In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse quotes Barbara Lantos, "Play is an aim in itself, work is the agent of self-preservation." He concludes from this that, "it is the purpose and not the content which marks an activity as play or work.... For example, if work were accompanied by a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism, it would tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work conent."
The key to such a libidinal work relation, according to Roheim (cited by Marcuse) is a "general maternal attitude as the dominant trend of a culture." "Consequently," Marcuse explains, "it is considered as a feature of primitive societies rather than as a possibility of mature civilization. Margaret Mead's interpretation of the Arapesh culture is enteirly focused on this attitude:
To the Arapesh, the world is a garden that must be tilled, not for one’s self, not in pride and boasting, not for hoarding and usury, but that the yams and the dogs and the pigs and most of all the children may grow. From this whole attitude flow many of the other Arapesh traits, the lack of conflict between the old and the young, the lack of any expectation of jealousy or envy, the emphasis upon co-operation.Sandwichman conjectures that -- contrary to the assumption of the psychoanaltic literature (according to Marcuse) -- Mead's account of the Arapesh is a feature of her mature civilization. Whether or not it actually depicts Arapesh culture is a matter of luck, personality (Mead's) and perception. In other words, not only is there a possibility, but the general maternal attitude toward the world-as-a-garden is a persistent utopian motif in modern civilization. The pregenital polymorphous eroticism is all around us already. We just have to tune in to it.
29 comments:
That has to be the least erotic thing with the word "eroticism" in it I have ever read!
Sublimate, my dear Bridget, sublimate.
By the way, B., how about dropping by to have a look at my etchings...
Actually, this stimulates me to excitement beyond desire, although I have read that some of the tribes Mead studied took her for a ride in their accounts to her of their own behavior. She needs to be taken with some grains of salt, or at least with some double checking from other sources.
[Mead] needs to be taken with some grains of salt
Barkley,
Indeed. That's what I insinuated when I said that her account was more a reflection of her own culture, personality etc. than necessarily an accurate report on the Arapesh.
On the bases of natural abundance, exhaustive knowledge of their environment, slow dialectic of man and nature ("no sharp dichotomy between the natural environment and the social wealth"), no struggle to accumulate, equality of distribution and distribution as an internalized means to perpetuate equality/reduce social conflict to a minimum which, in concert with flexible property and much inter-village visiting, obviated any need for such thing as a controlling authority, you had until at least 1965, the !Kung Bushmen of Botswana -
'The people of the Dobe area are full-time hunters and gatherers in an unattractive semidesert environment, yet they appear to work less and live longer than do some peoples with more advanced economic systems. Their subsistance requirements are satisfied by a modest input of labor, on the order of two or three days of work per adult per week. This level of effort is sufficient to support a large proportion of unproductive young and old people. There is plenty of time to develop the public life of the community. ...' (Richard Borshay Lee in Hunters and Gatherers Today, 1972) (emphasis added)
Was he being taken for 'a Mead'? Anything here about real possibilities, not behind but ahead?
Oh, primitive communism and all that. Marshall Sahlins documented the lower amount of work, right up S-man's alley, in his Stone Age Economics.
i am a "work less, live more" kind of guy myself.
but i think the argument is that if the other guys work harder, pretty soon you will be working for them.
the argument is that if the other guys work harder...
coberly,
That may indeed be "the argument", but it is especially flattering to the other guys who inherited the financial wherewithall to keep you working for them.
sandwichman
not sure he needs to flatter himself. he holds the whip. he IS the other guy.
digression: back on maxspeak i claimed that the war against SS was still going on behind closed doors. was challenged to provide proof. suggest a glance at Dean Baker's blog (Beat the Press) this morning might show evidence if not proof.
coberly,
I don't know of anybody who thought or thinks that the war on Social Security was over, certainly not me. Indeed, it is precisely because I know it is not over and worry about Hillary in particular coming in and messing with it to show how "responsible" she is, that I continue to be very worried.
It is also, as I told you offlist, why I did not think your constantly going on about how we could "solve the problem" with this small tax increase in the future was at all helpful. It just plays into the idea that there is this "problem" that needs to be solved, when most of us on this list (or at least on the old maxspeak), do not think there is a problem and would prefer to try to convince the public and the politicians of that, even though we are going up against deeply entrenched misperceptions and propaganda machines.
Rosser
I agree with you.
I don't think I am saying, however constantly, that "we can solve the problem" with this small tax increase.
I am saying "there is no problem. their own numbers show that their own projected huge horrible deficit could be closed with a tax increase of a dollar a week."
It is true that there is an implied "if...then.." structure to my point that may indeed be over the heads of most people. But I found an audience of local members of the NAACP got my point pretty easily, wrote a letter to their headquarters urging them to resist the last assault on SS, and offered to find me money to publicize my case.
I turned them down about the money, but I continue to believe that the people are smart enough to understand first that there is no crisis, and second, that a small increase in the tax would be well worth paying to keep the security that only Social Security offers them.
Try to believe that we are on the same side. I'll try to find a way to make my case and make yours at the same time. I think the people are smart enough to see that there is no contradiction.
coberly,
There you go again. If there is no crisis, then why even bring up the "small tax increase"? It is hard enough to convince people that there is no crisis without bringing up tax increases. The entire Republican Party right now is congenitally (if stupidly) against tax increases. So, one just suddenly alienates the whole lot of them. I think there are lots of Repubs who would like to support SS, but if one starts talking "tax increases," however small, one is going to just spur them to buy into all that ideological privatization BS.
"If there is no crisis, then why...?"
Because they are claiming there is a crisis. And I can show with simple arithmetic from their own numbers that there is no crisis.
It seems to me that Rosser, here, is saying that coberly should just shut up and go away because the people that matter (Republicans?) are not smart enough to understand what IF means, and what SMALL means.
He could be right.
But if I may borrow one of Bruce's metaphors, it sounds a little (to me) like Montgomery saying that Patton ought to just stop fighting so Montgomery could win the war in his own way.
Sixty years later we still don't know who was right about that one, but I hope you would understand why Patton, at least, couldn't stop fighting.
I did test the question today with a broad sample of the working people. I presented Rosser's case as honestly as I could and asked the worker what he thought of that. Then I presented my own case a simply as I could and asked him about that. He liked Rosser's idea that nothing needed to be done but wasn't sure he understood why well enough to trust it, then he thought he wanted to hear more about the dollar a week tax increase... if it led to a higher benefit... a thought he volunteered with no prompting from me.
So, greatly sorry that we cannot find a way to agree, I will respectfully decline to shut up. But I encourage those who disagree with me to not shut up either.
coberly,
"Working people" equals "he"? How many did you talk to? And is he (or are any of them) Republicans? Sure, lots of working class Dems are not all that averse to a small tax increase to "guarantee the benefits of social security." If you want to restrict your discourse to them, fine. But this is a blog blaring all over the place, even if most of the audience is probably more to the progressive left side of things. But I would hope that at least some of our arguments are filtering out more broadly.
Barkley
Barkley
my "broad sample" today was one. a kind of a joke for statisticians.
and yes, it is probably best that i talk to working people. they are the ones who would be paying the tax-that-you-get-back.
(on the other hand, the audience at the NAACP was fairly large (30 or so), and very supportive. except for the Republicans they invited to give the rebuttal.)
Republicans are funny when they start talking about "Trillion Dollar Unfunded Deficits.." and you show the audience by simple arithmetic that that actually means about fifteen dollars per week when all is said and done. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
fellas,
How on earth did an obtuse discussion of the concept of pregenital polymorphous eroticism degenerate into a continuing diatribe on the Social Security is dying and needs to be saved issue? For one thing social security is more appropriately post-genital, very post-genital. Also, there is nothing erotic about the issue unless, of course, you have taken sublimation to a new and peculiar plain. Perhaps the tangential nature of the digression is a phase in the polymorphic progression one experiences as one discovers that social security introduces a post erotic phase of life.
I question how we could apply those concepts while guaranteeing that the economy could reproduce itself. After a certain point if you want consumption you have to have production, which means work, no matter how libertarily work is organized, and work to produce things that people in the industrialized world think of as necessary seems to be somewhat, though not totally, incompatible with the idea of work as celebration.
