Voyou wrote:
>
>
> This was Rousseau's argument in "Essay on the Origin of Language," but
> I'm not sure it's true. If I understand you right, you are arguing that
> the sexual instinct is fundamentally social because the instinctive
> sexual urge requires other human beings to satisfy it. But humans always
> acquire the means to satisfy our hunger or thirst through social
> production, that is, hunger and thirst require others for their
> satisfaction too; so wouldn't these instincts be just as social?
>
> I think Marx makes this point somewhere in the 1844 Manuscripts, but I
> can't find the exact reference right now.
We are dealing here with Marx's philosophical and historical thought as developed in the 1840s, though I believe it consistent with (and to some extent informing) his scientific work (Critique of Political Economy). Instincts (whatever they are and my personal opinion is that they don't amount to much) are features of the individual, and for Marx _human_ individuals have no existence prior to and independently of the social relations in which, wherever whenever they find themselves they are always already enmeshed.-(it is not only tautological but _trivially_ so and obscurantist to boot -- leading us back to bourgeois individualism) to claim that this sociality stems from human biology -- especially since tha sociality is historically prior to the human species, having emerged 2 million or so years or so prior to the emergence of homo sapiens). The various homo species _never_ had to become social since the species evolved as such. I can't remember the exact passage in Rousseau (and whether he was serious or faceitions) but the view that there are indiviuals who _form_ socila relationships (rather always finding themselves involved in such) is imaged by Rousseau as primitive men and women living isolated lives in the forest, only very rarely and briefly meeting for the sole purpose of conception. Whatever Rousseau meant by this, it is a perfect image of the core of bourgeois ideology. REPEAT: It is seriously false to speak of human individuals _forming_ or _creating_ social relations since no human has ever existed outside or prior to such a complex or ensemble of social relations. (Thesis III)
This is also fundamental to Marx's epistemology, as formulated in Thesis II, which concerns not the validity of beliefs, theories, thoughts, etc but their prior involvement with each jother in collectively changing the external world which hence is NOT external, so the question of how humans know the extramental is a false question because there is never a time when their very existence is bound up with the extramental. The relevance of this to Butler is not to her arguments on sex and gender, which once formulated are so intuitively obvious that it is curious they did not become commonplace before Butler was borh, but the following sentence, which (in Marx's sense) is idealist to the core. Chris is of course right that no one has ever doubted the existence of external objects; that is not in question. What is in question is _how_ those external objects are known, and Butler simply assumes some version of the phenomenological answer, and answer that assumes knowledge of external objects is a serious quesion. "These criticisms presuppose a set of metaphysical oppositions between materialism and idealism embedded in received grammar." Butler's conclusion (reworded slightly) that sex and gender are formed within human social activity is quite correct, and I really don't undestand why Seth or Charles should get all excited about it. Her philosophical premises (which go back to the early phenomenologists) are however nonsense, and are not needed to establish the social/anthropological point.
Carrol