[lbo-talk] Naturally organized sociality and symbolically organized sociality

[Voyou]

On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 11:41 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: Sex is unmediatedly or immediately , i.e. directly social, in the
> bodily sense. The satisfaction of thirst or hunger is mediatedly , not
> directly, social . And the social relations in social production are the
> means not the end. In sex , the social relation _is_ the end or purpose,
> not the means.  In social production, the human producers relate
> socially as a means to the purpose of making some object to satisfy
> thirst or hunger, put an object in or on a body.  In sex, the two people
> put their bodies on each other, and that itself is _social_, Sex is
> doubly social. It is unlike putting an object on or in a body. It is
> socially/symbolically  putting a body on a body, body on body being a
> second level of sociality, a natural sociality. 

But if, per imposibile, one were to give a purely biological description
of sex, it would be in terms of certain physical interactions with
objects that excrete particular pheromones. These pheromone-secreting
objects are not immediately others that we relate to socially; they only
are that through the mediation of the prior existence of human sociality
more generally. I don't see that sexuality is immediately social any
more than anything else is.


> Human Sex _is_ a symbolically constituted practice. I am saying that
> all along. Most discussing don't notice that I am saying human sex is
> partly symbolically constituted, like all human activity. I have two

But this, as shag said, is what Butler is criticizing - the idea that
sex is "partly symbolically constituted" in a way that would allow us to
differentiate which parts are symbolically constituted and which are
not. It's not that Butler wants to say that sex is wholly symbolically
constituted; she rejects the distinction between symbolically
constituted and naturally constituted.


> CB: Yes, 1844 manuscript. I thought I just sent to the list the quote
> from the 1844 Econ and Philos Manuscript on this. I got the idea of
> what
> I am saying here from Marx right there. My translation of the quote
> from
> Marx ( which I will send to list again)as follows: 
> Sex is a unique combination of the social and natural, in which the
> natural has more of an equal role with the cultural than in most human
> endeavors.

Thanks for posting that extract again, I'd missed it the first time
around.