This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

if the poor, uneducated + marginalized knew how to overthrow the hegemony, surely they would have done so. marx is not just saying that the intellegesia have a role to play in the revolution, but that they play the central role - only by understanding the history can one invent new forms

ok also you realize not all working class people are 'uneducated' and 'marginalized'?

not sure which is worse, people using left-wing politics to enhance their status in the ruling class or people using their class background to fortify their position in a messageboard debate

j/k, i know which one of those is worse because one of them is not a real thing and the other one is

hi wikipedia thanks: "Žižek was born in Ljubljana, People's Republic of Slovenia, Yugoslavia, to a middle-class family. His parents were both atheists.[7] His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, native of the Brda region in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise"

an economist and civil servant and an accountant, in eastern europe behind the iron curtain, in the immediate aftermath of WWII which took place across the scarred face of his country. holy shit how many butlers do you think he had

yeah. and if you have a problem w capitalism you most likely have a problem w the false equality w which it pacifies its underclass; perceiving this, for the average person, requires time to think. (as soon as you're born they make you feel small / by giving you no time instead of it all, to quote a rich fuck.) there is something elitist of course in percieving the poor as a body requiring education in its own interests by the rich(er) but it isn't an elitism created by marxists; it's the elitism of capitalism, which marxists expect to abolish.

all working class people are uneducated and marginalized

j/k, i know which one of those is worse because one of them is not a real thing and the other one is

― max, Friday, July 26, 2013 5:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A+

dll otm

nilmar otm

i don't think so

don't be so fervent

i think the problem for prof. strawman is that often the model which presumes a straight line between theory and direct political action (and thus the goal of a more just society) just doesn't hold up. everyone really knows this already but rarely is it a *part* of the theory--instead we get more and more circuitous ways of circumventing that essential "problem." (marx's version is of course the classic one).

academic critique tends to lead to...more academic critique. but i would argue that this is as it should be! this doesn't mean that theory is a navel-gazing waste of time, it just means that the relationship between theory and political action isn't a direct one. and that's something that can be important and useful--it's a difference we should protect.

alright, i'll concede, i've definitely been using zizek as a strawman here. can't unload all my grownup disenchantment on one dude.

If you want a distinctly more fleshy and less straw-based target, there are numerous people enacting deconstructive work on Buffy The Vampire Slayer right now who definitely don't want to bring about a better society or who are at the least significantly more interested in having all the soup out of the tureen in the campus bistro. You can do whatever you'd like to them.

Those ppl are harmless though.

those ppl are the literal embodiment of the excesses of capitalism

but that's the absolute worst thing you could say about them

and that they prob overrate angel

as a boyfriend not a showt

show

i did my high school honors english thesis on woody allen, dostoevsky, and existentialism. it was decadent as fuck.

I.E. people working in the arts at post-grad level for whom formalist/structuralist/deconstructionist theory, and its associated language, really has decomposed down into academic jargon, devoid of that energy you see in 'the good old days' when Propp and Shlovsky were analysing the patterns found in folk tales, and it was radical, or when Barthes was looking at photography and saying look, there's structures here, or when later people were like let's break up those structures.

They make various nominally 'left-wing' critiques of cultural items by rote. 300 is a bit racist. No shit. Greek statues are generally not of wheelchair users. Actually, Madame Bovary is a bourgeois novel. No shit.

Fuck.

Catherine Belsey's horrible book Critical Practice, which I was forced to read, pretty much epitomises this, treating literary criticism as like a very, very tedious 9-5 job, heckling Leavis and Empson as if she were someone in charge of the bananas in Costcutter, who thought the previous managers hadn't done a good job of arranging the point of sale displays, and loved to indulge in posthumous nitpicking of their ways. Whilst presuming to marshal you around the banana area, instructing you in how to sell bananas, even though you didn't actually work there and had just wandered in.

People who you can't even say are bludgeoning into the arts and treating them as a sub-project of their grand politcal idea, because they have no such idea.

i guess these are the ppl we can blame for encouraging everyone to call things 'problematic.'

i think demonizing mediocre humanities academics is problematic. they are at worst a symptom of some other, larger problem... there is clearly a craving in our culture for critical/oppositional writing from a "leftist" perspective but no real political project available for these people to support. i think most people who get sucked into the rabbit hole of humanities academia are well-intentioned to start off with -- if often untalented -- there just isn't a productive outlet for their dissatisfaction.

also it's not like they are part of the landed gentry or even bourgeois really. most of these people are getting kicked around from adjunct job to adjunct job and barely pulling down enough money to support themselves.

lol 'problematic' r u 4 real?

that was a joke. i thought it would be funny to use "problematic" after JD just complained about its overuse.

let's unpack this

part of the issue, i tend to think, is that we have a set of "critical practices" (some of which are very powerful and useful when applied to particular ends or effects which are carefully considered) that are very often relics of an emancipatory critical tradition which imbues them with a sense of importance they can no longer legitimately claim. at the same time, we have these tools and nowhere really to direct them except at the terrarium of a novel or tv show or whatever--essentially limited universes which can be mastered by the theoretical observer.

the implication is that if we can discern the workings of hegemony in a novel then we are one step closer to exposing it in society at large--but the result of this idea is that we've developed ever more specific practices for reading novels and not a lot of ways to achieve that larger project. it's not that these practices are useless it's that they are projects of their environment (reading and writing about literary texts) and they are not always the tools needed for, say, an analysis of racism in society at large. as i said before, it's at best an indirect relationship. the problem, in other words, is that critical practices are not general means of achieving something like "comprehending the historical movement of a whole" but in fact highly situational and pragmatic devices or tools to be used for specified ends.

oh lol I missed his post but still big virtue of zizek imo is that he isn't doing these boring identity studies critiques

the ruling class in russia, w the arguable exception of the 'bourgeois specialists' maintained for their technical expertise, was liquidated (excellent soviet euphemism) or sent into exile. there was a NEW ruling class, yes, that eventually came to resemble the old one, but it wasn't the same as the old one.

― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour)

yeah, that was my point. if you're looking to overthrow capitalist tyranny under the rule of a plutocracy, then replacing it with authoritarian tyranny under the rule of an elite must be considered a complete failure. the real problem, the oppression of the proletariat, has not been solved or even addressed.

also, the attempts upthread to isolate academics from the ruling classes seem somewhat bizarre in this (marxist) context. intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite. you don't have to be a fatcat banker or hereditary royalty to be part of the system that oppresses those who perform the profit-generating labor. the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind. these are court jesters, a superfluous product of capitalist excess. their activities are either subsidized by the wealthy or paid from public coffers. though their salary comes from similar places, K-12 schoolteachers have a much better claim to separation.

^ trying out my fox news persona

haven't read every single post in past few days here but i do think geography matters here. guys like zizek are coming out of a european context where intellectuals get to stand on much more elevated soap-boxes than their us counterparts. sartre is long gone, but the notion of the "public intellectual" isn't, along with its expectations of commitment and Resistance. us academics may have their feet on american soil, but their heads are swimming in europe, so they tilt at windmills as though their tilts would be published in the morning's Le Monde..... except they won't.

this thread's been going twelve years and i've only read about 50 pages of zizek

tough guy

a useful marxism, one defined by action as much as theory, arising from and directed to the working classes - such a movement would probably attract upper & middle class followers

trotsky

the petit bourgeoisie may include a lot of people, but surely not those who spin inscrutable fancies for the amusement only of other ivory tower academics, a "labor" that produces no profit of any kind.

see, i'd argue that it's precisely this "closure" that allows new modes of thinking or criticism to slip through. in fact i think it's only through the autonomy which seems at times frivolous (even "useless") which allows academic writing to do anything which doesn't shine the shoes of the ruling class. that "excess" is the point and the great potential of this stuff, but by that very "excess" it can be misdirected (or not directed at all). it's what you use it for.

i mean, who gets to define terms like "useless" or "excess" or "profit" anyway, hmmm?? *winks and returns to reading Ecrits*

otm.

although i can't really blame people struggling to make it in this brutal society being bitter toward the argument that academics shouldn't have to prove their work is valuable in order to continue getting paid for it.

well it goes without saying (i hope) that academics should be just as open to criticism as anyone else.

as an academic who is heavily theory-centered, i can testify that doing this sort of thing can create a whiplash from "this is totally pointless nonsense" to "this is basically the most important way i could spend my time"--and i imagine that vacillation is similar for a lot of similar occupations (art, for one)--though maybe to less extreme degrees.

also i feel compelled to point out that as i was typing that the mailman just dropped off my new copy of Ecrits!

and if it makes anyone feel better, i would wager there's only a very small (and shrinking) number of people who make any real money doing this sort of thing. if you want to find the shoeshiners of the ruling elite i suggest the English department isn't where you should focus your attention.

academics are slightly more immmune to capital's constant demand to PRODUCE than most people are and that's why people get pissed off with them. in america you need to justify your existence by your usefulness to capitalism and if you can't do this you can end up homeless or in prison etc.

the problem is that anyone is subject to that brutal logic. at this point in history, most of the labor that people are doing is not socially necessary and often actively destructive. things could be sorted out differently, so that people could have work that is both more socially useful and personally fulfilling and the ability to pursue intellectual or artistic projects won't be seen as the mere province of the elites.*

*i do not know exactly how this would work, obviously. but i consider myself a "leftist" insofar as i believe in the possibility of a society that makes better use of people's talents.

what is that adorno said? that he believed every person is capable of things that, in bourgeois society, would be considered genius. i believe this. what is obscene about capitalism is that it wastes people.

still linkable after all these years

i fucking love that essay

see, i'd argue that it's precisely this "closure" that allows new modes of thinking or criticism to slip through. in fact i think it's only through the autonomy which seems at times frivolous (even "useless") which allows academic writing to do anything which doesn't shine the shoes of the ruling class. that "excess" is the point and the great potential of this stuff, but by that very "excess" it can be misdirected (or not directed at all). it's what you use it for.

― ryan, Saturday, July 27, 2013 9:03 AM (2 hours ago)

of course. this is why pop celebrities are such a vitally important component of the cause. ;)

christ i don't know what i was going on about here yesterday. i'm not the working class warrior i portrayed myself to be - my family's old-school upper middle class and i grew up around that shit, just had hard luck with deadbeat parents. guess i was being immature.

thinking about it a little more, my issue with ppl like zizek and other academics isn't necessarily with them, it's that there aren't any effective voices or activists on the left in the US, and it's hard watching the direction things are going in. but that's hardly the fault of academia and it's followers. and my issue with them is because an ex-girlfriend was a lefty academic. i'm a nut.