(1) Part One - We "Other Victorians"

Over de ontwikkeling van een tolerante tijd (17e eeuw) naar de preutse Victoriaanse tijd.

"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 demeanor avoided contact with other bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one's speech. And sterile behavior 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." [mijn nadruk] (3-4)

"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."(4)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (5)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (6)

[Ik vind het taalgebruik hier erg abstract en daarmee nogal nietszeggend. Al die beweringen, hoe waar zijn ze?]

(15) Part Two - The Repressive Hypothesis

(17) I - The Incitement to Discourse

De verbanning van seks ging samen met steeds meer gepraat (discourses) erover in verschillende contexten en machtsinstituten zoals de gezondheidszorg, de rechtsspraak, pastorale zorg.

"The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech."(21)

"This is the essential thing: that Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself. Not only were the boundaries of what one could say about sex enlarged, and men compelled to hear it said; but more important, discourse was connected to sex by a complex organization with varying effects, by a deployment that cannot be adequately explained merely by referring it to a law of prohibition. A censorship of sex? There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy." [mijn nadruk] (23)

[Wat beweert Foucault nu in die eerste zin? Het is zo vaag als wat. Wat ik begrijp: Verlangen naar seks werd omgezet naar gepraat erover. Seks was verboden en mocht niet bestaan, maar juist daarom werd er op allerlei manieren eindeloos over gepraat door de instanties die het verboden. Maar is dat nu zo interessant? Waarom je concentreren op dat laatste en niet op dat eerste? In de praktijk van alledag was er wel degelijk censuur. Wat belangrijk is is dat het in de praktijk bij mensen niet mocht bestaan behalve voor het doel van de voortplanting. Belangrijk is ook dat gewone mensen niet leerden om van van hun eigen en een anders lichaam te genieten, dat hun onwetendheid - en waarschijnlijk vooral die van vrouwen - leidde tot eindeloos veel problemen en ellende en pijn die vermeden hadden kunnen worden. De rest is theoretisch gezever.]

"A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. (...) it was necessary to analyze the birth­ rate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of unmar­ried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive practices - of those notorious "deadly secrets" which demographers on the eve of the Revolution knew were al­ ready familiar to the inhabitants of the countryside. (...) Through the political economy of population there was formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex. There emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct, their determinations and their effects, at the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains. There also appeared those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the traditional means - moral and religious exhortations, fiscal meas­ures - tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic and political behavior." [mijn nadruk] (25-26)

"Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it. The situation was similar in the case of children's sex. (...) But this was not a plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results." [mijn nadruk] (26-27)

[Dat laatste - de resultaten - is waar het volgens mij alleen maar om gaat: wat waren de praktische gevolgen? "Dingen werden anders gezegd, door andere mensen, vanuit andere perspectieven." Lekker vaag. Belangrijk is wat ze met al dat geleuter wilden bereiken.]

"The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or without curtains), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods - all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children. What one might call the internal discourse of the institution - the one it employed to address itself, and which circulated among those who made it function - was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active, and ever present. But this was not all: the sex of the schoolboy became in the course of the eighteenth century - and quite apart from that of adolescents in general - a public problem. Doctors counseled the directors and professors of educational establishments, but they also gave their opinions to families; educators designed projects which they submitted to the authorities; schoolmasters turned to students, made recommendations to them, and drafted for their benefit books of exhortation, full of moral and medical examples. Around the schoolboy and his sex there proliferated a whole literature of precepts, opinions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for reform, and plans for ideal institutions." [mijn nadruk] (28)

[Maar dat is logisch: als je iets wilt verbieden dan ga je er vanuit dat dat iets bestaat. En hoe gevaarlijker je dat iets vindt, hoe meer je moet doen om het uit te roeien. Dat je wilt dat iets niet bestaat betekent dat je weet dat het wel bestaat, anders zou je al die moeite niet hoeven te doen. Het is een open deur.]

"The sex of children and adolescents has become, since the eighteenth century, an important area of contention around which innumerable institutional devices and discursive strategies have been deployed. It may well be true that adults and children themselves were deprived of a certain way of speaking about sex, a mode that was disallowed as being too direct, crude, or coarse. But this was only the counterpart of other discourses, and perhaps the condition necessary in order for them to function, discourses that were interlocking, hierarchized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power relations." [mijn nadruk] (30)

[Waar, maar belangrijk is dat de insteek ten aanzien van seksualiteit negatief was. Het voorbeeld hierna laat al die disciplinerende instanties goed zien - en dat is interessant - maar belangrijk vind ik dus dat die man blijkbaar geen seksuele spelletjes met die stoute kinderen meer mag spelen, terwijl dat in de decennia ervoor geen probleem was. Dat vind Foucault blijkbaar toch ook. Het is wat er verloren gaat ... Belangrijk is waarom die dingen ineens niet meer mogen.]

