Foucault's critique of the Freudo -Marxists? That was pretty persuasive in my moving away from what I've come to see now as the limitations of the Frankfurt buoyz' analyses.
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Foucault wrote:
"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all 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. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement. . . . These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." (Sexuality 1: 45)
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"For the Greek moralists of the classical epoch, moderation was prescribed to both partners in matrimony, but it depended on two distinct modes of relation to self, corresponding to the two individuals. The wife's virtue constituted the correlative and the proof of a submissive behavior; the man's austerity was part of an ethics of self-delimiting domination" (The Use of Pleasure 184).
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If you're "in" to hierarchical power, have accepted or been socialized to accept it as 'natural' (as opposed to the equality of power a la communism), you'll find social relations based on dominance and submission from somewhat, to greatly pleasurable, depending on the degree of dominance and submission being demanded by 'your' class society's authorities and where you are in the pecking order, the hierarchy. If you see this condition of human relations as being natural, then you can safely embrace liberal or conservative versions of class society and feel justified in accepting, even going for, as much political power *over* others as you can possibly accumulate, while at the same time accepting whatever levels of masochism from your dominants as you *must*. Of course, those of the liberal political persuasion would want to get rid of sexist, racist, homophobic and other social impediments in order to allow all to be 'equal under the laws' enacted within their versions of the 'opportunity society', while conservative would be happy in accepting whatever is or even pushing history back to earlier, even more arbitrary ideological constructions of 'social justice'. Bottomline is that neither liberals nor conservatives *want* a classless society of equal political power. Sexual repression becomes productive of art, pleasure and the social relations of the class dominated version of civilization--TINA again, IMHO.
Mike B)
http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join
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