed between 1875 and 1880 (310). What are these three frames of reference in which sexual abnormality was diagnosed?

1. First, Foucault argues, an administrative frame of reference appears, where madness no longer appears as a departure from common truth, but against the background of a restraining order, i.e., a judicial demand. The courts develop away from the monarchic model, and towards a model of public administration.

2. Second, a familial frame of reference has developed, so that madness is understood in relation to feelings, affects, and the obligatory relationship of parent and child. The family comes to monitor the child’s behavior as the state comes to offer punishments for child delinquency. The example that Foucault gives here is that of masturbation, which since the 17th century had become an act which parents must monitor against.

3. Finally, a political frame of reference has appeared, in which madness appears “against a background of stability and social immobility” (156). Since public administration and the family structure now provided an assumption of “stability,” anything which disturbed this stability would appear as pathological. Psychiatry now finds a new set of objects which it must try to correct.

In this way, psychiatry and law begin to take over, in the middle of the 19th century, concerns which had previously fallen to the church to sort out: the relationship of sovereign power, legal agency, and individual bodily conduct became problematized in specific ways.

Sexuality is now one of the ways that bodily conduct now could be understood in relation to “instinct,” that is, involuntary behavior. (This seems important, since the entire question of homosexuality still tends to be framed as either a voluntary behavior that may be socially acceptable or legally

permissible, or not, or as involuntary behavior that may be controlled or not.) Sex crimes, now understood as acts resulting from pathological instincts contributing to a sustained, individual identity, take over from the idea of carnal sin or mental alienation.

The implication is this: what Foucault describes in his later study, The History of Sexuality, as the “confused category” of sodomy is not simply borrowed from theories of moral sin to help to define medical and legal normality in the nineteenth century; instead, what the moral violation “sodomy” names is re- framed: from a problem of act and event, the way in which "sodomy" had been understood in the 18th century (as in the sweeps driving men out of the Netherlands, or in the first, casual sexual encounters between Claas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobz in Proteus), to a problem of instinct and identity, resulting in the invention of the medical category of "homosexuality" in the mid-19th century (more like the later scenes in Proteus, in which Claas and Rijkhaart struggle with whether to confess, knowing that admitting a gay identity will only subject them to further punishment, but also knowing that if they don't confess, they may hurt each other by neglecting the depth of their feelings for one another).

Thus, for Foucault, from the point of the mid-nineteenth century, it wasn't simply that an act or series of acts by individual persons might be subject to more or less ad hoc policing in the name of maintaining order under a sovereign ruler, but rather that an entire identity-population would be pathologized as "sexually disordered" in the name of public administration and family health. Biopolitics operates on populations, in states where techniques for calculating, say, population demographics, are being deployed in the service of law or medicine.

But how are such crimes of abnormal sexuality supposed to be identified, if their basis is not in a particular act but instead in an identity? Sex becomes something that a person must confess: here, psychiatry takes over from religion the expressive power of confession (168). In previous times, madness, or, the abnormal individual had been a concern either of transgression against the royal, or against god. The sacramental structure of penance, in the Middle Ages and lasting into our own day, Foucault argues, had fixed features. First, it is through confession that sins are forgiven; remission of sins occurs through confession. One must confess, and one must confess everything. “Nothing must be left out.” By 1975, the time in which Foucault delivered this research, he can identify a range of disciplinary practices in which sexuality now can be seen to rely on confession.

“Confession and freedom of expression face each other and complement each other. If we go to the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, or sexologist so frequently to consult them about our sexuality, and to confess the nature of our sexuality, it is precisely to the extent that all kinds of mechanisms everywhere – in advertising, books, novels, films, and widespread pornography – invite the individual to pass from this daily expression of sexuality to the institutional and expensive confession of his sexuality to the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, or sexologist. Today, we have, then, a figure in which the ritualization of confession has its counterpart and correlate in a proliferating discourse on sexuality” (170).

