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Karl Marx With A Hard On

  
 
Jackie Susann
10:47 / 19.07.01
Okay, this is a theory I'm tossing around which I need some feedback on. It's long, hopefully not too dense. The contexts are (i) trying to figure out a more sophisticated (i.e., at least remotely intelligent) understanding of the relation between capitalism and sexuality than that touted by the left at a recent queer students' conference (ii) thinking about how the state uses sexuality to legitimate itself, but also how 'proper' sexualities are legitimated by reference to the nation/state/citizenry... anyway...

Marx (I know I just lost half of you) identified a tendency for capital to move from the formal to the real subsumption of labour. This means that, originally, capital just absorbs precapitalist forms of labour and production. However, there's a systematic tendency towards real subsumption of labour, meaning more and more labour processes are specifically capitalist, produced in and for capitalist economies. In Marx's time, the only such labour process was factory labour, which only accounted for a tiny porportion of the economy. However, he predicted that eventually the overwhelming majority of labour would be "really subsumed". I reckon, like a fair few people, that's what's happened. Under conditions of real subsumption, labour 'disappears' as a social force; it seems like just a part of the system, it's antagonistic force becomes imperceptible. That's not to say it doesn't have an antagonistic (okay, I'll say it, revolutionary) potential, but that potential is more or less entirely obscured by the ideology of egalitarian society.

My suggestion is that we might think about formal and real subsumptions of sexuality under capital. That would mean that originally, capital merely absorbs precapitalist forms of sex and sexuality. They're basically alien to the system, and hence potential sources of antagonism. Capital also absorbs and develops a precapitalist response to sexual deviance, i.e., violent repression.

However, this proves inadequate for various reasons (largely, I'm inclined to think, the way such a system produces zones of antagonism towards and exclusion from relations of production and consumption) and capital reorganises sexuality in a way that inaugurates a tendency to real subsumption. Specifically, sex/uality becomes commodified, it takes on the characteristics of the commodity form. Gay people aren't just weirdos to lock up, lobotomise or execute; they're a market segment.

Is this the situation which Foucault is analysing in the first vol. of History of Sexuality, more or less? The commodity form of sex demands, among other things, the production of identity categories whereby preferred sex acts will be held to reflect the innermost secrets of identity. This kind of identity basically reflects the internalisation of the commodity-form, and its application to sex drives/acts.

Later: The riots at the Stonewall (a gay bar) in 1969 are often named as the first expression of radical gay resistance; rather, I want to suggest Stonewall was actually about the clash between (a waning formal subsumption and its tendency to) violent repression and (an ascendant real subsumption's tendency to) commodification. This was the point at which gay resistance was throughly mediated by the commodity form of contemporary sexuality. That's not to discount SW or post-SW gay lib, but to recognise the historical specificity of their resistance.

That wave - the post-SW wave - of gay resistance forces a further reorganisation of capital's sex life; an intensification of the commodification of deviant sex, but especially gay sex, including the ghettoisation of the gay movement and the creation of an out middle/upperclass which will dominate movement politics. However, these shouldn't be understood as reactionary problems, but real advances on what went before that, nevertheless, demand critique and resistance. The point is that all changes in capital's sexual ethics are best traced to the resistance of sexual minorities and their complex relations to (oh, how many embarrassing words am I going to use in the course of this post) the proletariat.

So now, "after gay lib", after capital reorganises itself to neutralise the threat posed by gay lib, deviancy disappears. There is only sex, a normalised part of capitalism, properly commodified and devoid of antagonistic force. There are, of course, institutional holdovers from periods of formal subsumption who still want to persecute perverts, but their institutional power in this regard is dwindling.

When I was planning this post, I had ideas on a bunch of possible objections I wanted to suggest, but it's getting late and I can't remember what they were anymore. I'm sure you lot can come up with some. Is this a remotely reasonable theory? Is it anything more than a bad joke produced by sex for wage labour in marxist theory? Do you even get what I'm trying to convey?

Please criticise extensively.
 
 
Ellis
12:00 / 19.07.01
I think I understand what you mean...

Gay people are a powerful market too and so society has adapted to include them so they make money out of it?


Makes sense me to me. It seems to fit in with Marx's idea of the dialectic also.
 
 
grant
18:04 / 19.07.01
Sounds a bit like soma in Brave New World (if you replace the sex with drugs, I guess, or general category "hedonic pleasure").

Had no idea Marx wrote about capital as this kind of absorbing-of-opposition-type Blob Monster. Makes a certain amount of sense.

But if it's subsuming the transgressive sexuality into normalized categories, then, well, I'm not sure they're transgressive any more. Is that a bad thing?

For this bit:
quote:Capital also absorbs and develops a precapitalist response to sexual deviance, i.e., violent repression.
...I'd like a specific example.

What forms would a normalized violent repression take against normalized "deviant" sex?
 
 
ynh
22:14 / 19.07.01
I think I get it...

