> Yup.
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>>
>> >For reasons best known to themselves and the
>> >Solidarity NC, they, or some ofthem, constituted
>> the
>> >Syracuse U. chapter of Soli for a while, so I have
>> >actually beem comrades of a sort with Rob Cymbyla
>> -- a
>> >definitely out-of-body experience. jks
>>
>> Didn't they attack you in the first ish of AO?
>>
>> Doug
Scott McLemee was just saying on leftist_trainspotters that RED ORANGE:
A MARXIST TRIQUARTERLY OF THEORY, POLITICS, AND THE EVERYDAY,
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/matfem/95/0098.html that Robert Cymbala is
attached to , only sent him one issue and seems to be shall I say laggard
on the triquarterly publication schedule. Wonder if Theresa Ebert got
tenure?
"Free Action or Resistance: Cultural Critique in the Classroom, " Theory &
Event, v004/4.3reid.html
> ...Ebert's, and other oppositional Marxists', objections to ludic theory
> are relevant here as they point to the difficulties and challenges
> cultural studies has in confronting student resistance. For them, ludic
> theory "is an articulation and defense of the exploitive social order of
> capitalist patriarchy in that people are encouraged to 'meditate' on
> personal matters instead of having 'principles' about (changing) the
> social order."[12] Interestingly, Ebert decries ludic theory for engaging
> in precisely the practice Graff criticizes it for eschewing: focusing on
> the ethical relationship between individual experience and social-
> institutional structures. Part of this confusion lies in the different
> ways these theories are grouped. Graff identifies cultural studies
> pedagogies as "oppositional" and would certainly include Ebert's red
> pedagogy among them. Ebert argues that cultural studies and postmodern
> theories that focus on the personal or experiential -- the "local" --
> mystify the construction of totalizing, global critique. Graff also
> criticizes ludic theories, not because they focus on experience, but
> rather because they critique the humanist concepts, including
> individuality. As a result, Ebert and Graff become strange bedfellows in
> their opposition to certain theories. In fact, Ebert goes so far as to
> quote Graff's attack on anti-essentialist theory in her critique of ludic
> feminism.[13]
In Morton and Zavarzadeh's definition, ludic postmodernism refers to those theories that seek their genealogy in Nietzschean texts rather than Marxist ones. Ludic theories therefore include feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies, but oppositional Marxists save their primary critique for French post-structuralists, especially Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. Many cultural studies practitioners may object to their work being conflated in this manner. However, rather than addressing oppositional Marxism on this point, I believe working through the critique itself leads to a more thorough understanding of the relationship between resistance and lack in the cultural studies classroom, as Ebert's critique of ludic theory focuses upon postmodern theories of desire that critique notions of need and lack. Specifically, Ebert critiques Deleuze and Guattari, as their theories, in her estimation, "have now become the conceptual frame for almost all versions of the ludic idea of desire." [14] Her primary objection to them lies in their articulation of need as a "counterproduct" of desire.
In class societies, economic resources are not distributed equally (to each according to his needs); thus there are unfulfilled needs that, in fact, produce desire. However, for the class that Deleuze and Guattari represent, there are no unfulfilled needs. It is, then, quite logical, from the perspective of this class, to posit a theory of desire as a material force: desire is, for this class, immediately materialized, and therefore, there is no gap (the shadow world that they describe as idealist) between desire and the object of desire. That gap, however, materially exists in the actual world of class society -- it is the gap that, in fact, separates the class for which they speak from the proletariat: the class whose needs are fulfilled from the class whose needs are unfulfilled.[15]
Ebert's critique focuses upon Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of desire as a material force in contradistinction to the conventional psychoanalytic reading of desire as "lack." She believes they eliminate the notion of lack to obscure the difference between the needs of the poor and the wants of the rich. Deleuze and Guattari suggests a different reason for their critique. They argue that the conventional psychoanalytic understanding of lack, which marks us as forever desiring an object we cannot reach, has served as the foundation for the regularized production of identities within the state: "[l]ack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production ... It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production."[16] This passage does not suggest that lack does not exist, but rather that lack emerges from social production. The act of production creates needs in line with an already existing social organization. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese