[lbo-talk] Count Copula and the "yes we can" speech

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Feb 6 18:13:03 PST 2008


At 08:56 PM 2/6/2008, John Gulick wrote:


>shag (golly, I can't believe I wrote that!) posted:
>
>"It was the call of workers who organized;
>women who reached for the ballot;
>a President who chose the moon as our new frontier;
>and a King who took us to the mountaintop and
>pointed the way to the Promised Land."
>
>Gulick:
>
>Contra John Thornton, I don't find this to be spellbinding,
>but rather, insipid. Especially with Obama's pseudo-MLK
>cadence added.

well, yeah. Janet Halley argues that your response to collapsed continuum, imploded lists, etc. is a good indicator of what kind of...hmmm. I've forgotten and the book's in storage damn. But anyway, there a post on the old blog that explains. I couldn't look it up at work b/c my old blog is not safe for work. LOL.

How's the whiskey there guy? This is quite an extended drinking fest! :)

http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/24/having-just-broken-the-water-pitcher/

quote:

Halley writes: Here's how Foucault described his affective uptake of Borges's exploded list:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought

. In the wonderment of this taxonomy,the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossbilitiy of thinking that.

What effects do exploded lists provoke? The form launches an open-ended trajectory ending with implicit ellipses leading out to infinity; it multiplies taxonomies. It invites emotions of childish exploration, delighted surprise, hushed anticipation that one has found an analytic antimortality strategy.

This queer affect provokes intense resentment in many feminists. Queer theory's claims to infinite mobility are read as elite confidence that queer theory will be perpetually apropos, and to suggest that uncool stuck feminis, with its pathetic commitment to the superseded category of women, is fighting a rearguard action against intellectual adventure and academic omnipresence. To be sure, the invitation to ramify everywhere has been invoked to authorize dizzyingly random scholarly efforts and to ratify as high politics private hedonic projects that utterly fail to face up to the challenges posed by the social violence in which we live. The tone of queer theory when it does this is bratty, smug, and unserious. The feminists have a point.

Mandated multiplicity, dissolved identity, mix-and-match all the way down ­ these might, moreover, not make everyone feel good. Any leftist with a serious heterosexual fetish for the erotic connection between masculine men and feminine women is going to discover in Sedgwick's list a certain limit: its ambitions to infinitude, and her relegation of that desire, that personhood even, to "and so on ." might make such a person feel a bit forlorn, left out of the party.

The future of Foucault's laugh is a bit uncertain. For myself, Taking a Break from Feminism in order to decide misses the sense of delicious wonder at the profound uncertainty of all our knowledge, the steep, almost delirious complexity of sexuality as it is so variously lived, with the grim resolution that the structrual feminists, in all their consolidated knowledge, produce through the copula. I like this mix better than the segregated euphorias and dysphorias of the copula and the exploded list. I hope you will too.


>
>Barack Obama: political rhetoric
>Blink 182: punk rock
>New Line Cinema: independent film
>
>Others may follow suit if they so desire.
>_________________________________________________________________
>Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get
>your "fix".
>http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list