File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 178


Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 22:34:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: All Work and No Play? No Way!



Yoshie is right, of course. The real analogue to the bourgeoisie's moral
universe is analytical philosophy, my old discipline, nothing playful
about it. Grinding hard work, dense attention to fine detail, wooden prose
without humor or life, and savage competitiveness. Military and comercial
metaphor abound. Of course the bourgeoisie are much to precoccupied with
the balance sheet to bother with that stuff. One wonders why we doi it to
ourselves, since we could, for all they care, just have fun. 

--Justin

On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> 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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