[lbo-talk] Thoughts on Butler

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Sun Jun 8 15:24:58 PDT 2008


Voyou writes:


> This strikes me as an
> oddly elitist anti-elitism; Chomsky has decided, on the part of the
> common man, that the common man needn't worry about all that fancy
> Judith Butler stuff. An unexpectedly egalitarian moment in Lenin
> provides the right response here:
>
> "It is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the
> artificially restricted limits of literature for workers but that they
> learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be
> even truer to say "are not confined", instead of "do not confine
> themselves", because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all
> that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad)
> intellectuals believe that it is enough for workers to be told a few
> things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and
> over again what has long been known."
>
> http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm#v05fl61h-373-GUESS
=================================== Exactly! Would Lenin follow the (bad) intellectual philistines in characterizing the following passage from Guattari as somehow unintelligible to the masses?

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."

I think not!



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list