On Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:19:13 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>This happens at several levels in a passage in one of my earleir
>posts, that responding to Doug's interpretation of a paragraph
>in *Capital*.
Funny you should mention this. Angela and I had a similar disagreement over whether the film version of Starship Troopers was ironic, or whether it was a fascist apologia like the book it was based upon. Angela contends that since there is no character in the movie to supply the necesary "wink" that lets us know the film is ironic, the film is a straightforward piece of xenophobic/fascist propaganda. I argue that the film itself supplies the wink. The acting seems intentionally melodramatic, the violence is over-the-top to the point of being comical, the military recruitment advertisements in the movie are like a parody of the real thing. And taking seriously your argument about how our interpretation of one of an author's works colors our interpretation of his other works, I see no reason why Paul Verhoeven would make a movie with the intent of promoting fascism. The message I get from Robocop and Total Recall is explicitly anti-corporate/anti-fascist. Of course, Robocop is an example of the anti-globalist Leftism that Doug attacks in LBO #71. It juxtaposes good ol' cops and city bureaucrats with nasty, evil multinational corporations. Bourgeois democracy vs. Corporate fascism. If Verhoeven is guilty of anything, it's Nader-style populism.
>I am a bit confused, however by your brushing Plato aside as
>irrelevant, on the one hand
Heck, I wasn't "brushing Plato aside." I'm not very familiar with Plato.
And the passage you supplied wasn't very convincing. It seems to me that examples of something are really the only solid basis for providing a definiton of something. Sam Pawlett says that word corresponds to external reality. All the more reason to give examples in order to provide a basis for definition rather than define something by reference to other words.
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