Foucault on the Bus

It's very easy (too easy? it's not exactly a scientific survey if you're only looking for positive evidence) to find "Foucauldian" phenomena in the newspapers. Last week we connected issues from Foucault's idea of bio-politics and "Body of the Condemned" essay to the coverage of Saddam Hussein's hanging and the "death of citizenship" in Guantanamo Bay.

But I had a more banal Foucauldian moment this week that was a throwback to our first topic, looking at the knowledge/power regimes surrounding the practice of confession in our society, and specifically the confession of sexual details.

I've been picking up the free daily Redeye newspaper, and last week they had an article on the hoary old issue of whether you should tell someone you're intimate with the number of previous sexual partners you've had.

There's a lot that's Foucauldian about this even when the issue is just treated as one of social/personal etiquette: the value of honesty in this regard tends to be treated as either an end in itself when it comes to intimate relationships, or as part of a healthy relationship to the self - ie. to be comfortable with yourself is to be comfortable with your sexual past is to be comfortable with disclosing it.

But the connection didn't occur to me until I was reading the numerous letters that responded to the article on Monday, the most strident of which was from an individual who had worked with an HIV/AIDS program for the last 5 years and who argued the necessity of disclosure of sexual history on sexual health safety grounds (this had also been briefly raised in the original article).

Now, I should preface this by saying I risk betraying my 'foreignness' in the delicate area of sexual etiquette, but "where I come from" (not just Australia, but a subset defined by age, education, location etc.), sexual health safety is about a) using condoms and b) getting tested regularly for STDs, and thus the pertinent question to ask a prospective sexual partner is a) "Where is the condom?" and b) "Been tested recently?".

Asking about number of sexual partners struck me as a singularly indirect, unreliable and - as the rest of the discussion made clear - "subjectifying" line of inquiry if what one is actually interested in is the presence or absence of disease. An im-pertinent question.

Blogs and Foucault

Welcome to my Foucault blog site - "Flog" (a bit of a joke on Foucault's interest in disciplinary practices - sorry).

I ask students to set up and write blog postings for two main reasons:

1. it's an informal space for expression that some people find more attractive than speaking in class and that in all cases allows for more creative and personal associations - links, pictures, stories etc.
2. the bulk of the assessment for the course will be based on written submissions, and I think the sooner one starts writing on the subject, having to formulate sentences and ideas, the better. Having to write something down can bring up both ideas and problems we didn't realise existed.

This actually fits into a couple of key Foucauldian themes. The first is that this is definitely what Foucault would call an "incitement to discourse", even an incitement to "confess". Pedagogical practices at all levels for some time has moved from fewer but more stringent "testing" experiences, designed as hoops to jump through or fall down on, to more "continous assessment" practices where there are more tasks set, more feedback given and which are thus designed to provide an image of the student to themselves and to the teacher in a way that is not as clearly related to success/failure. No doubt we can see both good and bad aspects of that (interestingly, this trend is often presented as a "student-driven" change).

Having said that, you can also make a connection between blogging and the development of practices of formation of the self or creating the self as a work of art. This starts from the notion that there is a raw subjective material that doesn't contain an essence but is rather the "stuff" that is progressively refined and developed into something that didn't exist before. In this sense, the blog is not valued for its confessional quality but as a starting point for further revision and reflection.

You are not graded or "assessed" on individual blogs, but rather your synthesis of the material at the end, and your level of participation overall (ie the regularity of your posting). I and everyone else in the class will be able to view and comment on class blogs at any given time because I think we can all learn from and teach other.