Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 22:34:04 +0100
From: R Pearson <spectres-AT-innotts.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M2 List


At 01:08 PM 10/1/96 -0500, you wrote:
>
>I'd like to see M2 stay alive.  
So would I! I'm thinking of unsubscribing to M1 because of all the tosh that
goes on there and I'd welcome a serious discussion here.

I'd like to see more discussion of
>dialectics, Marx's philosophy, Ollman, evolution, theory, etc.  The things
>Lisa Rogers discussed kept me tuned in to the group discussion.  Ralph can
>be brutal sometimes but I like to know what he thinks.  I'd contribute
>more but I'm interested in literary, philosophical and sociological stuff,
>finding my positions somewhere between Laclau and Mouffe, Marx and Raymond
>Williams and Stuart Hall.  
Why include Marx and Williams with these characters?!!

>That puts me somewhere in the Cultural Studies
>camp, 

Yep!!
>an academically oriented bourgeois son of the working class.  I
>think most things I would write here would be taken as flame bait and
>everyone else who posts here debates so well and seems so well read that 
>I don't think I'd be much sport.   
>
>There are some things I've wondered about though in connection to this
>list: 
>
>1.  What do people think of Stanley Aronowitz's _The Crisis in Historical
>Materialism_ (U. of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed.)?
Don't know it.

>Colin MacCabe and Cornel West seem to like it quite a bit, but I know that
there are quite a few people, considering the Sokal affair, who think
Aronowitz is a chump, and
>a "smelly" chump at that.  Is his TCIHM a crock?   
>

MacCabe has problems with basic Marxist concepts- see his intro to Jameson's
_Geopolitical Aesthetic_.

>2.  What of voices on the Left [?] such as MacCabe or West?  Or Henry Louis
>Gates?  Or Edward Said?  The first two like Stanley's stuff, but why?  Are
>there any reasons that they would publicly endorse his book?  And the
>second two, while ethnically inflecting their critiques, are academic,
>some might say elitist.  Would you say that they just aren't Marxist? or
>that they are only mildly Marxist sympathetic? and that therefore we
>should be very suspicious of them and their opinions?  Don't they flirt
>too much with Foucauldian and Derridean procedures and terms in their
>analyses?  It's hard to read Said without seeing the poststructural
>influence--if muted by his humanism. 

Said has been keen to distance himself from poststructuralism.
But what *precisely* is wrong with coquetting with pomo's?

> And Gates on the "signifying monkey"
>seems indebted to Derrida for his analysis of representation and racism. 
Yep

>
>3.  Finally, THE NATION is the only "paper" on the Left that I'm
>subscribed to, and it's difficult to find any other analysis that's as
>good.  I want to check out the Left Business Observer--someone want to
>send me a copy?  But, what other daily or weekly papers or online
>magazines are people plugging into for current analysis of the media,
>politics, culture and the economy?  Some of the magazines or newspapers
>I've seen from the Greens, or from Unions or from socialists or communists
>are hard to obtain and seem poorly written and reported.  The problem I
>suppose is that it's hard to get good bourgeois journalism professionals
>to write in underfunded and understaffed communist and socialist
>newspapers. 
>
I'm in the UK and don't have ready access to either.

>
>4.  So I guess one thing I'd like to see more of is political, cultural,
>economic and media analysis from people on this list: less fighting and
>dissing each other and more reporting on your local conditions.  I guess 
>that steers M2 a little more toward M1, but without the in-fighting.  
>

Double-plus yep.

>I suppose all this may sound naive.  I don't follow every move the Spoons
>Hierarchs make or contemplate, and so there may already be a list that
>does what I'd like to read.  If so, in the immortal words of SNL's Gilda,
>"Never mind." 
>
The line I remember from Gilda is "If I were a ranch I'd be called the Bar
Nothin!"

Such silliness aside, lets hope we can have a serious debate.

Russell



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