please temp-ban Mordy from the Thatcher Is Dead thread

like its less critical theory i think than like second-gen popularizations of ideas that originally were proposed by critical theory?

xps

jameson, especially later jameson, is pretty damn nuanced and not very easily appropriated to this or that activist agenda. despite some marxist protestations otherwise he's always seemed more interested in the status and possibility of *theory* as a discipline. im working my way through all of his stuff lately so i could be wrong.

i was thinking maybe foucault--especially "history of sexuality" foucault?

yeah the only people i know who talk jameson regularly are not enmeshed in this culture really

much prefer the bell hooks personal experience vein of theory influenced twitter to the adorno actually socialism ppl myself

like its less critical theory i think than like second-gen popularizations of ideas that originally were proposed by critical theory?

yeah this is what i mean. i dont think a careful reading of foucault or whoever is really gonna jive with what some of these types seem to think they are doing. that's what good about theory--it's in tension with activism. this doesn't mean dont be an activist but it does allow you to critique it, and it leaves you open to critique yourself.

ftr the most textbook tumblry social justice person i know is writing their grad thesis on *capitalism & schizophrenia*

my method for judging philosophers: how awful are their admirers on twitter

i judge by their quote bots

can I be an ally if I don't have a twitter?

i judge by their quote bots

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a good praxis too tbf

I get the maybe ungenerous impression that most internet activists only have cursory familiarity w theory, maybe through reading a handout excerpt in college from discipline and punish or just knowing the names and some of the words through cultural osmosis

esp when ppl are brandishing chic neologisms like shibboleths

xps also maybe people being glib about appropriating it for their social / consumer personae, which is basically what the internet is. idk i find the good stuff p deep but i'm extremely basic when it comes to living it. hooks on patriarchy in particular since i come from a very patriarchal culture. it's tough to expand instead of be reactionary, falling into that pre-destined role/slot that rhetorically or dialectically or whatever just reinforces the prevailing pov. i think some of that "this is how it really is" from hooks is absolutely necessary (and to be fair to her as a theorist, she does create positions that are productive past that), unfortunately so many people stop there. how do you reform or reenact yourself and your relationships without contracting? that's where it gets tough imo.

I get the maybe ungenerous impression that most internet activists only have cursory familiarity w theory, maybe through reading a handout excerpt in college from discipline and punish or just knowing the names and some of the words through cultural osmosis

― Mordy, Friday, February 27, 2015 12:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

finishing like three books and half-finishing ten ime

I think that's otm there's also this dogmatism that argues that "this is truth/reality" as opposed to it being a paradigm or construct which is what you get more on an intellectual history level- that specifically these constructs are useful for ppl in some places and times in history but that critical theory is not about describing the truth of reality xp

doesn't deleuze say somewhere that there's no authentic leftism since it's always being outflanked. i wonder he'd make of twitter!

the slogan "the personal is political" is one of the more abused imo. not so much against the intent of phrase as used originally (so far as i know) but more how it now seems to license a kind of distressing "total war" of feelings vs feelings--with nary an attempt to broker anything actually "political" (in the sense of making and being bound by collective decisions with lots of different voices) in sight.

i know i'm kind of a broken record on this but i really think all of this at its worst amounts to the valorization of vocabulary over actual political practice, the elevation of battles of small ultimate political consequence--the AngrySquad got reebok to drop rick ross for having lyrics that mentioned abusing women, great, what about the working women actually being abused while making reebok shoes? i know this isn't zero sum, but the popular approach these days counts the former as a victory and lets the latter go largely unspoken, and that's the kind of misplaced priority that really worries me.

ha xp

how the obscure difficult dense theory trickles into popular culture is prob the most interesting thing about it, i dont think it necessarily betrays ppls lack of rigor in understand the source material so much as a lot of it is pretty unless and nonsensical for anything else than like talking about in college, also to the extent that there is any point to theory it is that the ideas will mutate into everyday familiarity

the other day i saw Lorde's "self preservation is an act of political warfare" quoted to justify eating ice cream in bed instead of going to an organizing meeting

lol

I have a different take on the reebok phenomenon which is that ultimately this is a powerless politics that can only be effected on a superficial level of celebrity/social media/entertainment/etc so it's not that they're not concerned about the factory workers its that reebok is happy to do some things to mollify customers and won't do others do u better celebrate the shallow victories or it's going to be really depressing.

i know i'm kind of a broken record on this but i really think all of this at its worst amounts to the valorization of vocabulary over actual political practice

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm to use the native terminology a lot of it is very performative

theory may mutate into the everyday but i'll be damned if i surrender it to those meanings. it's "uselessness" is pretty much its point in these realms--it's a discourse or mode of thinking that isn't the everyday!

part of the reason so much theory is abstruse is precisely because the theorists are fighting against the theory's appropriation. of course they always lose but then we always have new theories too.

