Foucault attempts to demonstrate this idea of power with the use of discourse of sex.  He uses the idea that if one does not want to think about something you will think about it 3x more by trying not to think about it. If someone were to tell you to not think about pink elephants. The first image in your mind would be a pink elephant. This is because it is human desire to look and rebel against the laws that prevent us from our natural instinct to investigate. In the Victorian Era sex was something that was not appropriate to discuss in public. It was a taboo to talk about such things and therefore causing this censorship on sex. 

      Foucault also uses the church and the act of confession as another cause of the desire to think and act sex out more. In class we discussed the idea that the priest plays the role of God. The priest must help the sinner by examining  “all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions…”(1504). Now one must identify the bad thoughts and judge ourselves in order to get rid of the thought of sexual discourse. The more that we fight against the use of language to allow sexual discourse to be mentioned, the more people are falling prey into thinking about discourse. The church transformed this practice of confession. It no longer only became confessions about the sin, but it became confessions on our thoughts and our desires. It was a sin to think anything that was not holy. 

         As the centuries past we focused this on this taboo of sexual discussion. We no longer focused on the primary issue that started this conversation. This means that people no longer were concerned about couples that had sex in marriage anymore. They were more concerned when sexual intercourse happened outside of these boundaries that we socially constructed. Now as a result Foucault demonstrates that this new taboo involves things such as pedophilia, homophobia, and beastiality. Why have these issues been causing issues recently? It is because they are the taboo of this era.  This makes me question that once gay is accepted socially as an appropriate sex form, what would the new taboo be?

        The discussion of sex became a big priority in society. The more society knew about the sexual discourse that occurred in their time period, the more they wanted to control this aspect. People began to study sex and analyzed this information to get power. As this idea of power became important to society, they began to construct certain rules that would help regulate the amount of sexual discourse.  Population, birth rate, and demographics became a study. Children’s sexuality became important, causing strict rules and restrictions on their age group. Foucault wanted to demonstrate this issue of power and how they used it to censor sex. 

Discourses of sex have greatly changed over the centuries. In the 18^th century sexuality was greatly under wraps. Over time sexuality gradually become more and more acceptable. Foucault argues that sexuality obtained more discourses and acceptance through its original censorship.

In the 18^th century, there was an censorship on sexuality. In order to control sex, they used language as the barrier of containment. Through the policing of words, it created a restrictive economy of words and speech on the topic of sexuality.

Over time the Catholic Church confessions talked about sex in great detail. The church believed in censorship until Sanchez and Tamburini thought that sex was an important part of confessions. They shifted the act of sex into a desire. It was no longer about the sexual act but the rationality of sex. The church’s confessions transitioned sex from indecency into moral and rational means. The west picked this up and men began to talk about sex to themselves and to others. Conversations about sex had become more useful and acceptable. Soon men’s character was determined by his recounting of sex in great detail transformed sex into discourse. It was no longer an indecent topic but a subject talked about in intelligence. The connection to the church gave sex the power to shift into this discourse by creating a moral and rational use of sex. There was longer any division between illicit and licit. It was no longer taboo but it was regulated through useful and public discourse.

Discourse of sex no longer fought for more space but it grew bigger in its own space. Sex was no longer hiding or constrained. It transformed their sexuality into perpetual discourse, to mechanisms where economy, medicine, justice incite and institutionalize the sexual discourse. Sexual discourse had the largest growth. The constraints on sex caused enthusiasm in sex that caused sex to be further analyzed. Sex discourses grew from operating in different institutions. The beginning eras sexually discourse had uniformity. The uniformity was broken down over time in to other discourses. Church confessions were the first step to breaking apart the discourse. The confessions made sex rational which cause a mass growth of discourse. The large censorship over sex led to many different enthusiasms to different discourse of sex.

