Repression

From Metapedia

Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are two of the authors who discuss the term repression. In Althusser’s case, he discusses the difference between the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), while Foucault wants to change our old notions of power, from a power which is basically repressive, toward a notion of a productive, positive power. Althusser believes that a certain amount of repression is needed in society in order to secure the functioning of the ISA’s. Thus, he makes a distinction between State power and the State apparatus (Althusser, 144). Not only this, but he proposes that there are two kinds of State apparatuses the RSA’s and the ISA’s. The main difference between both kinds of apparatuses, according to Althusser, is that the former “functions by violence” while the latter “functions by ideology” (Althusser, 145). The importance of the ISA’s in the maintenance of the “status quo” in society is that it acts in much less obvious ways than the RSA’s. The RSA’s act by law and decrees and occasionally by physical violence, while the ISA’s, do it far more subtly. People do not perceive themselves as being subjected to the ideologies transmitted by the ISA’s and thus accept the ideology without even knowing it. Whereas Althusser speaks of ideology, Michel Foucault speaks of power. Power in western society is often depicted as a negative power which, through law, censorship and repression, rules over subjects. When speaking of a theory of sexuality, Foucault claims that contrary to the popular belief that sex is a repressed category in our society, sex is actually a topic that is constantly discussed. Multiple discourses on sex pervade our society, such as the medical, juridical, psychiatric and pedagogic discourses (to name a few), which constantly construct and produce sexual knowledge. However, it is true that there is a policing of statements and a control of enunciations of sex. The purpose of this “restrictive economy of sex” is not to repress and prohibit, but to authorize certain people to speak of certain things in particular spaces. Not everyone is allowed to “speak” and even if they can “speak,” not everyone’s discourse is legitimate or credible. Foucault disagrees with the notion of a repressive power, because this sort of power would be “incapable of doing anything, except to render what it dominates incapable of doing anything either, except for what this power allows it to do” (Foucault, 85). However, there is a kind of usefulness to the belief that power is repressive: “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” (Foucault, 86). Subjects in society may complain about the repression they believe they are forced to accept; in fact, they are encouraged to. This is what Foucault calls the “speakers benefit” (Foucault, 6) where if we believe that sex is, in fact, repressed, then the simple fact of talking about it will appear as a deliberate transgression (and quench the person’s thirst for real change).