Of the Tautological Universe of Value Production

Instructor: Katerina Kolozova Date & Time: Saturdays, November 24, December 1, 8, 15 2 - 4:30 PM EST

DESCRIPTION What is exchanged in patriarchy is not merely women as a form of use value for reproduction, but also femininity itself, or fetishised femaleness as surplus value. The pure value “femininity,” as abstracted and dematerialised femaleness, is exchanged in the same way as the commodity: adding value to the tautology of exchanging the same for the same: M-M or P-P, in order to achieve M-M’ or P-P’. The structuralist analysis proffered by Claude Levi-Strauss divulges the reality of patriarchy as a value/signifier exchange system: women are currency, whereas what is maintained and grows is the cultural form of sexual reproduction: patriarchy.

This exchange serves not only to increase and enforce the capital of masculinity, but also to add sheer surplus value to it, an excess in value (not libido) as a marker of erected phallic power. Power seen not as materiality, but as value is a set of signifiers: a patriarch, the guardian of the household or oikos, individual and collective or of oikos and the oikonomia of a state (or any form of organized community), and potent reproducer of the same – the human as man, homo (Latin) and, finally, l’homme (in French). Family is hom(m)osexual (in Irigaray’s sense) by its inherent laws, i.e., it is patriarchal: there is no form of family that could subvert this norm as its material determination in the last instance is the signifying automaton of patriarchy.

In this seminar, students will engage with Marx, Laruelle, Saussure, Irigaray, and Haraway (amongst others), to consider how “sexual identities” equal commodity in the overall automaton of hom(m)o-sexual identification and value exchange. They will explore how sexuality might place itself beyond human morphology and its residuals, such as fetishisations of maleness and femaleness, straightness and gayness, and their many variations.

Image: The Family of Man, Installation view, Clervaux Castle, Luxembourg, 2013, photo: Romain Girtgen

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