Through out the 18^th century, they discovered problems that occurred from sex like population. This lead to an analysis of sexual problems like birthrate, contraceptive practices, and etc. Society started to credit population to how individuals used sex. Sex had become an object of analysis. It transformed sexual conduct into an economic and political behavior. Sex then became a public issues with critical knowledge. These fundamental necessities of economic pressure and political requirements lifted the prohibition on sex and freed the limited discourses on sex. Previously sex was an object of secrecy. Only by breaking that secret could it be precisely examined. Speaking of sex didn’t lead to the growth of the discourses; instead it was secrecy of sex.  The combination of men who dedicated themselves to speaking about it and infinitum while exploiting it as the secret created the many discourses. These discoveries led to the discourse of medicine, criminal justice and many more in the 19^th century.

According to Barbara Johnson, there are different ways to read Melville’s Fist. Each character offers a unique perspective if read from their point of view. Two ways to read Melville’s Fist is Literal and figural.

Most people read Melville’s Fist from Billy Budd perspective. Billy Budd is the literal perspective. The story is a battle between good and evil. The significant details of the plot are certain and simple. The characters are one dimensional and straightforward. Billy is admired for his physical and moral qualities. He is handsome, good-natured, straight forward, and simple. Billy’s least favorite qualities are that he stutters, illiterate, and unintelligent.  On the other hand Claggart is intelligent and articulated but is evil. His physical features imply mistrust and uneasiness. The other character Vere has the welfare of his men on his mind. He’s unaffected and resolute. He has no tolerance on infraction or discipline. The reason Billy’s version of the reading is literal is because of his qualities. Billy is simple and straightforward just like the plot of the story. He is also illiterate and unintelligent which the story is if not read closer and analyzed for its true meaning. Instead it finds the simple message; the child like meaning of good vs. evil.

On the other hand Claggart reading is the figural reading. Claggart’s perspective flips the relationship between the sign and signified. There is a discrepancy between nature and action. Billy’s character is described as good but is the killer. Claggart is supposedly evil but is the victim. Vere appears to be responsible but allows a man whom he thinks is innocent to be hung. Claggart assumes the sign to be arbitrary, reversing the value of the signs appearance. Billy also hits and Claggart in defense of not being able to answer his question. The lack of knowledge leads to a deadly act. Not being able to do something leads to a significant action. In addition Billy maintains his innocence and simplicity through filtering his answers. He retains his blank ignorance only by a vigorous act of erasing. He maintains his innocence through censorship. Billy’s straightforward nature is a false sign because of his partial lies to keep his innocence. He is not outright lying but withholding information to trick people into thinking he is innocent. The Figural reading is Claggart’s perspective because of his characteristics. Claggart is described as intelligent and articulated. This leads to a deeper analyze of the reading.  This analysis gives a deeper understanding of the signs and signified which are continuously flipped. Claggart appearance also portrays uneasiness and mistrust. The book is unable to be taken at face value because of this mistrust. Signs that are usually point blank also have another meaning.

Tradition is commonly defined in the form where the generation passes down to the next generation. Elliot strongly discouraged this form of tradition. Tradition to Elliot is a poet or artist who is a part of their subjects’ culture as a whole.

Tradition in nature is vague, it isn’t agreeable without a comfort reference. Individuals have their own personal thought, which causes them to have different reference points. This is what leads to vagueness of tradition. This reference point is what brings all the pieces of the puzzle together. Tradition has a wide significance. It has to be able to call anyone indispensably who is a poet over 25 years old. Man doesn’t write for how own generation, but has to write with the feeling of the whole literature of his own culture. He has to be a part of the entire literature culture. There are no generations but one whole collected culture filled with the ancestors of writers. Traditional writers have a sense of timelessness. Their writing breaks through the barrier of time and fits in at any time period.

Tradition is a sequence of all traditional work. This sequential order is complete before the new work because for the order to persist after supervention of novelty. The order is determined by its significance. Significance is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets. No writing has complete meaning without anything to compare it to. Therefore writing has no value alone and must compare to the ancestors of writing. Literatures works significance gets determined on its own, modified by new work that is created.

