SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[Dave Monroe]

"It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
possibilities.  I don't think we were consciously
groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we
should have been.  The success of the 'new left' later
in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of
college kids and blue-collar workers to get together
politically.  One reason was the presence of real,
invisible class force fields in the way of
communication between the two groups." (SL, "Intro,"
p. 7)


"It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
possibilities"

Cf. ...

"'Either...or...or' instead of 'either/or'" (Deleuze &
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus)

http://www.topy.net/organs.html

http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/Faculty/Professors/Protevi/DG/AO_brief.html


"real, invisible class force fields in the way of
communication between the two groups"

>From Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist
Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1998), "A Cultural Left," pp. 73-107 ...

"One of the good things which happened in the Sixties
was that the American Left began to realize that its
economic determinism had been too simplistic.  Sadism
was recognized as having deeper roots than economic
insecurity.  The delicious pleasure to be had from
creating a class of putative inferiors and then
humiliating individual members of that class was seen
as Freud saw it--as something which would be relished
even if everybody were rich.
   "With this partial substitution of Freud for Marx
as a source of social theory, sadism rather than
selfishness has become the principal target of the
Left.  The heirs of the New Left of teh Sixties have
created, within the academy, a cultural Left....  This
cultural Left thinks more about deep and hidden
psychosexual motivations than about shallow and
evident greed.
   "This shift of attention came at the same time that
intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor
unions ...." (pp. 76-7)

"... one of the essential transformations which the
cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of
its semi-conscious anti-Americanism,  which it carried
over from the rage of the late Sixties.  This Left
will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and
abusive names for 'the system' and start trying to
construct inspiring images of the country.  Only by
doing so can it begin to form alliances with people
outside the academy--and, specifically, with the labor
unions....
   "If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never
have any effect on the laws of the United States."
(pp. 98-9)

And from David Farber, "The Silent Majority and Talk
about Revolution," The Sixties: From Memory to
History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P, 1994), pp. 291-316 ...

   "At the close of the sixties, a machinist tried to
explain his sense of frustration.  He treid to explain
how he divided up the world.  He was struggling to say
something never expressed in the mass media, never
taught at the universities.  What he felt was so
obvious and in some ways so gross a truth that it
escaped most of America's professional observers and
commentators.  What he felt was that what some people
called the establishment and antiestablishment forces
were really just two sides to the same coin:

   The way I see it, you've got these people who run
big companies.  Then you've got others who run the
newspapers and the magazines and the television
stations, and they're all full of themselves.... 
They're full of long lectures....  They can take
anything and make it into what they want.  I guess
they're just smart talkers....  What I don't like
about the students, the loudmouthed ones, is that they
think they know so much they can speqak for everyone,
because they're right nd the rest of us aren't clever
enough and can't talk like they can....  There are
people in this country who make all the noise and have
their hands on most of the money....  I have a friend,
he and I work together, and he says he wishes they'd
get rid of each other, the rich guys and the college
radicals.

   "Many working-class Americans hated the student
protesters of the sixties, not beacuse they disagreed
with the students' opinions on this issue or that
(more working pwoplw opposed the war in Vietnam than
did people of the upper and middle classes), but
because they could not stomach the idea of the nation
not only being run by corporate elites but also
litsening so seriously to the clamorous claims of the
corporate elites' privileged children.  Richard Nixon
tried to take people's resentment against all the
'smart talkers' and 'loudmouths'--young and old--and
turn it into a political weapon." (pp. 296-7)

Citing ...

Coles, Robert.  The Middle Americans: Proud and
   Uncertain.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.  44-6

And cf. here ...

"Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine
anybody these days wanting to be called a literary
intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you
broaden the labeling to, say, 'people who read and
think.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html

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