The Secrets of Sexuality in the Semiotics of Language
“Aren’t the gospels about love? Exclaimed one friend as we discussed [the Origins of Satan]. Certainly, they are about love, but since the story they have to tell involves betrayal and killing, they also include elements of hostility which evoke demonic images.” (Pagels, 1995)
Foucault’s version of psychoanalysis can be found in what he originally wanted to title his book The History of Sexuality: Volume One which was “The Will to Knowledge” in man’s history of unveiling the “mysteries and secrets” about the biopolitics of sexuality beginning with Freud and the systematic organization of structured institutions such as hospitals and penitentiaries that went towards acquiring this “sexual knowledge.” Foucault’s main thesis was that the whole drive toward unveiling the mysteries of biopolitics through psychoanalysis was to ultimately liberate sexuality from the confining shadows of ignorance. Although this did not happen quickly, it took several decades, but nonetheless what developed out of Freud’s initial investigations provided enough competency for others to continue and extend his work. We understand homosexuality more today than we did one hundred years ago. We also understand female psychological and sexual development much better than we did one hundred years ago.
According to the Biopolitics, Sexuality and the Unconscious paper, of which I was attracted simply because of its subject matter, describes what is missing from Foucault’s version of psychoanalysis is the unconscious or the semiotics of language. Alenka Zupančič writes:
“At the same time, the concept of the unconscious is not mentioned one single time in the entire first volume of the History of Sexuality, even though psychoanalysis is one of its principal protagonists. This is strange to say the least: sexuality enters the Freudian perspective strictly speaking only in so far as it is “unconscious sexuality”, that is to say in so far as something about sexuality is constitutively unconscious — constitutively problematic, lacking, irreducible to any kind of truth about itself. “Unconscious sexuality” does not simply mean that we are not aware of it, while it constitutes a hidden truth of most of our actions.”
I love Foucault’s work. I feel his work poetic and nonetheless an important contribution to philosophy. While I have to agree with the above paper by Zupančič in that Foucault most certainly substituted “secrets” for “unconscious” in The History of Sexuality, conceptualizing sexuality as “secret” and to which it is a rather taboo topic to talk about even today as it makes some people “uncomfortable.” During the late part of the 1800s and early part of the 1900s, it was even more poorly understood. I have read some of the early twentieth century’s psychoanalytic papers written by Ph.D. graduates and although Freud contributed significantly by establishing psychoanalysis as a branch of study, it only provides proof of how much we didn’t understand. In most, if not all of Foucault’s work, he provides historical details into perceptions regarding time periods and people’s general lack of, or acceptance of homosexuality and criminality, and this perhaps is the main reason why his work diverges into different areas in his subsequent following volumes to The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s follow-up volumes tap into historical accounts, not psychoanalytic history, and so it becomes less about the development of the modern psychoanalytic movement and more about the process of human evolution through a preview of history. Secret or unconscious, is not history an account of the whole of human experience? And as such, I doubt Foucault would have been able to make the point he was trying to make.
Since sexuality was considered as something that should be “suppressed” because it is precisely considered ‘excitingly dirty’ and in need of regulation by the consideration of our betters (those upper-class gentlemen and women folk). So, prohibitions on ‘its incitements’ were frowned upon because something about sexuality is constitutively unconscious and that is because something about it involves ontological inconsistencies of its discursive move which has its roots in primal scene fantasy. If we were to talk about the semiotics of sexuality in unconscious symbolism, we would read signs of violence; conflict, weapons, and conquering. Along with themes of red apples, ovules filled with seed, and fruiting bodies such as trees ripe with progeny in a garden of fertility and the snake that deceives in the story of Adam and Eve. All touch on themes of war which make every civilized individual, with a conscious state of awareness, uncomfortable. So, why is it so taboo to talk about one’s sexual proclivities? Why do these conversations make some people feel uncomfortable? Could it be because “sex is violence?” Not in the traditional sense of primal physical combat violence but, nonetheless, interwoven into the primal scene’s tapestry in one’s fantasies or fears of castration. It is because sexuality is the “deployment of power,” and since, as we already stated, sexuality is constitutively unconscious we perceive sexuality’s deployment as an unconscious fear of violence or castration and it doesn’t always have to be perceived as such. Especially when our fears are based on irrational thoughts and delusional states.
I think it only fair that if we are discussing sexuality, we should be discussing serial killers and serial rapists. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, psychoanalysis didn’t understand the secrets or unconscious motivations behind homosexuality. These derangements in sexuality were believed to belong to “madmen” like Jack the Ripper. So, these mechanisms rooted in the human condition were certainly poorly understood, mislabeled, and feared and this is why Foucault, rather than moving forward in time, reaches back into history to draw on the theories and practices of Greek ancient philosophers regarding their sexual practices. Foucault says the Greek philosophers of the Golden Age developed sophisticated sexual ethics even if they said little about sex directly. In their calls for moderation and even abstinence, some of these philosophers drew close to themes that would later be taken up by Christian thinkers. Still, Foucault insists, these classical thinkers advocated sexual self-control for different reasons than their Christian counterparts. To them, and to their Greco-Roman successors, controlling one’s sexual behavior was a path to self-mastery. It took the form not of a moral code dividing right and wrong, but of an “art of living” that responded to one’s social position and stage of life. We might make a comparison as a difference in culture.