For writers become traditional he must be aware of the past culture of literature and its ancestors. With this knowledge the poet is a ware of the responsibilities and the difference of his work will be judged. This comparison must live up to the standard of the work of the dead poets. In Order to become a new work, the writer must conform to these ideals. Not conforming would live up to this standard and become a new work. New works are never more valuable than the previous works. This new work just fits in with the ancestors work. It is impossible for knowledge to become easily translated into useful material. Therefore art never improves, just material changes. New work most likely has both features; conforms and is individual. This occurs s by continual surrendering himself, causing an extension of his personality. Traditional work is slowly and cautiously applied, because time is a better judge than us. Time has the capability of testing historical sense, which leads to the standard of traditional writing.

More than a few times I have told people of various races “you will never understand what it means to be black, you just can’t because you’ve never been it,” however Fanon comes as close to describing the experience as anyone probably could. Although I could get into how the politics of race still affect us to this day, I prefer instead to look at the ways Fanon has placed the mindset that to this day almost comes prepackaged with “blackness.”

In the literature Fanon addresses how the knowledge of one’s blackness is omnipresent. The actual condition of being black seems to innately if not culturally shape how you look at yourself and more importantly how you believe everyone is looking at you. A big part of the reasoning for this is that racially blacks and whites have othered one another. By specifying one as the other in a receiving end of either hatred or glorification a bitterness and self consciousness has arrived depending on what side of the racial fence you fall on. An excellent example of this is when Fanon talks about the expectations a black man at his time would receive going into a profession. “It was always the Negro teacher, the Negro doctor; brittle as I was becoming, I shivered at the slightest pretext. I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a Negro physician?” Fanon isn’t exaggerating either as this was quite literally the way Negroes were viewed at the time and to some extent the way they are still viewed today when they take up certain occupations. The black man or woman was expected to walk a tight rope of praise and humiliation dangling over high expectation solely because the “other,” the Caucasian man had a societal advantage. The consensus in Caucasian minds was either to praise one’s work as the other or to completely dismiss it.

Living in a “post-racial” society we would at least like to believe that it’s easy to ignore or at the bery least work through color divisions. But at the time Fanon produced this work no such thing was possible. This quote spoke quite directly to me as Fanon contests, that the hatred and the shame that he faces as a black man is not steeped in any sort of logic or rationale. As a result his sanity is at risk, for he realizes that the only barrier tha often stands between him and his goals is racial prejudice. “I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”

People often seem to find offense in the world nigger, and I never agreed with their stance. On its own I don’t find nigger to offensive, I suggest honestly that there are a slew of racial terms that would perhaps even be more hurtful than nigger because I know that someone had to produce a great deal of effort to insult me with them. It is in this analysis that I find that the word does not sting when I cannot attach the cultural context to it. Fanon’s work is (to me) a look at how I am blessed to be able to remove such a context from the word. Living in a post racial world has not made me non black, however it has given me the ability to make that blackness less omnipresent in an attempt to become something more important, and that something is human without fear of judgment.

I wanted to post my long response to the very interesting exchange between Rafael and Marian regarding Rafael’s post on Fanon.  Go back and read their exchange, which has lots of interesting discussion of racism as a moral issue and as a symptom of structural oppression of various kinds.  My comment on their comments attempts (successfully?  maybe, possibly?) to refocus the debate on Fanon’s implicit theory of racism and racial commitments of all kinds as an ideology in Althusser’s sense.  Here goes:

First of all, I appreciate both of your rhetorical skill and passion here. But I want to see if I can clarify the terms of the argument, as I see them, and also tie it more closely to FFs argument. I think your exchange (meaning Rafael and Marina) gets a bit lost in the woods on the “racism” and “prejudice” issue, such that you end up talking past one another. Forget the terms for a moment: I think you both agree that anyone can (and does) prejudge in various ways and that it’s never morally defensible. M calls this “prejudice” and reserves “racism” for something else, but I think this is a red herring, since no one–including FF–is defending prejudice as a moral good or even a matter of indifference.

