Libidinal Economies… or why does Mary marry?

1. Libidinal Economies… or why does Mary marry? Dr. Theresa Thompson ENGL / WGST 3330 Spring 2009

2. Symbolic Interactionism • “Symbols” are the basis of social life. • “Human behavior, including sexual behavior, takes place within a social context, from which people take their cues.” • Individuals and societies develop through people’s interaction through symbols. • Individuals develop a sense of themselves as they learn to use symbols. • Individuals develop a sense of themselves as they learn to see themselves the way they believe others see them. • Is Joan a schizophrenic, a saint, or a witch? • Is Aphra a whore?

3. Some Key Terms • Power: the ability to make choices or influence outcomes, which is also power held by a person or group of people in a society. • Hegemony: The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others. • Capitalism tends to reduce social relations to commodity relations: profit / loss, product / producer, owner / worker. • Natural Law: two types, sometimes seen as interlinked. • standards of morality are in some sense derived from, or entailed by, the nature of the world or the nature of human beings. • some “norms” are “authoritative” by virtue of their moral content, even when no actual convention makes moral merit a criterion for legal validity.

4. More key terms • Economy: a community’s system of using its resources to (re)produce wealth. • Reification: Berger and Luckmann, "the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms.” (Workers as units of production.) • Political economy: theory or study of the role of public policy in influencing the economic and social welfare of a political unit. • Libido: emotional energy or urge, especially that associated with sexual desire. Libidinal desire ≠ reproductive urge. • Libidinal economy: a community’s system of directing, controlling, and / or modifying sexual desire with the intention of producing (or reproducing) its resources and increasing its general wealth.

5. Foucault: History of Sexuality • Power is exerted implicitly by the way in which our conversation (i.e., discourse) is formed, often exerted by denying its own truth, or by myths that misrepresent the source of power by pointing to less powerful sources. • In the 17th Century “…there emerged a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification and specification, of quantitative or causal studies.” • "The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface;..." (60). • Confession reifies us, it makes us objects of study, not desiring subjects. Gandhi: "no power on earth can make a person do a thing against his will."

6. “Natural” Law & Zero Institution • Claude Levi-Strauss (1958) • Zero Institution: a shared understanding (assumption) that is never represented. • For example pro-lifers have an unrepresented shared relationship with pro-choice advocates that makes the “fight” possible. • Slavoj Zizek: “It is the reference to such a zero-institution that enables all members of the tribe to experience themselves as such, as members of the same tribe.” • Foucault: Without resistance, all power fades. • Self-Policing / self-hating: When a law feels “natural,” no law is necessary. • Better example of natural law: gravity.

7. Hegemony of capitalism… • Deleuze, “Society of Control” (1990): “Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous.”

8. Jean-François Lyotard: Political economy is charged with desire and desires are infused with politics. • Whether feudal, capitalist, fascist, or socialist, a sex-gender system and a system of economic discrimination operate simultaneously and inseparably. • Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. • Contract: A “contract presupposes in principle … free consent” • Christian baptism constitutes a contract: agreement to obey Christian “laws” regarding marriage, chastity and birth control, homosexuality. • Institution: “…the institution is of a very different order in that it tends to render laws [contract] unnecessary….” • Emma Goldman on “Marriage and Love” • The symbolic moral order of Christian institutions. • Religious institutions create different symbolic universes. • Judaism and abortion; Buddhism and abortion; Islam and abortion.

9. A “profitable” future requires control over desire. • What constitutes the most significant resource of any given community? • The future. • P. D. James, Children of Men: What happens if women do NOT reproduce? • How does a group insure that its ideology gets reproduced? • Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation” (1969) • You know the law only when the police call you by name. • Example: Don’t ask, don’t tell…

10. Sex Economy? • Sex Economy & Wilhelm Reich: “the most immediate consequence of private property is the interest for chastity before marriage and marital fidelity to the husband.” • Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, p. 166: "Reich coined the term 'sex-economy' around 1930. . . . The use of the word 'economy' also reflects a Marxist influence: The safeguarding of the distribution of goods requires a rational economic policy.  A rational sexual policy is not different if the same obvious principles are applied to sexual instead of economic needs."

11. Desire & the Marketplace • Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1983):Desire is pre-personal because it is “immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist.” We are born into an existing and ongoing set of interactive discursive practices. • “desiring-production” = desire is production • Totalitarianism: Hitler and Woman • From Mein Kampf: “In the education of girls in the German state the emphasis must be placed primarily on physical education; only after that should the spiritual and mental values be considered. The one goal always to be kept in mind when educating girls is that some day they aim to be mothers.” • What’s love got to do, got to do with it? • ABC: “Concern with supporting marriage and with trying to increase the number of children reared by their married parents is vital to the future of the nation.” • Religion: Control the outside, control the inside?

12. Patriarchal Libidinal Economies • Patriarchal institutions give men greater access to and mediation of the resources and rewards of authority structures inside and outside the home. • Patriarchal economies institutionalize the (re)production of male power and authority over the sources of (re)production. • To insure reproduction, institutions must control male desires. • To insure patriarchal control, institutions must control female desires.

13. Patriarchal Institutions & Contracts • Restrict “market” for productive male sexual desire. • Secrecy is imperative for unacceptable (unproductive?) desires. • Real men desire many (and only) women. • Actual (F)acts • Other desires are “unnatural,” sinful, or “sick”. • Financial Perks for (all?) men. Does humor enforce or divorce the institution’s power? Sometimes both.

14. Salary Differences: U.S. Census 2005

15. Patriarchy and Women • Restrict female sexual desire. • Control sexual pleasure: • Double-standard. • FGM. • Restrict “acceptable” outlets for female sexual desire. • Women are submissive--or else? • Unnatural law: A long history doesn’t make patriarchy natural. • Place financial limitations on divorced women. • What if she can’t land her man? • Can single women be happy? • Reports to the contrary are overplayed in (patriarchal) media? • What makes the single woman’s happiness possible? Questions?