File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 178


Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 01:16:13 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Ghost riders in the sky?


I wrote:
>
>> And it seems pretty obvious that Dennis R never watches tv. Unless of
>> course the States is way ahead of the rest of us with riveting Japanese and
>> Indonesian soaps and cop slop every hour of the week. Not forgetting the
>> never-ending parade of table tennis and badminton tournaments on our
>> screens or all that land hockey the Indians force down our throats.

and Dennis spat back:

>Silly me, I'd forgotten that capitalist superstructures like
>video clips, CNN soundbites, and the propaganda of our culture-industry
>determine the material basis of the capitalist world-system, and not
>infrastructural things like factories, the accumulation of
>financial-industrial capital or the class struggle. As Marx so pithily
>put it, all that is air melts before solidifying.

Now, everybody, just take a look at the passage I was commenting on:

>We all speak Net nowadays. Microsoft, SAP and Sony are the true
>language hegemons, not the business English or other national
>codes their thoroughly multinational executives use. I'm not at all
>convinced that the Anglo-Americans still retain their
>cultural hegemony. If there's anything the Pacific Rim shows, it's that
>the Hong Kong films are more spectacular, the Japanese anime and manga
>more daring and innovative, and Chinese literature and poetry more dynamic
>than anything Disney or Time-Warner produces. Culture has always had an
>ambiguous relationship with capitalist hegemony; a rising capitalism can
>just as easily erase or stamp out art-forms as create new ones (e.g. the
>British-American lack of a decent food culture, or the postmodern German
>inability to produce decent films). It may be that as the East Asian
>countries take charge from their former American masters, these art forms
>will lose their oppositional sting and become part of a new kind of
>multinational neo-imperialism; John Woo's Face/Off, on the other hand,
>is evidence that in fact oppositional currents will still
>exist, and merely take a more indigenous (i.e. domestically East Asia)
>form. The American rentiers noisily reign, while Japan and
>Central Europe quietly rule.

All language and culture and art forms except for the last sentence.

Obviously Dennis expects us all to be adept at the kind of mind-reading
that goes on in X-Files and other such superstitious imperialist junk. So
we don't have the slightest hesitation in seeing that when he talks about
culture and  stuff he's really talking about the material basis of the
capitalist world-system.

Also, as a warning against discounting the significance of "culture",
someone put something up recently about the deliberate use of soaps and
rock videos as subversive weapons.

Dennis does a neat pirouette, but it's up in the clouds, along with lots of
fluff and bubbles.

Maybe Yoshie's right and he could use a taste of something with a severe
oriental tang to it, sort of a de-optimized Yoko Ono as Queen of the Night
singing:

	shiny, shiny, boots of shiny leather,
	whiplash girlchild in the dark

or however it went, to gravitate (love not given lightly) him back to earth
again.

What the hell is Yoshie doing in Columbus Ohio when she so obviously
belongs in Manhattan??

I'd love to see what'd happen with her in charge of a Prolet-Kult squad
touring the rust belt! (And Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov taking notes...)

The smack of firm govern-ment, no doubt...

However, with all this kinky stuff on the Net, I bet her real-life classes
are a total schmooze with cakes and de-caff...

Cheers,

Hugh









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