Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 23:19:20 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: 'Historically Generated' (was Re: M-TH: Re: Porn)


Carrol speaks of using a better term:
>Yoshie speaks of "...responses on to my comments about heterosexuality as
>social construct on this list, it seems that the dethronement of
>heterosexuality as naturalized norm is a huge threat to their
>identity-fetish."
>
>One possible clarification here. I think that the Marxist phrase should be
>"historically generated" rather than "social constuct," because in much of
>its usage "social construct" means "constructed in discourse," and that
>can be, usually is, idealistic.

That seems to be the common usage, though when I used the term "social
construct," I never meant "discursive construct," in that what is social is
historically generated and not reducible to/caused by discourse. But I
agree that "historically generated" is a much better way of putting it, in
that it won't allow conflation of our thinking with postmodernism. Thanks
for the clarification.

>Heterosexuality is clearly, it seems to
>me, "historically generated," that is, the contrast between
>heterosexuality and homosexuality is relatively recent. You could be a
>sodomist in (say) 1750, but you could not be a "heterosexual" or
>"homosexual," and in this case verbal difference reflects differences in
>historical reality.

Yes. I am interested in investigating the relationship between the
emergence of bourgeois individualism and that of
heterosexuality/homosexuality/bisexuality.

>And I'm not sure what to make of "identity fetish": "Identity" as an
>object of self-conscious concern is itself of rather recent vintage.

I agree. I used the term to indicate this more recent preoccupation with
identity. One used to have an identity without having an identity-fetish,
but now that identities (e.g. heterosexuals) have become objects of
rational and historical examination, some people are really desperate and
need some fetishism.

>Just
>how recent figures in questions I tried to raise about *Antigone*,
>suggesting that that drama exhibited at least embryonically concerns that
>did not completely "flower" until the 19th or even 20th century.

I would say that those concerns later became ideological resources for
bourgeois individualism. I try to avoid the term "prefigure" in that it
suggests a certain sense of Hegelian hindsight.

>*Oedipus Tyrannos* has been neatly summarized as the story of a man who
>went looking for himself and, when successful, could not stand the sight.
>In other words issues of "identity" (whatever that means) were
>foreshadowed in that drama also.

You can find more premodern concerns like that in the Western Lit than in
Japanese Lit.

The dominant tendency in pre-modern Japanese literature seems to me to have
been aesthetical, not metaphysical like issues of 'identity.'

Yoshie




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