Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 03:27:36 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Prude Leftists: Apollo vs Dionysus



Fully agree with Thomas' sentiments. The sad thing
really is that, as soon as we begin to analyse the
anti-fun attitudes of so much of the left, we slip
into a discourse which is as cold as the marble
pillars in Appollo's temple!

I'd be wary of the Situationist/sub-Marcusean
responses to this problem, because they lean for
justification on the vanguardism rejected by almost
everyone on this list. Why take the trouble to
"reconstruct relations so that they are joyous and
liberating" when there is plenty of joy and liberation
in most lives outside the miltantist left - in what we
might rather crudely label 'popular culture'?

It seems to me that the lifestylist programmes
advanced by the likes of SI involved a complete
rejection of the lifestyles popular in Western
society. Poor old Joe and Josephine Bloggs and their
2.5 children were seen as hopelessly enslaved by
consumerism, and needed to be completely re-oriented.
There are interesting parrallels between this attitude
to pop culture and the attitude of the 'Proletcult' 
writers who wanted to create a completely original
literature in post-revolution Russia, a group which
argued that all pre-existing Rusian literature was
reactionary and outmoded, and had to be replaced by
styles and forms which would read like they had fallen
from the sky. 

Proletcult did not, of course, consider culture as an
evolving phenomenon, full of contradictions and
complexity. A more materialist approach could see the
framework for a post-revolutionary literature in the
work of the very writers proletcult considered
obsolete. In the same way, a materialist understanding
of modern pop culture ought to be able to pick its
positive from its neagtive aspects, to celebrate the
positive and spurn the negative.

See you all at the Houhora Tavern for the darts comp
tonight :)

Cheers
Scott





====For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea":
THR-AT-LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/thrall/
THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/
and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production, http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7Ejho32/

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