Michel Foucault

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 Vols. Vol I: An Introduction. NYC: Vintage, 1990.

"Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed form the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43).

One wants to quibble: this is apt, but a little loose. It's not apt to be the sodomite but sodomy that's the "temporary aberration." A major aspect of prejudice against homosexuals involves considering it unnatural; part of that involves considering it non-genetic--a rather absurd discussion, as most of the nature-nurture debate always was, but an interesting one: it's clearly designed to allow peer-groups to regard homosexuality as at once a moral choice freely and consciously taken, unnatural, and a state of being. One has to sympathize with Foucault's choice of species, inaccurate as it is, because it renders something of the habit families have of disowning their homosexual offspring.

"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the overall and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, a pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power . . . " (45).

Deserves examination -- the actions and institutions Foucault names are extensively involved in sadomasochistic games and fantasies he talks about, so it would be ridiculous to suppose the related feelings would not be regularly invoked during their administration. Furthermore, since the violence administered by such institutions is not pretend even when the motives may be, the institutions must propagate sadomasochism throughout any of the population directly impacted. But when he insists that "These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45), he denies the reality of castigation and ostracism. Oppression appears as only a game because repressors and oppressors game each other; oppression becomes hallucination because its victims become crazy.

There follows a rather amusing perspective on, among other things, Freudianism.

" . . . the family, even when brought down ot its smallest dimension, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities. To reduce them to the conjugal relationship, and then to project the latter, in the form of a forbidden desire, onto the children, cannot account for this apparatus which, in relation to these sensualities, was less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying mechanism" (46).

Foucault continues Freud's sexualization of children's desire for their parents, sadly. One can, of course, consider any most any desire sexual or not simply by redefining the area of human interaction that one calls sex<./em>. But tabus around heterosexual copulation have practical motives, so many will continue in some form. To call prepubescent sensuality sexual even though it does not constitute a desire for copulation or orgasm blurs important distinctions and invites the repression Foucault seems to speak against.

I find Arthur Janov's response to this set of ideas more useful: "The polymorphous is the infant's; the perverse is Freud's." With respect to infants, I'd say that the sexuality belongs strictly to Foucault. Freud may have only been able to conceive of the intensity of infantile sexuality and desire in ways that relate to sex, a word used to describe copulation, but this reflects more on the Dr. than the patient.

By the same token, Foucault's observation that the powerful project "forbidden desire" onto children describes rather neatly the psychoanalytic ideologies that have grown out of Freud's retreat from trauma theory.

" . . . it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated odes of conduct" (48).

Interesting, but most of us actually do want to copulate with the opposite sex and to do so in ways that actually do tend to relate to reproduction even when one tries to avoid that. A heterosexual male finds himself much more enslaved to entrenched social power because he creates children, but to presume he does so because the church discourages buggery and circle-jerks seems to follow a minority case.

The minority case does certainly exist, however, and this appraisal of the power relations may be worthy.

Foucault's working hypothesis (see 69), that 19th century Europe did not repress but objectify and examine sex, runs somewhat skew to positions Foucault has spent much of his introduction criticizing. The social insistence (of some) that we examine "our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (69) IS the repression: it replaces ,em>feel with to know about.

Chomsky and Media

As I search for critics who analyze the relation of publication and distribution economics to written form, by far the most useful author I have found so far does not see himself as writing about literature per se at all.

In a series of books, Noam Chomsky analyzes socioeconomic strictures on publication and the flow of information. In both linguistic and political work, Chomsky sees literary formalisms as largely outside his authorial province, but he does give straightforward and well documented descriptions of patterns of ownership and commodification of media production and distribution, and the effect these have on what information may be expressed and communicated, where, and to an extent how.

Insofar as these filter in large part for profit, and profit

Particularly useful Chomsky on Media:

• Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with David Barsamian


• Media Control


• Necessary Illusions


• Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda


• You Are Being Lied To


• On Miseducation


• Secrets, Lies, Democracy

These do include quite a bit of thematic repetition, since part of Chomsky's intents are polemical.

