To begin to understand the repressive hypothesis, one must understand the nature of power and its influence on the notions of repression. When one thinks of power as something that has control over someone or something. It's generally understood as a limiting or oppressive act. Its not untrue that the discourse on power has a tone that insinuates a repressive form of regulation. Foucault asserts that the repressive hypothesis is interpreted as a consent-less effort to repress useless energy through power mechanisms stemming from all realms of daily life. Power seeks to negate "the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its reality (9-10)." Foucault argues that this is "so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years," as in this sort of sexual repression is unique to the processes of the Victorian era. It has created an intrinsic acknowledgement of the power mechanism acting upon an individual which creates a kind of permissiveness in the relationship. Foucault then describes the repressive hypothesis with his doubts. He asks first if sexual repression was a "historical fact." Next he wonders if the "workings of power and in particular these mechanisms that are brought into societies such as 'ours' really belong in the category of repression." From this doubt he derives a profound assertion (that he frames as a doubt) that the repressive hypothesis is a part of the "same historical [maybe power] network as the thing it denounces." In other words, the discursive practices of this so-called repression has actually created new roads for expanded expression within the acknowledged power mechanisms while increasing the permission to let them act on you.
Power in the case of the Victorian Era found routes in theemergence of discourse surrounding sex. During the rise of scientificexploration, the mechanisms of power were given new ways to insert it into thedaily practices of power’s subjects. He asserts that “multiplication ofdiscourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself (p 18).”What this means is that the more we formulate the discourse the more ways we are able to internalize the power mechanisms acting on us. This internalization expresses itself in, what Foucault calls, the “will to knowledge” and the incitement to discourse. Therefore the “institutional incitement to speak about it [sex] and to do so more and more is a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about (p. 25).” This is the way Foucault reworks the notions of power to include the “agentive” processes of the individual in the act of acquiring knowledge because it is a part of the productive rather than repressive aspect of power. An individual’s supplication to power is how you really see power’s power (lol), and the development of scientific discourse is how knowledge and power work in tandem.
To Foucault, discourse works as the “intrinsic technology of power (p. 73).” The power knowledge pleasure principle relies on the use of discourse because it defines the pathology of sex and sex is the private transference of power. He believes that discourse is the crucial element that ties the productive processes of power to the intimate process of sex. Power and discourse are extraordinarily interactive. Understanding sex as a pathway for the positive mechanisms of power is crucial because this path is a way to “produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure and generate power (p.71-72).” Power, knowledge, and pleasure are intimately connected through the discourse of sex.
The development of specialized knowledge through the scientific exploration and defining processes in accordance to specific power mechanisms, has returned with the new understandings of the confessional. In the western sense the confessional relies on the practice of anonymity within the daily lives of individuals. That anonymity and secrecy is largely misinterpreted as the repressive. However Foucault analyzes this as a productive rather than stagnated process because in its regulation through anonymity and secrecy the specialized knowledge of sex and new pathways of control is the result. The confessional has contributed to these productive pathways in a way that’s very specific to the western context. It has the power of liberation and that liberation has become the desire therefore the power of the confession space has begun constituting desire. It has defined the words of desire, it has placed desire in the context of the power mechanism, and it is reproduced in the home. The confessional has been scientifically validated through the medicalization of sex, it has been politically valorized through demography, and it has been moralized by the socializing processes of religion.
Foucault asserts that those who are “confronted by a power that is law” is the “subject who is constituted as subject who is subjected is he who obeys (p. 85).” Obeying to the processes of confessing and conducting sexual acts while navigating through the mechanisms of power is the way Foucault recreates the formerly top down notions of power. Secrecy is indispensable to the operations of power and people obey because it leaves a measure of freedom in the compliance. Understanding the deployment of sexuality as a process that proliferates the intensification of the body is crucial because it is a process that exploits the body as “an object of knowledge and an element of power (p. 107).” Therefore the intrinsic compliance to the systems of power is in our will to confess and our will to knowledge. We are the bodies who receive the knowledge, and where the power incubates.
If we understand power as if it lives and works inside of us, if it remains in our psyches, with the language and the sentiment analyzed by Foucault, then we can start reworking what it means to have the long lost agency anthropologists want to believe still exists. Steven Sangran focuses his analysis of Foucault on the idea that there are agentive processes despite the fact that power mechanisms have become intrinsic to the understanding of our existence. He believes that “culture must be conceived in terms that accommodate individual motive and desire.” He would like us to read The History of Sexuality as a revelation of the tensions in which agency can be identified. The cognitive dissonance between what someone actually wants and what he or she is told they want through the power processes is where the remnants of agency exists. This contradicts Foucault’s analysis of desire, which he believes is constituted by the mechanization of confession. Sangran thinks that sex “uncovered beneath defensive layers of social/psychological repression” can produce the truth of sex. Repression can produce the truth because of the “cultural production of the person” in which there is an acknowledgement of this repression and cognitive tension as a result. This is extremely interesting despite the fact that Sangran’s argument can be completely negated by Foucault’s argument that resistance to power acknowledges that power exists. This is not the vantage Sangran takes, he critiques Foucault by asserting that experiencing pleasure can be done without the binds of discourse (p.115). Psychoanalysis then performs as an attempt to realize this pleasure while conducting itself within those binds, but acknowledging that those binds do not encompass the whole of human agency.
Sangran’s fundamental assertion is that desire is subjective and influenced by power only as far as our consciousness. Modern forms of subjectivity are laden in these responses to power. Anyone who believes they are separate from this subjectivity are misled. The subject is a product of discursive procedures but also as the producer of its own intension (p. 113). The pedagogy of childhood sexual exploration has been manipulated to fuel the sphere of regulation into anonymity. Lena Dunham was a victim of the backlash of expressing this because of her experience as a child is an immensely relevant example of the processes of Victorian Era power still working on us. These potential actors in the appropriate sphere of sexuality, are subject to the silence required of them because of the confessional society in which we live. If the parents are being secretive about sexuality and if the powers of this regulation are reproduced in the home to the extent that Foucault thinks, then desire would be completely constructed. However, Sangren believes that desire/sexuality is organized by fantasies whereas Foucault believes sexuality organizes fantasies. This is something that would be very difficult to prove, but childhood sexual exploration because children are at the very beginning of their socialization process.
