The Perverse Implantation

Objection to Quantitative Proliferation of Discourses:
- It's a mistake to view the increase in discourses about sex as merely quantitative, as if the content of these discourses were immaterial.
- The forms of imperatives imposed on sex by speaking about it are crucial.
Transformation of Sex into Discourse:
- Governed by the endeavor to expel forms of sexuality not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction.
- Aimed to suppress unproductive activities, casual pleasures, and non-procreative practices.
Mechanisms of Control and Normalization:
- Legal sanctions against minor perversions multiplied.
- Sexual irregularity linked to mental illness.
- A norm of sexual development defined from childhood to old age, with deviations meticulously described.
- Pedagogical controls and medical treatments organized.
- Moralists and doctors used strong language to condemn even minor fantasies.
Underlying Motivation:
- Potentially driven by a basic concern to ensure population, reproduce labor capacity, and perpetuate social relations.
- Aiming to create a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative.
Multiplication, Not Reduction:
- The 19th century and beyond have been characterized by a multiplication and dispersion of sexualities.
- Strengthening of disparate forms and multiple implantation of "perversions."
- Initiation of sexual heterogeneities.
Explicit Codes Governing Sexual Practices (Up to the 18th Century):
- Canonical law
- Christian pastoral
- Civil law
- These codes centered on matrimonial relations, determining what was licit and illicit.
Focus on Matrimonial Relations:
- The marital obligation, ability to fulfill it, and manner of compliance were central.
- Requirements, violences, unwarranted caresses, fecundity, and methods of sterility were all considered.
- Detailed prescriptions governed the sex of husband and wife, with the marriage relation under constant surveillance.
Uncertainty Outside Marriage:
- The status of "sodomy" was uncertain, and there was indifference regarding the sexuality of children.
- Codes did not clearly distinguish between violations of marriage rules and deviations in genitality; both faced condemnation.
General Unlawfulness:
- Civil and religious jurisdictions considered a general unlawfulness encompassing various acts.
- Acts "contrary to nature" were deemed especially abominable but were seen as extreme forms of acts "against the law."
Juridical Nature of Prohibitions:
- Prohibitions on sex were essentially juridical, based on a "nature" that was seen as a kind of law.
- Hermaphrodites were considered criminals for confounding the law distinguishing the sexes.
Modifications to the System in the 18th and 19th Centuries:
- A centrifugal movement away from heterosexual monogamy.
- Less focus on the legitimate couple, which was expected to define itself from day to day and function as a stricter but quieter norm.
Increased Scrutiny of Peripheral Sexualities:
- The sexuality of children, the mentally ill, and criminals came under scrutiny.
- Attention given to those who did not desire the opposite sex, as well as to reveries, obsessions, and manias.
- These figures were listened to, and regular sexuality was questioned through a reflux movement from these peripheral sexualities.
Emergence of the "Unnatural" as a Specific Dimension:
- "Unnatural" acts gained autonomy from other condemned forms like adultery or rape.
- Acts such as marrying a close relative, practicing sodomy, or seducing a nun became essentially different offenses.
Fragmentation of "Debauchery":
- The category of "debauchery" split into infractions against marriage/family and offenses against the regularity of a natural function.
The Figure of Don Juan:
- Don Juan's prestige stems from overturning both the law of marriage and the order of desires.
- He embodies the individual driven by a somber madness of sex, a pervert beneath the libertine.
Emergence of a World of Perversion:
- Perversion emerged as distinct from legal or moral infractions, with a new sub-race of perverts circulating through society.
- These perverts were hounded, locked up, considered sick, scandalous, and dangerous.
- They included children wise beyond their years, ambiguous schoolboys, cruel husbands, and those with bizarre impulses.
Significance of Peripheral Sexualities:
- The appearance of these sexualities raises questions about whether the code had become more lax or stricter.
- It's unclear whether this signifies permissiveness or stricter control measures.
Medicine's Role:
- Medicine entered the pleasures of the couple, creating pathologies related to "incomplete" sexual practices.
- It classified related pleasures and incorporated them into notions of development and disturbances.
Shifting Focus of Power:
- The key consideration is not the level of indulgence or repression but the form of power exercised.
