Wednesday, June 08, 2005

too much blog talk

Mr Turbulent Velvet replied to our post about Nietzsche, sort of preemptively killing us in the windup. But we are still determined to trace out one of Nietzsche's posthumous "becomings" -- how N. became a Nazi -- in order to demonstrate that the selective reading of Nietzsche that made him acceptable to the nazis is picked up and reproduced by those who criticize him for being a protofascist without questioning the history of that image. Unfortunately, I’m doing some heavy lifting in another part of my life right now – the editing part – so that I just don’t have the energy today.

So, instead of Nietzsche, a little short post about a funny blog thing. A couple of days ago, at one of our favorite blogs, Charlotte Street, there was a post about “bruschetta brigade” – which I guess is the equivalent, in the U.K., of limousine liberals. It was a nice riff that ended like this:

“Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.”

We made a few comments in the comments section about luxury and its ambiguity in both the classical economic tradition and in Marx.

Well, these comments were seized upon as the quintessence of po-mo nonsense by another blog, Harry’s Place. And, in order to add a little of the necessary irony to the mix, the comments were then attributed to the guy who writes Charlotte Street. Who then writes about the HP people coming to his site and making pissy comments on the post. Thus completing the circle, which is either a vicious circle or a circle jerk – or both. First, you get the drift of the signature. Second, the politics of citation. Third is the blissful repetition of the gesture I was criticizing in my thesis without any consciousness that the gesture was being repeated. The unconsciousness is not my subjective interpretation -- several remarks showed that commentors had inversed the sense of the thesis I was making. And it wasn't a difficult thesis. The scorn poured on the meaningless phrases, all with words of more than two syllables, all obviously “unnecessary” when common sense would tell you all about luxury – how could this be anything other than the reactivation of the very trope I was pointing to? And finally, to put the icing on the eclair, I believe that some commenters on the HP blog must have read earlier posts of mine, stuff I’ve written over the years about my habitual destitution, and transferred the sense of that to the writer of the Charlotte Street blog – there was some discussion about whether the writer of the latter was unemployed.

All of which is pretty funny. If I’d set up a psych experiment on Derrida’s notion of the effects of a text, I couldn’t have come up with a set of more validating inputs. Plus, to me, the luxury of watching my original tracing of the psychopathology of luxury create responses that blindly repeat that psychopathology in another domain (that of rhetoric). I wonder if this is how Pavlov felt when walking through the kennel?

6 comments:

Roger Gathmann said...

Those people are an exciteable bunch, man. Sorta like the Tiger Beat crowd meets the pro-war crowd. However, I don't think it is a good idea for them to stumble around the Middle East. They could very easily hurt themselves. I think that they've found a great niche, piling on George Galloway day after day. It is inexhaustible fun, a., b/c George Galloway has never even noticed, and b., every day they can repeat what they did the day before, and experience the same enjoyment!

Of course, I could apply the last sentence to my own inexhaustible fun piling on George Bush. But I'll let somebody else do that.

Roger Gathmann said...

Paul, you didn't know that I am the Western Civ commissar? Hey, I have the Lenin prize to prove it.

I think we are mixing up themes, here. The Nietzsche theme I have temporarily suspended, as I am brain dead at the moment. The other theme was the usual poking at another blog. You will be happy to know, however, that the seed of the latter was a little covertly quasi-Nietzschian point I made against my man Marx at the Charlotte Street blog, re the reduction of luxury to some class defined concept, with which I strongly disagreed -- old Karl went a little off course there in the second book of Capital. I have a strange, curse, however -- whenever I make a conservative point, conservatives take me to be making an ultra left point.

Maybe my family, four hundred years ago, shouldn't have burned that witch.

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