Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags

[Idris2002]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission

Bet Teresa Forcades wouldn't think much of the likes of Diane Abbot

However, some question how she can be both a leftwing feminist and part of a misogynist church that bans contraception and backs punishment for abortion.

You don't say.

 

[J Ed]

 

[ViolentPanda]

I don't think that there are many who actually deny class inequality, they just ignore it.

Same effect, though.
And of course these intersectionistas will deny class inequality not only until the cows come home, but until the cows have got old and been sent to the knackers' yard. Engaging with the reality of class inequality would mean engaging with something where their discourse wouldn't be the hegemon, just one voice among others. That wouldn't be tolerated by the bourgeois do-gooders. Only situations that allow them to dominate the culture are allowed.

 

[butchersapron]

I think this is spot on. And what a lot of people don't realise is that a figure like Foucault is wide open to criticism as a conservative thinker, not a radical or revolutionary.

There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own natural identities. They get to choose - the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.

 

[love detective]

and ultra conservative

 

[Idris2002]

There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own natural identities. They get to choose the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.

Just not clear to them.

 

[cesare]

There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own natural identities. They get to choose the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.

The other thing that happens is that if people are subjected to actual racism/sexism/whatever, (and especially if they've grown up in an environment where there's plenty of it drip drip drip) there's a natural tendency to protect themselves by retreating into their identity. Not everyone's strong enough to fight - or, if they are, to fight on terms that they feel most comfortable with.

 

[butchersapron]

The other thing that happens is that if people are subjected to actual racism/sexism/whatever, (and especially if they've grown up in an environment where there's plenty of it drip drip drip) there's a natural tendency to protect themselves by retreating into their identity. Not everyone's strong enough to fight - or, if they are, to fight on terms that they feel most comfortable with.

Absolutely - and whilst LP and others get to choose what identity they want to individually adopt they can only see the identity in other as the result of oppression. Identity as freedom for one and oppression for 'the others'. And then these others are expected in turn only to act politically on the basis of these identities - and the ball rolls on...

edit: small example of that, the RCP lot (can't recall if it was them or one of their outreach groups) were trying to recruit me in the late 80s period - they were rather disappointed to find out on actually meeting me that i wasn't an irish republican spitting anger at the brits, which given my name, they had assumed was my natural and political identity.

 

[Idris2002]

Absolutely - and whilst LP and others get to choose what identity they want to individually adopt they can only see the identity in other as the result of oppression. Identity as freedom for one and oppression for 'the others'. And then these others are expected in turn only to act politically on the basis of these identities - and the ball rolls on...

edit: small example of that, the RCP lot (can't recall if it was them or one of their outreach groups) were trying to recruit me in the late 80s period - they were rather disappointed to find out on actually meeting me that i wasn't an irish republican spitting anger at the brits, which given my name, they had assumed was my natural and political identity.

You mean you didn't support the army of the peasants and the people?

Re: our current round of "kick the liberals" - another point is that they focus on the existence of oppression but don't stop to ask themselves why oppression itself should exist. . .

 

[Bakunin]

I do

Is that for hitting people or shoving up their arse?

 

[Delroy Booth]

Is that for hitting people or shoving up their arse?

It's actually a early 19th century implement called a slubbers mallet, used to get the little bobbly bits off cotton in preperation for spinning

 

[phildwyer]

My auntie great auntie Florrie (who was the kindest person you could ever hope to meet but utterly barking) bought be a barbie mini metro for my action men

Don't worry, you can exchange ıt ıf you take ıt back wıthın a week.

 

[Tom A]

It's actually a early 19th century implement called a slubbers mallet, used to get the little bobbly bits off cotton in preperation for spinning

Maybe we could also get them with a "Bow Street Bastard"?

 

[J Ed]

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/335378299712856064

 

[Idris2002]

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/335378299712856064

Suffering Christ

 

[kavenism]

I think this is spot on. And what a lot of people don't realise is that a figure like Foucault is wide open to criticism as a conservative thinker, not a radical or revolutionary.

In what way is Foucault open to criticism as a conservative? He may be conservative relative to the French ultra left of the 1970s but that's still not very conservative really.

 

[Idris2002]

In what way is Foucault open to criticism as a conservative? He may be conservative relative to the French ultra left of the 1970s but that's still not very conservative really.

In a 1981 lecture titled Modernity versus Postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas famously accused Michel Foucault of being a “young conservative.” The charge was meant to place Foucault, along with intellectuals such as Bataille and Derrida, within a postmodern tradition which rejected notions of scientific and moral progress stemming from the Enlightenment. Habermas portrayed these thinkers as preferring subjective propositions of aesthetic taste rather than objective rational thought. They were afforded the luxury of denying objectivity because their intellectual status rendered them “emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness”1 and therefore out of touch with the realities of daily life. In their preference for fanciful thinking over the concrete experiences of the real world, Habermas understood Foucault and his postmodern contemporaries as also disregarding the real intelligible structures which conditioned those experiences—an intelligibility which could possibility lead to changing society for the better.

http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/bcurj/pdf/gavin.pdf

 

[yield]

Fuck Habermas

 

[Idris2002]

Fuck Habermas

At least he doesn't look like a circumcised penis.

 

[love detective]

poor button

 

[kavenism]

http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/bcurj/pdf/gavin.pdf

Habermas was wrong. All of Foucault’s genealogical studies on power and later the idea of care of the self begin with concrete practices and what people are thinking/writing when they are doing them. Habermas on the other hand claims as universal an abstract notion seemingly divorced from practice with which to ground his work on communicative reason i.e. the decentred subject. That is the idea that subjects make validity claims in three distinct areas correlating roughly with ethics, politics and aesthetics. What Habermas has failed to notice is that this division of reason corresponds exactly with the modern European subject of enlightenment, the secular, rational subject who is distanced and reflective upon their practices mirroring the development of European societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a historically particular and partial view not the universal ground of any theory of formal pragmatics. The accusation of presentism he levels at Foucault is far more suitable to himself.

 

[butchersapron]

Still, at least he never lost his marbles and supported the mullahs as they slaughtered the left and the secularists.

 

[yield]

At least he doesn't look like a circumcised penis.

I'm ashamed to say I have a soft spot for Georges Bataille. Have you read the Accursed Share Idris?

 

[kavenism]

Still, at least he never lost his marbles and supported the mullahs as they slaughtered the left and the secularists.

I'm not sure he was supporting them 'AS' they slaughtered the left and the secularists. Before, certainly, and he wasn't the only one.

 

[Idris2002]

Zizek, I think, described the penis' support for the Mullahs as a "right move in the wrong direction", which sums him up in damning fashion, I think.

 

[Idris2002]

I'm ashamed to say I have a soft spot for Georges Bataille. Have you read the Accursed Share Idris?

That tends to be a cult book among American cultural anthropologists. . . and we don't talk to those . . . people.

 

[yield]

That tends to be a cult book among American cultural anthropologists. . . and we don't talk to those . . . people.

Ohh! I thought the American cultural anthropologist versus European social anthropologist thing was dead?

 

[love detective]

Zizek, I think, described the penis' support for the Mullahs as a "right move in the wrong direction", which sums him up in damning fashion, I think.

sounds like something articul8 would say

 

[J Ed]

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/335393920710213632

Cultural appropriation

 

[Idris2002]

sounds like something articul8 would say

You are dead to me now, love detective.

Ohh! I thought the American cultural anthropologist versus European social anthropologist thing was dead?

Basically, yeah.