But, it might fall into one of two problems: either the theory is terribly interesting but not entirely true - ie highlighting sexuality in postmodern (there, I lost everyone else for you) society and offering an enticing idea, but only connecting metaphorically to the processes described - or it's very true, but not ver interesting. In the latter case, it's not just sexuality but every aspect of identity that becomes real-ly subsumed.

I suppose that's where Foucault comes in, at a possible (real?) locus of identity.

Where do current US sex-worker unionization movements fit in? Are these, too, being defined by m/u-class elites?

That's all I can muster for now. And I always felt kinda ashamed for my marxist tendencies around here...
 
 
Jackie Susann
23:17 / 19.07.01
Hmmm...

Grant: I'm not sure what you're asking. My argument is that capital (in the west, this argument is all about the west) no longer uses violence to repress sexual deviance, that it's "disappeared" sexual deviance by fostering a commodified appearance of equality and diversity. In earlier stages, on the other hand, the death penalty for sodomy was not uncommon. That seems a pretty good example of institutionalised violent repression.

And yeah, Marx doesn't so much think Capital as the Blob, more that it tends to make social antagonism invisible, not that antagonism is absorbed and destroyed.

Ellis: It's not so much that gay people are a market segment, as that they're an antagonistic social force that capital has to manage. And at certain points, it does that by submerging them into a market segment. However, deviants as a (what's one more dirty word?) class remain antagonistic.

YNH: Only antagonistic social forces can be meaningfully described in terms of 'subsumption'. Labour, obviously, is the key antagonistic force for old Karl. Negri and Hardt have suggested capital also subsumes civil society - the oppositional institutions that mediate, in an earlier phase, between capital and the workers, especially trade unions but also churches and schools, etc.

So at base what I'm suggesting is that sexual deviance might be an "authentically" antagonistic social force, unlike (for example) "identity" or other particular identity traits. I'm still not sure if that's an arguable or even coherent proposition. It has to do with the family, and that old-school analysis which says capital privileges the hetero-nuclear family because its the most efficient way to reproduce the working class for further exploitation. But I'm saying that analysis doesn't hold anymore, that we're at a point where capital is producing its own kinship relations and sexual identities, not just useful precapitalist nuclear families and abject Others. It also has to do with the way capital and sexuality are used to legitimate each other, the way capital is so often justified by its ability to protect the family, and the way traditional families are justified as the basic social unit of capital.

But the key question, which I still can't work out one way or the other, is whether it's meaningful to describe deviance as properly antagonistic to capital, or whether this apparent antagonism is only contingent, and that capital can reform its way to sexual equality. Or is it enough to show that deviancy has taken an antagonistic form, even if there's nothing necessary about it?

Is this what you meant by this theory not being particularly true? Or, what did you mean?

Sex worker unionisation... I'm not sure what your point is. You seem to be saying it invalidates my claim that capital has promoted an out middle class who try to assume control of the gay movement. I don't think there's a contradiction, though. On analogy, it's a truism that union bureaucracies have tended to de-radicalise workers' struggles, and mediate in the interests of the State. To say Capital promotes this tendency isn't to deny that there are real, radical workers struggles. Similarly, the middle-class-ification of gay movements doesn't mean there aren't grassroots struggles going on.

Theory summary: Capital, throughout its history, is confronted with the antagonism of sexual deviancy, which it establishes a series of historically-specific strategies for managing. These range from violent repression to the postmodernisation of sexuality. However, the apparent relative tolerance offered by western society to sexual deviants is simply the mark of the real subsumption of deviance, the obscuring of the basic antagonism between deviance and capitalist modes of production.
 
 
the Fool
01:02 / 20.07.01
Let me see...

Is part of what you are saying that the commodification of 'gay' as consumer package both ghettoises and controls this 'deviant sexual aberation' by packaging it in a big pink box labled 'gay' in so doing removing the percieved threat it poses to Capitalism.

This stops the 'deviant sexuality' having the ability to disrupt the 'norm' (and the market it supports) as it is put in a box that allows it to exist but keeps it hidden. Cheaper and easier that violence and extermination. With an added capitalist bonus. It creates a 'gay' market.

The notional 'gay' market can be pandered to, thereby reinforcing the percieved stereotypes in that big pink box. It then becomes harder for people to separate themselves from this box because they start drawing identity from it. Things outside the box can be completely ignored as they are 'not acceptable'.

You reduce potentially radical identities and 'groups' to their pontential profitability, then market to that as a way preventing further discourse and isolating the group. All other discourse is 'outside' the box and ignored because their is no profit in it, profit being the only way to get acceptance in the capitalist system. The 'radicalness' is suppressed by manipulating percieved group identity. Attitudes toward this group can also be manipulated by use of the same identity template, as well as tolerance of the group without acceptance.

Am I on the right track?
 
 
Jackie Susann
01:54 / 20.07.01
On the right track, definitely. I still feel like there are important consquences of this theory that I can't quite work out or articulate... especially around the way heterosexuality works as the official state sexuality even in periods of supposed tolerance and diversity.
 
 
ynh
02:11 / 20.07.01
I think maybe I need to work on my sentences. The sex workers' union question was a case of poor understanding, Jackie, nothing more.

