SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

Mon Nov 4 10:58:20 CST 2002

Note, by the way, the (problematic, granted) slide
from literary to political language here, from "two
very distinct kinds of English ... allowed in fiction
to coexist" to "the presence of real, invisible class
force fields in the way of communication between the
two groups," with, "perhaps," some
regret-to-lamentation over not having "consciously
grop[ed] after any synthesis," with particular regard
to both the "success" and the "failure" of "the 'new
left.'"  Argue all y'all want about possible
Pynchonian ironies here, this seems as
straightforwardly, and decidedly aligned ("perhaps we
should have been," "The success of the 'new left' ...
was to be limited"), a political statement as
Pynchon's ever allowed to be signed, authorized, with,
by his name ...

>    "At the simplest level, it had to do with
> language.  We were encouraged from many directions
> ... to see how at least two very distinct kinds of
> English could be allowed in fiction to coexist.
> Allowed!  It was actually OK to write like this!
> Who knew?  The effect was exciting, liberating,
> strongly positive.  It was not a case of either/or,
> 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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