ok Doug -- you will be not at all surprised by my saying i find this compelling but why are you posting it exactly? don't do a chavez on me now what do you mean by this?
At 13:38 3/03/99 -0500, you wrote:
>from Meaghan Morris, "At Henry Parkes Motel," in Too Soon, Too Late
>(Indiana University Press, 1998):
>
><quote>
>However, in a move that is foundational for some versions of cultural
>studies, Chambers immediately retreats from extending the complexity
>principle to analysis of relations between the (global) "machinery of
>capital" and (local) cultural machinations. Instead of entering the "field"
>constructed "mutually" by industry and culture, the former simply drops out
>of play. Put baldly, the result is that "the immediate mishmash of the
>everyday" in this account does not include rapidly changing experiences of
>the workplace, the home, family life, or mechanisms of statebecause it does
>not include these as "everyday" at all. Nor does it extend to the relations
>between high-tech culture and the increasingly globalized division of labor
>that Richard Gordon has called the "homework economy."
>
>Instead, as an account based on the emblematic street experience of un- or
>underemployed males in European or American cities (or what then becomes
>its echoes elsewhere), it restricts the scope of inquiry to what may well
>be, in a grim sense, one of the "growth" areas of that economy, but which
>does not necessarily thereby serve as a useful synecdoche from which
>general principles of "culture" in "the modern world" may be composed.
>Perhaps this is one reason why women, in postsubcultural accounts, still
>appear in apologetic parentheses or as "catching up" on the streets when
>they're not left looking out the window. The ways in which the economic and
>technological changes of "the 1980s" (in Chambers's phrase) transformed
>women's lives simply cannot be considered-leaving women not so much
>neglected as anachronistically misplaced.
>
>Left as a restricted account of local developments, Chambers's "possible
>guide" would have a different, more "modest" force. It is the allegorical
>expansion that gives the lie, like the myth of the Metropolis, to the
>rhetoric of the local in Chambers's text, and to accounts of popular
>culture that take the collapse of old dichotomies (production/consumption,
>industry/culture) as an occasion for simply effacing the first term and
>expanding the second along with most of its traditional content - pleasure,
>leisure, play, resistance. Yet it is a difficult reading to argue against,
>because the imaginary figure of the Enlightenment Intellectual-prophet of
>Truth, poet of Totality, priest of General Theory, and so on-is still so
>powerful in debate about culture....
></quote>
>
>