MLA Prof (Re)Presents Malthus

AIA-FL Blog ^ | January 12, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

MLA Prof (Re)Presents Malthus

Bethany Stotts, January 12, 2010

Another installment in the MLA quotations collection.

NYU Professor Maureen McLane, speaking on a panel on “Major Romantic Writers,” recently promoted the idea that should conceive of Thomas R. Malthus’ population control theories as “a theory of information” rather than biology :

“In her marvelous essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex’ from 1975, Gayle Rubin follows Lacan in proposing that we ‘conceive of psychoanalysis as a theory of information rather than organs’ and we might follow this through for Malthus, undertaking along the lines of the extremely productive debiologization of Freud a debiologization of Malthus. Or rather, we might think of Malthus’ theory as a theory of information rather than or in addition to one of bodies. A media theory, perhaps, rather than an algorithm of reproduction and death. Or perhaps it is more precise to say, given transformations in biology, that any biological theory is also simultaneously a theory of information” (emphasis added).

- Maureen McLane, English Professor at New York University.

English Professor McLane also asks:

“Is sexual desire a special kind of desire or just desire in general, the general equivalent of desire or passion in terms of the potentialities of humans as desiring machines? Malthus famously rejected the labor theory of value because he rejected the abstractions of exchange value that could not be reconverted into sustenance but his treatise does implicitly propose a complex algebra for assessing the relations of desire, labor, reproduction and death” (emphasis added)....

[texmexis best]

She needs to review information theory before she touches pen to paper.

[marron]

Malthus could be O’s health care czar.