Butler (Re: cop shows, postmodernism and all that

[Charles Brown]

A test that economic long waves seem to fail. Like the geometry of the stripes on the back of a tiger , long waves are very pretty mathematics. But they are a reification , a looking for and finding things, things-in-themselves, not things-for -us. ("Us" being the working class, the human race). Even pretty facts , empirically nice fitting statistical correlations are things. The world is full of many wonderful THINGS , in this commodity fetishized consciousness , snips and snails and tiger back swirls, objects galore.  If you look for things-in-themselves, you will find them, because Kant was half-correct in saying they exist : we can know them too. 

But what some Marxists are interested in is knowing things-in-themselves as things-for-us. Things-for-us are such that we can make them, thereby changing the world, not just interpreting it, like semioticians, interpreting meaning, discourse, language, structures. The world has been interpreted many ways, Marx said, 
but the thing is to change it.  How does a Butler's interpretation help us change the world for us, so to speak ?

Others have other approaches. See I can be liberal. 

Let me say that I am all ears as to how even the mathematics of the stripes on the back of a tiger can help the working class in the class struggle, because capitalism is killing us fast and slow.

Charles Brown


>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 02/08 12:10 PM >>>
Frances Bolton wrote:


>This sentiment has been expressed a number of times. I still don't know why
>we have to take such a consequentialist view of reading Butler. Why isn't it
>enough that her work is interesting? Why  must it contribute to furthering
>the cause of the left?  I can't remember anyone on this list suggesting
>falling behind the Butler banner, as opposed to that of, oh, let's say Marx.
>What's up with this "oh but is it good for the left?" litmus test, anyway?

A test that Alexander Pope would fail miserably, no? Not to mention Emily
Dickinson and Stereo Total.

Doug