For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, where anomalies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies “made a display of themselves.”
But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence became the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as a model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principal of secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one: the parents’ bedroom. The rest had only to remain vague; proper demeanour avoided contact with other bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech. And sterile behaviour carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on making itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly and would have to pay the penalty.
Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied, and reduced to silence. Not only did it not exist, it had no right to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least manifestation – whether in acts or words. Everyone knew, for example, that children had no sex[uality], which was why they were forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also an injunction to silence, an affirmation of non-existence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of production, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and his hysteric – those “other Victorians,” as Steven Marcas would say – seem to have surreptitiously the pleasures that were unspoken into the order of things that are counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorised, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammelled sex have right to (safely insularised) forms of reality, and only clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern Puritanism imposed its triple effect of taboo, non-existence, and silence.
But have we not liberated ourselves from those two long centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to a slight extent, we are told. Perhaps some progress was made by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical prudence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of “overflow,” in that safest and most discrete of spaces, between the couch and discourse: yet another round of whispering on a bed. And could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is contained by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces Freud’s conformism, the normalising functions of psychoanalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Riech’s vehemence, and all the effects of integration ensured by the “science” of sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology.
This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn historical and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. [As] the minor chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremonious history of the means of production; its trifling aspect fades from view. A principal of explanation emerges after the fact: If sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labour capacity is being systematically exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those – reduced to a minimum – that enables it to reproduce itself? Sex and its effects are perhaps not so easily deciphered; on the other hand, their repression, thus reconstructed, is easily analysed. And the sexual cause – the demand of sexual freedom, but also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about it – becomes legitimately associated with the honour of a political cause: sex too is placed on the agenda for the future.
The History of Sexuality: Will to Knowledge v. 1 by Michel Foucault is available from Amazon and other good retailers.
‘This series explores the subject of sexuality via contemporary still lifes. These paintings at once demystify the sexual nature of the objects by candidly displaying them for the viewer’s eye, but then remystify their intent by divorcing them from their sexual context via arrangement in the manner of conventional still lifes. Rendered in this liminal state, the meaning becomes ambiguous. Are the objects meant to incite outcries of scandal and obscenity, or merely to invoke the viewer’s inner anxieties about sexuality? To comment on the excesses of, or to celebrate, sexuality in today’s culture? Or, are the objects rendered primarily for their aesthetic beauty?’
