File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 955


Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 18:50:16 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Sex and Power


James wrote:

> What I meant by 'commoditisation is a bullshit concept' is that it
> implies that the commodity form is something that is imposed upon human
> products post-festum. In fact, the commodity-form is the form in which
> all wealth is produced in a capitalist society. It is not an after
> thought, or a process, but the form of human endeavours within
> capitalist society.

Yes, it is the form in which wealth is produced; but when people talk
about the "commoditization of sex" or "commoditization of emotion"
they are, I think, talking about something slightly different.  The
implication here is that sex and emotion are not "human products" in the
sense in which you talk above; they exist outside of the process of
commodity-production but get, as they like to say in my neck of the woods, 
recuperated by it for its own ends.

> As to whether Marxism is lacking, no doubt it is. But I have to say that
> all of the contenders have been a sad disappointment. Is there anything
> in Foucault's discipline and Punish that is not told better in Marx's
> chapter on the 'bloody legislation' (Cap 1), or in the History of
> Sexuality that is not told better in CS Lewis 'courtly love', or that is
> not plagirised from Ken Dover's book on the Greeks?

I think Foucault is somewhat irrelevant in this connection, no?  But to me
arguments like "what does X say that Y hasn't said already" seem rather
pointless.  In the most minimal case, the answer can be "X says it differently 
and in a way that connects to a different set of things and that may be useful 
in different contexts."  The point, after all, is not whether X's thought is
brand new (which no thought is), but what it is good for.

> And all those books on 'the gaze' and 'objectification' - wouldn't you
> agree that cultural studies has been deadly dull affair, substituting
> weak sociological treatises on 'audience' or worse still preoccupying
> itself with the techniques of representation instead of the study of
> social relations?

Well, I personally find "gaze" a concept which is irritating and worse 
than useless.  It was, however, initially deployed to answer a very practical
question: what kinds of films should women make, in the service of women?
If this question, and others like it, had been a matter of continuous,
stubborn public discussion by leftist artists since Mulvey's time, I think we 
would be in a very different theoretical place now.  


-m


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