Re: Re: Wilde Socialist's Hard Labour (was Re: Oscar Wilde: was O Happy Day)

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
    Where Yoshie writes,

Yoshie,
 is 3.
Before the Victorian era, a trial like Wilde's could not have taken
place, for in the pre-Victorian past there was no "common sense" that
there was such a thing like an "abnormal sexual identity," a "kind of
person" by nature likely to commit certain "unnatural" acts.  In the
anti-sodomitical periods before Wilde's, it was understood that
"sodomy" was a _universal_ temptation, with _everyone_ capable of
committing it; now, however, a new understanding of sex emerged: _not
everyone_ is inclined for "sodomy" -- only an _abnormal minority_ of
"homosexuals" are.  (Recall the works of Michel Foucault, Jeffrey
Weeks, John D'Emilio, etc. here.)  The trials of Oscar Wilde played
no small part in the consolidation of this new ideology of sexual
normality & abnormality based upon so-called "identities."

Doyle
The presumption behind this statement is that there is clarity from
Foucault, Weeks, D'Emilio et al about what the work process of what fucking
does in the brain.  In other words, what exactly does the concept of
homosexual really amount to?  I've read some parts of Foucault's work on
sex.  What is missing in his work is the innards of the black box of the
mind.  This is typical of the Post Modernist strain of thought Foucault
represents.   Within that in previous discussions about homosexuality,
Yoshie, has ascribed to Capitalism kinds of insight about how the mind works
that seems to me not adequate to describing a new ideology.  Capitalism has
not so much understood human thought to create an identity as used profit
and control of production as a means to assert their dominance of society in
a chaotic melange of social production.  Looking at homosexuality in a Post
Modernist way does not give us insight into what is going on with how people
connect through social brain work in a materialist way.  Instead Foucault
takes the given legal structures and social institutions as the primary way
to understand what makes someone a homosexual.  The basic difficulty then is
to get what the work process of doing brainwork really is.  Similarly
Chomsky guesses at a language module to the brain because the universal
rules of grammar tell him this is so.

What in particular seems to me unexplained in this theory is social ties.
Fucking leads to social ties, most of the time pair bonds, but often triples
and fours and possibly fives of people who feel close.  Yoshie wants to
avoid this sort of structure of the work process in labeling homosexuality,
and make the term Homosexual lose its work process meaning.  Before Modern
Capitalism people didn't connect up as homosexuals consciously.
Homosexuality was universal as Yoshie writes about the possible universal
inclination toward sodomy, but not a way of thinking about oneself in those
times.  But the structure of connection is not universal, and the process of
making connection has a definite limit to it as well as giving one a sense
of who one is in a long term stable manner.  Going from that point where
each of us cannot hope to connect with but a few people it is not possible
to understand from Foucault how various cultures vary from the English
model, where Yoshie asserts the construction of the homosexual began.
Yoshie cannot account for more or less homosexual activity in different
regions of the world, or in animals.

The work process of the sexual bond has had shifts in how this is understood
in various epochs of human cultures.  At one point it was not understood
that romantic love, passion was what made the pair bond in marriage which is
more characteristic of our idoeological times.  That families construct
those bonds previous to our capitalist individual autonomy, and that people
fucked on the side when they felt like it, but this was not about the
institution of marriage.

The labeling of homosexuality as a construction of this period in Capitalism
seems to me unable to understand the work process of sex and what it
accomplishes.  Foucault himself spent a lot of time in the dress up world of
the Castro where I lived in the obsessive and compulsive activity of role
playing.  I cannot see that as being understood in his behavior in the sense
of the Capitalist construction of an identity he writes about in his book on
sexuality.  Why was his attention structure drawn to those kinds of narrowed
down focuses?  I am not taking a stand against this, as much as trying to
get at the disability like issues that appear in that.  That is that most
people don't seem to have such obsessive and compulsive behaviors around
sex.  And since that is so, what is going in the divergence from able bodied
just so stories.

This in turn is about the labor process of brainwork which requires kinds of
structure to the network of other human minds.  The labor process is about
how the emotional structure which has definite structure to it functions,
where sex has kinds of feelings attached to it for example.   So that the
work process of social connection accomplishes different goals from the
eating in a communal way process does for social ties.  I do not believe
Yoshies theory about the origin of  the 'Homosexual' works with the facts of
cognition.  It does not explain why children have different bonding needs
from lovers, does not explain what continues in this period of time from
pre-capitalist modes of production.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor