The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism Book

"""using this to remember my fav quotes from the book"" (pg 61) "[The reification of desire as sexuality], together with emerging attempts to manage social consumption, begins to suggest the value of a Marxian reframing of Foucault's methodological distinction between the family's inside and outside in terms of capital's increasing regulation of that border. A reification of desire unfolds as the family is increasingly saturated not only with pathology but also with commodities, amid the normalized consumption characteristic of an emergent, intensive regime of accumulation, from within capital's emergent distribution of a new sexual knowledge of self. As this cell ceases to be a significant unit of production and gradually becomes instead a significant unit of consumption, this specific example of reification develops within a broader horizon of reification, within what I have characterized as the increasingly consolidated differentiation of the equally abstract, quantified space-times of labor and leisure. Foucault certainly insists that sexuality arose as a tactic by which an emergent bourgeoisie differentiated itself both from the proletariat that emerged along with it and from the ancien régime. But in his elaboration of the Freudian moment in sexuality's deployment, he also concentrates on the family cell itself, effectively abstracting its outside (beyond the handful of pathologized somatic types he notes as inhabiting that outside), focusing on sexuality's intrusion into it and obscuring the role of this intrusion in a larger strategy by which the family's very conditions of existence were increasingly managed as part of an effort to maintain a vigorous rate of accumulation.

Foucault's unrelenting focus on microsocial levels of cause and effect, on microsocial relations of force, produces a representation of sexuality as an autonomous tactic, an instrumentality that transgresses a spatial barrier, compromises the membrane separating inside and outside, as if of its own accord. But it is not instrumentalized sexuality per se but this much larger-scale effort to manage accumulation, to forestall crisis, that begins to compromise this particular membrane, that provides access to this new sexual knowledge of self. "Sexuality," to the extent that Foucault's narrative represents it as "deployed" by no agent other than itself, is a phenomenon he thereby fetishizes in the classically Marxian sense of the term. Here Foucault mystifies what Lukács demystifies, the status of epistemological abstractions'the abstract temporality that psychoanalysis imputes to sexual desire, for instance'as products of an ever more complex division of social labor."