I'm interesed in the question your post raises along the following lines: precisely what about sexual desire is threatening at the systemic level? Why do sexual practices *need* to be confined, condensed, atomized, and magnified through various institutions and modalities of discourse (medical, moral, scientific, etc,)? An important passage for unpacking this question comes on page 47 when Foucault expounds on the differences between "traditional" types of power - e.g. law or taboo - and discursive-disciplinary power. He claims that the discursive-disciplinary matrix of power controlling sexuality in the Victorian period "acted by multiplication of singular sexualities." I think the phrasing here is significant. As much as sexual discourse "explodes," tracing new paths, developing new explanatory frameworks and diagnostics, etc., praxis remains hopelessly compartmentalized; one can pursue a whole array of practices - even "deviant" ones - so long as one stays within the categorical parameters set out by dominant knowledge systems. In this sense, it seems, on Foucault's account, that fluidity in sexual identity (or simply identity at large) could have widespread socio-political effects. I.e., far more subversive to be an individual in a heterosexual relationship who refuses to normalize her own self-understanding as "heterosexual" than a sado-masochist who proudly owns up this designation. (Though we could also have a discussion about hyperconformitivity as disruptive in and of itself, which might or might not apply to the "proud" sado-masochist; but you catch my drift.)

I agree with Aha that sexual desire is troubling because it's inefficient - if left undisciplined, it could destabalize capitalist production and consumption. How so? I think this "destabilizing possibility" comes in the non-economizability of the undisciplined libidinal drive. Ideologically speaking, capitalism relies on an ingrained logic of economization - things are contractual, reciprocal, balance, at equilibrium, etc. (hence the foundations of contract law, which ideology likes to downplay, but without which, capitalism could not function). As such, assymetry can never amount to more than travesty; imbalance is only temporary, i.e. a problem to be solved as efficiently as possible. This, I think, is why Foucault found it constructive in his own life to pursue certain forms of sado-masochism: assymetrical pain is not easily inscribed within matrices of capitalistic balance. (The irony of course is that capitalism never reaches its dreamt-of "equilibrium," that the system, particularly in this transnational period, relies on the chaotic and fundamentally assymetrical displacement of peoples.) Similarly, sexual practices that don't focus on the climax present problems for capitalism - the orgasm is an economizing force; it brings the sexual act full-circle, and often becomes the focal point of "exchange" for partners (e.g. one gives oral sex to the other and then vice versa). There's something monstrous - as far as capital flow goes - in sex acts that eschew the orgasm completely. How do we know when the exchange has been made, when the power has been transferred, when the drives have crossed a certain threshold, etc.?

I agree that the threat of the sex-drive stems from the inefficiency of libidinal energy not channeled in to production or consumption, that it raises the possibility of pleasure not commodified or reducible to the form of economic exchange. How well do you think this carries over to the 'positive' pleasure-effects of power, the cat and mouse game played by the authority figures of the doctor, teacher or analyst and the patient, or the voyeuristic pleasure of the analyst or doctor? Surely, these have their own economic interest attached to them, but Foucault seems to see these as secondary, albeit reinforcing, phenomena: "this concatenation, particularly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests, which, with the help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography, have tapped into both this analytical multiplication of pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it" (48).
It is in passages such as this that Foucault's understanding of power seems irreducible to a Marxist view. Yet, if not the optimization of productivity, what gives these manifestations their unity, what determines the concerted movement away from sovereign, juridical power and toward regulatory, normative power? This passage and others has me wondering whether it could be the production of pleasure per se that is the source of this tendency.

On a semi-related note. What do you make of the bit at the end: "The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures" (157). Is this something similar to what you were saying about Foucault's experimentation with sado-masochism as a anti-economical form of pleasure?

