July 20, 2005
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.
In this work Michel Foucault describes the deployment of sexuality as one of the most important technologies of power designed to control and discipline human life in post-Enlightenment Western society. For Foucault power, broadly defined, is the multiplicity of immanent forces which are both constitutive of and constituted by each other through a variety of conjunctions and contradictions and which sustain and are sustained by the structures of the state, the law, and various hegemonic social groups. It is in the final section of the book (Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life) that Foucault addresses how race and racism are tied up with the deployment of sexuality as a technique of power. Foucault traces the genealogy of power in its transition from the sovereign’s right to inflict death upon his subjects into the diffuse power over the administration of life in post-Enlightenment society, which is exercised through a variety of social institutions, among them institutions of education. This transition is also formulated as one from the law to “the norm,” in which social institutions become a chief instrument in the instillation and regulation of normative social activities which ultimately operate to the benefit of power. Foucault also notes that under the regime of sexuality social institutions support power by functioning to segregate and hierarchize society.
The shift from right of death to power over life, from law to norm, is further elaborated by Foucault as what he terms a shift from the “thematics of blood” towards an “analytics of sex.” Foucault posits racism as a retrogressive return to the thematics of blood, a retrogression employed by power in order to lend historical weight to the revitalization of a political power which is now properly deployed through the regulation of sexuality. He offers Nazism and the Jewish Holocaust as the example par excellence of such a move. The importance of Foucault’s theory for the study of race and pedagogy rests in his claim that the institution of education is one of the primary mechanisms in the technology of power which instills and regulates social norms, including practices of segregation and social hierarchization. Though the deeper implications of this work for race theory are unclear, it is a promising area for further exploration.
From the text:
“They [social institutions] also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.”
And later:
“While it is true that the analytics of sexuality and the symbolics of blood were grounded in two very distinct regimes of power, in actual fact the passage from one to the other did not come about (any more than did these powers themselves) without overlappings, interactions, and echoes. In different ways, the preoccupation with blood and the law has for nearly two centuries haunted the administration of sexuality. […] Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form): it was then that a whole politics of settlement, family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.”
See in addition Foucault’s other work; while all of Foucault’s work is concerned with the power of institutions, Discipline and Punish is particularly apt to this discussion.
For further reading on Foucault, education, and race, see the following bibliography (particularly notable works are marked with an asterisk and may be followed by a brief annotation in italics):
*Ball, Stephen J., ed. Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
The first compilation to address at length the implications of Foucaultian theory for education.
Caputo, John and Mark Yount, eds. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions.
University Park: The Pennsylvia State University Press, 1993.
Marshall, James. D. Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
Middleton, Sue. Disciplining Sexuality: Foucault, Life Histories, and Education.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1998.
Popkewitz, Thomas S. and Marie Brennan, eds. Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse,
Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College Press,
1998.
*Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
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