On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 10:13 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> One effect was to get a pretty good
> condensed damnation of the u.s. into the pages of _critical inquiry_
> :-)
does this perhaps belie your point below about rocking chairs? it's not like manning the barricades or anything, but . . . it's not like waiting for the revolution to flood over us, either.
>
> "Counter-revolutionary" is your word, not mine. Brennan shows them more
> respect than I have for them, because I have from the beginning put
> _Empire_ in the same category with other pop works such as Korzybski's
> _Science and Sanity_ or Phillip Wylie's _Generation of Vipers_: they
> make a big flash, _everyone_ is reading and bubbling about them, and
> then they sink into obscurity.
time will tell, but this sounds like an invitation to a bet: http://www.longbets.org/
;-)
>
> I do think that, during its 15 minutes of fame, _Empire_ is helping
> some
> people to feel that they can afterall get to heaven in a rocking chair.
here is where i think you have less reference to what brennan calls "the record" than brennan or you would have us believe hardt or negri make. it sounds to rather as if you imagine this result the only logical conclusion and then take the step to say that is what will happen. it's unconvincing.
> That's my e-mail rhetoric: Brennan develops that essential point in
> more
> sober prose with detailed analysis. Read him and see what you think.
i plan to. honest. no time, now, unfortunately (barely can do dignity to your extensive reply, here).
>
>
>> if not, then what? cynical intellectual opportunists (because we all
>
> I really have no opinion about them as persons. I don't know them.
> There's a poem by Hardy in which a soldier reflects on the man he
> killed: in peacetime he probably would have had a drink with him. I've
> had good personal relations with people whose ideas I detested, just as
> my favorite poets are all poets whose ideas I detest.
i vaguely recall yoshie having staked out this territory explicitly, but i clearly do you a disservice by attributing the view to you by extension. i'm not sure yoshie would disavow it even if it wasn't her.
>
>> know that being a successful pseudo-leftist intellectual is such great
>> business)? if that's the case,
see above.
for the rest
>
> That's not the case. My remarks are strictly on the book. The passages
> I've posted from Brennan are focused on the book. Brennan tries to be,
> and is, quite generous to the men themselves.
>
> The ideas of the book, if taken seriously and acted upon by many
> political activists, would be destructive. Here is another paragraph
> from Brennan:
>
> ****
> Against the backdrop of a vast manual system of interlocking, armed
> work
> farms in the clothing industry, the prison-labor system, massive new
> infrastructural projects (in the laying of fiber optic cable, for
> example), and new arctic drilling ventures, the world economy is for
> Hardt and Negri resolutely "post-industrial." Even as Brussels vetoes
> U.S. corporate mergers, George W. Bush raises steel tariffs, and Chile
> indicts Henry Kissinger as a material witness in the trial of General
> Augusto Pinochet, the nation-state, we are told, has lost all
> sovereignty. In what can only be called a bracero economy of controlled
> "illegal" immigration and the reinstitution of slavery (in the Chinese
> tenement halls of the United States as well as in rural Sudan and
> Myanmar), we are told that knowledge rather than brute physicality is
> the constituent element of new labor. Consequently, the supersession of
> manual by mental or immaterial labor turns out to be a matter of faith
> rather than anything resembling an analysis of the record.*****
>
> You can't build political coalitions with this sort of attitude towards
> the state.
you can't build them living in the 30s, either. the truth is that for all the truths you think we already have sewn up, here we all sit with very poor organization in the states. i don't get it.
>>
>> ps -- when did you become a zizek fan?
>
> I'm weakening. I've seen a couple of good things from him lately. As I
> said yesterday in a post referring to a past squabble between Justin &
> me, theory and practice never quite agree -- and moreover no one's
> theory is wholly coherent. I still think Lacan a fraud (as Doug used to
> at least), but apparently it is not impossible to be influenced by
> Lacan
> and have some shrewd things to say.
>
hey! some of my best friends are lacanians, and marxist lacanians, at that.
:-)
more, maybe, when i've been able to read brennan, but i also think thomas seay is doing a better job than i could.
j