Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
- Thread starter Prince Rhyus
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I'd fucking seen that "animals" episode before as well 
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It's not early 2000s any more tom. Move on.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
That is quite a flight of fancy you have there boy
JimW
支那暗杀团
I can't bring myself to watch her, so don't know - since they always get her in has she bothered to do much research? Can she reel off the numbers to cut through the bullshit or is it all just touchy-feely emoting?
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
No, doesn't even have the decency to crowd source it.
Yeah, in a really awkward and insincere way. The Tories must rub their hands with glee when they see her on the telly.
JimW
支那暗杀团
Depressing. My sense of the sort of privilege she has is it lets you wing this sort of stuff without feeling embarrassed about not knowing what the fuck you're talking about, as decent people would. The bare-faced public school chancer's guide to getting ahead.
rekil
to menny cranks
fingers crossed
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
What does all this mean, especially this part
As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. I remember that feeling when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn’t mean that those stories can’t be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter. In Doug Rushkoff's recent book Present Shock, he discusses the phenomenon of “narrative collapse”: the idea that in the years between 11 September 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, all of the old stories about God and Duty and Money and Family and America and The Destiny of the West finally disintegrated, leaving us with fewer sustaining fairytales to die for and even fewer to live for.
This is plausible, but future panic, like the future itself, is not evenly distributed. Not being sure what story you're in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.
As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. I remember that feeling when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn’t mean that those stories can’t be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter. In Doug Rushkoff's recent book Present Shock, he discusses the phenomenon of “narrative collapse”: the idea that in the years between 11 September 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, all of the old stories about God and Duty and Money and Family and America and The Destiny of the West finally disintegrated, leaving us with fewer sustaining fairytales to die for and even fewer to live for.
This is plausible, but future panic, like the future itself, is not evenly distributed. Not being sure what story you're in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I think she's saying that society forces her to lie about herself (i.e the sort pick and mix shallow pomo stuff that allows her to call herself an anarcho-femnist etc) but that men either don't have to lie or are allowed to tell lies where they are the hero/centre/moving force etc - incredibly crude and simplistic. I mean this, how was this allowed to be published? Oh that's right, the imaginatively oppressed Laurie is her own commissioning editor.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
She has a degree in english literature from Oxford, yet she insists on reading novels as works about individual heroes and villains. How did she ever pass? I suppose it fits the worldview of 1)glamorous active types able to don different identities at will (the heroes) and 2) those trapped in one passive victim-identity forever (these are who the heroes do their heroing for) and 3) the villains who are really the heroes gone bad, or more accurately, the people who have the same range of identity and action option open to them - the other people with agency.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Is this accurate? I am loath to ask a woman or indeed anyone in real life: 'Excuse me I've always wondered, do you behave in ways that stories sanction?'
Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing
Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
I sort of get that but there's something else being suggested in these bits:
I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colors and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again. I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting. I still play the ukelele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukelele. But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.
Why the prominence of I remain a small, friendly, excitable person plus I’m busy casting spells for myself but capped with a reference to fairtytales (which is are an extremely sexist form of culture)?
Missed 'an evening of comedy and thought-provoking debate about men and feminism' with our Laurie et al.
http://eastlondonfawcett.org.uk/are-men-doing-it.html. Last week alas.
http://eastlondonfawcett.org.uk/are-men-doing-it.html. Last week alas.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I wonder if she'll ask the same questions of the event that she asked a male dominated panel in new york.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Here it was. In the centre is Rob Horning co-editor with Malcolm, promoting the LP article that muscovyduck tore to shreds
https://twitter.com/marginalutility/status/346680765549006849
He is also a socialist or supports socialist campaigns at least:
He also writes stuff like this using a Marxist understanding of the world I think
The meta-ness of Katniss’s strategizing is interesting; by having Katniss think through how to symbolize and act out generic falling-in-love story for an audience hungry for vicarious entertainment, Suzanne Collins is also having her narrate the novelist’s problems in plotting the novel. Collins foregrounds the emotional manipulation of the story, problematizing it while indulging it along stereotypical lines, a clever means for having it both ways. This aligns we, the readers, with the audience of the violent reality show within the novel’s universe. Would we really want the Hunger Games put to a stop? Doesn’t our compulsion to keep reading betray us in that regard?
Not only does this scene remind us of our complicity in systems of control through vicariousness, it also illustrates the conundrum of authenticity under ambient surveillance. Katniss can’t experience “falling in love” as a reaction; she can’t consume her own story. She can only perform it. Her emotions are not responses to events but tactics. They are always competitive, a means to some end she’s fighting for. They can no longer unproblematically serve as post hoc explanations of what an experience meant to her. Instead she has to wonder to what degree her performed emotions shaped what happened. ”Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff, playing at being in love not actually being in love,” as Katniss tells herself in the midst of playing up her love for Peeta.
<snip>
With social media surveillance as understood, we’re in the same situation. A paranoid hermeneutic reigns instead. Everything we do is always understood as someone else’s entertainment, and the degree to which others are entertained or edified determines the “meaning” of what we are experiencing. Evaluating the authenticity of a response relative to our “real” feelings is no longer a meaningful way of analyzing events. We don’t know who to trust; we think everyone might be playing us if they are not merely consuming us as spectacle.
Oh FFS.
Can't say I know any women who do this (or feel they have to do this) or men who are surprised to find a woman is a 'real person'. Laurie must be hanging out with the wrong crowd or something.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
Oh FFS.
" But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me."
As with her 'love of the poor' posturing - a 100 per cent phony.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
She should be applauded for her environmental sentiment, tbh - preventing the release of extra magic and sparkle into the atmosphere as a by-product of combustion of personal energy is something that everyone should aim to do.
Tom A
Goat among sheep
Bully for you. Wish the same could be said for me, however when I did my master's degree I made a convoluted effort to stay away from anything more political than Amnesty International or People & Planet. I voted for ReOpen Nominations for pretty much everything in the student elections that year
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