> Before I go any further, if it isn't clear, I think one of _the_ big points
> of "relations of production" as a conceptualisation not to exclude
> "culture"
> but to _preclude_reliance_ on any discussion of culture when it wasn't
> needed.
Honestly,this isn't clear to me. If I try to make it make sense... the popular cultures of particular racialised groups, rather than other social mechanisms (including the economic), are often used to explain their continued systemic impoverishment. Is that what you mean? So, in that case I'd say of course it's not the family systems or leisure patterns of Aboriginal Australians that demand they remain economically underpriveleged. Giving those things up -- living more "white" -- is only incidentally successful in raising your chances of not remaining poor. However, I can't think of one real contributing factor to this problem that is clearly not "cultural".
> Of course these things can't be separated in the real world, but
> isn't that why we have academics?
I can think of reasons why we have academics, and this seems a generous one, but I'm not sure what it means.
> It's simply not possible to discuss
> everything and I can't think of many contexts where one's religious
> denomination or the particular version of football one follows is relevant
> to the rate at which surplus value is being accrued by ones employers.
Hmm. So, you don't see any connection then between the fact that someone who makes said profit is more likely to have cultural allegiances to rugby union than rugby league and the reproduction of a status quo in which some people make said profit and others do not.
> > In each case I could say they event in itself and a representation of
> > that are obviously qualitatively different.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > But in each case I could also argue
> > that the event is only an "event" insofar as it is experienced through
> > representation
>
> But I would argue that "primary" events like every day relations of
> production and the Bali bombing are both represented and experienced quite
> differently to "secondary" events like Star Wars Epi. 5 In fact, given how
> entertainment-saturated the media is, we hardly ever see primary events.
> Especially the relations of production.
But the "Bali bombing" was entertainment as a media event -- people tuned in, that gave it a title, they assigned villains and heroes and systems of allusion. More over from its planning it was meant to have these attributes -- it was part of a genre and mythological system, and shit how did I end up sounding like a Barthesian structuralist, I think I need to go and lay down. I mean, though, seriously, the gap betweent the "Bali bombing" and Star Wars, insofar as people consumed it by that label, is not that great.
> >... But the football thing, not being perceived as training for labour, is so
> much
> > more effective at doing it. Oh, the teamwork, the sportsmanship, the
> focus, the
> > training regimens...
>
> All of these also being why many leftists think sport should be encouraged
> ...
Part of the hideous heroising of (the Other) working class culture, as far as I can see. Give me one, just one, reason to believe joining a rugby league team will make a difference of the "leftist" kind.
> And I couldn't help noticing these words in your post to Carrol:
>
> >Unless you want jettison
> > everything Marxism has actually offered to the analysis of all those
> relations-
> > of-production you cannot dismiss or sideline "culture". Economics as a
> > discipline, Marxism as a field of theories -- "culture".
>
> An interesting concept of "Marxism"; it sounds more like Weber, or
> postmodernism ... or at a stretch, I suppose, some varieties of neo-marxism.
Why?
> Then again I suppose a lot of "marxist" cultural studies makes me think "I
> am not a marxist".
And... why?
Catherine
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