Doug Henwood wrote:
> Really? Marx took the leading bourgeois thinkers of his time - and
> even some minor, risible characters - very seriously. Why shouldn't a
> contemporary Marxist do the same?
Perhaps (probably) they should -- but this argument by analogy won't work. For a century now the "leading bourgeois thinkers" have shown a strong tendency to generate endless returns to Kant, starting the process all over. That proposition may or may not be true - but it is not obviously false, and to the extent that it is valid even advanced bourgeois thought might well have nothing of value that wasn't already "in" bourgeois thought of the 18th/19th centuries.
When I read your man Bloom's *Anxiety of Influence* many years ago I was impressed by it but also noted that it was only accurate if the world began with Milton. (I don't believe, for example, that his arguments would apply to the relationship of Homer and Virgil.) The irresistible drive to be "new" or "up-to-date" is for the most part a capitalist development, but at the same time capitalism left the poet (novelist / dramatist / critic / psychologist) only one theme: the choice of a world from the outside by the abstract individual. So they all had to hide from themselves their working acceptance of Pope's "True wit is nature to advantage dressed / What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." This "drive" does indeed operate like a force of nature -- thus providing the grounds in individual experience for a psychology which posits "drives" which are somehow outside both language and social relations. (See Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., "Talking with Jesse Helms: The Relation of Drives to Discourse" _JPCS_ 1 [Spring 1996], 81-90.) This need for originality in endlessly revisiting the same essential action (at this level of abstraction "superstructure" does simply mirror the "base": the base being capitalism's endless refashioning a new but same capitalism from the ashes of the old) probably has something to do with the extent to which most major poems of the last two centuries have been poems about how the poet came to write the poem he/she was writing. (I'm not saying anything that wasn't all there in *Paradise Regained* -- if you read it taking Milton's Son at his word in the Temptation of Athens and seeing it as Milton's recognition that in this new world there was only one book -- and that book only contained what anyone could gain from direct individual inspiration without the book.)
But to develop all this (as I recognized a couple of decades ago) would require a book which I can't quite write for various reasons -- but I think if you think about it, I have established as a reasonable hypothesis that there is nothing to learn from the most advanced (bourgeois) thought of the late 20th century that was not already there in the most advance (or "even some minor, risible characters") of the 18th and early 19th centuries. And it isn't even better expressed -- it's just expressed in ever newly invented jargon (which by being that oxymoron, *new* jargon, conceals from its users the fact that it is jargon).
Carrol