Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 10:12:29 -0500
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: Empire (hacktivismo)


You make a number of intriguing comments, which I can't totally compute:

>Althought all the riches and the liberating energies of american culture,
>the surface of all that is officialy related to America seems to be a mix of
>sexual transgression with power desire transvested with a puritan aura, as
>if the new Madona clip was a necessary complement of the images of the
>soldiers on the front

It seem that licentiousness (music videos) and Puritanism (indignation at 
Bill Clinton's extramarital blow jobs) cohere in some paradoxical manner as 
complementary poles of one cultural dynamic.  The question is then is it 
really a struggle between two opposed forces or just one entity at war with 
itself, like moralistic televangelists who fuck prostitutes in hotel rooms?

Zappa: Zappa emerged out of an era reacting against hypocrisy and 
conformity, a different cultural order from what exists today.  The 
subversive energies of countercultures were sublated into the mainstream in 
the 1980s and hence there is no talk of conformity, as consumierism became 
sexier in the yuppie era than it was in the 1950s.  Zappa BTW was an 
"atheist" with respect to the counterculture as he was to other pieties, 
mocking the Beatles, the peace-and-love mentality, his own audience, 
etc.  As for Zappa and academicism, see Ben Watson's THE NEGATIVE 
DIALECTICS OF POODLE PLAY, a hilarious if silly take on Zappa by a 
Trotskyist punk groupie.  Watson got to meet Zappa eventually.

I thought I was the only one who remembered Josh White.  He may have been a 
conventional Souther Christian in certain respects, but his "Free and Equal 
BLues" is a model of Enlightenment rationalism.

At 02:08 AM 4/1/2003 -0300, filipe ceppas wrote:

>Dear Matt, thanks for your comments.
>
> > I can adequately discuss ethical issues to do with the supposed moral
> > imperative within democracy to democratize the world at the risk of 
> enduring
> > Ralph's charges of bourgeois academicism :-). I think you want something
> > meatier than this. Presently I think about the deep social psychology 
> of the
>U.S and the setting up of such a damaging dichotomy between U.S and them.
>
>Your message invites me to talk about America, and it would be no false
>modest to say that I'm the less prepared to do it. But I guess nobody here
>would mind the foolish things I could say, specialy if I can relate it to
>Frankfurt School ideas, which I think I can do not...  I think that the
>concern about moral issues you describe on your message is an important one,
>but I don't know if I understand it in the same way you do. Yesterday I was
>tv-zapping and saw Collin Powell speech at C-Span on a meeting with Israeli
>community (I had the impression it was in NY, but I'm not shure). I would
>say that it was an interesting antrophological event. Today, zapping again,
>I saw on C-Span again senators discussing about Sexual Misconduct at U.S.
>Air Force Academy, and it was another interesting antrophological event
>also. These two events and the Them or Us problem you mention, plus the
>finger pointing/name calling "academic" routine, and a lot of things related
>to Iraq war (like the yellow dust of the Grand Wazoo desert storm) sent me
>directly to the obnoxious universe of the musician american amateur
>antrophologist Frank Zappa... It occurs to me that, like Ralph, he would
>probably see your discourse (specially your List Protocol message from
>saturday) as a waste of time academicism, but it seems to me that you are
>pointing to an important issue that goes WITHIN american society, the Them
>or Us conflict, a point that the "politicaly ingenous" Zappa himself took
>"seriously": the old battle of religious against secular values.
>
>Althought all the riches and the liberating energies of american culture,
>the surface of all that is officialy related to America seems to be a mix of
>sexual transgression with power desire transvested with a puritan aura, as
>if the new Madona clip was a necessary complement of the images of the
>soldiers on the front... All in the name of the Free (which recalls me
>another musician, Josh White, singing "Jim Crow": free to suffer till his
>death...) But it is probably a well known clich or something worse. My
>question is that this clich seems to deny crude distinction of
>"theological" and "atheist" dimensions of culture and values, doesn't it?
>Anyway, I ask myself how can we relate this topic with the praxis question,
>specially from Critical Theory perspective... Maybe we can ask first if
>there is any praxis perspective that we can extract from the Critical Theory
>philosophical ideas...  ???
>
>flp.
>
>ps. may it would be nice to tell something about me and my work. I'm a
>professor of philosophy and education; I'm working with teaching philosophy
>at secondary level schools here at Rio de Janeiro, and I'm interesting
>particularly on Adorno ideas about philosophy and education.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project":
      http://www.autodidactproject.org

"Nature has no outline but imagination has."
                           -- William Blake