sorry for not getting back on this one sooner.
curtiss wrote (some time back now):
> I don't know Nancy but will give a look if you could point me to
a
> title
there's a more recent book on aesthetics and politics, which i can't seem to find right now, but it has an excellent intro. (and, a thought-provoking chapter on labour)
also: The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy. (1993) Calif: Stanford Uni Press - start with the intro, go to the final chapter 'fragments', and then the rest is my suggestion.
> I'm not a student or instructor, but as one influenced and
affected by
> Marx (does that make me "Marxist"?), it seems that Baudrillard
and
> Lyotard, and their ilk, treat Marx like a dead dog: irrelevant,
a lump
> of waste. And this attitude is only part of a position that
seems
> intended to disable struggle and the possibility of change.
well, yeah, i think there is something of this. all that distancing and ritual renunciation of marx that seems to be so much the condition of stuff. i say stuff, 'cause i'm not entirely sure how to locate this: the awfully grotesque character of actually-existings; the fizzer of '89; conditions of academic labour; what? sometimes tho i think these are explanations which stop us from actually reading this stuff - as they have me, as if in all their empirical explanatory power they can be read as the theories themselves.
baudrillard is crud, not i think for these reasons, which may well be true, but becuase he beleives that the only way out is an ironic complicity with all the crud. now, some people don't get the joke; which is not to say they are dumb, but rather to say that the joke does not work, hence baudrillard's strategy is a failure - especially, i might add, a failure in the US.
lyotard is a failure for me too, in that a discussion of the sublime might be interesting, but he never quite gets away from a veneration of the kantian sublime. even kant was more interesting than this. and lyotard's language games are finally little more than protecting one ostensible set of games from coming into conflict with those of another, however important may be the insight that a universal regulative principle is not desirable - or rather, finally - possible. (i have yet to figure out how he decides to bound one set of games from another without a principle of differentiation....)
doug mentioned spivak giving a paper and beginning and ending with the sentence: 'i am not a post-marxist'. without knowing the paper, i think she was referring to those attempts to, as you say, declare marx dead. doug? you know the title of the paper?
> Maybe I'm nuts, but I think the case can be made that students
and
> knowledge workers are members of the proletariat, and this case
can be
> made in terms of that hoary old concept, surplus value. But
that's
> another thread and another provocation.....
no, i don't think you're nuts at all, and i think there are others here who've made similar arguments. and i agree with you insofar as distinctions are made along the lines not of the actual task performed - well, more accurately, the occupational designation: the tasks change dramatically, don't they? - , but of the relation to s-v. and, maybe this needs to be put in terms of a discussion on the changes within education and its relation to the processes of s-v making. any ideas? i haven't quite gotten beyond a sketch....
cheers,
angela