Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 47
[M]y main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes,
and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and
individual modes of behaviour, the paths that give it access to the rare or
scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday
pleasure—all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and
invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the
“polymorphous techniques of power.” And finally, the essential aim will not
be to determine whether these discursive productions and these effects of
power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, or on the contrary falsehoods
designed to conceal that truth, but rather to bring out the “will to knowledge”
that serves as both their support and their instrument (1980a, pp. 11, 12).
Foucault does not ask: “What is the will to know” He inquires how it practices. His
history of the Catholic pastoral and of the sacrament of penance illustrates
confession as incitement to discourse, a process which he traces to the beginning of
the seventeenth century. This transformation of desire into discourse was expanded
from the ascetic to the general community, from the monks to all Christians.
According to Foucault, this is also the similarity between the seventeenth century
pastoral and the writing of de Sade. Truth is simply a medium for the expression of
sexuality, where confession constitutes subjects. But Foucault does not only
catalogue and ridicule the foolishness and naiveté of Victorian sexual discourse: he
aims “to locate the procedures by which that will to knowledge regarding sex, which
characterizes the modern Occident, caused the rituals of confession to function
within the norms of scientific regularity” (1980a, p. 65). The sexual confession was
inscribed in scientific discourse through the inscription of speech as an object of
scientific interpretation, the understanding of sex as omni-causal, the idea of the
truth of sex as hidden from the subject, a clandestine, dark secret to be extracted by
interrogation. Truth lay not in the confession, but in analysis, codification,
interpretation. Confession was medicalized, sex was diagnosed, not damned. This
has been the one-hundred-and-fifty-year process of production of a scientia sexualis
and discursive practice. In the West, the ars erotica is only latent, it continues to
exist only in the pleasure of analysis, in all senses. The injunction to confess is the
command to be free. The critical importance of this position as a critique of previous
scholarship is the argument that there can be no freedom, truth, or pleasure without
their political history. Foucault mocks these absolutes of traditional philosophy:
Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to
the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional
themes in philosophy, which “a political history of truth” would have to
overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—but
that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power (1980a,
p. 60).
Foucault does not measure levels of repression or permission, rather, he shows how
power creates lines of penetration. For example, a medical regime advanced,
multiplied, and chased desire to the limits, thereby extending and expanding power’s