kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:
> Someone once said (you know who you are) that relentless criticism becomes
> torture... and someone else said that in a world of shit, some navel gazing
> should be expected (as a necessary condition for survival). I think it was
> Eagleton who then noted that if people didn't write and do stupid things,
> nothing would ever be accomplished (so, who wants to talk about Who Want to
> Marry a Millionaire?).
Several things get mushed together here. Let's try to sort them out.
Even communists have a right to have fun. *As long as they don't confuse their fun with their politics*. Too many academic marxists in the last 30 years have done just that: they have pretended to themselves and others that their fun was (marxist) politics. And too many non-marxist leftists in the academy have pretended that their fun could replace politics. (I still don't see how Butler's books are more than Butler having fun and calling it politics. And most defenses of her I have seen amount to someone saying that their fun in reading her is politics.)
Literary criticism (or just chat about this and that) is (for some of us) a lot of fun. But calling that fun politics is an extraordinarily clever way to disguise bourgeois ideology (that is the justification of murder) as just us critics having our fun, and why are you torturing us with your criticism of our fun.
Psychoanalysis (Freudian or Lacanian) is, as I argued recently, sometimes good poetry and sometimes interesting and fun literary criticism. But when it pretends to make political judgments it becomes a defense of bourgeois ideology and capitalism. And that is no longer fun.
I have no objection to navel gazing if it's kept clearly separate from any pretense to be resisting the shit you speak of. When it pretends to be resistance rather than fun, then it ceases to be a relief from that shit and becomes part of the shit.
Matthew Arnold in a slick new radical dress is Matthew Arnold still.
Carrol