In Foucault’s third volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault discusses the Oneirocritica, an ancient Greek treatise on dream interpretation (the language of semiotics) written by Artemidorus in five volumes during the 2nd century AD. So, maybe Foucault wasn’t too far off the beaten track from the subject of “secrets” and the semiotics of language when writing “The Care of Self.” Foucault says it is tempting to see “the lineaments of … the ethics that one will find in Christianity.” Yet there is still a substantial difference between the sexual ethics of imperial Rome and those of medieval Christendom. In the former, Foucault points out, there is still no concept of sexual sin, or of the Fall, or of a divine will whose demands must be enacted in universal human laws: “In itself and substantially, [sex] is not an evil.” Christianity would borrow concepts from Roman sexual practices, but it would do so in the context of a “profoundly altered ethics” that emphasized obedience and self-denial, not moderation and self-mastery.
So, Foucault’s form of “biopolitics” is directly connected with questions surrounding the sexual ethics of the Golden Age philosophers of ancient Greece which was passed down to Christianity through philosophical influence, and from Christianity, we see a profoundly altered sexual ethics in that moderate sexual self-mastery is completely obliterated through the gold standard of sexual abstinence. Thus, moderation becomes even less valued and abstinence embraced as the highest standard one can achieve in their “art of living.” Why is this so? Because sexuality makes some people feel uncomfortable and this confinement led to subversive underground movements within the Catholic church’s priesthood and in society itself. Whereas in the age of imperial Rome, sexual ethics were much different. The imperial Romans accepted the practice of homosexuality as well as pederasty. So, a form of Foucault’s biopolitics is directly interested in the liberation of homosexuality and gay rights from the chains of a Christendom biopolitics, and we can directly observe this in California’s early decriminalization of homosexuality.
And so, it is here that I interweave what I have come to understand about gang stalking and electronic targeted assaults into my essay. Gangstalking and electronic targeted assaults operate like a cage for the Targeted Individual by utilizing coercive control over the subject. Does this discursive move of power over the targeted individual move them to respond to the abuse? Yes, and in its creation, we see a prison of sorts, and as I have learned from reading Michael Foucault and Michelle Boulous Walker, sex is not repressed in the discourse of philosophy, but rather has been put into discourse through the semiotics of language, in the unconscious of what a text does not say through the repressions it inflicts upon the subjects. That is to say, it is through the reading of silence, symbolism, and sign we come to understand how silence speaks. Gangstalking and electronic targeted assaults prove that sex has always been in the discourse of language unrepressed and therefore is knowable and readable. It is just not always visible to the naked eye because one must know how to “read with the eye” or uncover the “none vision of the text,” and it is through the symbols and signs that present themselves we accomplish this.
Foucault’s starting point in The History of Sexuality may be considered erroneous or wrong on a technicality, but nonetheless, it is the silence of repressed sexuality which Foucault was writing about regarding homosexual liberation in past history. In a different light, one might consider the practice of pederasty and how a young adolescent boy’s sexuality is silenced by the slave owner in imperial Rome. Is this not a form of silence? Is it not the spoken language of denial of a person’s right to freely choose his activities? If sexuality was not silenced during imperial Rome, did the ancient Greek philosophers who promoted sexual self-control as a way to self-mastery hold an obvious influence over imperial Rome? If they held any influence, it was only over those who were interested in transcendence in the Golden age of maturity in the pursuit of being role models. It is in the spirit of this repression that Foucault speaks of Medieval Christendom beliefs against homosexuality and other acts of sexual deviance. It is this silencing or repression, Foucault addresses because he himself has lived a form of it in the modern era.
Although Alenka Zupančič’s opinion is that deviant sexual practices were never, in fact, silenced because deviant sexual practices sought out clandestine areas with which to move in the shadows, and it is by this discursive operation that it was allowed to form “power” when it emerged as a subculture that influenced politics and state law in the late 1960s and the 1970s. And in this, he would be correct. This is absolutely true. One of the things Foucault says in The History of Sexuality is “power resides with the people.” Power is vested with the people to organize themselves into groups and, thereby, petition the government to reformulate or establish new laws in the best interest of the people. Is this not the struggle of the Targeted Individual suffering electronic targeted assaults in the new age of advancing high-security surveillance?