The stickier issue concerns the issue of the effects of what M calls prejudice from different positions. M argues, as I understand it, that the prejudicial beliefs/actions of minorities are perhaps just as immoral as that of the predominant group but fail to be nearly as socio-economically impactful, since the dominant group largely controls the State, Big Business, the media, etc. etc. I certainly agree, though Rafael rather skillfully undermines this argument in ways that bear a lot of scrutiny, pointing out (to paraphrase) that the US is headed rapidly to “majority minority” territory and that minorities increasingly have various forms of institutional power, and thus access to “racism” in Ms terms.

My beef here is that FF is really making a different point in the piece we read. He’s not interested in individual morality here: it may be that X person is wrong to call him a “nigger” or even that FF himself is wrong to tell a well-meaning white woman, “kiss my ass.” But for FF, racial ideology *constructs* the very moral subjects that ostensibly choose “good” or “bad” behavior. And that’s because, in a society where race is a central category of identity, the only kind of self we’ve got is formed and maintained by the constant, ongoing “mirroring” that happens when we are “interpellated” (in Althusser’s terms) by others via the ideology of race. This interpellation runs the gamut from the crude and frontal (“hey, nigger!”) to the much more subtle (“oh, aren’t those African masks primal and exotic!? I guess we’ll put a few in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum as part of the ‘march of civilization’ towards Cubism”).

The drama of FFs essay/performance is to show how hard it is to escape this web of ideological interpellation, and I disagree with R that he does so by retreating in to a cocoon of black supremacy. In the middle of the “chess match” he dramatizes, there is the gesture towards “negritude”–an attempt to speak in a black voice that talks back to white tradition–but for FF this movement is limited in its capacity, since the dominant Tradition (and we can think of Eliot here) can always subsume this isolated black voice within a broader Eurocentric tradition as a (very) junior partner.

So I also disagree with M to the extent that, however true it is that prejudice is amplified enormously by the majority’s access to various kinds of power, that’s not really FFs concern here (though it is elsewhere: see WRETCHED OF THE EARTH). His point is more intimate, in a way, and more Althusserian: that ideology gets under our skin, that ideology speaks through us, that our very selves are made of ideology. It is implicit, however, that FF has more faith than Althusser that individuals can gain some breathing room within ideology by doing things like reading poems, talking back to folks on the train, and, well, reading Fanon. Doing so allows us to exist not as “maimed” or victimized subjects, but as subjects who are alienated from the dominant yet still able to critique it and function within it.

[I didn’t mean to go on so long, but this is complicated stuff. I think I’ll post it as a separate post as well so everyone can review FF a bit.]

Frantz Fanon speaks his mind regarding his experience as a black man. We follow his thought process over a few of his experiences and his reactions to pieces of literature.
Fanon suggests that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man… the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” Fanon describes blackness to be one that is dependent on white, not one of positive dependency, but rather an imposition that is inescapable. I can’t agree with Fanon more. In a country where white supremacy is prevalent, blacks simply cannot be viewed through a lens where they aren’t judged by their skin color. Fanon quotes an unidentified person: “Understand, my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign.” This compliments Fanon’s idea, color prejudice is not something self-imposed or brought out within any society, but one that is created arbitrarily by a group. Fanon’s inescapable experiences of black inequality and judgment lies in the fact that he is in a place where prejudice exists.
Through the experience of a young child repeatedly calling out “negro” in the presence of Fanon, he goes through a series of deprecating thoughts: “the Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.” The mother of the child realizes that Fanon is a civilized man and and tells Fanon to ignore her son. The child’s repeated utterances of the ugly words left Fanon speechless and dumbfounded. He describes himself to be a triple person, one that is responsible for his skin, race, and ancestors. He gets caught in a bind where any type of reaction to the child would be disadvantageous to his people.
Fanon talks briefly about the working of a serum for “denegrification,” that at one period in time, the idea of whitening a black man was considered. I have never considered the idea that such experiments were attempted before and it’s quite appalling to think that dark skin was seen as some type of curse. Fanon does not input his opinion regarding denegrification. The idea begs the questions: would the majority of dark skinned people take the serum if they had the choice? In other words: how many people of the dark skinned population would abandon their identity? Fenon believes that blacks should persevere and hope that prejudice will one day disappear. And given his self-applied responsibility as a triple person, he would likely turn down a denegrifying serum.
Fanon talks about a particular character in Native Son, Bigger Thomas, who is put in a position where he’s told to shoot a white man. He responds with, “I can’t shoot white folks,” in which he justifies himself with the simple fact: “because they’re white folks.” Fanon calls Thomas’ response a result of feeling nonexistence, more severe than the feeling of inferiority. A character like Thomas shows that the minds of a person can be programmed a way in which logical explanations are absent. Thomas’ response to why he cannot shoot a white man simply begs the question once again. Imposed prejudice does more than set racial inequality, but inflicts a negative mindset upon the ones subjugated.

