Ah, yes, "'even' Catherine Driscoll," you say. What does the adverb "even" -- Cf. "c. Used as an intensive to indicate something that is unexpected: declined even to consider the idea," _The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language_ 4th ed., 2000 -- say about you, Catherine, and Marxism as a political project (rather than merely a useful social theory or, worse yet, a "leftover" -- see below), as well as relations among them?
The adverb "even" with which you modify Catherine's relation to Marxism as a political project has something to do with the production of obsolescence, as perceptively analyzed by Evan Watkins in _Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993):
***** ...[R]ather than simply producing the conditions of change, whether new technology or whatever, dominant social positions must depend on an emergent distance between what henceforth can be temporally marked as "old" and "new"....That distance functions like a kind of "surplus value," over and above the "fact" of change and the labors of innovation, and is available to be realized as the social capital of distinction from "the others" [in this thread, Marxists who regard Marxism as a political project, rather than merely as a useful social theory] condemned to a now rapidly disappearing configuration of what used to be. (32) *****
The adverb "even," as well as other rhetorical tics, gives you the distance necessary for the production of "a kind of 'surplus value'" by condemning "the others" to obsolescence.
At 3:49 PM -0500 2/8/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>I thought you would object to being in any camp, much less a
>>"Marxist Camp," except maybe in the sense of being a connoisseur of
>>Camp (as in Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'").
>
>To my occasional regret, there's little that's campy about me. I
>always feel ploddingly inadequate next to a true campmeister.
>
>Doug
At 1:14 PM -0500 2/9/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Just what is the point of all this taxonomy? It reminds me of junior
>high school, sorting out the cool kids from the dorks. I forget -
>are the Marxists the cool kids or the dorks?
>
>Doug
The idea @ LBO-talk is that "cool kids" (= Connoisseurs of Marxist Camp, among other Campy Things) know how to patronize "dorks" (= Marxists, among other Campy Things). Andy Warhol explains precisely how it works:
***** I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded and that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers....You're recycling work and you're recycling people, and you're running your business as a byproduct of other businesses....So that's a very economical operating procedure. It's also the funniest operating procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inherently funny. (Andy Warhol qtd. in Andrew Ross, _No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture_, NY: Routledge, 1989, p. 170) *****
At least, Warhol knew what he was doing. -- Yoshie
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