Page 128 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 119

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

almost archetypically anarchist quality of Foucault’s practical
politics is evident, for example, in his prison reform agitation.
Moreover, the implicit hostility to Enlightenment rationality of
the earlier archaeological writings becomes increasingly explicit
and at times reminiscent of Adorno and Horkheimer in the later
genealogy. It is true that, for Foucault, the ubiquity of power
renders it open and indeterminate: ‘it induces pleasure, forms
knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a
productive network which runs through the whole social body’
(Foucault, 1980, p. 119). There is, then, no single structure of
power, but rather a play of powers. This provided a rationale for
anarchism, rather than for what Bennett means by ‘reform’. It
aimed not so much at an ‘objective’ account of discourse as at a
strategic, or tactical, but nonetheless militant, intervention into
that play.

Foucault on sexuality
Perhaps the most telling example of this approach was the
first volume of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault upturned
the then widely accepted ‘repression hypothesis’ concerning
Victorian sexuality and argued, to the contrary, that new
‘techniques of power exercised over sex’ and a new ‘will to
knowledge . . . constituting ...a science of sexuality’ had in effect
created the modern sexual subject, precisely through a ‘putting
into discourse of sex’ (Foucault, 1978, pp. 12–13). His conclusion,
directed against Freud and Lawrence, is both striking and
original. Distinguishing between the ‘idea’ of ‘sex’ and the social
organisation of ‘sexuality’, he argued that what had been
perceived as the chronicle of ‘a difficult struggle’ to remove
censorship should rather be seen as the ‘centuries-long rise of a
complex deployment for compelling sex to speak, for fastening
our attention and concern upon sex, for getting us to believe in
the sovereignty of its law when in fact we were moved by the
power mechanisms of sexuality’ (p. 158). The much-anticipated
later volumes of the history, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of
the Self, were far more scholarly in character, indeed prodigiously
so. They also seemed less radical in theoretical import—in part,

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