This would be the case no matter what the distribution of wealth or power was.
jack
i am sorry but i am unable to protect you from things you don't want to see. have you considered closing your eyes?
it works for most people.
John M,
Yes, production/reproduction requires work but work need not remain in the form of wage labor just as profits need not be private -- other possibilities have been created. No return to primitive communism but an advance towards something moreless similar during which labor becomes work as a conscious celebration of the social.
Yah, too idealistic or even infantile but the alternatives are as well.
Jack,
Are you against social security recipients having polymorphous sex? Or is this a substitute so that they do not become victims of the ED industry? Of course, if we go against that one, all those drug companies making drugs to battle ED will start funding think tanks that will manufacture a "crisis" in connection with it all...
well, the subject was pregenital polymorphous eroticism...
and while i don't know what Marcuse meant, i would suspect that pre-genital if not polymorphous would tip us off that he was talking about something other than the old in and out.
but even that might be subject to Coolidge's law with respect to ED.
Barkley,
Certainly I'm not adverse to social security recipients participating in the joys of polymorphous sexual activity. I was only responding to the peculiar turn which coberly and you had taken in the conversation. I would, however, urge caution in regards to the use of any ED drugs. The side effects have two very devergent consequences. On the one hand the individual becomes nearly permanently prepared for action creating some consternation in public gatherings. Pool side attendance is out of the question. In the second event, though an infrequent occurence, he suffers permanent ED along with total organ dysfunction. He will have then embarked upon the last phase of his polymorphic journey.
coberly, Protection from things that I don't want to see????
jack
sounds like you are mastering the trick.
i was talking about your complaint about seeing things on this blog that you did not expect.
coberly,
It's less a matter of the unexpected than it is a matter of the unrelated.Moving from pre-genital polymorphism to the social security issue seemed like a stretching of the tangential seque. I'm not against discussion of either subject, but how did you manage to see a relationship between the two?
jack
i didn't.
go back up. it clearly says "digression."
that it elicited comments tells me at least some were not averse to a conversation that does not run on a single rail.
but us liberals have always been more flexible that way.
Speaking of "pregenital" and "postgenital" (and I think that "maternal" is the right word for the attitude that Mead is describing, and it does not necessarily imply that reproduction or sexual behavior is OVER - merely that it has been fruitful and needs to be tended to and provided for - another word for such caretaking is "husbandry", interestingly enough) -
Stuart Sovatsky, in his interesting discussion of the spiritual aspects of the postgenital, in which he uses the theoretical framework/metaphor/vocabulary of kundalini and throws around a lot more Sanskrit than I am familiar with, quotes Marcuse as pointing out that "the instincts are to be understood spiritually".
To speak crudely, in other words, the suggestion is that in addition to inborn drives for selfish pleasure, we also have (as part of our heritage as children of the Universe, with a right to be here) attitudes of "generativity" in the Eriksonian sense, and even the Search for Truth, Love, and the Potentially Sentient Way.
May the Creative Forces of the Universe have mercy on our souls, if any.
I mean to be more clear about how I'm disagreeing with Marcuse's (and hence, the Sandwichman's) characterization of the relibidinization of work as a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism
let's not call it "pregenital" - for the baby, yes, polymorphous enjoyment of what comes is a blessing from outside - but the possibility of actively enjoying the gardening (or gathering, or hunting/fishing, or going to the factory or office) by the adult is not regression, but progress -
as Gandhi said when asked his thoughts about Western civilization, "I think it would be a good idea"
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Mistah Charley
thank you. i was hoping that's what he meant.
i have had experiences that make me think pleasure in work is almost always a possibility... that is spoiled by what i can only think of as a slave - master relationship in workplaces.
i think there may have been a time when the organizers of work were the natural leaders of a village or tribe, and they led by somethig like joy in work... and also by finding meaningful work for "the least among us."
but about since the industrial revolution the "natural leaders" have considered themselves a separate tribe, and live in a different part of town, and treat workers, and, god help them, non workers as members of a conquered tribe.
i think our communist friends have an inkling of this, but they want to make "the least among us" the bosses, and treat the former bosses like members of a conquered tribe.
and i have no idea if any "family" organization of work is any longer a possibility for us.
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