We Victorians
Longtemps nous aurions supporté, et nous subirions aujourd'hui
encore, un régime victorien. L'impériale bégueule
figurerait au blason de notre sexualité, retenue, muette, hypocrite.
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.
Au début du
XVIIe siècle encore, une certaine franchise avaitú cours,
dit on. Les pratiques ne cherchaient guère le secret; les mots se
disaient sans réticence excessive, et les choses sans trop de
déguisement; on avait, avec l'illicite, une familiarité
tolérante. Les codes du grossier, de l'obscène, de
l'indécent étaient bien lâches, si on les compare
à
ceux du
XIXe siècle. Des gestes directs, des discours sans honte,
des transgressions visibles. des anatomies montrées et facilement
mêlées, des enfants délurés rôdant sans
gêne ni scandale parmi les rires des adultes : les corps "faisaient
la roue".
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, when anatomies 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 model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the
truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle 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 in words. Everyone knew, for example,
that children had no sex, which was why they were forbidden to talk about
it, why one closed one's eyes and stopped one's ears 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 as an
injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, 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 Marcus would say - seem to have surreptitiously
transferred the pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that
are counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be exchanged
there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammelled sex have a
right to (safely insularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine,
circumscribed, and coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern
puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, 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 conditioned 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 normalizing functions of
psychoanalysis, the obvious timidity underlying
Reich'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 adjusts it to coincide with the
development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois
order. The minor chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the
ceremonious history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect fades
from view. A principle 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 labor capacity was being
systematically exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate
itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those-reduced to a minimum- that
enabled it to reproduce itself? Sex and its effects are perhaps not so
easily deciphered; on the other hand, their repression, thus reconstructed,
is easily analyzed. And the sexual cause-the demand for sexual freedom, but
also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about
it-becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause: sex
too is placed on the agenda for the future. A suspicious mind might wonder
if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an
impressive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as
if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse
could be formulated or accepted.
But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to
define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression:
something that one might call the speaker's benefit. If sex is repressed,
that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere
fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate
transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to
a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he
somehow anticipates the coming freedom. This explains the solemnity with
which one speaks of sex nowadays. When they had to allude to it, the first
demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth century thought it
advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters
so trivial and base. But for decades now, we have found it difficult to
speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of
defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are
being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to
the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we
are making.
Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of
a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression.
Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow
sex will be good again. Because this repression is affirmed, one can
discreetly bring into coexistence concepts which the fear of ridicule or
the bitterness of history prevents most of us from putting side by side:
revolution and happiness; or revolution and a different body, one that is
newer and more beautiful; or indeed, revolution and pleasure. What sustains
our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this
opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and
promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold
pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervour of knowledge,
the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of
earthly delights. This is perhaps what also explains the market value
attributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but also to
the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would eliminate the effects of
repression. Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials
are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if
the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing
so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some
individuals have even offered their ears for hire.
But it appears to me that the essential thing is not this economic factor,
but rather the existence in our era of a discourse in which sex, the
revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a
new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together.
Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form -so familiar
and important in the West-of preaching. A great sexual sermon-which has had
its subtle theologians and its popular voices-has swept through our
societies over the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced
hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real; it has
made people dream of a New City. The Franciscans are called to mind. And we
might wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long
accompanied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial
societies, been largely carried over to sex. The notion of repressed sex is
not, therefore, only a theoretical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality
that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of the
hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the
grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex,
modify its economy within reality, subvert the law that governs it, and
change its future. The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon
refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say that sex
is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is
not characterized by repression, is to risk falling into a sterile paradox.
It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the
whole economy and all the discursive "interests" that underlie this
argument.
This is the point at which I would like to situate the series of historical
analyses that will follow, the present volume being at the same time an
introduction and a first attempt at an overview: it surveys a few
historically significant points and outlines certain theoretical problems.
Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly
castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks
verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the
things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to
liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function. I would like
to explore not only these discourses but also the will that sustains them
and the strategic intention that supports them. The question I would like
to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so
much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against
our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral
did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show,
ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we
silence? And we do all this by formulating the matter in the most explicit
terms, by trying to reveal it in its most naked reality, by affirming it in
the positivity of its power and its effects. It is certainly legitimate to
ask why sex was associated with sin for such a long time-although it would
remain to be discovered how this association was formed, and one would have
to be careful not to state in a summary and hasty fashion that sex was
"condemned" -but we must also ask why we burden ourselves today with so
much guilt for having once made sex a sin. What paths have brought us to
the point where we are "at fault" with respect to our own sex? And how have
we come to be a civilization so peculiar as to tell itself that, through an
abuse of power which has not ended, it has long "sinned" against sex? How
does one account for the displacement which, while claiming to free us from
the sinful nature of sex, taxes us with a great historical wrong which
consists precisely in imagining that nature to be blameworthy and in
drawing disastrous consequences from that belief?
