We Speak the Sanatorium
Sam Barnes
The opening verse of the Tao Te Ching, rendered here through translation and thousands of years after-the-fact, announces that “the way that can be spoken is not the perennial Way.” Real encounter with life, whether it be in its social, spiritual, or societal aspect, lies just beneath our tongues. And yet the power of speech is essential to history– its regulation and propensity for transformation form, if you will, the shores and sea-floor of a speaker’s conscious mind. It is quite difficult to penetrate deeper than the bottom of what words allow, and in those times a fissure in language becomes inevitable: think, perhaps, of the invention of zero. And sometimes the sea is pushed back.
- Map of Beemster, the Netherlands’ first dredged municipality
Foucault’s opening move in The History of Sexuality is to trouble the intricacies and machinations through which the early capitalist Western culture has fought the timeless tides of lust and love and funneled them into a severely restricted, abstracted role. Like the dikes and polders that in those very same decades were enabling the Dutch to build the first worldwide shipping empire, opposing mechanisms of repression and release helped to define a discourse that knocked sexuality off of its immortal horse (perhaps a satyr) and into the mundane schema of measurement, definition, opposition and defense, and—perhaps most troublingly—regulation. “There arose an apparatus for producing an ever-greater quantity of discourse about sex,” writes Foucault (27). By forcing it under the cold light of the courtroom, the confessional, the sick bed and the sanatorium, sexual discourse became a vehicle for State and Authority. Even the rebels from the Victorian code of “tact and discretion,” such as de Sade and the anonymous author of ‘My Secret Life,’ fed into this complex, for in casting themselves and their exploits as outliers, they served only to enlarged the edifice of sexual normalcy in the consciousness of their culture.
In traditional societies, sex was a domain of subtle humor and rapturous bliss. Portrayed as the alternately mischievous and astounding gods and goddesses of dozens of pantheons, stories were a cipher for the happy mysteries of amorous love. With the coming of the rationalist enlightenment and the beginning of the European economic conquest of the globe, though a shift was in. Sex was no longer a toy; it was a weapon, whose ammunition was words.
We moderns, as heirs to this troubling lineage, can hardly help but insert narratives of submission and domination, profligacy and fortitude, competition and hierarchy, into stories hailing from cultures that had no words—much less psychological complexes—that would enable such scenarios to be imagined. In the centuries between Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, Europeans began to grapple with Nature in her myriad aspects. Guilders in the Netherlands diked the North Sea and dredged the bogs; lens-grinders in Germany trained their sights on the stars; the burgeoning British Empire standardized weights, times, and measures; and social reformers in France opened hospitals, prisons, sanatoriums and schools that encased primal sexuality in layer after layer of words.
February 4th, 2013 at 2:47 am
I love how you connected the growing discourse on sexuality with other ways our civilization sought to describe and control Nature through words. I hadn’t thought of it before, but the expansion of human influence into new realms does seem highly relevant to this discussion of sexuality. But where else did we point our lenses? With this technology came the opportunity for expanded surveillance as well. With better tools for navigation came colonies for enslaving people and abandoning citizens with outstanding debts. Is this domination of sexuality primarily a domination of Nature or of other people? I don’t have an answer, but I do think it’s worth thinking about.
– Eli
February 4th, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Hi Sam,
Your use of the sea metaphor is an enticing way to set out a Nature versus Culture opposition, but I want to disturb that dichotomy a bit from a Foucauldian perspective. Although he may romanticize ars erotica in his text, he doesn’t assume that it was more natural a set of practices but rather a different set of cultural presumptions at work, invested with its own power relations. So I want you to trouble your own notion of the wonderful phrase about “subtle humor and rapturous bliss.” For your part of the presentation, I’d like you to present the connections about how scientia sexualis operates in conjunction with rising capitalism in relation to the concept of population–that connects with your excellent insight about the Netherlands and also connects with Eli’s point about the links between surveillance and empire building.