Deleuze & Air-Guitarri: Subpop of the 70s

[Richard Scott]

Sartre??

Please explain...

Also how was reggae a critique of transnational capitalism? Is it still?
And if not, when did it stop?

Richard

----------
> From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@gladstone.uoregon.edu>
> To: frankfurt-school@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject: Deleuze & Air-Guitarri: Subpop of the 70s
> Date: 04 July 1997 02:02
> 
> Ah, the sublime joys of summer ideological mudwrestling. Well, if wrestle
> we must, then we might as well do some rentier-bashing while we're at it.
> 
> I was never impressed with Deleuze and G., for the simple reason that,
> like so many French theorists in the Seventies (and this includes
> Derrida), they had no effective concept of a transnational mass culture.
> They were OK as rousers of the rabble, but they completely misunderstood
a
> largely imported American media culture as being some kind of utopian
> field of rhizomic possibilities. First it was power to the people, then
it
> was networking to the people, now it's the Internet to the people -- at
> least, the people with the right credit history. Seventies media Maoism
> merges seamlessly into Nineties Microsoftism. 
> 
> You could argue that postmodernism, in all its hallucinogenic splendor,
> was neither more nor less than a collective attempt to prove one's
> ideological credit history to a fundamentally bankrupt system (namely,
> Anglo-American rentier capitalism, as opposed to those more efficient
> systems of predation emerging in Europe and East Asia). The worse the
> bankruptcy of actually degenerating neoliberalism, the greater the
> intellectual collateral required to prove that the system is 
> solvent (e.g. Fukayama's uproariously clueless "End of
WhiteWesternMaleMan", 
> where the whole of world history is leveraged off of a single
> shoddily-built concept hastily cloned from the dregs of a Heritage
> Foundation beer bust).
> 
> Lacan's Imaginary, Kristeva's semiosis, Derrida's tympan, even Foucault's
> panopticon stand at the very beginning of this process: such concepts
> were, in this sense, the intellectual versions of the Eurodollar market
--
> neo-national speculations, which picked up where the American Empire (or
> at least its reigning pragmatisms) left off. What was quasi-radical 
> in the Seventies became the repressive status quo of the Nineties: thus
> the tendency of so many contemporary intellectuals to speculate on the
> derivatives market of theory. Post-structuralism today is the Wall Street
> of intellectuals who no longer have secure jobs at national universities.

> 
> The dialectical flip side of this is that such thinkers can be
interesting
> in a symptomatic sense, i.e. Foucault's gay identity and the lesbian-gay
> revolution he was symbolically aligned to; Kristeva's emigration from
> Bulgaria to Paris, with all the Spivakian duplicities such a
> crossing from periphery to metropole requires; Derrida's own trajectory
> from marginalized Algerian Jew to international theory-star of
> marginalization; Lacan's thespian strategy of cinematizing the
> Freudian scenario, etc. If these theorists had anything
> in common, it would be the attention they paid to micropolitics and a
> (nascently) postnational culture, which Fredric Jameson would name,
> famously, as the (silicon) logic of multinational capitalism. Ironically,
> their very provinciality vis-a-vis the American Empire (English is the 
> language of finance as well as theory) gave their theories
> a pungently subversive and generally Left-leaning twist; none of these
> thinkers can be considered even remotely neoliberal. If we were
> charitable, we could say they were looking for a Green Party or a united 
> front of the micropolitical movements in an era when ever more rightwing
> Social Democrats seemed to be the only organized alternative to market
> barbarism. I'm not so sure of this: I think the Seventies theorists, by
> failing to deal adequately with transnational culture (reggae and hip
hop,
> Hong Kong video, etc.) were basically cultural conservatives who didn't
> like the impending Americanization of Europe, and came up with
alternative
> models of solidarity mostly limited to intellectuals and media-workers
> themselves.  Maybe that's too harsh. Maybe it's just that where Europe
had
> deconstruction (essentially, the deregulation of the concept of
> dissemination), America had the pragmatic cultural deregulation wrought
by
> cable TV. 
> 
> To make a long harangue short, none of the canonic Seventies thinkers
even
> got close to the problem of how to fight multinational capital on
> its own turf, or theorizing a vicious class struggle gone
> irrevocably global: for that, you'd have to go to such unrepentant
> Marxists as Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, the late, great Ernest Mandel, and
of
> course the inimitable J.P. Sartre (whom, like many an initially crusty
> Mouton-Rothschild, just gets better and better as he ages). 
> 
> There. Enough ideological hydrocarbon to set Tokyo Bay alight. Anyone
with
> a lighter?
> 
> -- Dennis
> 
> 
>