[lbo-talk] Trash [was: Celebrity and false idols]

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Dec 11 12:03:09 PST 2005


Rotating Bitch wrote:
>
>
> Accordingly, there is no 'outside' to politics. The is no choice to
> political participation. Everything we do is always already political.
> Political participation is a fact of life because we live in and through
> political institutions and practices.
>
> On such a view, participation in the social world, when justified by
> 'private' reasons such as "just earning a living" or "just having a fun,"
> is not good enough. And, any form of conventional political participation
> that is disciplined by ideological social control or constrained by a
> technocratic ethos is found wanting.

Someplace Plato's mouthpiece Socrates compares dialectic to meat carving. The excellent meat carver divides the meat at the joint; the poor meat carver breaks the bone. It will probably take me a couple of weeks to think this through, but my first response here is that you (or, rather, Amy Gutman)are splintering bones so badly that the joints are utterly obscurred by the splinters.

Someone has toast rather than warmed corn bread as a snack. And there is nothing political about it. If politics includes everything (and I am in the habit of making it include a hell of a lot) it doesn't cover anything. It is either an abstractable part of life or it is mere bullshit. The abstraction is never clearcut -- and that is where competent dialectics comes in -- finding the joint at which to make the abstraction.

I'll throw out a subsidiary abstraction here, pop culture from popular culture. Pop culture gets delivered to us by the ruling class (directly or indirectly), and as such it is all deeply reactionary. By their reaction and use of it the working class seizes parts of it and transforms it into popular culture. I'm not going to say a thing to expand or defend this for a few days or weeks or months; I just toss it out as a tub to butt around.

Carrol



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