[lbo-talk] Virulent groupthink

snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Thu Jul 15 09:24:20 PDT 2004


At 10:53 AM 7/15/2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Carl Remick wrote:
>
>>Thank God the left is immune to this crippling conformism and that we are
>>free to express the most robust opinions about anything -- even movies!
>>-- without let or hindrance.
>
>Posting 16,000 words on a single subject is hardly evidence of let or
>hindrance.
>
>Doug

please add in the rest of the words that have been slung on the topic since--what?--November? As I said already, and Carl wished to ignore, I have plenty to say about the film that is critical and welcome spirited discussion about the _film_, but this isn't about the film. The criticism is merely a tool for carrying on another discussion.

We used to have to deal with the Red Orange wankers. They were take courses from the left-most profs on campus. They felt it their revolutionary duty to read the texts and then commandeer the room for three hours while they systematically engaged in _external_ critique, castigating the author for not being the right kind of Marxist. The criticism always began with the briefest of glosses on the text, only to end up being used as a platform from which to filibuster endlessly in a way that would put O'Rilly to shame.

When we pointed out that the rest of us would actually like to discuss what the author actually wrote, and then maybe criticize the book on its _own_ terms (if a writer is a pomo, then criticizing it for failing to be marxist is pre-mature to say the least), they sniffed and snorted and denounced everyone as 'complicit in regimes of post-al ludic politics that inscribe and reinscribe a subject-positionality imbricated in identitarian assumption of bourgeois imperialist imaginaries implicit in the de/re/territorialization of the discursive terrain, which foregrounds the un/re/de/il-logics of supplementarity but which re/de/in-tensifies the entrepreuneurial anarchism of the totalitarianism of difference/deference>'

Kelley

"We're in a fucking stagmire."

--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'



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