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called "curdled milk." So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge - an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mareville, but also one to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. One can be fairly certain that during this same period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating." [mijn nadruk] (31-32)

"What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret."(35)

[Ik vind dat een schijntegenstelling. Seks werd op allerlei manieren negatief benaderd en beschreven en in de praktijk onmogelijk gemaakt, dat is waar het om gaat.]

(36) 2 - The Perverse Implantation

"A possible objection: it would be a mistake to see in this proliferation of discourses merely a quantitative phenomenon, something like a pure increase, as if what was said in them were immaterial, as if the fact of speaking about sex were of itself more important than the forms of imperatives that were imposed on it by speaking about it. For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procrea­ tion? Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination. Were these anything more than means employed to absorb, for the benefit of a genitally centered sexuality, all the fruitless pleasures? All this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality, is it not motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative?
I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective. But this much is certain: reduction has not been the means employed for trying to achieve it. The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions. " Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities." [mijn nadruk] (36-37)

[Dat zijn geen vragen. Zo is het precies. En wat dat laatste betreft: waren al die variaties er niet altijd al? Foucault gebruikt uitdrukkingen als "er werd meer en meer / minder en minder over gepraat". Hoe controleerbaar zijn die beweringen historisch gezien? Heeft hij allerlei bronnen op zitten tellen? Het is dus onduidelijk hoe hij aan die beweringen komt.]

"There emerged a world of perversion which partook of that of legal or moral infraction, yet was not simply a variety of the latter.(...) They were children wise beyond their years, precocious little girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious servants and educators, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with bizarre impulses; they haunted the houses of correction, the penal colonies, the tribunals, and the asylums; they carried their infamy to the doctors and their sickness to the judges. This was the numberless family of perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and akin to madmen. In the course of the century they successively bore the stamp of "moral folly," "genital neurosis," "aberration of the genetic instinct," "degenerescence," or "physical imbalance."" [mijn nadruk] (40)

[Zegt Foucault hier nu eigenlijk dat die perversies er eerst niet waren? Mij lijkt van wel. Dat er meer over gepraat werd en allerlei instanties er over praatten, is dat wat hij bedoelt?]

"Perhaps the point to consider is not the level of indulgence or the quantity of repression but the form of power that was exercised. When this whole thicket of disparate sexualities was labeled, as if to disentangle them from one another, was the object to exclude them from reality? It appears, in fact, that the function of the power exerted in this instance was not that of interdiction, and that it involved four operations quite different from simple prohibition." [mijn nadruk] (41)

"... an entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the family milieu. The child's "vice" was not so much an enemy as a support; it may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good." [mijn nadruk] (42)

[De eerste bewering is feitelijk en klopt ook. Maar dan weer die laatste vage bewering, wat zegt die nu eigenlijk? Door het te bestraffen en te controleren houd je het in stand en laat je het juist niet verdwijnen? Maar dat laatste was wel het streven, lijkt me, en niet dat in stand houden. Dat dat dan niet lukt is weer een heel ander verhaal.]

"The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality."(43)

[Een voorbeeld van dat afschuwelijk vage gecondenseerde taalgebruik van Foucault. Ik heb ook een hekel aan dat praten in termen van 'lichamen' wat door veel feministes van bepaalde richtingen helaas werd overgenomen. Lichamen doen niets, mensen doen iets. Het 'seksuele lichaam' is niets. Lichamen zijn een middel voor personen.]

"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the overall and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power."(45)

"We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but - and this is the important point - a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities." [mijn nadruk] (49)

[Door zaken tien keer te herhalen worden ze niet waar. Natuurlijk was er wel degelijk sprake van seksuele repressie. Dat allerlei instanties daar een rol in spelen en hun geld mee verdienen - zoals artsen - zegt niet dat er geen sprake is van repressie.]

(51) Part Three - Scientia Sexualis

"I suppose that the first two points will be granted me; I imagine that people will accept my saying that, for two centuries now, the discourse on sex has been multiplied rather than rarefied; and that if it has carried with it taboos and prohibitions, it has also, in a more fundamental way, ensured the solidification and implantation of an entire sexual mosaic."(53)

[Nee. Meer media meer gepraat. Maar wat is het belang van al dat gepraat? Foucault maakt het superbelangrijk. Onterecht vind ik.]

