Especially Jodi Dean who underestimated the peasantry. Louis Proyect
------------- This is pretty damned witty. I listened to Jodi Dean on some panel or other a couple of nights ago because you mentioned her, implying a problem. She is definitely not communicating with the masses. I have to wonder how many people in the room understood her. The questions section was even more archane. I spent sometime trying to understand how she could be related to Marx in any fashion. The trick is to follow Freud, some of the Frankfurters and then augment all that with somebody like Judith Butler. Thankfully Butler has multiple voices. Dean's central problem is the intense focus on subjectivity in a messy fucked up society. It certainly does a lot of damage on the inside. But we can get there with Chomski's plain language. In other words the psychological structures of just about any school of thought don't constitute the proper forum in the current public crisis. It's hard for me not to think Dean is an opportunist and a near perfect match for the Le Monde complaint. On the other hand, she has an intellectually `cool' profile in an abstract sort of way. She's a woman, queer (guessing), an academic, committed to socio-political and more especially theoretical change, and she needs a forum outside some truly unread journals and tortuous graduate seminars. She is definitely not the poster girl for what I think of as the committed intelligentsia. I recommend re-education camp and I have the perfect job. Become a receptionist at a family and women's health clinic where an endless row of down and out and recently unemployed are waiting for a variety of services. The receptionist's job is to figure out what the problem is (lots of psychological and perception skills needed here) and which service is best suited, unless the person already knows who they want to see. She will need some looking after. This kind of work is demanding in ways, I am pretty sure she has never known. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