In other words, there exist economies, both monetary and affective, of sexual expression. It’s not at all the case that repression of sexuality indicates there is less sexual activity, rather, repression is part of the way that sexuality is produced and the way it proliferates - through the discourse of the psychiatrist's office as well as through intimate acts in private settings or in other institutions (schools, etc.). On the one hand, we must confess our sexuality as the record of a specific kind of problem. On the other hand, there is more and more circulation of materials referring to or representing sexuality as problematic. These two apparently opposed phenomena actually are generated together, according a larger normalization of the “instincts” which occurred as the need to punish and the need to diagnose led to an increasing integration of the operations of legal and medical systems.

Historically, this long-developing normalization can be seen as deriving from the late Medieval period into the modern period. Within these periods, we see different pathological figures rise in importance and fade away. Foucault describes these figures who rise and fall in cultural importance as discourses of normalization shift between church, state, and medicine: the witch (as the bad Christian in Medieval times; the great monster, he who commits heinous crimes against the state, and so is destroyed in

the great symbolic spectacles of torture and mutilation of early modernity in the 17th century); the little masturbator, or the recalcitrant child in the 18th century; and finally, in the middle 19th century, the proliferation of such abnormal figures as the “pervert.” Now, people who formerly would have been treated as committing acts of sexual deviance or transgression as sodomites, mollies, or other gender and sex deviants, are treated as pathological identities, instead of as people with proclivities or “tendencies” for certain acts or pleasures. Law and medicine cooperate to make “instinct” a central axis through which they can interact. With the figure of the invert, especially, it is clear that sex crimes focus on the expression of pleasure – an “instinct” for “unnatural pleasures” is pathologized, against the idea of a “normal,” “stable” family home.

Foucault thus argues that by the period of the mid-19th century which he is discussing here, the problem of sexual pleasure has become newly understood as having a relation to the economic and social productivity of the family unit. The family is a cultural site where pathology is produced, if the family is not carefully monitored by the state, and if the child is not carefully monitored by the family. This point is important for Foucault – it is not simply that power works top down, as ideological structures of the state controlling people’s thoughts or beliefs; rather, disciplines of power and knowledge circulate through the social fabric, and enable the rise of particular discourses and bring about the importance of particular figures whose cases exemplify the ways old problems pass away and new problems appear.

“The act of generation or reproduction is just one of the forms in which pleasure, the economic principle intrinsic to the sexual instinct, is in fact satisfied or produced. For that reason, as producer of a pleasure not intrinsically linked to generation, the sexual instinct can give rise to a series of behaviors that are not governed by generation” (286).

One 19th century theorist of abnormality Foucault cites provides a list: “Greek love,” “bestiality,” “attraction to a naturally insensitive object,” “attraction to the human corpse,” as “producers of ‘pleasure’” (286). Homosexual acts here are a “primitive” holdover that is grouped together with sexual fetishization of objects, necrophilia, and other violations of “natural” instincts. Of course, people still “argue” today that once we legalize "gay marriage," we might as well allow people to marry animals!

An important conclusion that Foucault draws here is in this lecture is that as “instinct” is normalized, pleasure takes on a role never before understood in such a specific way – pleasure becomes an object of medical investigation that can be psychiatrized. And so, in the late Victorian age, the theory of pleasure occurring outside of familial reproduction (against the new backdrop of Victorian sciences such as thermodynamics, psychiatry, evolution, genetics, eugenics, and others, although Foucault mentions mostly psychiatry in relation to the rise of eugenics) comes to be understood as a problem of degeneration. This new understanding of crime as degeneration has become a matter for the law to sort out, if psychiatry can deliver over the required medical knowledge of the pathology (286).

