>kelley wrote:
>
>>
>> that is not instinctual. you have learned to think of it that way, though.
>> for one thing you have to live in a world in which there are strangers.
>> for most of human history we did not live in those worlds. we knew
>>everyone.
and Caroll replied:
>Kelley, I spent half a teaching career trying to convince lit students
>of this with no more success than you are apt to have.
Well, Kelley didn't have to teach me this, did she? After all, I said it first. And in the post to which Kel was replying at the time. I posited instincts to touch people and instincts opportunistically to grasp at food when hungry. I put 'em in their contemporary social context to show that instinctive behaviour always occurs within social relations.
To quote the bit to which Kel took initial exception:
"I often knowingly behave against what feel like instinctual tendencies (it is a good idea when you want to lash back at a huge aggressive drunk, or caress a passing stranger, or eat a commodity for which you haven't paid, for instance). And I sometimes behave according to them. They are not decisive, because they ever occur within a society of proprieties, hierarchies, definitions, meanings, categories, and sanctions. But they are no less real for that - and they might just be important, too."
Have I really written this so badly that it's impossible to comprehend that I was saying instinctive behaviour and instinct-denying behaviour occurs within a particular meaning-bestowing historical moment? The instinct in theft is not the theft bit; that's an historical construct contingent on the notion of exclusive ownership. The instinct bit is the taking of food by the hungry. The instinct bit in carressing a stranger is not the violation of an unconsenting individual's bodily integrity in a world of social mobility, large population centres and liberal rights. It's the touching of another.
So, yeah, I still reckon that (a) instincts are, and (b) instincts matter.
None of this constitutes the misogynistic imposition of a tendentiously constructed autonomous nature. It just allows for the possibility that that, as I said, "at play in our ensemble of relations are natural tendencies".
And Doug sez this all started when I suggested the selfish gene theory. Well, from my point of view, it started before that. I thought Yoshie had said (and as I feel misrepresented, I should allow for the possibility I'm misrepresenting Yoshie) that in a 'degendered' world young women would have no call to get involved with older blokes. I responded to warn against what I saw as an incipient certainty, arising out of a discourse theory taken as all-explaining. I took this as a danger to people's freedom. Now freedom is a point of note for all you lefties, innit? I'm not at all sure about TOE (the theory of everything), and I feel it harbours dangers in how we would construct (and enforce!) freedom (I have often argued about certainty with Charles over the 18 months, for instance). Marxism is about the dialectical development of our corporeal being and our psychic being - so you can *not* make anything of us you might like to make (capitalism hasn't succeeded in four hundred years) of us (eg. youth-loving young women or oldie-loving old blokes) - and you can't justify it, either. This last suspicion is why I call myself a humanist (a practical humanist in Ange's words).
I honestly have no idea how such a view is just so much ignorant woman-hating. In fact it annoys the hell out of me that people chuck stuff like that around so lightly. And if I'm being over-sensitive. If it's not me who's thus guilty. Exactly who is, and exactly why?
Cheers, Rob.
Oh, and Carrol, am I the alleged author of the shit below? Did I even imply it? If not (and I fucking didn't), why write it?
>Rape, Opposition to abortion. Stinginess. Lying. Chauvinism.
>Exploitation. Racism. Belief in God. All just natural instincts.