It will be said that if so many people today affirm this repression, the
reason is that it is historically evident. And if they speak of it so
abundantly, as they have for such a long time now, this is because
repression is so firmly anchored, having solid roots and reasons, and
weighs so heavily on sex that more than one denunciation will be required
in order to free ourselves from it; the job will be a long one. All the
longer, no doubt, as it is in the nature of power-particularly the kind of
power that operates in our society-to be repressive, and to be especially
careful in repressing useless energies, the intensity of pleasures, and
irregular modes of behaviour. We must not be surprised, then, if the
effects
of liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to manifest
themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its
reality is so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a
thousand years now, and so inimical to the intrinsic mechanisms of power,
that it is bound to make little headway for a long time before succeeding
in its mission.
One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall term the
"repressive hypothesis." First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an
established historical fact? Is what first comes into view-and consequently
permits one to advance an initial hypothesis-really the accentuation or
even the establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the
seventeenth century? This is a properly historical question. Second doubt:
Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are
brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the
category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the
forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every
society, most certainly in our own? This is a historico-theoretical
question. A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that
addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power
mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in
fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and
doubtless misrepresents) by calling it "repression"? Was there really a
historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis
of repression? This is a historicopolitical question. My purpose in
introducing these three doubts is not merely to construct counter arguments
that are symmetrical and contrary to those outlined above; it is not a
matter of saying that sexuality, far from being repressed in capitalist and
bourgeois societies, has on the contrary benefitted from a regime of
unchanging liberty; nor is it a matter of saying that power in societies
such as ours is more tolerant than repressive, and that the critique of
repression, while it may give itself airs of a rupture with the past,
actually forms part of a much older process and, depending on how one
chooses to understand this process, will appear either as a new episode in
the lessening of prohibitions, or as a more devious and discreet form of
power.
The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hypothesis are aimed
less at showing it to be mistaken than at putting it back within a general
economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth
century. Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said
about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What
are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the
pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as
a result of this linkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of
power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in
our part of the world. The central issue, then (at least in the first
instance), is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether
one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its
importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses
to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to
discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which
they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and
which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue,
briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put
into discourse."
Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the
channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the
most tenuous and individual modes of behaviour, the paths that give it
access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it
penetrates and controls everyday pleasure - all this entailing effects that
may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement
and intensification: in short, the "polymorphous techniques of power." And
finally, the essential aim will not be to determine whether these
discursive productions and these effects of power lead one to formulate the
truth about sex, or on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that
truth, but rather to bring out the "will to knowledge" that serves as both
their support and their instrument.
Let there be no misunderstanding: I do not claim that sex has not been
prohibited or barred or masked or misapprehended since the classical age;
nor do I even assert that it has suffered these things any less from that
period on than before. I do not maintain that the prohibition of sex is a
ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive
element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been
said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. All these negative
elements-defenses, censorships, denials-which the repressive hypothesis
groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no, are
doubtless only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play
in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to
knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former.
In short, I would like to disengage my analysis from the privileges
generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of
rarefaction, to search instead for instances of discursive production
(which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power
(which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of
knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions
to circulate); I would like to write the history of these instances and
their transformations. A first survey made from this viewpoint seems to
indicate that since the end of the sixteenth century, the "putting into
discourse of sex," far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the
contrary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that
the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of
rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of
polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a
halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in
constituting - despite many mistakes, of course - a science of sexuality.
It is these movements that I will now attempt to bring
into focus in a schematic way, bypassing as it were the repressive
hypothesis and the facts of interdiction or exclusion it
invokes, and starting from certain historical facts that serve
as guidelines for research.
Method
...
(¶) ... we need to distinguish between two questions. First,
does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of
the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional? To this
question, I think we can reply in the negative.
In any case,
the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how
deployments of power are directly connected to the body - to bodies,
functions, physiological processes, sensations, and
pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is
needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the
biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another,
as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are
bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance
with the development of the modern technologies of
power that take life as their objective.
Hence I do not envisage
a "history of mentalities" that would take account of
bodies only through the manner in which they have been
perceived and given meaning and value; but a "history of
bodies" and the manner in which what is most material and
most vital in them has been invested.
(¶) Another question, distinct from the first one: this materiality
that is referred to, is it not, then, that of sex, and is it not
paradoxical to venture a history of sexuality at the level of
bodies, without there being the least question of sex? After
all, is the power that is exercised through sexuality not directed
specifically at that element of reality which is "sex,"
sex in general?
That sexuality is not, in relation to power, an
exterior domain to which power is applied, that on the contrary
it is a result and an instrument of power's designs, is
all very well. But as for sex, is it not the "other" with respect
to power, while being the center around which sexuality
distributes its effects?
Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in
itself that we cannot accept without examination. Is "sex"
really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations
of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was
formed inside the deployment of sexuality? In any case, one
could show how this idea of sex took form in the different
strategies of power and the definite role it played therein.
Right of Death and Power over Life
....
Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the
law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum
of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory.