Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 20:03:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: de-Oedipalizing and politics



Rojan,

Thanks for your reply to my questions.  I had asked how it is that 
philosophies of libidinal economy (specifically those of Deleuze and 
Guattari and of Lyotard) did not qualify, in your mind, as 
metanarratives.  You said:

> it is not a metanarrative with a certain conclusion 
> nor an historico-ontological judgement ("all shall be well and all
> manner of things shall be well")
> but, as explained in other post, an imaginary histoire-horizon
> 'required' for local interventions (cf. anxiety of utopia in jameson'
> po-mo book) 

But doesn't the message that we should de-Oedipalize our sexuality give 
us a prescription?  A conclusion?  Isn't it, in fact, another 
enlightenment metanarrative in just this sense of "conclusion"?
Or judgement?  Aren't we "all to be well in all manner of things" once we 
overcome the alienation of our desire through the Oedipal structure of 
our culture has imposed on us?  How would you argue otherwise?  I mean, 
how would you say that the mission to de-code our anti-incest sexuality 
is not utopian in spirit?  

Maybe your answer is in the following excerpt, although I will need you 
to elaborate a bit more to see how you are thinking.  In this excerpt, 
you were answering my question about whether you see Lyotard's libidinal 
economy as being as political as that of Deleuze and Guattari. You said 
Lyotard's system is:

 > less prescriptive on a socio-political plane
> just as prescriptive in regards to undermining knowledge-structures that
> perpetuate socio-politico-overcoding, as well as in regards to the
> overcoded socialization structures themselves

Somehow it seems to me that you are making a radical distinction between 
missions to undermine the way our sexuality is shaped and attempts to 
undermine the way our (institutional agencies?  economies?) are 
shaped?

Critical theorists have often argued that our economic and social 
institutions emerge from our sexual coding.  (Maybe others here can 
elaborate on this better than I can.)  I believe Marcuse, for example, 
talked ofthe way in which our sexual coding, as you call it, served to 
alienate us from our spontaneous sexuality and this served the purpose of 
labor.  Only if we were alienated from our sexuality would we allow 
ourselves to be colonised by capitalists and thereby forfeit our labor 
with out protest.  Some feminists (e.g., Mitchell), I believe, argue 
similarly, but say that this sexual coding serves to support not only 
labor but patriarchy.

So, unless we have a way to separate out the sexual coding of our erotic 
impulses from the social structures that we create, it seems to me that 
any mission to re-code ourselves has direct implications for the 
restructuring of society in general.

No?

..Lois Shawver