"Until Freud at least, the discourse on sex - the discourse of scholars and theoreticians - never ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about."(53)

[Als je over iets praat verberg je dat iets niet, dat kan niet. Het zijn daarom de anderen die er niet over mogen praten, ook al weten die best dat 'het' er is, misschien wel beter dan al die geleerden en medici. Maar die laatsten horen bij de mensen met macht en geld dringen hun waarden en normen op aan iedereen die niet bij hun clubje hoort. Al dat praten - het discours als je wilt - is maar één middel temidden van andere middelen om macht uit te oefenen.]

"It thus became associated with an insistent and indiscreet medical practice, glibly proclaiming its aversions, quick to run to the rescue of law and public opinion, more servile with respect to the powers of order than amenable to the requirements of truth. Involuntarily naive in the best of cases, more often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire pornography of the morbid, which was characteristic of the fin de siècle society." [mijn nadruk] (54)

[Machthebbers hebben nooit veel op met de waarheid. Hierna zwerft Foucault weer van het een naar het ander om maar duidelijk te maken dat waarheid in samenhang gezien moet worden met machtsverhoudingen.]

"The confession was, and still remains, the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex."(63)

[Pagina's lang gaat het dus al over de biecht en zo. Zinloos geklets. Het ware verhaal over seks wordt geproduceerd? Wat betekent dat in liefdes naam?]

"Paradoxically, the scientia sexualis that emerged in the nineteenth century kept as its nucleus the singular ritual of obligatory and exhaustive confession, which in the Christian West was the first technique for producing the truth of sex."(68)

"Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century-bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will - did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion ..." [mijn nadruk] (69)

[Dat is geen hypothese, dat is al een stelling, en van toetsing is geen sprake. Dat is ook erg lastig met vage termen als 'de waarheid van seks', de 'productie van waarheid' en zo meer.]

(75) Part four - The Deployment of Sexuality

"In order to situate the investigations that will follow, let me put forward some general propositions concerning the objective, the method, the domain to be covered, and the periodizations that one can accept in a provisory way."(79)

(81) 1 - Objective

"The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less toward a "theory" of power than toward an "analytics" of power: that is, toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. However, it seems to me that this analytics can be constituted only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation of power that I would term-it will be seen later why­ "juridico-discursive.""(82)

"We shall try to rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. But how then do we analyze what has occurred in recent history with regard to this thing-seemingly one of the most forbidden areas of our lives and bodies-that is sex? How, if not by way of prohibition and blockage, does power gain access to it? Through which mechanisms, or tactics, or devices?" [mijn nadruk] (90)

[Foucault valt van de ene abstractie in de andere en het blijft de hele tijd onduidelijk waar hij zich in zijn baseringen anders op baseert dan op zijn mening over allerlei zaken. En maar volhouden dat er geen repressie van seks is (geweest). Dit abstracte gezever negeert volkomen de alledaagse praktijk en de mensen die die repressie dagelijks ervaren hebben. Zullen we maar eens gewoon onderzoek gaan doen in plaats van te speculeren?]

(92) 2 - Method

"Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings - misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, and its unity."(92)

[Zelfs zo'n zin is totaal onduidelijk. En hij verduidelijkt echt niet wat 'macht' inhoudt in het vage vervolg hierna. Het is niet dit en niet dat, maar wat het wél is is onbegrijpelijk. Zie dit citaat:]

"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their move­ ment. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."(93)

[Totaal vaag. Zie ook p. 94 e.v.]

(103) 3 - Domain

(115) 4 - Periodization

"The same can be said of the family as an agency of control and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the "bourgeois" or "aristocratic" family that the sexuality of children and adolescents was first problematized, and feminine sexuality medicalized; it was the first to be alerted to the potential pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close watch and to devise a rational technology of correction. It was this family that first became a locus for the psychiatrization of sex."(120)

[Maar natuurlijk was dat geen repressie, dat lijkt alleen maar zo.]

Part Five - Right of Death and Power over Life

"Whence the importance of the four great lines of attack along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries. Each one was a way of combining disciplinary techniques with regulative methods. The first two rested on the require­ ments of regulation, on a whole thematic of the species, descent, and collective welfare, in order to obtain results at the level of discipline; the sexualization of children was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of the race (precocious sexuality was presented from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth as an epidemic menace that risked compromising not only the future health of adults but the future of the entire society and species); the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of their bodies and their sex, was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of society. It was the reverse relationship that applied in the case of birth controls and the psychiatrization of perversions: here the intervention was regulatory in nature, but it had to rely on the demand for individual disciplines and constraints (dressages). Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the "body" and the "population," sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death." [mijn nadruk] (146-147)

[Maar er was geen repressie, hoor, dat zien we allemaal verkeerd. En daarmee sluiten we een zinloos verhaal af. Ik beloof plechtig dat ik nooit meer Foucault zal lezen.]