However, reading silence is such a slippery area of philosophy with which to move because oftentimes language is miscommunicated or misunderstood like Foucault’s substitution of secrecy for the unconscious. When silence is spoken as repression, suppression, or oppression one has to ask, “How is this form of repression hurting the group it affects?” Therefore, one must ask the question of the new phenomena of Targeted Individuals, “How is this form of repression hurting the Targeted Individuals it affects?” Language provides us with its complexity and difficulties and with the very real chance of confusing meaning by failing to address what silence represents or by failing to give an adequate explanation to what a person’s repression means to the individual being silenced and, furthermore, fails at conveying the meaning behind to the one carrying out the targeting. This is language’s subtly and downfall and why gang stalking and electronic targeted assaults are so difficult to confuse because it exploits language’s vulnerabilities by hiding in the shadows of what can’t be perceived or readably known. To know how silence speaks through what it fails to say is an acquired skill many people simply do not cultivate. Just because a text does not explicitly say something, doesn’t mean it isn’t saying it. This is the ‘nonvision’ of the text and that lurks in the obscure corners of language. After all, is it totally clear what is Kay Sage is trying to convey to us in the following painting? I mean, is it explicitly clear or do we only catch a glimpse of what she may be trying to convey?
According to Alenka Zupančič,
“Society and capitalism did not repress sexuality; on the contrary, they gave it a discursive support and opened up an infinite number of spaces where it could proliferate, prosper, and — in doing so — be both profitable and a perfect means or paragon of micro-politics and biopower (control).”
Could this be what gang stalking and electronic targeted assaults are all about? Corralling a group of individuals together so they can proliferate with “their own kind” in a paragon of micro-politics and biopower, thus giving them a sense of control over their own lives? According to Zupančič, this is what the post-Antebellum was all about. It was about providing clandestine, shadowy, underground movements with which slaves could move in the darkness of ignorance and thereby free themselves. Yet, the black man was oppressed and silenced for many, many decades following the fall of slavery and without willing whites interested in abolishing slavery it might not have never happened. According to Zupančič, the women’s suffrage movement was also part of the silencing that led to liberation. According to him, women were provided the same opportunities to organize themselves in secret, form chapters, and a whole movement with which to free themselves. Today, we see the Targeted Individual suffering electronic targeted assaults in its infancy as a movement and where the federal government, although providing a forum with which these individuals can express and document their experiences to lawmakers, oftentimes displayed a lack of objective thinking, represents a class struggle to which politicians, lawmakers, and law enforcement present themselves as seeming to be at a loss as to how to stop it as a form of crime.
There is something crucial to understanding how (and why) power works. Power, as discursive, is structured around or above its own point of lapse or contradiction. Is this “point of lapse or contradiction” the point at which power can be redirected or taken away thereby oppressing or silencing the dominant power and liberating the minority group?
The ‘primary’ character of repression or suppression (Verdrängung) implies that it is one with the institution of the discursive. There is a structural gap that pertains to discursivity, and this gap is what gives to the unconscious its structure, and it is involved — by default- in all relations of power. Discourse begins from the fact that here there is a gap, and what is most certainly ascertained is that discourse is implied in the gap.
According to Zupančič,
“Freudian’s theory of primal regression (“Urverdrängung”) as the condition of all repression proper. The point is to acknowledge that, whatever the object of power, the latter never operates simply in relation to this object, but also in relation to its own structural gap. This is why the hypothesis of the unconscious is crucial for the understanding of the working of power.”
In this point, Zupančič is saying that Foucault operated his theories in this structural gap which did not address the unconscious in his theory of biopolitics. In this light, at least for me, Foucault’s omission becomes a serendipitous discovery that allows this aspiring philosopher (albeit by no means expert) to address the question, “If the object of power never operates simply in relation to the subject, what is the structural gap (the unconscious of the object of power) in relation to the targeted individual as a form of power?” Understanding the semiotics of language behind how this power operates is crucial to understanding what gives meaning to the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual subjecting people to the invisible language of invisible empires and thereby making them victims of violent crime.
In psychoanalysis, the object of power is connected to the gaze: In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at. The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that he or she is a visible object.
References:
Aristotle. (2014). Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis, Indiana. Hackett Publishing Company.
Benjamin, Jessica. (1995) Like Subjects; Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Differences. Binghamton, New York. Vail-Ballou Press.
Butler, Judith. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, California. Stanford University Press.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2003) Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it into the New Testament. New York. Oxford University Press.
Foucault, Michael. (1978) The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. New York. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michael. (1985) The History of Sexuality: Volume 2. New York. Random House.
Foucault, Michael. (1986) The History of Sexuality: Volume 3. New York. Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michael. (1965). Madness and Civilization: The History of Insanity in an age of reason. New York. Pantheon Books.
Mitchell, Juliette. (2000) Madmen and Medusas: Reclaiming hysteria. New York. Basic Books.
Pagels, Elaine. (1995) The Origins of Satan. New York. Random House.
Walker, Michelle Boulous. (1998) Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. New York. Routledge.
Zupančič, A. (2016). Biopolitics, Sexuality and the Unconscious. Paragraph, 39(1), 49–64.
