On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Michael McIntyre wrote:
> Within that context, Tom Frank's argument that capitalism excels at
> recuperating every transgressive gesture was an important
> intervention, at least locally. How resonant it is outside Hyde Park
> I don't know. Whether or not it essentially reproduces a left
> critique of postmodernism that's coming from a lot of different
> directions I also don't know, though my sense is that The Baffler got
> there early.
I think rather the Baffler was the third generation of this argument. The first was Marcuse's _One Dimensional Man_ in 1964. The second was the journal Telos, which was originally founded in 1969-70 to bring the ideas of Western or Critical Marxism to the New Left. They must have published 100 articles exploring this idea of capitalism's capacity to absorb attempts at revolt and use them to regenerate itself, which they called the "artificial negativity" thesis. Many of them went on to write the same ideas out in book form in more popular language during that decade. By the early 80s, the notion that advertising culture had turned revolution into revolutionary life style products had filtered down to art students, at least in New York. And then the Baffler appeared.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com