-aha

There's an interesting sense in which the "cat-and-mouse" dynamic of the sexual/ized subject and the medical professional becomes its own form of economization: the production of knowledge of sexuality forecloses the sex act itself; generating diagnostic/explanatory frameworks of sexual practice and identity totalizes away their radical potential. One important question appears to revolve around the difference between the production of pleasure and the production of knowledge of pleasure: when F talks about the "analytical multiplication of pleasure" through the "optimization of the power," does he mean that new forms of pleasure are actually produced (i.e. the modern period has discovered previously unknown erogenous zones, methods of stimulation, etc.) or, rather, that pleasure has undergone discursive multiplication such that we can now talk about - and thereby control, harness, and economize - pleasure more so than ever before? In other words, the tensions between rupture and epistemological shift that we've seen in almost all the thinkers for this course. However, is this question not somewhat misleading in F's case? Part of the radicality of his genealogical analysis of sexuality comes in the short-circuiting of these ostensibly conflicting positions. As far as sex is concered, the production of the knowledge of pleasure = the production of pleasure (more authentically than, say, the production of knowledge of new forms of structurality = the production of new forms of structurality). In this sense, sexual deviance that appears to resist inscription within the socio-symbolic order of modern society coincides directly with the explanationary discourse that enables such inscription. Even the pronunciation of "sexual deviance" perpetuates the sytems of categorization that F analyzes - e.g. "I know! I'll partake in these 'alternative' practices in order to subvert the systems of control" requires situating one's own practices within a web of disciplinary control. That said, it's unclear where agency is supposed to reside. The passage you cite may shed some light here. I'm inclined to read F's contention that the rallying point should be "bodies and pleasures" rather than "sex-desire" as implying that an important difference exists between pleasure as such and pleasure codified in the form of "sex-desire." Perhaps "desire" is the name for economized pleasure produced through discipline, and as such, that some *purer* form of pleasure, pleasure that refuses to terminate when it's "supposed to" according to the diagnostic manuals published by the medical community. Thoughts? What do you mean by "the production of pleasure per se" as the source of the tension between repressive and disciplinary power?

I meant basically the identity you call 'knowledge of pleasure = production of pleasure.' While it's true that these new pleasures, new knowledges of pleasure have their own forms of economization, economization seems at times to be secondary to the production of new pleasures: sure, the practice of confession causes subjects to internalize their subject-hood so that they 'work all by themselves,' to borrow from Althusser, but there is also a new form of pleasure being created in the confessor/listener relationship. Similarly, for doctors, analysts, etc. All these practices result in greater control and disciplining of the subject, but there are parts where I'm inclined to read them as the formation of new economies of pleasure first, and economies of capital and economic exchange only secondarily.
The "bodies and pleasures" quote is pretty mystifying to me because I can't find a case in Foucault where pleasure isn't part of an economy in this wide sense, where it isn't founded upon a relationship of power or difference and is totally undisciplined. Perhaps unorthodox sexualities had this place before the proliferation of discourse about sex. If this is the case, I think you are correct in saying it certainly doesn't now, given that the affirmation of 'alternative sexual identity' is itself an act of categorization and discipline.
-aha

On the subject of the relationship between pleasure and power, of disciplinary pursuit and indisciplined evasion, I was reminded of this Hitchens’ article on Slate during the Larry Craig scandal. Hitchens sets out to answer the question why people would continue to risk exposure having sex in public places a) once homosexuality is no longer illegal, and b) when sites such as craigslist (har) allow one to link up with partners anonymously and privately. His answer is basically for the thrill of the threat of exposure, and for the thrill of leading a double life. I’m curious what Foucault would say about the fact that the double life, in most of the people discussed by Hitchens, is specifically that of a political authority and illicit sex, that the threat is of exposure by a force they themselves are a part of during the other half of their double life.
The nostalgia expressed by the british politician especially reminds me of a the kind of pleasure Foucault links with power: the need for exposing something while keeping it secret in order to harness the pleasurable struggle between power and resistance.
http://www.slate.com/id/2173112/

-aha

In regards to homosexual scandals in the media, I immediately thought of Reverend Ted Haggard. A little over a year ago, Haggard was the poster boy for Evangelicalism. He was the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals as well as the pastor for Colorado Springs' New Life Church. In November of 2006, Haggard was forced to resign as leader after reports surfaced that he had been inolved in a homosexual relationship for three years. The Overseer Board of the New Life Church determined that Haggard did commit a "sexually immoral act" and suggested that Haggard leave the church for good. Not only was Haggard one of the most powerful forces in the Evangelical church, he also participated in frequent conference calls with the White House. One cannot deny the current influence religion has over state and I find it very compelling that such a religious and political figure was leading a double life. On a weekly basis, Haggard stood in front of thousands of peole and exerted his power to tell them that homosexuality is a sin. Haggard's followers looked to him as the provider of a moral compass. Ultimately though, his outing is what undermined his postion of power.