and Peter K. replied:
> But as you well know The Man has since appropriated
> the term for use in his nefarious designs. I'm still
> wondering about that peculiar phrase Hirschorn
> used today in Slate: "'commodification of dissent'
> voguishness."
Well, the SI had a term for the re-integration of dissent or critical trends into capitalism/the Spectacle: recuperation. And they held that recuperation would occur whenever dissent or critical trends would refuse to engage capitalism. Their activities that the cultural studies crowd so overemphasizes and places only in the context of other art movements of the time -- dervive, detournement, the construction of situations -- had a political component, and a Marxian one at that.
So for Peter K.'s quote from Eagleton:
> The question of appropriation has to do with
> politics, not with culture; it is a question of
> who is winning at any particular time. If *they*
win,
> continue to govern, then it is no doubt true that
> there is nothing which they cannot in principle
> defuse and contain. If *you* win, they will not be
> able to appropriate a thing because you have
> appropriated them. The one thing which
> the bourgeiosie cannot incorporate is its own
> political defeat. Let them try hanging *that* on the
> walls of their banks. The negative avant garde tries
> to avoid such absorption by not producing an object.
> No artefacts: just gestures, happenings,
> manifestations, disruptions. You cannot integrate
> that which consumes itself in the moment of
> production. The positive avant garde understands
that
> the question of integration stands or falls with the
> destiny of a mass political movement.
let me reply with this from Guy Debord:
= The cultural creation that could be referred to as = situationist begins with the projects of unitary = urbanism or of the construction of situations in = life, and the fulfillment of those projects is = inseparable from the history of the movement striving = to fulfill all the revolutionary possibilities = contained in the present society. In the short term,
= however, a critical art can be carried out = within the existing means of cultural expression, = from cinema to painting — even though we ultimately = wish to destroy this entire artistic framework. This
= critical art is what the situationists have summed = up in their theory of détournement. Such an art must
= not only be critical in its content, it must also be
= self-critical in its form. It is a communication = which, recognizing the limitations of the = specialized sphere of established communication, “is
= now going to contain its own critique.” (from "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action
in Politics and Art")
So for Debord, cultural activism was merely an element of overall political agitation, and Art _per se_ has no privileged, trans-historical role -- and even art that is critical must also be 'self-critical,' i.e., acknowledge that it is only an aspect of a larger political project.
Since Yoshie has already spoken of the Dadaists, it seems that Eagleton's dadaist/negative avant-gardist is a straw man. -- Curtiss, who wants to remind everyone not to think of it as goofing-off at work, but as reclaiming surplus value from your employer. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com