Spelling Desire

It isn't enough to talk about sexual identity and sexual orientation as parameters of social choice. This leaves some options undefined, as for example, a woman that feels fine with her body but prefers to be masculine. To cover these is sufficient to specify whether the attributes of identity and orientation are to take place within the realm of the body or the mind. And by the latter I mean culture, aesthetics. The fact that nowadays the available attributes of the mind resemble that of the body is just a transient stage of cultural evolution, the stage of irony and simulacra. We should learn to distinguish and allow the free recombination of the attributes of identity and orientation within the realms of sex and gender. The philosophically oriented reader will have to dismiss me for treating sex and gender as different categories without further discussion. An interesting question for those with progressive agendas regards the potential shapes of a post-sexual world [1]. If we formulate the question as: can a simulacrum survive its conditions? The answer is, no. But if the question is: can a simulacrum survive its historical incarnations? The answer is, yes. Hence, the underlying question is whether sex is the condition of gender or just one of its incarnations [2]. As we identify the most basic conditions giving evolutionary rise to gender, only then, we can say if these conditions will still hold in the foreseeable future [3]. At this point we are pushing the notion of simulacra beyond its transient nature. What begins to take place in an affirmative answer to the future of post-sexuality is a notion of simulacra as a symbiosis between history and economy. And by economy I mean a set of persistent conditions preceding the production and reproduction of strategies. History would provide the signifiers, the conventions, on top of which the strategies are placed. Is as if history would provide a natural shelter for strategies, and as for any shelter it may prove useful to preserve it as long as the costs of creating a tailored one are greater. I treat nostalgia, in this context, as an instinct of tradition and I will not stress further on it. What I mean by signifiers is not just the material object on top of which the meaning takes place, I also mean symbols, objects which have multiple incarnations but which are not invoked as meanings. For example, aesthetic or alphabetic forms; they have no meaning other than that of the conventions on which they are ascribed, nevertheless as forms they can be "incarnated" in multiple substrates [4].

[1] Regarding the dilemma of talking of "post-gender sexuality" or "post-sexual gender". In this two formulations there is an interplay of meaning and valuation. For the first formulation the word sex is invoked in its basic mechanic existence. In contrast, gender is seen as an anachronism on social relations. Verbs like penetration are its epitomes. There is no distinction between organic or inorganic bodies, the many forms of "penetration" are to be explored. It is akin, for example, to cyber-punk literature. For the second formulation, sex refers to the body condition regardless of what you do with it. It is seen as an anachronism to be overcome through a transcendence of the mechanistic conception;  it doesn't looks for new mechanical forms as is the case of the first formulation. The possibilities of social intimacy in the realm of lasting feelings rather than fragmented emotions is to be explored. While the utopic territory of the first formulation is the skin, for the latter is the heart.  I am not sure, though, whether the dichotomy at stake can by reduced only to an issue of continuity and fragmentation or if there are other fundamental antagonisms involved. 

[2] One may precipitate to think that the very existence of homosexuality proves that the "classical" meaning of sexual relation is just an incarnation. Nevertheless there is a possibility of homosexuality being a simulacra of heterosexuality and not being able to survive without it (in the same way that dramatic art would not survive without real life).

[3] Evolutionary means are much wider nowadays than literal darwinism.

[4] Behind this is the idea of the relativity of the signifier and signified.

A criticism of Marxism

"it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." (Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)
Hence, universality of consciousness concerns to what is universal in the social existence.

The purpose is to specify what Marx means by "social existence" in a synthetic way. In particular seeing it as a "measure" of a more general 'social existence' of men and this last concept, at the same time, seen as a particular 'existence' for men, which may have 'existences' other than social. Finally, not just for men but for a more general category: CAS.

'Objective' is an agents universal distinction over the context being used. Example: "some say love is luck, others say is not". In the latter statement 'love' as a feeling condition, constitutes the object regarding to the agents 'some' and 'others' (which themselves constitutes objects under some existence condition regarding to the receptor of the statement), while in the statement: "some say love exists others don't", 'love' as a feeling condition don't constitute an object because there is no consensus regarding it's existence as a feeling condition. Of course we have assumed in the interpretation of the last two statements that 'some' and 'others' are referring to 'love' as a feeling condition, in case of the last statement, of arguable existence. Note that in the second statement, 'love' as a semantic condition constitutes an object. But even as a semantic condition we can find a no semantical object, as is the case in the statement: "some say kapush is a word others don't".
In order to address a 'distinction' in a given set of agents, from a sociocognitive dynamics, there must be a condition of existence to which this 'something' constitutes an object (within the set of agents). In 'kapush', if we assume it as an oral utterance, the 'object condition' has to be traced down up to a phonetic consensus, assuming both distinguishes uniquely the oral utterance: kapush!. Interesting questions depart from above; what other existence conditions can we find in the social use? what are the relations between the diverse existence conditions (developing useful schemes)?
'Subjective' is an agent dependent distinction over the context being used. From a sociocognitive dynamics, the existence of an 'object' (of at least one existence condition) precedes that of a 'subjective' distinction.
As opposed to 'objects', 'interpretation' refers to agent dependent increasing distinctions over objects.
If we read carefully the definition of 'objective' we will notice we defined 'objective' using the concept of 'distinction'. At the same time in the next paragraph we state that from a sociognitive dynamics, 'objectivness' precedes 'distinction'. This is the kind of paradoxes which arises in communication theory where one has to use communication to talk about communication. Interestingly, this is a problem you also find in cosmology, in the roots of the 'anthropic principle'. Looking closely to the paradox as found it in our disscusion of 'objects' and 'distinctions', we find that actually when we said 'objects' are precede by 'distinctions' this is an analytical precedence: a definition, an the opposed precedence is a dynamical relation: sociognitive dynamics. Es dificil no pensar en 'Ouroborus' como símbolo de esta paradoja, sin embargo, creo que una mejor analogía es la de pensar en la instancia de un lenguaje, topológicamente igual a un círculo y tal que analíticamente se lee en una dirección y dinámicamente en la dirección opuesta. Más aún, si pensamos en que el pensamiento analítico es en sí un fenómeno dinámico, podemos resolver esta nueva contradicción, distinguiendo la representación de los espacios físicos en que transcurre el pensamiento analítico y en que transcurre la dinámica social o física ah! e aquí de nuevo la paradoja, nos enfrentamos realmente Ouroborus!.

Existence concerns to all the different categorizations of experience for a CAS: Synchronic and diachronic experience. The first one, enforced by repetition and leading to time independent reality schemes; a static interpretation of objects. The second one, enforced by unpredictability leading to a historical or singular interpretation of objects. In order to have an equivalence between the concepts of time and space in replace of synchronic and diachronic we will talk of globally temporal and locally temporal. Analogously we may introduce the concepts of globally spatial and locally spatial. Given the cognitive nature of our subject of study, is important to clarify that whenever we speak about time or space in this context, actually what we mean by that is CAS time as for example anthropological time, and CAS space, meaning a CAS context or surrounding. The concept of local time as origin of singular interpretations doesn't has much sense if is not attached to the concept of local space. Because is precisely the notion of local time what allows, in a dynamic sense, the existence of local time as a social experience. Therefore we speak of spatiotemporal locality.

After all this we can state an hypotesis about the latter citation from Marx: he refers to 'social existence' as a globally temporal experience, which lead us to the conclusion that, either he underestimate or doesn't considers local spatiotemporal experiences as origins of consciousness on men.