Capitalist pudding

[Mark Kohut]

This is terrific, Matthew. Thank You....I, too, can't read some of those
you say
we shouldn't bother and/but as some say for effect: I have read some of
Bourdieu's work
because of you.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 5:38 AM matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> As a small town kid off to Uni in the 90's, I was lost among the names and
> concepts being bandied about. There was a subtle and invisible pressure to
> learn the lingo and use it: the Other, aporia, deconstruction, and, most
> importantly, postmodernism. And all those names like De Man, Baudrillard,
> Lacan, etc. I bought the books and dug in. I started to realize that the
> way academia embraced all this was rather exceptionally a US phenomenon.
> Moreover, it was mostly the English Dept. with its subdivisions of Rhetoric
> and all the Whatever-studies that were gobbling it all up without really
> digging any deeper. Almost none of the people I encountered had read
> anything by Husserl, for example. Or Merleau-Ponty for that matter. Forget
> the Analytical cats. That is how I came to have no admiration for certain
> so-called thinkers. Zizek is a great a example. Frederic Jameson is
> another. And to that list I would add Lacan and Lyotard along with others.
> They constitute the Second Betrayal of the Intellectuals. While they were
> thinking of cool things to say (Baudrillard: "Americans may have no
> identity, but they do have wonderful teeth. " Idiot hadn't seen the teeth,
> or lack of, in Kentucky.)
>
> To tackle the very complex issues you mention, I have found it much more
> illuminating to delve into Pierre Bourdieu's work. Unlike some so-called
> sociologists, he actually carried out studies and analyzed the data
> collected and incorporated it into his books ("Distinction", "Homo
> Academicus", etc.). Of course that would not be sufficient in and of
> itself. To understand what workers want or other values or desires they
> have come to hold would involve looking at how Unions are perceived now as
> opposed to 80 years ago, shifting voting patterns, NAFTA, Hardhat riots,
> Vietnam war, and more. (Oh, and a deep look at how post-WWII Capital -
> Banking and Industry - along with fascists set about the slow dismantling
> of western liberal democracy, working toward manufactured consent and
> engineered ignorance.) Some of that would align with the discontent felt by
> workers in other countries and their turn to the right instead of
> traditional workers parties focused on economic issues above "culture war
> battles". I mean, Alternatif Für Deutschland has gained working class
> voters in the former West Germany.
>
> In Solidarity,
> mc otis
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 8:42 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> > Echoing the “conspicuous consumption” theories of Veblen, French
> > philosopher and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard posited that
> consumerist
> > workers in modern capitalist societies did not want emancipation. Their
> > materialistic desires meant they enjoyed “swallowing the shit of
> capital,”
> > Lyotard wrote.
> >
> > 2 responses: 1)modern philosopher restates plato’s cave allegory 2) one
> of
> > the more disturbing scenes in  Gravity’s Rainbow
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
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>