- Instead of simple prohibition, the function of power involved four different operations.
Four Operations of Power:
1. Propagation vs. Elimination:
  - Ancient prohibitions (e.g., consanguine marriages, adultery) differ from modern controls (e.g., childhood sexuality) in their power mechanisms.
  - Prohibition of "incests" aimed at asymptotic decrease, while control of infantile sexuality aimed at simultaneous propagation of power and the object it controlled.
  - Campaigns against children's onanism involved mobilizing the adult world, using these pleasures as a prop to discover and trace their origins and effects.
  - Surveillance, traps for admissions, and corrective discourses were imposed, creating suspicion and fear among parents and teachers.
  - The child's "vice" became a support for power, demanding perseverance and proliferation rather than disappearance.
  - Power advanced, multiplied its relays, and penetrated further into reality, creating indefinite lines of penetration around the child.
2. Incorporation and Specification:
  - Ancient codes defined sodomy as forbidden acts, with the perpetrator as a juridical subject.
  - The 19th-century homosexual became a personage with a past, case history, and distinct morphology.
  - Sexuality permeated their entire being, written on their face and body.
  - Homosexuality was transposed from sodomy to an interior androgyny, becoming a species rather than a temporary aberration.
  - Minor perverts were classified by psychiatrists, with names like zoophiles and auto-monosexualists.
  - Power aimed to give this alien strain an analytical, visible, and permanent reality, implanted in bodies and made into a principle of classification.
  - The strategy was to scatter reality with these sexualities and incorporate them into the individual, specifying and solidifying each one.
3. Constant and Curious Presences:
  - This form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences, proceeding through examination and observation.
  - It required an exchange of discourses, with questions extorting admissions and confidences going beyond the questions.
  - Medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and instrument of this process.
  - Sexuality, as a medical object, needed to be detected in the organism or behavior.
  - Power contacted bodies, caressed them with its eyes, and intensified areas, creating a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure.
  - The intensity of confession renewed the questioner's curiosity, and pleasure fed back to the power that encircled it.
  - Medical examination, psychiatric investigation, pedagogical reports, and family controls functioned as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power.
  - Pleasure came from exercising power, while pleasure also kindled from evading it, creating perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.
4. Sexual Saturation:
  - Modern society created groups with multiple elements and circulating sexuality, distributing points of power.
  - Families, educational institutions, and psychiatric facilities became networks of pleasures and powers.
  - The 19th-century family was not just a monogamic cell but a complicated network saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities.
  - Separation of adults and children (e.g., parents' bedroom vs. children's), segregated boys and girls, strict instructions for infant care, attention to infantile sexuality, and the presence of servants all contributed.
  - Educational and psychiatric institutions delineated areas of extreme sexual saturation, drawing and establishing forms of nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sexuality.
Modern Society as Perverse:
- Nineteenth-century "bourgeois" society was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion, manifest and taken over by discourses and institutions.
- This power acted by multiplication of singular sexualities, extending forms of sexuality along lines of indefinite penetration.
- It included sexuality in the body as a mode of specification, attracting its varieties through spirals of pleasure and power.
- It provided places of maximum saturation, producing and determining the sexual mosaic.
Polymorphous Conducts:
- Polymorphous conducts were extracted from people's bodies and pleasures, solidified in them through power devices.
- The growth of perversions is the real product of the encroachment of power on bodies and their pleasures.
- The West defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures, with perversions as fixtures of this game.
Implantation of Perversions:
- This implantation is an instrument-effect, isolating, intensifying, and consolidating peripheral sexualities.
- Relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out, measuring the body and penetrating modes of conduct.
- Scattered sexualities rigidified, becoming stuck to an age, a place, or a type of practice.
Economic Interests:
- Economic interests, aided by medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography, tapped into the analytical multiplication of pleasure and the optimization of power that controls it.
- Pleasure and power do not cancel each other but seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another through complex mechanisms.
Rejection of Increased Sexual Repression Hypothesis:
- Modern industrial societies did not usher in an age of increased sexual repression.
- A visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities and a deployment different from the law ensured the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities.
- Never have there existed more centers of power, more attention, more circular contacts, and more sites where pleasures and power catch hold.