But we also know that
-- it matters whether you sleep at night or during the day. I worked graveyard; I can vouch for this.
-- it matters whether you breastfeed or bottlefeed a child.
-- it matters whether you eat junk food or unprocessed food
-- there's jet lag
All these examples suggest that there is a natural norm and that straying from it exacts a price.
Also: "The sooner we discard the vapid notion that one set of social relations is more "natural" than another, the better."
So, there's no difference between having sex for lust/love and having sex for money?
???
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> But for another thing, I think it's really weird that anyone buys into
> or perhaps not believing but using language anyway to suggest that
> tastes, desires, emotions, etc. are foundational, fixed and secure in
> some primal way that isn't touched by social relations. So untouched,
> it's in nature. But after all this time, isn't it clear that there is no
> unmediated access to "nature". By the time we claim a "nature" out there
> for us to find and get in touch wich, we've already created "nature" and
> claimed ourselves as somehow separate from it. Clearly "nature" is
> nature for us, and clearly social relations are part of what makes
> nature appear to us as something alien, out there, something that's
> separate from us and with which we must get in touch.
Yes. Putting your arm up a ewe's vagina is just as much a product of social relations as DJing at a NY club or teaching a freshman poetry class or roofing a house. The claim that there is a pure, unmediated nature we need to "get back to" is--ironically--a precipitate of alienation in a capitalist society. The sooner we discard the vapid notion that one set of social relations is more "natural" than another, the better.
Miles ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk