[lbo-talk] Shuttle. Click

[Rotating Bitch]

At 01:59 PM 11/18/2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>I spent about six weeks back in '99 doing nothing much but going through
>>that whole Introduction to Bodies that Matter over and over again,
>>sentence by sentence. And there is no real difficulty in it, as your
>>commentary reveals, there is only a pretence of translating historical
>>materialism into Lacanian double-speak. No one has ever shown how there
>>is a gain involved. Doug repeatedly reposts this fragment of the
>>Introduction, but he has never explained how it, concretely, illumines
>>the topic at hand; without out exception one can make the point without
>>using Butler. She is pretty consistently redundant.
>
>This is a classic. Either she's hopelessly opaque or hopelessly 
>simple-minded. Sometimes she's both. Which is it?
>
>Doug

I don't get this. She's rejecting classic formulations of Marxism where the 
answer is ostensibly in the working class (which digs its own grave) or is 
in the "vanguard" (which can't really explain why this vanguard comes to be 
revolutionary -- why they are radical, as opposed to the entirety of the 
workingclass" It tries, but it's not convincing). In the wake of theories 
which failed, there were others, notably Freudo-Marxism. But, even that was 
an entrappment in the present, where the answer was in the marginalized 
(Marcuse) or maginalized intellectuals (Hork and Adorno).

But, they're still entrapped in the present.

Why? asks Butler. And she's criticiziging "constructivism" or "social 
constructionism" -- while also seeming to be one -- but on a facile reading.

She's trying to explore, while going beyond these formulations, how it 
might actually happen when you say something will inevitably happen because 
they system produces a working class that digs its own grave.

How so?

Sometimes, people rely on a magical confluence of events that simply push 
people into revolution. Carrol uses the term from his Gould. Yet Gould 
rejected that theory in his last book.

time for a new one. I don't think pomo's the one, but I detest facile 
dismissals of what they're up to. but, to go into that,everyone will take 
it personally, so I'll bitch at Bitch Lab.

"You know how it is -- come for the animal porn,
stay for the cultural analysis."

Bitch | Lab
http://blog.pulpculture.org