Confess: Sexuality as Scientific Discourse

Having introduced the genealogy, the project proceeds now to an investigation of a particular genealogy: History of Sexuality, Volume One. Within this volume, Foucault introduces what was to be a six volume project on sexuality – a sexuality defined in terms of and relations to power. First, this section looks at his thesis in this first volume by exploring the repressive hypothesis, the incitement to discourse as a confession, and finally the role sex plays in identity before exposing the role of power in each of these operations. Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis the idea that “one great central mechanism destined to say no” controls human sexuality (History 12). He refers to the common notion that societies require sex to be in some way private and forbidden. Indeed, the idea that sex does not present itself as a suitable hobby or topic for discussion persists. But Foucault finds that contrary to this common understanding, that society seeks to control and limit sexuality and the discussion of sexuality, power actually elicits sexual discourse.
But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail (18).

It is clear enough that Foucault does not see a privatization of sex, a localization of sex and discourse to the bedroom, but instead sees institutional efforts to solicit discussion. To defend this idea, he refers to several examples including the text My Secret Life, the narrative of a French farm hand and finally developments within the Christian confessional. My Secret Life describes in great detail the sexual habits and practices of its author. It seeks to leave nothing out while including even the most trivial of details. “The guiding principle for the strangest of these [sexual] practices…the fact of recounting them all, and in detail…had been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries” (22). Foucault uses the work, written anonymously, as a symbol for an age in which though explicit sexual discourse appeared to be outlawed, it was also called for by society. To compliment this text, he recounts the story of a French farm hand mentioned above who paid a young girl to pleasure him. The simple man was a traveling laborer, working for food and often sleeping in barns. Yet his small sexual encounter caused a stir in France, requiring the assistance of lawyers, investigators, physicians and psychiatrists.
One can be fairly certain that during this same period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this bit of theater with their solemn discourse…our society…assembled around these timeless gestures, their barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing and investigating (32).

So even as the school teacher reprimands children for discussing the sexual incident at school, other elements in the institution cannot refrain from extensive discussion. Not only that, but the psychological inquiry into the farm hand purported to offer truth.
Foucault sees similar developments within the Christian confessional.
According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: everything had to be told (19).

Not only has there been an increase in sexual discourse but also the linkage of sexual discourse to confession: “This technique [confession] might have remained tied to the destiny of Christian spirituality if it had not been supported and relayed by other mechanisms. In the first place, by a ‘public interest’…a power mechanism that functioned in a way that discourse on sex…became essential” (23). At first a confession can be understood as an admission of guilt. On the one hand this implies that the action confessed is a crime. On the other, it implies that something can be gained from the admission of such an offense. In other words, confession becomes a path towards truth. When applied to sexual discourse, the model of confession convinces that when the confessant admits to the truth of his deviations he will find some sort of liberation. “The confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth…Western man has become a confessing animal” (59). For Foucault, this is just the sort of activity to which the will to knowledge and power would be intrinsic to.
Of what significance is the shift of sexual discourse towards the confessional? By positing the idea that sexual discourse as a confession in some way reveals truth, it simultaneously becomes a source of identity. The truth not only of the sexual act appears but along with it comes a glimpse into the personhood of the confessor. “Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth…it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness” (77). The truth kept secret by sex offers a connection to the very identity and being of the person. Sex therefore cannot be separated from the entirety of a person’s being and identity. According to the West, no part of a person’s composition is isolated from his sexuality.
Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected [by his sexuality]. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principles; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret which gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him (43).

Such a mentality lead to what Foucault calls a “new specification of individuals” that without explicit acknowledgement allows sexuality to permeate each part of someone’s personhood. Words describing such a relationship between sex and identity might include presence, immanence and organic. It can be seen within the text that such terms will also characterize power, which is not coincidentally the driving force behind developments in the use of sexuality.