This is kinda Walter Benn Michaels idea re corporations in general. Changing the gender or race of the ceo is painless- more intense interventions into capitalism are not

the AngrySquad got reebok to drop rick ross for having lyrics that mentioned abusing women, great, what about the working women actually being abused while making reebok shoes? i know this isn't zero sum, but the popular approach these days counts the former as a victory and lets the latter go largely unspoken, and that's the kind of misplaced priority that really worries me.

this is definitely a thing, hey? similarly in journalism think-pieces about some sexism from a comedian, or some racial appropriation by a white singer are given equal importance and column inches (if not more) than like actual reportage, investigative journalism, research etc. about oppression actually operating out in the real world.

part of the reason so much theory is abstruse is precisely because the theorists are fighting against the theory's appropriation. of course they always lose but then we always have new theories too.

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:25 PM (54 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like they r kinda being uptight abt this?

imo fwiw cultural appropriation is the most absurdly half assed of the tweet theories

haha sure. like, your foucault's and lacan's don't really need me to protect them but i think they are kinda victims in all this. abstruse language aside they are just making their little theories and they are fun to read and think about and they can help you think about things you are doing in a new light that may often be very useful. you're never gonna reorganize your life/society on the basis of foucault though.

someone plz correct me if I'm wrong but I also get the impression that a lot of this perfunctory activism is more of a first world thing and the left in eg South America is far more robust with its interventions

i think if you read "critical theory" and come away thinking you can change the world through angry tweeting you've probably read the wrong theory or read it very, very poorly.

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 12:11 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good tweet

xps it's never that "all or nothing" to borrow from another theorist i quoted in a thread yesterday.

you're never gonna reorganize your life/society on the basis of foucault though.

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo these theories can be powerful and change society, tho almost exclusively in small incremental ways, and the process by which that happens is the corruption of the theories themselves

sure fair enough. im coming at this as a "theorist" myself (can i plug my work here?) but my main concern is to stick up for theory as a discipline without making any grand claims for it. i mean, all kinds of culture work on society the way you describe but theory seems to get people riled up more than others.

tru, why do we get so riled abt theory

would be a great book title.

i'm sure theory is good as it exists in ryan's brain but irl any time it comes up it's super annoying; in twitter, activism, lolcollege or otherwise.

i don't consider bell hooks theory. maybe she has more academic writing but the two books i've read of hers ("ain't i a woman" and "margin to center") are very far from what i consider theory, just arguing really simple points (black women were written out of us women's history; white feminism reflects the preoccupations of the affluent white women who wrote it) in plain language with very few references to philosophy. hooks' framework (extended to include queer theory) seems like the one used by twitter sj ppl. i think it's a well-articulated + useful framework that i use all the time and changed the way i think about things

Ok but that sort of historiography does come from the academy

not all culture work

im basically the "not all theorists" guy on this thread, huh.

xp mordy- i'm not saying they're un-academic (although both suffer from a lack of sources) they just don't qualitatively resemble what i think of as theory in any way

pathetically, i've never read hooks, but she seems more of a "public intellectual"--which definitely has a different sense in the US now than, say, France in the late 60s.

I feel like activism could use a huge infusion of heteroglossia and deconstructionism- it's a bit too fixed in the way it speaks and thinks

Like the problem is really that it isn't critical theory enough

that post epitomizes 'armchair' lol

successful activists of the past did just fine without critical theory, no?

lenin was pretty sucesssful

this convo's a little too meta. what's a goal of activists that could be better achieved or conceived through more heteroglossia and deconstructionism?

Like the problem is really that it isn't critical theory enough

― Mordy, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:50 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please temp-ban Mordy from the please temp-ban Mordy from the Thatcher Is Dead thread

They might be able to build better coalitions I think and move away from a lot of the eating their own tailness