Subject: Re: SI
To: avant-garde-AT-world.std.com
Date: Fri, 13 May 94 19:09:18 PDT
Cc: triley-AT-weber.ucsd.edu (me)


Tad Kepley writes:
>
>On Thu, 12 May 1994, Tristan Riley wrote:
>
>> Tad Kepley writes:
>> >
>> >On Thu, 12 May 1994, Mark Evenson wrote:
>> >
>> >  Isn't it slightly defeatist
>> >> to concentrate on the sphere of poetics for transformation at the expense
>> >> of the "real" substrate of economics/politics?
>> >
>> >Resoundingly yes.
>> 
>> Could one request elaboration on this?  Should one take this as a
>> claim that the SI was "resoundingly...defeatist"?  In what sense?  
>
>"concentrate on the sphere of poetics for tranformation" ??!! Maybe we're 
>not talking about the same sits, here, guys...

Again I would ask what argument about these "sits...we're...talking 
about" is hiding behind lots of question marks and exclamation points.  
Are you claiming there was no theme of Marxist revolution and social
transformation in SI writings and practice?  Or that this theme was
something unimportant in SI theory? If so, what is the
evidence for this claim (beyond the exasperation of question marks
and exclamation points)?

>No, one shouldn't take "resoundingly yes" as a claim that the SI was 
>"resoundingly...defeatist". You'd better re-read his question.
>

Q: Isnt' it slightly defeatist to...?
A: Resoundingly yes.
What am I missing in this reading and what am I to learn in
re-reading?

  
>> > These guys weren't 
>> >late-twentieth century self-hating collegians (even though they _did_ write 
>> >some pretty stupid stuff about the Newark and LA riots).
>> 
>> Perhaps more elaboration here on the connection between "self-hating
>> collegians" and SI writings on Watts? And why "stupid stuff"? 
>> 
>> 
>
>The sits wrote their stuff on those riots from a position of more than 
>relative ignorance about the actual conditions in those respective cities 
>and America in general (an ignorance that turns up elsewhere in their 
>work). They also were tempered with the Frogs' fascination with American 
>black folks- a fascination bordering on the racist.

What of their "fascination" with other such urban upheavals about
which they might have been better informed--e.g., Paris '68,
Algeria--and about which they also wrote such "stupid stuff"? That
is, is this what it appears on the surface (a rejection of the
celebration of specific violent class- and race- based upheaval 
by the SI on the grounds of their ignorance of local situations) or is it
something else (e.g., rejection of *any* such thread in the sits in the
larger service of selectively reading the vanguard Marxist politics
right out of their work)?


>I was drawing an allegory between that stuff and the reams of stupid shit
>written by bored PC ivy league undergrads after the recent LA
>conflagration...  which is stupid not just cause it's stupid, but because 
>it's self-abusive...

It's "stupid...cause it's stupid...[and] because it's self-abusive".
Less than clear to me, I'm afraid, precisely what all this means.
One possible argument lurking beneath this is that *any* sympathetic
treatment of uprisings of largely non-white, non-middle class,
non-intellectual class groups by largely white, middle class or
intellectual class groups is to be dismissed as merely "stupid" or
"self-abusive".  There are other readings which would make Tad
Kepley's comments less trivial--I'm eager to believe that one of
these others is what Tad Kepley intends.

Tristan