(no subject)

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Tue Jul 3 06:04:49 PDT 2001



>I don't know what Brad's second point was, but surely his first, that the
>discourse as reported was every bit as convoluted and dense as the worst
>piece of Judith Butler prose, is correct. If that is to be forgiven in
>Jameson but not in Butler, one must ask why?

It's Wednesday now, so I think I may respond.

I've much sympathy with Brad and Leo's point, Fred can be a bloody frustrating read at times, but remind them that on this occasion, the words may not be his. Dennis is clearly in an excited state of conference afterglow, a mood that caught me, even if I didn't quite get what he was saying.

I think that non-identity stuff is to do with alienation - that we're caught under the sway of instrumentalism and its excluding (ie of the present in which life is actually lived) focus on a future thus limited by a perpetual self-fulfilling prophecy. Objects become the concepts by which this prime directive identifies them and their significance, so that can leave really important aspects of the things objectified out of the picture altogether.

And we become such objects, too - under a rationality of control that denies our life in the now. And we forget we're the subjects in the piece, too, and could make the present master of the future rather than vice versa.

So there ya go, a mix of Weberian bleakness and a potentially revolutionary subject/object dialectic ... I think the author meant it as the latter, but, as time went on, seemed to tend towards the former reading.

Dunno if that's right, and don't know if this is where Dennis was intending to take us, but there it is.

Cheers, Rob.



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