[lbo-talk] Iraq war (was: stupidity is most dangerous in people with high IQ)

Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net
Sat May 25 20:12:27 PDT 2013


On 5/25/2013 12:45 PM, michael yates wrote:
> Doug misses the irony of my reference to the sticks. Abbey has fans everywhere. His sensibility was, without a doubt, the dominant one in OWS. And let's see, I've spent time in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City and environs, Billings, Missoula, Bozeman, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Boulder, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Joplin, Madison, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Miami, Miami Beach, Washington DC, and yes, New York City. And I deal with writers from around the world on a regular basis, in India, China, Europe. Is that enough people for you? What happens in the West (the sticks in my ironic reference) affects us all, and Abbey was in the forefront of what is now the modern environmental movement.
>
> Doug, do you think you're the real America? A sixty year old white guy? But I am not talking population numbers or real America (I don't even know what that means), but environmental disasters right in front of our eyes. And lots more that people all over the US are upset about. There are activists everywhere, thoughtful people, and this is what gives hope, not that Krugman is citing Kalecki or someone, Bhaskar Sunkara, writes an essay critical of the Nation that Katrina agrees to publish. Not that these might not be good things (Ok, I will say they are), but only that they might not be as significant as you think they are. Surely, we can disagree about this. Without some ridiculous comment that "you are not the real America." God, do you think that there aren't millions of boobs in the big cities?
>
> We all do what we can to effect change. With very limited success so far. But we keep trying. Why badmouth one of the great writers of the west? Especially when he and his many progeny still have a lot to offer us. Why pretend that your sensibility is superior? Abbey was certainly as sophisticated, as well-versed in literature and art, etc. as you, and certainly I. And he knew a great deal about capitalism as well.
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We’re drunk with critique, cynicism, and skepticism. And in this way, all critique has come to be neutralized. We now know, a priori, that everything we speak of– including our own critiques! –will contain illegitimate assumptions, illicit interests on behalf of the powerful and dominant classes, and unfounded decisions. It is all neutralized in advance. In the culture industry of the academy– and, in particular, the academy that calls itself radical –we will always be able to show that some scandalous desire, ideology, or interest is at work. As a consequence, we become paralyzed. We can say well enough what is wrong with any positive knowledge claim and how any ethical or political proposal conceals hidden interests and despicable forms of oppression and inequality, we can show, like the theologians, how everything is stained by sin, yet we can make no positive proposals. Our sole and single ethical prescription becomes “make no claim, make no proposal, judge no thing.” Our business– and it is a business, a tenure business –comes to consist in showing that everything is stained and dirty.

In a strange way, we thus become the mirror image of the theologians, yet with the caveat that where they can commit by virtue of their belief in a transcendent term– a horrific God that would condemn trillions to eternal suffering –we can say nothing. Like the theologians we find sin in everything, seeing all as fallen. Like the theologians or the fundamentalist freaks of today, we discard all science as really being masked strategems of power, of interest, that are ultimately constructed and without any truth. We thus strangely find ourselves in the same camp as the climate change denialists, the creationists who use their skepticism as a tool to dismiss evolutionary theory, and those that would treat economic theories as mere theories in the pejorative sense and continue to hold to their neoliberal economics despite the existence of any evidence supporting its claims. We critique everything and yet leave everything intact.

The point is not to abandon the project of critique. We’ve all heard the critiques of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, of the gender theorists, of the post-colonial theorists, of Bourdieu and his critique of the scholastic disposition (academia and academics), of the Derrideans, the semioticians, and a host of others. These critiques, at this point, are complete. They no longer shock. As Lacan observed in “Position of the Unconscious” in Ecrits, the formations of the unconscious shift and respond to our interpretations of the unconscious. The point is that today we need to find the will to believe a little, to affirm a little, and to commit a little. Marx called for “the ruthless critique of all existing things”, yet that stance has today become the most reactionary and ineffectual position at all. In the absence of daring to affirm certain things as real and true, we leave all intact as it is. Only where we abandon our foundationalist, obsessional assumptions, our desire to have the truth before we pursue the truth, our intoxication with epistemology, will we be able to move beyond this paralysis.

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/page/11/



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