Although societal taboos are increasingly becoming fewer and fewer in contemporary culture, it is a common facet of human nature to observe that when something ‘obscene’ is expressed publicly in popular culture, it immediately will become a widespread sensation. One example that comes immediately to mind is the recent New York Times best selling novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” which although contains dubious literary merit – or so I’ve been told – also vividly depicts human sexuality in a way not often brought up in polite conversation, so inevitably everyone felt the necessity to read it.  This idea that what is considered ‘wrong’ or ‘inappropriate’ is also exactly what society craves obsessively and will go to any lengths to get a glimpse of is a focal point in Michel Foucault’s discourse in “The History of Sexuality,” and goes farther to say that by defining these harmless notions as wrong in the first place we are in fact creating our own taboos which we will then feel the necessity to obsess over and crave. In the text Foucault states that in censoring and “putting boundaries [around] what one could say about sex…installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (1506).  It is because these limitations pertaining to acceptability in society are so rigidly fixed that make taboos so desirable to us.

Foucault portrays this repressed state of society by ways of Europe in the Victorian era 17th century. He states the origins of this form of thought rests in this age primarily through the mode of the teachings of the Catholic Church, “whose greatest reserve was counseled when dealing with sins against purity” (1503).  The Catholic Church is still notoriously uptight about sexuality and one’s ability to overtly express it, and as seen with the various scandals concerning Catholic priests and small children throughout the years, perhaps they are not taking the right approach to this ideation of sexuality. It is an interesting notion that we in fact are the perpetuators of the very ideas we as a society claim to abhor by identifying these ‘wrong’ concepts in the first place, and is a concept which brings me back to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” in which he states that the fact we are able to use language so readily is because we as a society forgot that we were the ones who created it in the first place. There is a forgetting period which is pertinent for any established ideology to continue existing as supposed ‘fact’ and this is seen in the Victorian era’s view, and in a sense still of our own contemporary capacity to discuss taboos such as explicit sexuality in popular society today.

Through reading F. Fanon’s Black Skin White Faces I was able to see what being a Black Man in his time was like at that time. I can understand how he felt while also being able to see the inconsistencies in his both his beliefs and his identity as a black man. 

His ability to find some type of identity in the world he was attempting to be a part of was constantly hindered by his outward appearance. Franz could not create and identity as a a distinguished and learned man because what he was, was socially incompatible with who he was trying to be. As a black man in his time (the most important thing to take notice of) had to live with the scientific racism that sought to dehumanize those without european or asian ancenstry; a historical fact that explains why he keeps referring to his ancestors. 

Franz Fanon’s referral to his ancestors is important because he felt that he lacked the historical connection to an intellectual past; a luxury afforded to those races he lived amongst. He felt that the primitiveness of his ancestors (sub-Saharan people) hindered his ability to be accepted among the white society he wanted to be a part of. 

He then goes on to elevate within his own mind the black identity by finding links to poetics and inventiveness in African history; a connection which to him was more consonant to the identity he wanted to create for himself in a euro-centric society. He goes on to demote and bring down the idea of whiteness that he has created within himself so that he can bring up black identity and this is where we see how he is as guilty of racism and tribalism as the Europeans who occupied the society he wanted to be a part of. 

He becomes as racist as those who view him in a negative light by seeking supremacy in his own race above those of white people.