Queer Theory & Futurism

[alice wellintown]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yes...his pastiches might be like: we are crusted/mashed together with....
> the inanimate, to get the most general....we have to go under the superficial surface pastiche................
>
> Again, part of the reason for the sewer and toilet trips..and undersand trips AND, easier to say yes to, the trips into the hollow earth.....which he clearly means as our deeper psychic selves (in some cases)?

First, Marx, Adams, Freud, and Nietzsche. Materialsitc History. That's
the tension in P's works. It can not, but for brief moments, relax or
find a dialectic, or even abide, not Two Cultures Mr. Snow, but many
disciplines, but must always set father against son.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views,
and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious
liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway
of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical
development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science,
and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.,
that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead
of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in
contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

“The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in
general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material
productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing
relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the
same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at
work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces
these relation turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In
considering such transformations a distinction should always be made
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or
philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious
of this conflict and fight it out.

“Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks
of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by
its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be
explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the
existing conflict between the social productive forces and the
relations of production.... In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient,
feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as
progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.”[