> 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.
And Debord points forward to the hippie/rock revolt cum capitalist enterprise in 1967's _The Society of the Spectacle_, thesis 59: " . . . A smug acceptance of what exists is likewise quite compatible with a purely spectacular rebelliousness, for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular raw material."
Alec
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/