But why, perhaps, is Camille Paglia correct (God-- contraries make strange
bedfellows!) when she says that D.H. Lawrence views anthropology as a
subset of zoology in _Women In Love_ (_Vamps and Tramps_)? Why, when I see
my male and female cats, do I still see him trying to rape her sometimes by
his sheer size and... what else?... I mean, he's been gelded but I think he
remembers... and she fights back with hisses and throwing off, and then
they reach an equilibrium with him licking her... ears... among other
places?
And why has Fritjof Capra moved from the realm of mere physics (_Tao of
Physics_) to biology (_The Web of Life_), and believes that Gregory Bateson
would have made more progress if he had abandonned cybernetic "mechanistic"
models for more open-ended ones, so that we can track viruses like AIDS as
they mutate...?
But I digress. Or do I? This is a bone of contention I have with Foucault,
as well as with my Ph.D. friend at Blip Dee Blop University who loves him
so much. She's a radical feminist sociologist, and when I asked her why she
loves him so much, she said--
See, how I like to try to make things SIMPLE?--
"Because he believes that the individual can, finally, be re-constructed."
To which I smiled and replied, "But I'm already here."
"But how much are you here because of societal constructs that you don't
even understand?"
Well... I smiled. First of all, this is nothing new under the sun. Emerson
said to accept wherever you are and take it from there. There's no such
thing as progress, really. And then Freddie (ever read in Kaufmann's intro
to _The Gay Science_ how highly he thought of Waldo) says in that, one of
his easier-to-read because it's... more Apollonian?-- efforts, that there
are four "errors":
1) seeing ourselves incompletely
2) endowing ourselves with fictitious attributes
3) placing ourselves above animals and nature
4) inventing "ever new tables of goods and always accepted them for a time
as eternal and unconditional..."
And really, this #4 is the joke about much with Foucault and why Barthes
laughs at Derrida and... others... in _The Rustle of Language_. He talks
about the New Troops merely taking up where the Old Duffers like himself.
(I personally find Barthes more *accessible* in works like "Mythologies"...
More accessible than what, you might ask? Than... other Barthes works?
Than... Foucault's _History of Sexuality_? Oh... I leave that question
OPEN!)
It's also my retort that, be I have been born now or in one of my previous
lives, there is an *innate* part of me which responds to the societal
constructs of my time, so that... for example, Alexander the Great and
Hadrian both got married, but carried on, beyond the prescribed time, with
their male lovers. And why did Antinous die? Rumor has it it was suicide?
So "the love that dare not speak its name", which shadows some of
Shakespeare's sonnets (or *so I hear*) and inherent guilt about it, was
perhaps functioning then, too. But does it always have to be so?
I mean, Ellen deGeneris got kicked out of her home for "coming out" to her
father, but now she's happily doing a situation comedy which I don't watch
but hear is quite pleasant.
Following Michel's beautifully vague wording... "power mechanisms that
functioned in such a way...." "there emerged.... incitement to talk about
sex." And, yes, he's on to a true historical pattern here, isn't he? I
personally have done a great deal of work on Lawrence, for example, on whom
he gives scant, pathetic attention, on page 157. And... would you rather DH
Lawrence and Freud have NOT trail-blazed? As much as Highwater can say that
Freud was "heterocentric", someone more up on Freud told me that he also
told the parents of a lesbian girl to chill out, there's nothing really
"wrong" (she was just frozen at a certain "phase" of development) with her,
and that some of the greatest people to have roamed the planet happen to
have been homosexual, too. I mean, *for his time*, wasn't Freud pretty
progressive, to say that?
Back to Foucault. Page 36. As I've said before, I really like this chapter
title. Who called what "perverse"? So what if the pleasures were
"fruitless"? Well... someone did, didn't they. Terms like "homosexuality"
and "sado-masochism" were invented. Who's the insider/outsider? How does
that get people like Henry James into, possibly, a celibacy/observer
situation, whereas his straight brother, William, can continue to actively
defend Whitman and Santayana? Why does this also remind me of Huysmans's
_Against Nature_? (And I don't mention these book to force you to go
outside the topic. Merely to *suggest*, if you want to pursue. I'll stay
with Foucault and SEX, believe me!) And who are the first to get SCREWED by
this all? Bourgeois boys/men. Because girls/women are still a "dark
continent". And the proletariats are like... worker bees, really. Not only
do "they" not care what's happening with them, because they won't be the
rulers of tomorrow, but they can not afford things like psychotherapy, and
they still have things like the State, Law, and Church, not to mention
increasing use of the Press, to disseminate what the Pop version of all of
this is.
