File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 25


Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 19:56:10 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!


Doug wrote:
"Though Baudelaire represents a kind of bourgeois art, for sure, your
typical bourgeois would find his poetry (if the typical bourgeois ever
bothered to read it) as decadent and depressing ("Vivre et un mal").This
touches on a recent thread from M-Th, the habit of calling pomo
"playfulness" a form of bourgeois sensibility. But there's nothing playful
about the average bourgeois, who is deadly serious about most things. So is
"bourgeois" art the product of bourgeois society, or is it really the
product of the bourgeoisie itself?"


Of course, the former. It's mainly intellectuals--whether they are grad
students such as myself in the public sector, artists living off grants +
teaching gigs, or that possibly dying breed of "men of letters" with
"independent means"--that work and rework on culture.

I didn't have the time to take part in the Thaxis thread on "playfulness,"
but I did catch some parts of it. I don't think that postmodernism and its
notions of play express "the self-perception of the bourgeoisie," as James
H (?) put it.

You said in your response to James on Thaxis:
"In some ways, I'm persuaded by this analysis, and even have a paragraph or
two in Wall Street on the relation between the development of finance, the
effacement of production, and the ethereal postmodern consciousness.
	But...real bourgies are too busy working their 70-hour weeks to
play. So their foundations subsidize a bunch of bohemians who hate the
strictures of real bourgeois life to play with "play." And most of those
bohemians work their butts off and don't have much real time to play
either. So who's really spending all this time on the sublime and the
erotic? Is it all just simulacra of the liminal?"

I think you got it right. I am one of those unproductive public-sector
workers who live on crumbs off the bourgeois table, and teaching two
classes and grading 50 papers per week while trying to work on my
dissertation don't leave much time for actual play. And that is why our
generation of bohemians, feeling overworked and undersubsidized, are
organizing grad employee unions. Isn't that right, Dennis? (Maybe he's not
on this list.)

Althusser says that ideology offers imaginary solutions to imaginary
understanding of real problems, or something to that effect. So pomo is
ideological in the sense that while it indirectly expresses our legitimate
yearning for more free time and play in our lives, it misunderstands the
cause of this problem as restrictive discursive norms and offers pleasures
of the text as the solution. (Americanized versions of cultural studies
sell mass-produced knock-offs of French couture philosophy to downwardly
mobile grad employees.) We Marxists should propagate a superior politics of
free time, play, desire, etc.

Yoshie Furuhashi

P.S. Those French guys who wrote seminal pomo texts, however, probably did
enjoy a whole lot of free time. I hear the French bourgeois treat their
hangers-on better than their American or Japanese counterparts do.


   

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