Deleuze & Guattari, Zizek on Arendt (More from Brennan)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 9 13:34:41 PST 2003



>From: Doug Henwood (dhenwood at panix.com)
>Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 15:22:24 EST
>
>Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
> >how, i might add, can a very assertively professed Marxist settle
>for 'oh it's
> >only popular culture, not important'
> >i have never understood that at all
>
>Because pop culture is only concerned with what hundreds of millions,
>nay billions, of people think and dream about, when the real action
>is around the forces of production. I'm shocked you had to ask.
>
>Doug

I might take a second look at _Empire_ if it were actually being read by hundreds of millions. There are pop cultural phenomena, and there are pop cultural phenomena, and in this case, it looks like a niche marketing, the niche being leftists who are media junkies (us!). (On PEN-l, there were interesting threads on _Gangs of New York_ and _Huck Finn_. I got a lot out of discussing them with folks. That sort of exchange would be welcome.)

One measure of any left-wing social theory's analytical power is whether it gets taken up by activist intellectuals who actually make use of it to analyze the real world. By and large, though, those who favor _Empire_ have less to say about it than those who are critical of it.

In any case, since fans of _Empire_ can't take criticisms, they would have to talk to each other and figure out what use -- if any -- they can make of it. -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



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