File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 306


Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 11:16:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-I: Moderator's note


Barkley Rosser:

>     Does this apply to all the marxism lists, just M-I, or 
>what?  Is this due to the dustup over "Murray" et al?  If 
>so, this is a very unfortunate development.  It would 
>suggest that if "Murray" is indeed what he has been charged 
>with being (rather than just a very screwed up individual), 
>the agencies in question will have succeeded in their goal. 
>I, for one, would like to hear some further justification, 
>discussion out of malgosia/Spoons Collective, et al, 
>regarding this rather serious matter.
>Barkley Rosser

Okay, I spoke to Hans Erhbar on the phone last night on the general
situation. He said that they had already decided to cut the Marxism space
loose in June, but that the dustup over Murray had simply freaked them out
and they wanted to speed up the divorce. I told Erhbar that I would not
file a FOIA request, which had really bothered them a lot. It seems that
they don't want any attention of the FBI on the Spoons lists, for some
reason.  Although they express it in this manner, I take a different
approach to the problem. The FBI has absolutely no interest in any of the
lists hosted by Spoons, except the Marxism lists which have a
semiautonomous status. It is we who need protection from harassment, not
the members of the other lists. Can you imagine an FBI trying being
assigned to track the Bataille mailing-list at Spoons? What would he make
of this sample post:

"hm.... I wonder where all this could go, I started reading Leiris _L'Age
d'homme_ where he, as some of you know, shares his experience of growing
up into manhood and a more masculine style. He doesn't mention
blackstockings as such but he does say that an early initiation into
manhood involved the binding together of an interest in theater shared by
everyone in his family and role playing. Since he was the youngest, his
role in the plays he and his brothers played out inavariably was that of
the female. This role, pleased him he writes, as much as any role in
suffering, it was his first revelation of virility. He played the
prisoner and the one tied to be tortured. Later on... i would
like very much to relate this across some of Deleuze's suggestive
remarks on masochism, some of which appear in his intro to _Venus In Furs_
which, who knows, could loop back to Quevedo and his own impossible desire
and certain things Zizek writes in this regard; but now unfortunately i
must postpone all this for another time as my heidegger essay is calling
me to my ownmost possibility."

The problem is that the Spoons folks intended from the start that the
Marxism list be focused on philosophical issues like these, since Marx has
had a big influence on the thinkers they already had dedicated lists to,
like Deleuze-Guattari, Lyotard, et al. 

The problem is that a bunch of commies crashed the party and decided to
use the Marxism list to discuss current events, like the Australian
"wharfie" strike. So there has always been an attitude of having been
usurped or hijacked on their part. I can hardly blame them. If we get a
Marxism-International list going on Panix and a hundred or so people who
read nothing but Social Text joined the list and talked about nothing
except transgression, cross-dressing and psychotherapy all day, I might
decide that it wasn't worth my time funding or spending my precious time
maintaining such a list. But that's what makes this country great. You can
have differences of opinion. 

Louis Proyect





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