antigram and infinite thought‘s 90s pop war reminds me that I meant to post this video a while back, but I don’t think I ever did.
I forget why I was going to post it, but then, it’s not like it really needs any justification. Read more↴
Adam points to the annoying habit among people doing academic work of moralizing about the “relevance” or accessibility of their work, and, I think, gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the way this usually proceeds. By positioning themselves in opposition to academic “irrelevance”
the speaker can make a double assertion:
- The common people are right to be suspicious of some intellectual work, which really is useless at best or counterproductive at worst.
- I, however, do not do that kind of intellectual work and am very suspicious of it myself.
The problem with this is that by focusing on the individual’s choice of academic style, this kind of move distracts from a critique of the exclusionary power structures of academia. Read more↴
I’ve been hanging out recently with a woman from the Revolutionary Communist Party, who has the endearing quality common to recent recruits to Leninist organizations – an enthusiasm born of half-digested Marxism and vaguely remembered liberal pieties. There’s a lot to like about the RCP’s theory: their recognition of the importance of Black liberation to revolutionary struggle in the US; the way they call any theoretical work “science” (presumably an indirect 5%-er influence); their emphasis on class struggle after the revolution; and Avakian writes quite well. Which makes their evident madness all the more strange, as what they do is so out of line with what they say. If they’re really interested in raising the consciousness and leadership of the masses, why are they so fixated on Chairman Bob? If they’re so interested in class struggle, why are they never involved in political confrontations? Read more↴
Is it? These Soviet space program matchboxes (linked to by owen) suggest not.
Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band.
I was reminded of this when &catherine posted something about the tATu best of, which I wasn’t aware of but which is pretty good. Apart from most of the tracks from Dangerous and Moving, the album includes the closest tATu have yet come to dubstep, a pleasingly eerie remix of “Cosmos,” and a “Bollywood” version of “Craving.” Which works surprisingly well, but more importantly served to remind me of a great film I saw a while back (with, coincidentally, the same friend who so wisely analyzed the Russian Revolution), Bhagam Bhag. Read more↴
Everyone thinks they know what Freud says, it’s all about sex. Freud says the opposite of course. For humans, there is no sex, in the ‘biological’ sense.
Dorothy L Sayers:
“It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena—that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort.”
“That’s rather obvious.”
“Well, let’s have a look at the obvious. The biggest crime of these blasted psychologists is to have obscured the obvious.… Do all these facts taken together suggest nothing to you beyond a general notion of sex repression?”
— Gaudy Night