Race, Gender , and Class

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
How do you know "culture" goes against our "deepest evolved instincts" and our "best interests" (I wonder who gets to decide what these are), and isn't, in fact, simply a sort of "deepest evolved instinct" in and of itself that evolved as humans organized in groups as part of what was "in their best interests"?
Well the point is that 'culture' in humans can override and supersede the imperatives of biology, of instinct. That's a big part of what distinguishes us as human and how our evolution has largely moved away from genetics and into the cultural realm. That's the crucial bit - what people in societies do may not always now reflect what has been genetically encoded. Hence internal conflict, alienation, cognitive dissonance.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ha, you say "raving lesbian" as if being a lesbian is some sort of mental illness, Mr. Tea.

Not at all, it's just a phrase, no connotations of madness - maybe more common in Britain. I enjoy a good rave myself now and then...
 
Last edited:

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Well the point is that 'culture' in humans can override and supersede the imperatives of biology, of instinct. That's a big part of what distinguishes us as human and how our evolution has largely moved away from genetics and into the cultural realm. That's the crucial bit - what people in societies do may not always now reflect what has been genetically encoded. Hence internal conflict, alienation, cognitive dissonance.

I understand what you mean, but I think this is a little too simplistic.

It's hard to be sure what's been "genetically coded" and what hasn't, when it comes to human behavior, especially considering that phenotypes are often expressed in part based on environmental input from outside a body.

It's hard to think of genes and our genetic "self" as something that exists before or outside of our social reality. It's also hard to assume that the way we live, the things that cause cognitive dissonance, are not a product of culture clashes rather than maladaptation by creatures who are ill-equiped genetically to live certain ways.

Though I do tend to believe (this is not a rigorous, scientific belief, obviously) that living in "families" and organizing the way we do now causes cognitive dissonance because humans for most of our evolutionary history did not live this way.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Actually that's exactly what you seem to do. Projecting?

Actually, a quick look at most of the threads here seems to suggest that I go to great lengths to expound upon arguments I'm making when it seems they are not being understood.

Sure, we all throw around ideas, often without qualification, but it seems that you rarely, if ever, write posts that are anything more than a bunch of footnoted questions rather than a thesis about a topic.

I've been posting on this message board for a long, long time, so it's quite often unnecessary for me to explain myself to people (say, Mr. Tea) because they're already quite aware of my ideological background. Perhaps this is what confuses you.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I think it might be the case that there is partly a biological basis for the incest taboo, but I'm not sure, I don't know. I think I've provided a fairly good account of how this might occur. You on the other hand seem to be utterly convinced of whatever it is that you believe to the exclusion of even considering anything else as being reasonable. I haven't asked for it because I'm not arguing but where is your coherent water-tight argument that biology absolutely plays no part whatsoever in being the basis for the incest taboo?

What is the mechanism by which biology has created the incest taboo? Thanks in advance for your answer.

I don't know if you realize this, but most evolutionary biologists believe that there's a biological incentive/imperative for all people to have sex with as many partners as possible in order to ensure that they have as many offspring as possible. Doesn't matter if they're your cousin, or whoever. Look at dogs, look at monkeys--a male monkey or dog will fuck another male dog, or a female monkey who's in heat (usually not one who isn't)...a person's leg...a teddybear...In this view, people are wired to have as much sex as possible with whomever is handy so that the chances are higher that people will reproduce.

I tend to disagree with this view, because I believe there's a biological incentive to hedge one's bets when it comes to reproduction. One child who is adequately taken care off and who will "thrive" and produce its own offspring is preferable to three who can't be cared for (fed, sheltered, educated to work, socialized to be decent to others and sociable, etc.) and who will be more likely to die without reproducing. Given human babies need more one-on-one care from their mother than any other species' offspring, and more investment of time/resources/psychological interest, it seems that being selective about reproductive partners would have higher pay offs than indiscriminate fucking and impregnating, in terms of conferring advantages to one's offspring that will ensure that they will in turn successfully reproduce. As a male, you don't want to waste your time fucking, say, a terrible alcoholic who is going to miscarry or who won't take care of the kid even if it's born. Even if she looks good and you're attracted to her. So you might have sex, receive some measure of sexual satisfaction from her, because she's handy, but you'll use a condom and wait until a more suitable parent comes along. Maybe she gives you everything your mother didn't--love, stability, emotional support. As a woman, there's no biological incentive to fuck a gorgeous man if he's homeless and won't be able to help contribute some money or resources to ensure the kid is healthy and thrives (at least in situations where a woman herself does not have the resources to provide for the child alone). But it might feel really good and maybe you'd need it right then for whatever reason.

