Lecture in Social Theory; introduction to biopower

By Russell Cole

To begin, you might take a moment’s pause when I mention that Foucault – who developed the analytic, Bio-power, which is designed to make sense out of social power in Modernity – had originally set out to study the development of sexuality.

One’s first inclination is to presume that sexuality has remained constant throughout the scope of the history of human existence. This might be true with respect to the purely biological aspects of sexuality, allowing for reproduction. Although, even such an assumption might not be entirely supportable, since subversive biology has introduced into the mix various gradients – what are called morphs – which constitute additional sexual classifications, which – despite their androgyny, in many cases – continue to provide important functions within the inner-workings of genetic populations.

In order to dislodge many preconceptions of sexuality that you might possess, which translate into expectations that sexual identities have been a constant throughout the whole of the human experience, I should point out that Hellenistic Culture did not make distinctions among sexual archetypes. They did not search for a deep, hidden truth whose revelation would lead to an attribution upon the Being of a particular sexual type.

Men were simply utilizing pleasures of the body; sometimes with other men; sometimes with pubescent boys; other times with women, such as their wives or the prostitutes who populated certain temples.

All of these activities failed to possess any significance beyond merely constituting pleasures. They were not demonstrative of underlying psychic morphologies translatable into sexual identities.

They failed to possess concepts, marking social identities, such as gay, or heterosexual, or pedophile. In fact, man-boy relationships were considered appropriate as long as they were structured according to ethical imperatives that reflected the fact that the participants in these relations were both Free Men; the man and the boy. Therefore, there were concerns about the man dominating the boy in the relationship, and subjecting the younger counterpart to a form of subjugation inappropriate for any Free Man to endure. Consequently, these relationships were fomented through an elaborate courting process where the older man would present the boy with gifts until the younger member in the affair finally felt that it was appropriate for him to reciprocate in a romantic fashion.

This process might be comparable to popular conceptions in American society regarding the courtship stages that are executed in order for a man to seduce a woman. The woman, for various reasons – not least of which includes potentially being labeled as sexually promiscuous – reserves from engaging in intimate relations with the man – according to this perception of heterosexuality and its entailments – until she feels she has performed sufficient impression management work to ensure that her motives appear to involve more than simply inciting the pleasures associated with sexual intercourse.

The preceding description is, of course, not universally held, and is now way supposed to be more than a reference to what might be considered a traditional conceptualization of sexuality in American society. Obviously, following the Second Wave of Feminism and its entailing revision of the definitions of ‘woman’ and its relationship to ‘man,’ many women no longer feel the encumbrance experienced by such a ritualism.

Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Sexual Liberationist ideologies have existed prior to the Sexual Revolution that is typically associated with the 1960’s. Sexual Liberation was prevalent during periods such as the 1920’s; sometimes – although not entirely accurately – associated with the counter-cultural movements referred to as the Bohemians. In opposition to the Sexual Liberationist discourses, scholars in sexuality typically identify what is referred to as Sexual Communitarian discourses, which stress the important of placing moral restrictions upon sexuality for the benefit of societal and community social structures.

Referring back to Hellenistic sexual conventions, I do not want to explore this subject any further, for obvious reasons. However, compare this understanding of the identities and the expected relationships among them – especially, since the older men who seduced, “The beautiful boys of Athens,” also had wives and the men would, additionally, partake in sexual activities with their wives – with our current understanding of sexuality, which the Greeks, quite obviously, did not possess.

For purposes of administrative expediency – when it comes to correcting behaviors socially defined as deviant – we have medicalized sexuality; consequently, leading to an understanding a man-boy relationship as something that indicates more than a pleasure of the body, but, additionally, an underlying psychic abnormality, and, in fact, a pathology that we might call pedophilia.

Now consider, why have we created an intellectual environment where we have academic professionals devoting their careers to the study of this invisible – although, ‘character’ defining – a psychiatric attributete – residing somewhere in a space we can only imagine in our mind’s eye – referred to as the psyche? Why do we as a culture find this kind of relationship – which must be a result of our cultural conditioning, because the Greeks certainly did not possess such a sediment – so aberrant? What social forces are responsible for generating a cultural condition where we feel compelled to regulate – not only health – but what descriptions or polemics can be offered while being taken seriously, regarding issues pertaining to sexuality? If one is labeled under a social category that falls under the provision of psychiatry, he or she no longer possesses the prerogative to participate in public discourse regarding issues and public policies concerning such matters.

Obviously, the institutional forces responsible for conditioning us to interpret particular behaviors as symptomatic of illness have a profound effect, because they not only define what constitutes a sexually related pathology, but preemptively discredit those who might argue in opposition to the medico-juridical discourses produced by these institutions. I would suggest that the ultimate precipitant to our aversions toward socially defined ‘unnatural’ forms of sexuality rests in our conditioning into a systematization of social institutions and, more specifically, the relationships and conducts – what we call roles in sociology – they define and impose upon our bodies and the ways we use them.

Further, our internalization of these codes, which we come to apply upon ourselves when evaluating our own behaviors, and, additionally, what we should aspire to when comporting in the social reality we have been socialized to understand and embody with respect to its prescriptions for healthy versus unhealthy modes of conduct. All of the definitions of good health versus pathology are definitions and understandings generated by the complex of disciplinarian-knowledge-constructing-institutions that have been littered so prolifically in the civil societies of Modernity.

It is due to the semiotics of these disciplines – i.e., psychologists, doctors, social workers, sociologists, demographers, and criminologists – where they symbolically own membership to science – that their discourses are endowed with a preemptive property causing them to trump their knowledge competitors; thus, reserving the authority to legislate truth. This is all fine and good. However, think back to the hyperactive – or, what we could, in a different sense, refer to as aware and attentive to his surroundings – young male, who fails to conform with behavioral expectations; resulting in his treatment by medical professions, who feed him stimulants in order to make him disinterested with the environment that surrounds him, and, instead, capable and willing to stare into a text book, as he is trained to assume a position as a laborer – where he performs mind numbing repetitive tasks – contributing to the production of resources that ultimately belong to other people.

All of these forms of correction and treatment and training fall under the expansion of the concept, bio-power. Concretely, I am referring to the interests that compel society to regulate the pleasures of the body in a way the implements sexuality as an organizing schema that maintains social relationships in way that society is ensured of reproducing – in an orderly and consistent manner – the identities, who are defined by virtue of their contributions to the production of social resources.

In order to regulate this system, so that it continues to function, disciplinarians have innovated an expansive repository of knowledge implemented – often through the operations of medical professionals, such as doctors and psychiatrists, and quasi-health care professionals, such as social workers and counselors, who have devised corrective mechanisms serviceable for the purposes of normalizing behaviors that fail to conform to this homogenized field of social agents whose existences are integrated into a systematization, allowing for the manufacturing and disproportionate distribution of products.

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