There is also a DVD on Zeitgeist called Necessary Illusions, and he makes considerable reference to these themes in lectures, interviews, and articles, all easily found on www.chomsky.info. It wanders between biographical anecdotes about Chomsky, quick clips of interviews,

Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara 1939-1995

African-American, Harlem-raised, engaged leftist, Bambara sets her stories in leftist organizing communities, the communities they support, or with people otherwise involved in left issues. She maintains strict focalization in her stories; that is, nothing enters narrative that does not corespond strictly with what the focal character might see, feel, think. The prose is active, rhythmic, impassioned, and strong throughout, although certain details of perspective seem lacking at times in the impressionistic flow.

From The Sea Birds Are Alive. NY: Random House, 1977

"The Organizer's Wife" is set in what appears to be rural black community, perhaps Southern, 20th Century. Bambara handles the dialect like Twain, with steady misspellings, rather than like Toni Morrison, with the dialect rendered clearly by syntax alone. The focalizer falls in love with a guy, but Revun Michaels' church sells the place out from under her. She beats him with a yardstick and kicks him in the head when he tries to get up. He's "small and balding" or the "short, fat, balding preacher" and appears unable to defend himself against the young woman, who is apparently rather large. The narrative makes out that the preacher's height and weight are linked somehow with craven hypocrisy and moral weakness. One feels the contempt often felt by people engaged in manual labor for those who make a living without lifting; it's unclear how much distance Bambara herself has from this opinion.

The woman sort of mysteriously begins holding an infant - she's gotten pregnant somewhere along the way - and her husband is apparently the organizer. Someone has probably bought out the church so that they can't organize and work with the community on it, and probably particularly so they can shut the school down. I was left feeling that more details about the preacher's position would help define the difference or correlation between the focal character's rage and her situation. an injustice, but one wonders the extent to which the focalizer's criticism of and violence against the preacher is justified. Does she assume that he could avoid the sale, and is this justified? One needs the details of the business transaction to decide. While these details are clearly no yardstick of justice, they would give us an idea what the preacher might or might not accomplish practically.

The difficulty seems to be that Bambara herself considers these things as morally or practically straightforward. Perhaps they are in some sense. Clearly, racist cops should be curbed. Clearly, a church that serves as the center for an entire community should not be sold out from under that community, however its continuance might be arranged. But even assuming Ultimate Justice for such assessments, left groups constantly fragment over ideological and practical differences over just how to repair such problems. Taken very broadly, such distinctions account for the entire spectrum of social opinion on these issues.

This seems to me just the weakness of ideological or politically involved literature in general. The difference with Bambara, really, is that she's so engaging and so loving with emotional detail that she manages to reduce the issue greatly. But she doesn't resolve it here.

"The Apprentice"

Narrator's with a friend, Naomi, who stops to interrupt a bust in which a cop's roughly frisking a black man; the cop stops and lets the man go, perhaps since he sees witnesses. Naomi seems pretty professional about it, insists on getting details of the man who's been pulled over, the cop and the badge and so forth.

Naomi's got some grey hair. She appears to be an organizer of some stripe.

They wind up at a church, talking with an older woman. An old man brags obtrusively. The story wanders. She's doing a character sketch of her energetic organizer buddy Naomi, that's all. In this we find the strength and weakness of Bambara's writing. She catches moments of consciousness authentically and intensely. But strangely, the episodes do not reveal their ideological inspiration as they might. That is, one empathizes with the narrator's clear feeling that Naomi is wise and courageous. We see in a general way that Naomi works against Injustice: the police treatment of the African-American driver smacks of racism and might have done so more clearly. Bambara's issue might have to do with the level of engagement, and she may be signalling readers that one who becomes engaged winds up doing so 24/7, simply out of the constant need.

All this is valuable, but one wants something more out of such a sharp observer. What is the political nature of Naomi's involvement? How does the psychological dynamic relate to the business of involvement? What internal conflicts does Naomi face?

This issue, of course, breaks down differently here than in "The Organizer's Wife," which seems more complete emotionally, but in which the exact nature of the sale of the church seems missing. Clearly the sale of the church constitutes a loss for the community andlated errand in the snow and cold, running through the ghetto with a bunch of kids.


"The Long Night" is a thrilling description of living through a police raid, worth reading just for the emotional roller coaster, but also nice to visualize life as a target of CIA involvement in Latin America or in the gunsights of COINTELPRO in the US. Little media attention has been given to back the realism of this kind of description, but this is just plain harrowing, very intense stuff, and feels totally authentic and particularly relevant in this day and age, given the demise of habeas corpus and our onetime 4'th and 6th Amendment protections.