Another example: There's no biological imperative for rape, because in the ancient past we know most women left babies who were the product of rape out in the woods to die. (Hell, they left all kinds of babies in the woods to die--infanticide was commonplace before abortion was accessible and safe.) There's no point in producing offspring that won't make it to reproduce themselves. Or in even trying. This is a waste of time and precious resources. But there could be a psychological reason, and a basic physical reason (I'm horny and x is willing), to have sex with someone who might not be a great parent.

In other words, there many reasons why we fuck, and often reproduction has nothing to do with them--they're the same reasons why we piss when our bladder spasms, or why we go out and drink with friends. Because we need relief or an outlet for other psychological needs that are just as hard-wired as "hey orgasms feel good" is. I think evolutionary biologists ignore this sort of incidental/psychological fucking when they try to explain how we came to be what we are, and all too often evolutionary biology is used to explain what people *already think they know* about people (e.g. men are promiscuous, women are monogamy robots, etc) without first challenging these assumptions. (Just like the "orgasmatron" scientists ignore the fact that female orgasms are not achieved solely through mechanical stimulation and identical across the sex, unlike male orgasms which are...)

The problem with trying to assume that we know which cultural values are biologically based is that evolution is a dynamic process, where many many factors (environmental ones that we have no idea about, for one) worked in combinations we can never replicate and entirely random genetic mutations were, thanks to specific environmental cues, advantageous for some people and therefore those people were more likely to survive and reproduce more healthy offspring, (and thereby exert a larger influence over the gene pool), and so on...

Not something we'll ever be able to adequately model in a lab/research setting.
 
Last edited:

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Actually I think Poetix hit on this in another thread when he talked about scarcity and game theory:

In a situation where there's no scarcity, sure, human evolution could have been a simple, linear process.

Just like I think game theory can't account for the way people behave in the real world in any rigorous sort of one-to-one correspondence, I don't believe the reproduction-centered model that many evolutionary biologists rely on bears much resemblance to the real world.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Culture/Biology

There was a very interesting book published lately by Daniel Lord Smail, called The Deep History of the Brain. Smail's central thesis is that culture and biology are not easily distinguished. This is clear if you think about thing like drugs, which have clear biological effects. But all culture, actually, has biological effects - an action film induces adrenaline, serotonin, so do books, so do tea ceremonies. There was a review of the book in the LRB, I don't have access, but the first paragraph reads:

"Are you enjoying your morning coffee as you read this? Or your evening glass of wine? Did you enjoy watching the match last night? Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is your sex life? According to Daniel Lord Smail activities like these are the true drivers of history. Forget great men with great ideas, the march of progress or the ‘seeds of change’: the essence of the historical process is the manipulation of human chemistry by the substances we consume, and the activities we engage in willingly or which are imposed on us against our will."
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
There was a very interesting book published lately by Daniel Lord Smail, called The Deep History of the Brain. Smail's central thesis is that culture and biology are not easily distinguished. This is clear if you think about thing like drugs, which have clear biological effects. But all culture, actually, has biological effects - an action film induces adrenaline, serotonin, so do books, so do tea ceremonies. There was a review of the book in the LRB, I don't have access, but the first paragraph reads:

"Are you enjoying your morning coffee as you read this? Or your evening glass of wine? Did you enjoy watching the match last night? Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is your sex life? According to Daniel Lord Smail activities like these are the true drivers of history. Forget great men with great ideas, the march of progress or the ‘seeds of change’: the essence of the historical process is the manipulation of human chemistry by the substances we consume, and the activities we engage in willingly or which are imposed on us against our will."

And this is why I'm all for the radical deterritorialization of (my own and others) bodies by any means necessary.

:D

"Vitalism" is a misnomer. There's nothing so-called vitalists (at least, of the sort whom I identify with) want more than to completely divest of contingency on the material world, on biological "life" (that busy hum of electrochemical impulses and energy flows that never take a break) and instead, against all odds, to redefine "life" as a sort of radical immanence that leaves behind, forever, the horrifying, black-hole of powerlessness at the heart of "subjectivity" within the ruthlessly efficient, mechanistic determinism of the natural world.

And you know, I certainly have no interest in spending my entire "life" trying to ferret out a decent enough reproductive opportunity so my kids can eat, drink, swallow, snort, smoke their lives through a system where narcissism is an ontological default mode.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
When it comes to sex, seems to me we live in this sort of phantasmagoric netherworld where we're constantly called upon to act out drives and pulled along by the tides in a sea of desire that has little, if anything, to do with us personally, no regard for our personal well-being or satisfaction, and yet is easily manipulable for personal gain.

Libidinal surplus always = budget surpluses.

Sex is the value-added of life's commodity.
 
Last edited:

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
"this is why I'm all for the radical deterritorialization of (my own and others) bodies by any means necessary."

