(no subject)
Oct. 21st, 2003 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernist"The chimerical pursuit of perfection is always linked to some important deficiency, frequently the inability to love."
-- Bernard Grasset
I have been thinking about Georg Simmel a lot lately. He is sort of my theorist de jour, I suppose. In the last few months I have been going back to the classics, kind of like playing hopscotch in reverse with the goal of illuminating the ontogenesis. postmodern flux, for better or worse, with all of the ludic freedom and lack of accountability that comes with it, is in some way about rendering the origin insignificant. and what better way to do that to the past than to forget it, or rather, construct it as not worth remembering in any real sense--the signifiers play on the lips, but what they stand for is washed away by the waves of people with pomo personality proclivities, or "the end of history" American Empire style. at its most innocent, it is the illusion of Eden pre-fall recreated via reification of the synchronic. at its worst, it's winston smith reporting for another day of duty. so i've felt this moral impetus to go back to to
durkheim and Weber, at least; the origins of thinking about sociality in modernity lie with them (the Classics are another story, more deferred protoorigins, and Giorgio Agamben does better with them than I do).
so first today i was thinking about Simmel, and how, unlike Marx, he has no labor theory of value. his theory of value is rooted in desire, exchange, even sacrifice to some degree. exchange creates value, along the lines of "how badly do you want it?" model. Marx, of course, is all about value determined by labor. Then I started thinking about love. And Simmel's Metropolis. And Marx's alienation. And what their respective utopias would encompass and imply.
Simmel's Metropolis, as half of the binary tackled by everyone from Thomas Hardy to Raymond Williams to Paul Gaugen, was characterized by increased sophistication, monetary economy, reserve/aversion as m.o., a split between "head" and "heart," intensification of nervous stimuli, swift and uninterrupted changes, formal justice, exchange, division of labor and autonomy. It was neither his utopia, nor his dystopia; it was his modernity. Marx's modernity was dystopian, while encoding seeds of revolutionary transformation. His big meta-category was, obviously, alienation.
But what of love?
Both Simmel and Marx get conscripted into academic panels about alienation of modernity. Marx is usually, to be really reductionist about it, an "optimist" (I can't say idealist b/c of the whole priveleging Hegel implication that term carries in any discussion of Marx), because of his allowance and advocacy of agenda, agency, transformation. Whereas, as far as Simmel is concerned, that's just how things are; in that, he is more on par with Durkheim or "pessimistic" Weber.
The alienation Simmel describes is systemic; Marx focuses on alienation of the worker from his labor. Simmel's system, and the denizen of his metropolis is driven by exchange, rooted in (always dialectical) desire, but desire nonetheless. Love is possible because it can be achieved through mutual desire/mutual sacrifice/mutual exchange. In Marx's system, where human relationships are commodified, the implication, at least for me, is that for love to exist, it has to be deobjectified. Love is action; labor--and everyone is necessarily alienated from it, through false consciousness and objectified labor and whatnot. Obviously I know that Marx did not write about love, but I find applied theory interesting. And at the end of it, the implication, for me, is that in Marx's utopia, love is non-negotiable. And located within an individual, rather than social exchange, which necessarily objectified relationships, but also makes them possible. Simmel's tenuous negotiations at least map love as possibility on the face of Metropolis, imperfect as it is, imperfect as the social order is.
The quote I put in the beginning sums up for me why so many people dedicated to perfection on a global scale (read: revolutionaries) are so incapable of love, as commonly understood. They dispense with it or push it off to the margins in whatever terms are appropriate to their ideology, but it seems to me that they dream of a "perfect" society in which they could love. discourse about how love during status quo is bourgeouis, patriarchal, misleading, false consciousness b/c conducted under false premises or whatever is just "superstructure." just a way of externalizing some fear or deficiency, and appending it to a project that can take over an entire life & lifetime but yet is not in danger of ever fully manifesting.
-- Bernard Grasset
I have been thinking about Georg Simmel a lot lately. He is sort of my theorist de jour, I suppose. In the last few months I have been going back to the classics, kind of like playing hopscotch in reverse with the goal of illuminating the ontogenesis. postmodern flux, for better or worse, with all of the ludic freedom and lack of accountability that comes with it, is in some way about rendering the origin insignificant. and what better way to do that to the past than to forget it, or rather, construct it as not worth remembering in any real sense--the signifiers play on the lips, but what they stand for is washed away by the waves of people with pomo personality proclivities, or "the end of history" American Empire style. at its most innocent, it is the illusion of Eden pre-fall recreated via reification of the synchronic. at its worst, it's winston smith reporting for another day of duty. so i've felt this moral impetus to go back to to
durkheim and Weber, at least; the origins of thinking about sociality in modernity lie with them (the Classics are another story, more deferred protoorigins, and Giorgio Agamben does better with them than I do).
so first today i was thinking about Simmel, and how, unlike Marx, he has no labor theory of value. his theory of value is rooted in desire, exchange, even sacrifice to some degree. exchange creates value, along the lines of "how badly do you want it?" model. Marx, of course, is all about value determined by labor. Then I started thinking about love. And Simmel's Metropolis. And Marx's alienation. And what their respective utopias would encompass and imply.
