From owner-marxism-international  Wed Apr  9 10:01:32 1997
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 10:00:58 -0400
Message-Id: <199704091400.KAA101158@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU>
From: Keith Alan Sprouse <kas3f@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC HOLSTUN 

At 08:53 PM 4/8/97 -0400, you wrote:
[snip . . . snip . . .]
>They all
>
>1. Find our text very funny (the nervous laughter of the petty bourgeois
>in the presence of ideas)

Actually, I found the reply that you forwarded REALLY funny, certainly in
the presence of his ideas, especially in the way he HAD ideas that were
expressed in his discourse.  And the fact that he really nailed you.  I,
like Doug, am glad that you passed the critique along -- it should save alot
of people the time they would have spent responding to your post(s). 

>2.They all present to us their own credentials as Marxists ("I believe. .
>.. in my heart of hearts")
>
>3.They have one or two choice words for Zavarzadeh, Morton, Syracuse
>University....

This one has become interesting for me.  I have not yet read any of the
post-al people, (and I truly hate to see myself saying this) but if this
ludic, hyper-academic, masterbatory discourse is common to their works, I
probably won't bother.

>4.They all say our text is unreadable (but its unreadability in no way, it
>seems, prevent our critics from responding to it!!!!)

I didn't find your text unreadable due to any difficulty with the prose.  As
a grad student in literature with a strong interest in theory, I learned the
"lingo" a long time ago.  What I DID find difficult was the fact you have
chosen such a tiny, tiny, tiny, audience -- and one that remarkably reflects
who you are (grad students, thus rather priviledged).  I am not silly enough
to think that lots of proletarians are on-line here (I don't know too many
working-class factory workers from back home that are "wired"), but that
doesn't mean that there aren't a number of intelligent and thoughtful people
out there with whom you might either enter into some sort of leftist
allience, if that were truly your goal.  Even people in this rag-tag
collection of listmembers that truly seem hate each other and couldn't agree
on the color of the WHITE HOUSE have managed to unite to attack your
screeds, which I have found oddly hearening (maybe *shadenfreude* on my
part, or a sense of humor that has suffered from too much PhD exam
preparation).  And I think it's too cheap a shot to sniff that this is
solely due to some kind of anti-academy bias here -- that you are being
oppressed due to your too-keen understanding of the world and the brilliance
of your discourse ("don't hate me because I'm beautiful").  In fact, it's
just posts like yours that breeds the very anti-academy bias that you
"suffer."  If you stick around here long enough (and the list doesn't
self-destruct in the meantime), you will hear intelligent things said in
prose which aims to express complex ideas in a language that doesn't require
the "academic jargon decoder ring."   You'll also hear alot of ad hominem
attacks that have nothing to do with ideas, some calls for decency, some
queries from people just embarking on some study or another, occasional
posts from guilt-ridden grad students who haven't been posting due to their
PhD examination preparations (well, at least one of those!), and so on -- in
short, the messy, materialist, day-to-day stuff of life that, according to
Nietzsche (nice irony to use him here, I must admit), "the will to
aestheticize" to which you seem to have fallen victim, aims to avoid.  For,
at least in your posts, the ludic post-marxism of the post-al group seems to
be as much an aesthetic as anything else.       
    
At any rate, I had to come out of my cave on this one.  I promise, after 19
May (the last day of my two-week exam period), I'll actually become a true
contributing member to the list (if it's still around).

Keith

___________________________________________________________
Keith Alan Sprouse			e-mail:  kas3f@virginia.edu
Dept. of French Language and Literatures	office:  804.924.4626
University of Virginia			home:  804.979.3961
Charlottesville, VA 22903		fax:  804.924.7157



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