The privatising of passion

The removal of sexuality behind the scenes is a phenomenon of the privatisation of passion. Passion was once a term which referred to the ecstasy and devotion of the religious. It concerned precisely those moments at which an individual felt in contact with cosmic forces, with a realm beyond day-to-day experience. The notion of passion later lost these meanings almost completely, becoming secularised and confined mainly to the sexual sphere. This is part of the very transition by means of which

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`sexuality' emerged as a distinct phenomenon, separated from the more general and diffuse eroticism once frequently linked to aesthetics and to the experience of unsocialised nature. ²¹

There is no known culture in which sexual behaviour has been carried on in a completely open way under the gaze of everyone. Yet there is plenty of evidence to indicate that, in many non-modern cultures as well as in pre-modern Europe, sexual activity was not strictly kept hidden from the eyes of others. In some part such visibility was unavoidable: in lower socioeconomic groups it was normal practice for parents and children to sleep in the same room, often together with other relatives. Sexual activity carried on more or less casually outside of the dwelling-place also seems to have been something of general occurrence.

The privatising of sexuality might again be thought to be linked to the rise of a new moral conscience. According to such a view, sexuality became increasingly subject to prurient attitudes which condemned it as licence. Foucault has helped to show how misleading this interpretation is. As he says, it suggests a story according to which:

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.... 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 sanitised one's speech. ²²

In this interpretation, which conforms broadly speaking to that of Freud, the privatising of sexuality is a matter of repression -- that repression which is the price we have to pay for the fruits of civilisation. Foucault does not so much oppose what he calls the `repressive hypothesis' as contrast it to one which stresses the proliferation of discourses bringing sexuality into the newly constituted public arena.

But Foucault's thesis that concern with sexuality becomes obsessive and more or less all-pervasive in the modern world does not seem any more convincing than the conception that it is designed in some part to replace. We can formulate an alternative

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to both views in the following way. `Sexuality', in the modern sense, was invented when sexual behaviour `went behind the scenes'. From this point onwards, sexuality became a property of the individual, and more specifically, the body, as eroticism conjoined to guilt was progressively replaced by an association of sexuality with self-identity and the propensity to shame. The hiding away of sexual behaviour was not so much a prurient concealment from view as a reconstitution of sexuality and its refocusing on an emerging sphere of intimacy. Sexual development and sexual satisfaction henceforth became bound to the reflexive project of the self. The various `discourses on sexuality' of which Foucault speaks form part of the wider spectrum of the development of reflexive, internally referential systems.

Sexuality has then become, as Luhmann might put it, a `communicative code' rather than a phenomenon integrated with the wider exigencies of human existence. <sup>23</sup>In sexual behaviour, a distinction had always been drawn between pleasure and procreation. When the new connections between sexuality and intimacy were formed, however, sexuality became much more completely separated from procreation than before. Sexuality became doubly constituted as a medium of self-realisation and as a prime means, as well as an expression, of intimacy. Sexuality has here lost its extrinsic connections with wider traditions and ethics, as well as with the succession of the generations. Sexuality remains, or rather becomes, a central focus for `experience', and the word `experience' comes to have a particular significance in relation to sexual life. Yet this `experience' has little to do with the existential domains with which sex in some sense places us in contact.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 623