More frequently than seems imaginable, one hears people — poets, even — denounce literary critics with a grounding in political economy as so many rigid Party men ("the good Joe in browns," was it?); ditto the urge to equivocate deconstruction with moral relativism, with its apparently inevitable slide toward fascism, yawn. We distantly remember this game from Intro to Empty Rhetoric: "1, 2, 3 Hitler," it was called. Since there's no sane analogy between dictators and theorists, we might assume the purveyors of such are drooling morons, hoping for whatever charge they imagine is to be gotten from shouting "Stalin!" or "Hitler!" in a crowded auditorium.
And yet, how much fear it must require even to pretend that people who make accounts of things are the source of your domination! It's a fear that must in some way be respected, or at least grasped for its compelling hysteria: as when a long-bound man turns his fury on the person trying (perhaps futilely) to strike off his shackles and shrieks, "Stop hitting me!" Or as when someone with a mortgage they can't quite afford, and a job at which they keep staying late, decides to decry utopian thinking, knee-jerk Marxism, and etc.
We can all agree that almost all the attempts to counter power, by ideas or other means, are doomed to fail. Nonetheless, to fantasize them as your oppression, to lash out at them, is little but a clinging at the pant-leg of your actual boss, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of capital...
Posted by jane at July 27, 2006 07:03 AM | TrackBack