Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 11:22:07 -0500 (EST)
From: eugeneh <eugeneh-AT-HUMANITIES1.COHUMS.OHIO-STATE.EDU>
Subject: Re: desire and banking



     Tutul asked:
     
     "What am I trying to get at? I think I understand how labour-power 
     creates this abstract value that opens up the possibility for 
     instituting use-values and exchange-values, how labour-power is thus 
     congealed into the commodity-form.  I fail to see the parallel de- and 
     re-territorialization of "desire", specifically at the economic level. 
     Could someone enlighten me, or point to passages where D and G dwell 
     on this point?  Or maybe someone has something easier to offer?"
     
     Here's what I think: just as comparable -- i.e. abstract -- 
     labor-power entails exchange-value, the nuclear family entails 
     abstract desire, to the extent that desire is limited to the mother 
     who is at the same time forbidden.  So this purely abstract desire, 
     which could be free (schizophrenic, deterritorialized) is instead 
     bound (reterritorialized) to a forbidden object and a same-gender 
     identification, in Mommy and Daddy respectively.  Since the family is 
     segregated from social production, from the "public sphere" or "civil 
     society," desire receives what is from society's standpoint a purely 
     abstract representation, which either gets reterritorialized or 
     doesn't and remains schizophrenic.  Advertising is perhaps the most 
     blatant mechanism of reterritorialization: it pins abstract desire 
     onto specific objects; but job training and state bureaucracies are 
     also institutions of reterritorization, inasmuch as they provide or 
     impose objects for/on free desire.
     
     Does this bear at all on the question you were asking?
     
     Gene Holland


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