God I wish. I’ll even buy drinks if anyone wants to come check out my ivory tower of Cultural Marxist might sad little hobbit-hole next to the copy machine where I can’t even get enough wi-fi to attend a web-based conference call.
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That’s what 100BaseT is for.
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I assume you don’t actually have to buy any drinks and that they are pre-bought in your desk drawer? (Social Science and all)
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Yes, if only the Mothership would allow IT to activate any of the ethernet ports in my office other than the one that runs my (not webcam-equipped) desktop and my phone.
If they allowed me to connect my MacBook Pro to the ethernet, I might actually become effective at undermining the power structures that support their own self-reproduction by co-opting the labor of the masses doing my damn job.
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Ha, the real joy of working in a mental health field is that a certain number of your coworkers and students have positively Southern Baptist attitudes toward Demon Rum et al. And the joy of working in a system that has essentially managed to eliminate tenure-track jobs is that you’re actually fucked if they catch you nipping in the middle of the day. You see what happens when they allow women into Old Boys’ Networks? White-collar jobs suddenly grow pink-collar salaries and restrictions.
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Ugh. Sounds painful.
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See, this why you should never trust the Marxists. They’ll toss a bright red cap into the wash, and, well
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It’s really hard to undermine traditional marriage and the institution of the family while getting only 1.8Mb down and .7 Mb up, let me tell you.
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“Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls”
Speaking of cynical popular culture (as well as an implicit male viewpoint)
Tom Lehrer - Bright College Days: http://youtu.be/bATv2GwOs08
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I hope that doesn’t mean you’ve taken the Green Pill. ; )
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I finally got around to looking up “Dysgenics” today. I mean, it was pretty obvious from the formation of the word that it is a term to designate the user as a horrible racist. It’s sort of the opposite of what I was saying about the upper right. If you take the upper right boxes and think of everything else as a black box then it’s amazing how much I agree. If you take that bottom part and think of everything else as a black box, I’m just blown away that someone could write that word without thinking, “Everyone who reads this will know I’m a crazy idiot.”
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Really?
Check out this guy:
Some people are very attached to the Bell Curve.
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Then I would feel compelled to ask you why you think you have to interact with people in that way.
P.S. Nice popular culture reference.
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Saw my first Howard Zinn play last night.
It made me think of you all.
Very inspirational were my feely-feels.
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Assuming wikipedia is an accurate representation, my hypothesis that “Dysgenics” is a word with no content that serves to mark the speaker as a right-awful person and probably a terrible racist seems confirmed. I’ll add “moron” to that list as well.
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I guess to me that cycle of businesses feeding into mass media feeding into the population feedback back into businesses as all contained within the culture. Mass media exerts control on popular culture, but it is itself part of popular culture. Where are the people with the money who are paying to have cultural attitudes changed to benefit themselves getting their ideas? There is a tendency to separate them from the system, but that’s just another way of assuming that people with a lot of money are somehow better than other people.
They have this idea or that, and they think they are clever, but obviously if the culture props up fabulously wealthy people and allows them to have outsized influence, then it’s just a culture that isn’t stopping the tendency of power to beget power. They didn’t do anything other than exist at the right time in the right place to be that person. Mass Media sometimes feels like it is in the lead, but it is just as often following behind - as much work is put into guessing what people want to hear as is reporting things.
We all try to pick a name for our kids that not too many other people will pick but then the grade one class is full of Austins and McKenzies. When I named my daughter everyone I told said, “Oh, that’s a great name, you never hear that these days.” But there are tons of kids with that name around the same age as her.
I think the example of being a kid is a little different, though. Adults genuinely don’t understand kids. For adults making culture for other adults, they’re all part of the same culture that is making the culture (and you can break it down into subcultures and parallel cultures, but the producers and consumers and essentially linked).
ETA: Just read @HMSGoose’s comment on this in the other thread and I think he does a better job than I do.
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#My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings All the Boys to the Yard
Has this been posted previously in this thread? I know I’ve seen the first image before (from a t-shirt), and thought I may have posted it… somewhere. The second was new to me.
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It’s likely I’ll be repeating things here I’ve said previously in this thread.
Since before this thread started, I’ve been slowly reading The Dialectical Imagination, by Martin Jay, a history of the Frankfurt School from its origins, and I’m finally on the last few pages of it. I have a hard time reading dense texts quickly, which is probably a major reason that I never graduated from college. Anyway, it’s a secondary text, and it’s a muddle of biography, history, and philosophical exegesis. I didn’t find it clear on any of those points; Jay never offers a definition of “Critical Theory”, nor discusses why it might be hard to define. Still, it gave me some sense of what the context was, for some of the texts I have read, and some sense of what the overall trajectory of the group was.
When I was a member of a Trotskyist group, when the Frankfurt School came up at all, it was to be dismissed as part of a tendency in the 60s to look for anyone but the working class to act as the agent of revolutionary change: in this case, students. That’s, at best, a gross oversimplification of Herbert Marcuse’s position. When I started reading Jay’s book, one of the first things to really leap out at me was that the Frankfurt School came into existence just after the failed German revolution of 1924, and their starting point was that the German working class was now too well integrated into the system to rebel against it.
That actually matched some speculation of mine, except that I had thought of 1924 Germany as a high-water mark for working class rebelliousness, so that conclusion surprised me. My partner made the reasonable point that it was precisely because these academics were so close to a failed revolution that they became thoroughly demoralized by it.
In any case, the scholars of the Frankfurt School explicitly turned away from activism and partisanship and towards abstract theory. Despite treating “praxis” as some erotic goal, they cultivated a theory that actually engaging in praxis rather than theorizing about how important it was to engage in praxis, would degrade their ability to theorize about praxis.
I was further surprised that, by the 30s, they’d posited ideas about the nature of the Soviet Union and the economic development of capitalist societies – that the Soviet Union was really “state capitalist” and that was the general trend of global development in that era, that massive spending on arms could forestall economic crises for extended periods of time – that I’d been told were big breakthroughs for Trotskyist theory in the 50s and 60s.
However, the trend for the Frankfurt School, in general, was away from political engagement, their theories and analyses growing increasingly abstract, pessimistic, and generally away from political radicalism.
So, it seems to me quite ironic, in the end, that the Frankfurt School is believed by some to have had this tremendously radicalizing influence on academia and political institutions, when it seems much more the case that academia and political institutions had a conservatizing influence on the Frankfurt School.
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It sounds like they may have had a big influence on academia after all!
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I’m gonna have to put this on my reading list, as the Frankfurt School engages culture and one of my dissertation chapters is going to be a chapter on theory and music (not like music theory, but theories on popular music and how that tussle played out over time).
This will be the name of my new band, I think! Want to join the band? You can pick your weaponized instrument of choice… we’ll write songs about marxism and theory in the 20th century.
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