Can you elaborate on the relationship between capital producing its own kinship relations versus reinscribing and reverberating with the traditional family? I have a feeling this is acting on/within your larger theory in a way I'm missing.

The question of whether your position is meaningful is pretty much equivalent to what I meant by true, yah. Actually, though, I think that well-reasoned it can be meaningful even if it's not entirely true, but whatever.

Utilizing the broad definintion of subsumption outlined above, are schools and churches, for example, distinct antagonists, or do they fall under the larger antagonist: civil society. If not, then is it meaningful to separate sexuality from civil society either?

More interesting, maybe, is what does it mean if each is a distinct antagonist? Working that out may be the centre of your argument. And it's certainly possible, I think, to argue for schools (and esp. the academy) as fundamentally antagonistic forces that are being demonstrably subsumed. If each is distinct, and capital acts to subsume each, then you have a good basis for arguing that capital cannot reform its way to equality. Very exciting.

On the other hand, perhaps having that sort of fill-in-the blanks theorysaps some of its power as a critical tool? I dunno. It does resonate with our Affirmative Action recall following the postmodernization of blackness. Or have I stretched this too far already?

Oh yeah. By contingent did you mean "only in terms of capital's reliance on the family to reproduce wage labor?"
 
 
the Fool
02:26 / 20.07.01
Tolerance and diversity, but not acceptance. You can tolerate something, but still hate it. As long as you can't see it and it doesn't attempt to become 'part of' your world its okay. Should it attempt to be visible, its decried as being 'in your face' or offensive. There isn't much tolerance at all.
 
 
Jackie Susann
03:43 / 20.07.01
By contingent, I meant the possibility that capitalism happens to have always (for want of better word) persecuted sexual deviants, but that such persecution isn't essential to capital, and that there could be a capitalist society without such persecution. As opposed to capitalism necessarily and intrinsically persecuting sexual deviance.

The rest I need to think about... thanks.
 
 
grant
15:11 / 20.07.01
quote:Originally posted by Jackie Nothing Special:
Hmmm...

Grant: I'm not sure what you're asking.

And still you managed to answer it perfectly... normalized/subsumed violence is invisibility, then.
Is that right?

quote:
My argument is that capital (in the west, this argument is all about the west) no longer uses violence to repress sexual deviance, that it's "disappeared" sexual deviance by fostering a commodified appearance of equality and diversity.



quote:But the key question, which I still can't work out one way or the other, is whether it's meaningful to describe deviance as properly antagonistic to capital, or whether this apparent antagonism is only contingent, and that capital can reform its way to sexual equality. Or is it enough to show that deviancy has taken an antagonistic form, even if there's nothing necessary about it?

If, as I think you're saying, capital is essentially normative -- if it makes the norm and renders everything else unthinkable/invisible -- then any deviance is going to be antagonistic because, by definition, deviance ain't normal.
Is that what you're saying?


quote:Theory summary: Capital, throughout its history, is confronted with the antagonism of sexual deviancy, which it establishes a series of historically-specific strategies for managing. These range from violent repression to the postmodernisation of sexuality.

I was just reading last night about the history of vibrators as medical devices for treating hysteria. I'm not sure how, but it seems like this is an instance of capital (as power structure) interacting pretty strongly on the sexual plane.
As a note, the instance of the article (it's on Salon somewhere) was Alabama passing a law making vibrators illegal in 1998 or 99. Closing down sex shops, basically - but also legislating against masturbation. Might make a useful case study for you.

quote: However, the apparent relative tolerance offered by western society to sexual deviants is simply the mark of the real subsumption of deviance, the obscuring of the basic antagonism between deviance and capitalist modes of production.

I think I want to know what effect the "real subsumption of deviance" has on sexual deviants. I mean, it seems like if I get off on humping car tires, say, and used to get hassled by cops when I hung around the neighborhood tire swing, but now my desire for tires is invisible, unknown, out of the question, then I'd basically be able to swing on the tire swing to my heart's content with no one being the wiser. I might not be striking a blow against the system, but I'm also not feeling the same weight of oppression. Invisibility, in the case of sexual deviance, can be empowering in a way, I suppose. Free to ride my machines without any hassles from the man....

Or is it that the weight of oppression has taken a different form BESIDES invisibility?
Or am I missing some of the implications of being invisible?
Is deviance its own kick??
 
 
grant
15:11 / 20.07.01
Ooo, I just read Fool's post.

Makes much more sense now.....
 
 
Blank Faced Avatar
06:26 / 22.07.01
"deviants as a (what's one more dirty word?) class"

hmm, how about 'clusterfuck'?
 
 
Tom Coates
11:06 / 13.08.05
I thought I'd bump this thread because of some of the conversation about Marx elsewhere and because it seemed to me to have at its heart at least one (potential) example of how capitalism responds to changes around itself and recapitulates itself even in deviant and dissident groups.
 
  
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