From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Subject: Re: john wesley hardin
Keywords: was a friend to the poor
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 14 Apr 92 12:19:12 CDT

In article <22568@alice.att.com> rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin) writes:
>In article <1992Apr13.131025.7128@hemlock.cray.com>, n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
> > 
> > Some time left for lunch and so I will again try to make clear to
> > John Wesley just what I am talking about.  
> > 
> > The "transformation" that I can find again and again in literature
> > and the transformation I can see in action is this:
> > 
> > Wait!
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > First I will again refer the fellow to Rene Girard so that he will stop
> > asking about Derrida.
> > 
> > Now I refer him to Klaus Thewelit and the two volumes of his book
> > "Male Fantasies"
> > 
> > Now I ask him whether he has heard of the term "the Other" and
> > is aware of the uses made of this term.
> > 
> > Now since he is still lost I ask him whether he has read any
> > Feminist literary criticism.
> > 
> > Now I stoop so low as to ask him whether he has read Terry Eagleton
> > on Aesthetics and Ideology.
> > 
> > Now I refer him to Adorno, Horkheimer, shit -- to the entire Frankfurt
> > school and to Walter Benjamin for information about the commodity
> > and the objectification of persons.
> > 
> > Next I'll ask him wheter he has read Barthes on Sade -- especially
> > the Sadean principle of taking away the victim's language and
> > then blaming the victim for being without a language.
> > 
> > Next I'll ask him just what the hell he means be suggesting
> > that the idea that certain groups that are and have been
> > enslaved are colonized by the language of their masters or are
> > denied speech is wrong.  And what is meant by suggesting that the assertion
> > that this is true is some kind of ploy.
> > 
> > Then I will direct him to read what I have already written on the
> > subject and then to try to address what I say.  Perhaps he will
> > be courteous enough to do more than indulge whatever is being indulged.
> > 
> > Are you, John Wesley, denying that the speechlessness I have
> > described is real?  Does the fact that for centuries women
> > have had next to nothing to say about their situation as chattel
> > suggest that speechlessness is a fantasy?  Or is there some
> > esoteric way in which they have been heard and heeded?
> > 
> >    
> > -- 
>
>
>
>Do you leave it open, perhaps as obvious, that women are also treated
>otherwise, say by Hollywood cinema?  Or do you know in advance
>that the glamorizing and repression of women is what Hollywood does?
>So of course it has produced few, or no, films about that repression.

Cite a few instances.  I am certainly open to the possibility that
great films have been made that overcome this.  I think great
literature has been written that overcomes this -- perhaps the
most interesting those poems that the poet wants to (or seems to
want to) produce to justify ideology but give the lie to that
ideology.  Paradise Lost.  Hamlet.  What are some examples?
This means that I don't think all consciousness is completely
saturated by ideology.  If I believed that there would be
no point or place of resistance.



>
>You might see and analyze exactly what the film you analyze itself
>sees and analyzes.
>
>What would happen then?

I do this -- I know the assumption that I fit into the category
of ideologue as anti-ideologue is natural -- but I call your
attention to what I have written and to my willingness to play
alazon to my own eiron and hope that this suggests that I am
not so easily categorized.

>
>The distance between high and low culture in America is very different
>from Europe, a fact ungraspable by, say, Adorno.

Yes -- Old Adorno hated the blues.  But you take what it is possible
to take.  The analysis of the reproduction of culture (for the WEST)
generally very insightful.  Nietzsche another story.  He might
have hung out with Howling Wolf -- sitting quietly at a table and
remembering the pathos of distance.


>
>Here's the end of a Stanley Cavell piece on Allan Bloom:
>
>   ``A parting word about Bloom's vision of the young with their Walkmans
>   on, which he reads as deafening them to `what the great tradition has
>   to say'.  It may be so.  But maybe it is to be read as their blocking
>   out our opinions and explanations of what they listen to.  I do not,
>   on the whole, share their pleasures here.  I take it that I am, on
>   the whole, not meant to, meant not to.  The young, on this reading,
>   feel that there are times and places in which, in their solitude,
>   they are not answerable to others.  Just like us.''

Yes -- and what have I done to be associated with Allan Bloom?
This is from Cavell's longing to theorize a place of resistance
and he is aware that Bloom in a typical gesture wants to
exterminate what is different.  I want "the young" as well
as other groups colonized by ideology to be left alone and
want to imagine a place free of the subjection of ideology.
Several articles I am writing point to this place and its
misrecognition. The place of silver, sex, and shit in Conrad's Nostromo.
Nostromo himself. Conrad longed for this place. The ship that never
sailed on land and sea.  He sees the possibilty but when the Nigger
of the Nigger of the Narcissus comes aboard bringing his dying
with him the soladarity of the crew (Conrad's place of rest)
is diminished and the natural order itself revolts.  The danger
does not go away until the Nigger is sacrificed and returned to
the sea.  Suddenly a great calm.  And then the shore where
the good crew disappears, fade away, as they gather before the Mint.
The other is sacrificed to ensure the great tradition of
immortality.  So, the same old story.  The comic elements
that represent change, nature not subdued, finitude, time.
bodies, floods, women, history are scourged off the stage and
the old men and the woman as deathless virgin preside over
the ending.

The trick is for popular culture to not repeat the same
symbolic sacrifice.  Insofar as it does, it does not
provide a place for resistance.  
 
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