So where does literary production (which, I would contend, holds an innate capacity for critique on many levels) fit in on the fun / shit / shitty fun conflationary gauge?
Patrick
-----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Saturday, February 26, 2000 1:13 AM Subject: Re: Commodification of Dissent and the SI
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>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
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