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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