Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

The new sexual normality was undoubtedly connected with the
promotion of the procreation of a plentiful supply of labour
power (ibid.: 85f£. ), but it was also part of the creation of the
labourer, that mutilated personification of abstract labour. The
creation of the labourer involved the necessary subordination
of the pleasure principle to the reality principle, and not just to
the reality principle which is part of living in any social context,
but to the reinforced reality principle or 'performance principle'
(as Marcuse dubs it) that is inseparable from a society based on
labour: 'The pleasure principle was dethroned not only because
it militated against progress in civilisation but also because it
militated against a civilisation whose progress perpetuates
domination and toil' (Marcuse 1956/1998: 40). In this context,
what is important about sexual perversion is not the particular
content of the acts, but simply that it proclaims pleasure to be
the end of sex, and this is what is incompatible with the creation
of the labourer: 'Against a society which employs sexuality as a
means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an
end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the dominion
of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation'
(Marcuse 195611998: 50).
The normalisation of sex in terms of procreation inevitably
means the genitalisation of sexuality: sex comes to be defined in
terms of the genital contact that leads potentially to procreation.
Sexuality, from being polymorphous and spread throughout the
body, becomes focused in the genitals. There is a 'desexualisation
of the body: the libido becomes concentrated in one part of the
body, leaving most of the rest free for use as the instrument of
labour' (ibid.: 48).
The genitalisation of sexuality leads to sexual dimorphism,5
the idea that there are two and only two sexes. If sexuality were
thought of (and enjoyed) in terms of polymorphous pleasure,
the touch of skin on skin, for example, then there would be no
reason to think of people as being divided into two sexes:
The interpretation of human bodies according to precisely two categories,
neither more nor less than two, is logically an effect of reducing the
perception of erogenous areas of the body to those that are functional
in reproductive activity: the sexual responsiveness of body areas that
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