Doug Henwood wrote:
> > A thirst
>> thought can only be abated by the _material_ impact of water in the
>> digestive and circulatory systems. Symbols meaning water won't do the
>> trick.
>
>No kidding. Do you think Judith Butler is a moron or a psychotic?
^^^ Butler seems to be critically and especially a theoretician for the lesbian and gay liberation movement; politics and knowledge in the politics of sexuality. The central use of the claim of no _significant_ determination by heterosexual biological instinct is to establish the principle of anti-essentialism. This gives theoretical underpinning to the rhetorical term "heterosexism" or concept of heter-sexists as an oppressor group.
" Significant" is a pun here, in the signifying structuralist tradition. There is no significant determination or biology doesn't affirmatively determine the cultural rules of American ( European ? Culture X ?) sexuality or sexual roles.
The precise general structuralist concept is that biological facts only make determination of cultural structures or rules or ideas by limiting them, not by determining them affirmatively ( See _Culture and Practical Reason_ , by Sahlins, for example
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/2094.ctl )
I'm arguing that biological heterosexuality does make some affirmative determination of the symbolic structure of sexuality in American culture. This would make it an unique exception to the general rule of only negative or limiting determination of culture by nature.
As Marx seems to say, sex is a special exception . That would be because sexuality and sexual instinct is a natural sociality, unlike appetite for food , for example. Natural appetite relates a human being and a natural object. Natural sexuality relates two humans, i.e. is a natural sociality.
See passage from Marx here
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
...In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man.
>From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.
The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.
Charles
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