Keep a lid on things.
---Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/
bedfellows!) when she says that D.H. Lawrence views anthropology as a
subset of zoology in _Women In Love_ (_Vamps and Tramps_)? Why, when I see
my male and female cats, do I still see him trying to rape her sometimes by
his sheer size and... what else?... I mean, he's been gelded but I think he
remembers... and she fights back with hisses and throwing off, and then
they reach an equilibrium with him licking her... ears... among other
places?
And why has Fritjof Capra moved from the realm of mere physics (_Tao of
Physics_) to biology (_The Web of Life_), and believes that Gregory Bateson
would have made more progress if he had abandonned cybernetic "mechanistic"
models for more open-ended ones, so that we can track viruses like AIDS as
they mutate...?
But I digress. Or do I? This is a bone of contention I have with Foucault,
as well as with my Ph.D. friend at Blip Dee Blop University who loves him
so much. She's a radical feminist sociologist, and when I asked her why she
loves him so much, she said--
See, how I like to try to make things SIMPLE?--
"Because he believes that the individual can, finally, be re-constructed."
To which I smiled and replied, "But I'm already here."
"But how much are you here because of societal constructs that you don't
even understand?"
Well... I smiled. First of all, this is nothing new under the sun. Emerson
said to accept wherever you are and take it from there. There's no such
thing as progress, really. And then Freddie (ever read in Kaufmann's intro
to _The Gay Science_ how highly he thought of Waldo) says in that, one of
his easier-to-read because it's... more Apollonian?-- efforts, that there
are four "errors":
1) seeing ourselves incompletely
2) endowing ourselves with fictitious attributes
3) placing ourselves above animals and nature
4) inventing "ever new tables of goods and always accepted them for a time
as eternal and unconditional..."
And really, this #4 is the joke about much with Foucault and why Barthes
laughs at Derrida and... others... in _The Rustle of Language_. He talks
about the New Troops merely taking up where the Old Duffers like himself.
(I personally find Barthes more *accessible* in works like "Mythologies"...
More accessible than what, you might ask? Than... other Barthes works?
Than... Foucault's _History of Sexuality_? Oh... I leave that question
OPEN!)
It's also my retort that, be I have been born now or in one of my previous
lives, there is an *innate* part of me which responds to the societal
constructs of my time, so that... for example, Alexander the Great and
Hadrian both got married, but carried on, beyond the prescribed time, with
their male lovers. And why did Antinous die? Rumor has it it was suicide?
So "the love that dare not speak its name", which shadows some of
Shakespeare's sonnets (or *so I hear*) and inherent guilt about it, was
perhaps functioning then, too. But does it always have to be so?
I mean, Ellen deGeneris got kicked out of her home for "coming out" to her
father, but now she's happily doing a situation comedy which I don't watch
but hear is quite pleasant.
Following Michel's beautifully vague wording... "power mechanisms that
functioned in such a way...." "there emerged.... incitement to talk about
sex." And, yes, he's on to a true historical pattern here, isn't he? I
personally have done a great deal of work on Lawrence, for example, on whom
he gives scant, pathetic attention, on page 157. And... would you rather DH
Lawrence and Freud have NOT trail-blazed? As much as Highwater can say that
Freud was "heterocentric", someone more up on Freud told me that he also
told the parents of a lesbian girl to chill out, there's nothing really
"wrong" (she was just frozen at a certain "phase" of development) with her,
and that some of the greatest people to have roamed the planet happen to
have been homosexual, too. I mean, *for his time*, wasn't Freud pretty
progressive, to say that?
Back to Foucault. Page 36. As I've said before, I really like this chapter
title. Who called what "perverse"? So what if the pleasures were
"fruitless"? Well... someone did, didn't they. Terms like "homosexuality"
and "sado-masochism" were invented. Who's the insider/outsider? How does
that get people like Henry James into, possibly, a celibacy/observer
situation, whereas his straight brother, William, can continue to actively
defend Whitman and Santayana? Why does this also remind me of Huysmans's
_Against Nature_? (And I don't mention these book to force you to go
outside the topic. Merely to *suggest*, if you want to pursue. I'll stay
with Foucault and SEX, believe me!) And who are the first to get SCREWED by
this all? Bourgeois boys/men. Because girls/women are still a "dark
continent". And the proletariats are like... worker bees, really. Not only
do "they" not care what's happening with them, because they won't be the
rulers of tomorrow, but they can not afford things like psychotherapy, and
they still have things like the State, Law, and Church, not to mention
increasing use of the Press, to disseminate what the Pop version of all of
this is.
Keep a lid on things.
---Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/