> ----- Original Message -----
> From: wrobert at uci.edu
> I'm skeptical of this division of the 'genuinely felt' and the 'learned.'
> Anne Fausto-Sterling does a good job showing the way that this assumed
> division constructs gendered and sexed assumptions. More significantly,
> I'm not sure why you need reference to some sort of 'nature' in order to
> challenge structures of exploitation and domination.
> ---------
>
> If a man feels exploited and dominated, it must be because he is not buying
> the prevailing social mythmaking that would have him accept this as natural.
> So, what I'm saying, is that if we are all trained to accept the status quo
> and if all values are relative , in reference to what do we feel exploited
> and dominated?
> Joanna
>
Surely part of the answer is that the values we inherit from ourOn 7/5/2011 1:10 AM, Mike Beggs wrote:
social environment do not fit together into a coherent, consistent
> whole, but conflict with one another.
Beware, I'm going all academic on y'all for a minute: Mike is, of course, completely on target here, the norms and values sought to be taught by hegemonic institutions under all prior and present modes of production have been and are contradictory... along side the never wholly separable material conditions to which they are tied. No appeal to nature is necessary to understand cognitive dissonance, individual alienation from existing material semiotic relations or collective resistance.
With respect to Marx on these issues, seeing as how the man had no affection whatsoever for feudalism, the proletarian estrangement/alienation from nature, the products of (their) labor, their actions within production, their own social/universal species-being, other men, and shared space (public and private) review in the 1844 Manuscripts is never an estrangement/alienation from a more natural mode of life but rather from “the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’”, “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism”, “hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe”, “the sentimental veil” of the family, in short, all ossified, solid, and holy “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” laid out in the Manifesto.
Historians of various sorts - RG Collingwood, Keith Thomas, Clarence Glacken, Donald Worster, Carolyn Merchant and many others - have written variously useful and periodically wonderful dissections of the complex and intertwined ideas of Nature and operationalizations of nature but it is Raymond Willliams who helped me most with this: "“The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history. Like some other fundamental ideas which express mankind’s vision of itself and its place in the world, ‘nature’ has a nominal continuity…. but can be seen on analysis to be both complicated and changing.” Furthermore, a “singular name for a real multiplicity of things and living processes may be held, with an effort, to be neutral, but I am sure that it is very often the case that it offers, from the beginning, a dominant kind of interpretation: idealist, metaphysical, or religious.” Very quickly following Williams, Neil Smith's argument in Uneven Development is, overly shortened and - in my reading - paralleling Geertz's argument about cultural universals, that capitalism is not only a new mode of social re/production but that the qualitatively new, and equally contradictory, dynamics within capitalist modernity's production of space are coincident with/part and parcel of a new mode of the production of nature, including human nature.
With all this at hand, appeals to nature strike me as deeply problematic.
My one caveat is two sided. On the one hand, Laura Pulido generated the wonderful term "strategic essentialism" to note both the danger and utility of very carefully appealing to hegemonic essentialisms when struggling against dominant institutions - her research is tied to native american struggles in the southwest. On the other hand, Haraway semiregularly quoted Spivak during the 90s - as I've noted here before - indicating that for all that it is not possible for her to use the tern nature innocently, nature remains something she cannot not want... she, and I, find that tension useful.