> Even communists have a right to have fun. *As long as they don't
confuse their fun with their politics*.
How about this --> not having to work for an employer is fun. So communists have a right to have fun as long as communists don't stop working for their employer. If the communists were having fun, then the capitalists might to one of two things: Omigod, they're having fun! I want to be a communist too - or - Damn, they're having fun! I'm jealous, because I'm not having fun, they shouldn't be having fun. The latter is puritanism, and is quite anti-fun, and this is what needs to be challenged - this ugly jealous work ethic (which includes academic production industries -let's call it iron criticism (which speaks of the "age" to which it is argued that we should return)(I took all the fun out of that metaphor by explaining it didn't I).
> 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.)
Well then, if everyone was a bit more like Butler, the world would be a better place - by your own reading of her work! The real problem you have with Butler, if you are critical of her work, is that it's too political. She's not fun enough.
> But calling that fun [lit crit, KM] 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.
As was said, it's all political anyway. Even the most banal study of ancient insects in the 'good book' is highly charged power politics. You see what I did there? I can't wait for Dominique Laporte's History of Shit (MIT Press) to come out. It will likely be more fun, and political, than most of what is being tossed around as "taking Marx seriously."
> 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.
So when Zizek argues that you can predict a nations foreign policy based on the size and shape of their toilet bowl, this isn't fun? I think it is fun, and damnit, it's probably a good leftist strategy too! [secretly I think there is a link between high and low water pressure and religious fanaticism. With low water pressure, some shit remains in the bowl... and you know that someone fucked up. With high water pressure, everything is swept away - and the only possible exclamation is "It's a miracle!"] [I'm waiting for the clever retort, "Ken, you're full of shit!"]
> 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.
When resistance becomes fun, it links up with a demand for more fun - like a contagious social neurosis - and this provides a powerful motivation to call in sick. I'll bring this up because I think it is instructive. Chomsky has said that he does this "political" stuff out of an abstract duty to other human beings. He has explicitly claimed that he derives no enjoyment from it. I certainly don't believe him. A friend of mine interviewed him a while ago, and asked him about his activism, and he said, "Chomsky lit up like a child and began to speak rapidly, and passionately." You see, Chomsky *does* enjoy criticism and activism. He's involved because he cares, not because he feels some abstract "ought" pulling at him. Now he denies it for good reason. One could easily say, "Well, your ideology is criticism, and you need to reproduce that ideology by making sure there is something to critique - so your enjoyment depends on the status quo." But you have to admit, this is a pretty pathetic criticism. It depends on a Foucaulting matrix - cause and effect, power and resistance and the reinstatement of power... it misses the crucial point - that the effect *outdoes* the cause. In other words, the power matrix isn't a closed circuit, something radical is contained in the very seed of whatever is repressed and by bringing this repressed quilting point to view, we transform it - from the Beautiful to the Monsterous (which is why the object of ideology is sublime). But, this means nothing. Because psychoanalysis is all crap, right?
> Matthew Arnold in a slick new radical dress is Matthew Arnold still.
Is the dress union made? Then more power to Matthew Arnold! (I wish I knew who Matthew Arnold is)
thanks for this, ken
Yoshie wrote:
> Navel-gazing in the Uriah-Heep-mode ("everyone is so 'umble and so
insistent that everyone else be so 'umble") is neither fun nor political.
It's all political! The problem is that people assume that certain things aren't! That's why we should be jeering "It's the *political* economy, you idiot" not "it's the economy, you idiot!"
> If late modern philosophy were really just fun and proclaimed as such, I
got no objection to it. However, normally it is presented as more radical
politics than Marxism, and that is false.
Marx was full of wit and sarcasm. I'm surprised that so many of his disciples aren't.
> Now, go argue with Terry Eagleton and have fun.
It's a contract! thanks, ken