What do you mean by this? The radical excise of foreign biology games? Sorry if this question sounds dim...
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
to redefine "life" as a sort of radical immanence that leaves behind, forever, the horrifying, black-hole of powerlessness at the heart of "subjectivity" within the ruthlessly efficient, mechanistic determinism of the natural world.

There's a question of paleonymy there, I think: why retain the word "life" when using it to describe something entirely alien to the organism's survive-and-reproduce modus operandi? Badiou suggests that "death" is an equally good name for the kind of immanent excess you describe; in a sense, its defining characteristic is indifference to both "life" and "death", understood as dispositions of bodies (towards teeming or rotting, as the case may be). What seems to be retained in Deleuze's vitalism is a notion of inorganic immanence as a borderless teeming, a universal flourishing; but I don't see that it couldn't just as well be characterised as universal decay, entropy, blackening. Everything is running down...
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
There's a question of paleonymy there, I think: why retain the word "life" when using it to describe something entirely alien to the organism's survive-and-reproduce modus operandi? Badiou suggests that "death" is an equally good name for the kind of immanent excess you describe; in a sense, its defining characteristic is indifference to both "life" and "death", understood as dispositions of bodies (towards teeming or rotting, as the case may be). What seems to be retained in Deleuze's vitalism is a notion of inorganic immanence as a borderless teeming, a universal flourishing; but I don't see that it couldn't just as well be characterised as universal decay, entropy, blackening. Everything is running down...

Yes...seems plausible that we're not talking about "life" at all (hence the airquotes or I think they call them scarequotes in the UK), though...

The small problem I have with this line is that "death" doesn't really seem to fit neatly where "life" does now either. Death is what happens after the survive-and-reproduce impulse inverts because it can't attach to objects sufficient to its magnitude or any object grand enough to substitute for the lost one. A dying body can take on all the characteristics of a living one (for example sublimation is common where there is libidinal surplus in either direction, eros/thanatos), but death as an ontic category is rather final and uncompromising. You just can't seem to get anything done when you're dead.

Plus there are all of those icky humanist ideas mixed up in death as a political act. Subjectivity is no good unless we use it for something. It's just that the kinks aren't worked out.

So to avoid all of the humanist baggage (successfully? I don't know) we're using "post-human" now.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I should probaby clarify that last post, since I was rushing out the door writing it, but I'm too lazy. Josef, I'm talking about Deleuze's and Guattari's "body without organs"...there are many summaries online handy...most probably better than my rant would be...

Have you read aTP or Difference and Repetition? Pure Immanence? (Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty is also pretty great but that one deserves a thread of its own)

It seems that virtual bodies are swollen with post-human potential, especially D&G's "virtual" bodies...
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
it's interesting that the mother is only ever a partial object or fragment, never a subject. desire can only have an object but no subject. for example, the breast, or the mother's image in a mirror (this is what drives the Imaginary phase, which I guess would be roughly equated with the adolescent/anal stage in Freud's schema?) I agree the media panders to lower drives. I'm not sure if it addresses desire but drives for sure. It generates/produces drives in fact. You don't know you want something until you see it advertised, or at the mall, etc. i think we would agree that capitalism deadens the libido to some extent, or at least perverts it from natural objects onto images, products, celebrities, etc.

By the by, just saw this really good post on Larval Subjects about Oedipus, anti-Oedipus, and such:

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/the-transcendent-and-the-transcendental/

In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari enact their own “return to Freud”, though one which certainly transforms Freud. As Freud had argued, the unconscious knows no negation, contradiction, opposition, or objects, but instead only knows connections and productions. This was the surprising result he had already attained in his early unpublished Project essay, where the functioning of the primary process becomes unmoored from any sort of representational realism or instinctual and natural relation to sexuality. Yet somehow all of this falls apart with the introduction of the Oedipus where, instead of relating to partial objects and flows, the primary attachment becomes an attachment to fully formed objects (the father, mother, brother, sister, etc.). Nonetheless, Deleuze and Guattari do not give much in the way of an analysis of just how these paralogisms are possible from the standpoint of active and affirmative desire. Here we would need to look to Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as, I believe, the work of Lacan. We can thus think of the relationship between schizoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis as being like two sides of a severed egg. The latter explores the domain of the actual and all of its illusions, coupled with their genesis and strategies for escaping these sad passions premised on an installed lack and castration (for Lacan it was always a question of moving beyond these things as I argue in my post on the Borromean knots), whereas Deleuze and Guattari explore the productive realm of the unconscious and its desiring-machines perpetually manufacturing the real.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Wow. I was in love and didn't realize it. Jesus, LMAO, <grumble> If I'd never been raped under anesthetic on that operating table at Grady Memorial, who knows how things would have turned out?!
 
Top