[lbo-talk] Garb of the Totality

Brian Siano siano at mail.med.upenn.edu
Mon Aug 25 14:29:05 PDT 2003


On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 13:57:39 -0700, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:


> Quoting Brian Siano:
>
>> The massive variety of clothing styles available to nearly everyone-- a
>> variety that's pretty much unparalleled in human history, by the way--
>> is derided as just another corporate yoke, just another variety of Mao
>> jacket or prison oranges imposed by malevolent corporate masters to
>> enforce conformity. This means that the mass of citizens can be
>> ridiculed as mindless, conformist sheep, unaware of what's _really_
>> going on.
>
> No, it just means that the protest against reification is itself subject
> to reification. The ideology of pluralism vs. conformity is itself a
> piece of reactionary thinking, a.k.a. market fundamentalism. Any really
> radical critique has to push beyond both poles of the binary, i.e.
> setting the realm of consumption towards production, finance, and
> distribution, the way the anti-
> sweatshop movement has done -- e.g. going from the malls of the
> metropoles to the textile mills of the periphery.

Buit a truly radical critique must, by its very nature, establish a strategy of appropriation. That is, the utilization of dominant and regnant discourses normally used in the service of hegemony, in order to subvert, and thus critique, the nature of the discourse of privilege. By adopting a multi-directional critique that moves beyond the binary, a truly radical theorist could develop a mode of analysis that moves beyond deconstruction itself, in fact rendering all modes of discourse self-reflexive and thus, self-negating.

We will now discuss Christopher Robin as a proleptic Mao figure.



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