Finally, in the late 19th century, there arose a new notion of degeneration, arising from the linkage of medical knowledge and political power, also fitting into an ethnic model of racism, and it supports the rise of a new medico-social discipline: eugenics. At the end of the 19th century, Foucault argues, the pathologization of pleasure goes along with the capability to diagnose degeneracy, and both of these possibilities arise after instinct is first taken up by legal discourses and medical discourses. And so, psychoanalysis results on the one hand, to treat abnormal pleasure; and eugenics arises on the other, to treat abnormal genetics.

Today, eugenics has little "official" support in Western scientific academies; it has today passed away as a racist pseudo-science. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis has been giving way to pharmaceutical treatments such as anti-depressants or hormone therapy, to new forms of "integrative medicine" combining scientific lab testing with alternative "neutraceuticals" (nutritional supplements) or to new forms of medical talk such as “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” none of which are very concerned at all with anything resembling confession or self-witnessing in the way that psychoanalysis or much psychology had been previously. In the midst of this recent set of changes, The American Psychological Association depathologized homosexuality in 1974; homosexuality in the US was effectively decriminalized by a 2003 Supreme Court decision (allowing for the “gay marriage” debate to achieve critical mass). A new horizon

for the functioning of power and knowledge in and as sexuality has emerged. What materials or material forces constitute this new horizon?

Since Foucault delivered these lectures on abnormality, the human genome has been decoded, the internet has been commercialized, and genomic sciences have become cybernetically oriented. More broadly, contemporary genomics has become a transdisciplinary science in fact reaching a level of descriptive power at which it can define historical, present, and future possibilities for entire communities, nations, societies, civilizations, even technologies. On the other hand, advances in gender and sexuality understanding now allow the body to be understood in relation to gender not evidenced in anatomical form; and medical technologies have made feasible surgical and hormonal changes of gender expression on a relatively widespread basis. The result is that a body not correctly or adequately matched to the subject’s “brain” (actually, soul, affect, or desire?) produces a now cataloged condition of gender identity disphoria treatable by gender reassignment techniques (of course these surgeries date to the earlier part of the 20th century, and Foucault was well aware of this possibility). The interlocking of law and psychiatry has now begun to be more complex as DNA analysis specifically and genomics and computation more broadly provide the means by which disease is diagnosed, crimes are solved, history is understood, and both new organisms and new machines are designed. Foucault’s notion, broadly, was that between the 18th and 19th centuries, a new form of politics replaced an older form in Western cultures: biopolitics, the politics of maintaining (or disinvesting) state interest in entire populations of people, replaced an earlier “anatomo- politics” that revolved around the figure of the sovereign. Foucault’s goals are clear in laying out his study of abnormality: ours, he thinks, is the age of “biopolitics,” an age in which the very processes of “life itself” become political instruments.

But in turn, it seems that genomic analyses as well as simulation-oriented network cultures produce a profoundly new temporal investment that goes beyond the biological life of the subject. On the one hand, the point of genomic analysis is in effect to diagnose an individual’s evolutionary history in the language of DNA analysis; and on the other hand, the deployment of the internet on a global basis means that entirely new behaviors whose temporality is mediological rather than phenomenological or biological result in “viral video,” internet contagion, and so forth, not only enhancing the importance of the embodied, biopolitical subject, but also breaching a new kind of behavior that only exists in what we might call time- intensive hyperindustrial forms and processes. Just as anatomo-politics was replaced, but never entirely displaced, by biopolitics, so now a new biopolitics that determines– perhaps, a “biopolitics of epochality”? - compounds and confuses the biopolitical developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Perhaps the transsexual of the mid-to-late 20th century was the new homosexual of the 19th century, whose appearance in medical and legal regimes prompted new medical and legal responses; and further, perhaps the transgender person of the late 20th and early 21st century becomes the now prominently "visible" analog of the gay, lesbian, or bisexual person resisting the medicalization of gender as political identity, just as an earlier generation of queer subjects resisted the medicalization of sexuality by coming “out of the closet” in the mid-20th century - although now, this resistance happens while additionally coordinating (or dis-coordinating) their sexed, gendered appearance both “online” and “IRL.”