Simmel's Metropolis, as half of the binary tackled by everyone from Thomas Hardy to Raymond Williams to Paul Gaugen, was characterized by increased sophistication, monetary economy, reserve/aversion as m.o., a split between "head" and "heart," intensification of nervous stimuli, swift and uninterrupted changes, formal justice, exchange, division of labor and autonomy. It was neither his utopia, nor his dystopia; it was his modernity. Marx's modernity was dystopian, while encoding seeds of revolutionary transformation. His big meta-category was, obviously, alienation.
But what of love?
Both Simmel and Marx get conscripted into academic panels about alienation of modernity. Marx is usually, to be really reductionist about it, an "optimist" (I can't say idealist b/c of the whole priveleging Hegel implication that term carries in any discussion of Marx), because of his allowance and advocacy of agenda, agency, transformation. Whereas, as far as Simmel is concerned, that's just how things are; in that, he is more on par with Durkheim or "pessimistic" Weber.
The alienation Simmel describes is systemic; Marx focuses on alienation of the worker from his labor. Simmel's system, and the denizen of his metropolis is driven by exchange, rooted in (always dialectical) desire, but desire nonetheless. Love is possible because it can be achieved through mutual desire/mutual sacrifice/mutual exchange. In Marx's system, where human relationships are commodified, the implication, at least for me, is that for love to exist, it has to be deobjectified. Love is action; labor--and everyone is necessarily alienated from it, through false consciousness and objectified labor and whatnot. Obviously I know that Marx did not write about love, but I find applied theory interesting. And at the end of it, the implication, for me, is that in Marx's utopia, love is non-negotiable. And located within an individual, rather than social exchange, which necessarily objectified relationships, but also makes them possible. Simmel's tenuous negotiations at least map love as possibility on the face of Metropolis, imperfect as it is, imperfect as the social order is.
The quote I put in the beginning sums up for me why so many people dedicated to perfection on a global scale (read: revolutionaries) are so incapable of love, as commonly understood. They dispense with it or push it off to the margins in whatever terms are appropriate to their ideology, but it seems to me that they dream of a "perfect" society in which they could love. discourse about how love during status quo is bourgeouis, patriarchal, misleading, false consciousness b/c conducted under false premises or whatever is just "superstructure." just a way of externalizing some fear or deficiency, and appending it to a project that can take over an entire life & lifetime but yet is not in danger of ever fully manifesting.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-20 10:26 pm (UTC)how do you read "value" in "theory of value"? like, is Marx's theory of value a theory of the good, in the old philosophy sense? economists treat at as an antiquated theory of price, but I am told that's bourgeois . . . what else is there?
no subject
Date: 2003-10-20 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 12:12 pm (UTC)i was not generalizing about people with "ideals." i have ideals. all of my friends have ideals. having an ideal does not mean that you will be incapable of love. the argument runs the other way. people who are incapable of love often embark on projects that can consume them and justify, to them, their deficiency, yet the projects are of such grand and utopian scale that they need never manifest and thus they need never deal with their fears and deficiencies. all i'm saying is it's a self-selecting group, and for emotional health i prefer people who live in a simmelian metropolis than aspire to live in marxist utopia.
by value i was using both exchange value and labor value. in ricardian definition, exchange value is "the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys"; marx elaborated on that to say that Exchange value "presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort."
The labor value of a commodity is amount of socially-necessary abstract labor time embodied in that commodity. while "labor value" is a purely marxist term and thus pretty uncomplicated, exchange value is something that is more complicated than the market assessment of relative values. in certain cultures, the "economy" which is isomorphic and entwined with the symbolic cultural life is organized around gift exchange, where the actual "value" is far less standardized and has a lot more to do with desire.
i hate to do this
Date: 2003-10-20 11:43 pm (UTC)Diary of the Revolution
4.23.68
He felt himself despicable.
On the grass with her--
To beg her to help him.
The books under his arm.
The wind over cold earth.
It was a spring afternoon,
but he still did not understand.
4.24.68
Barricaded at doors. Siren. Gate locked.
Police circling buildings.
The body desire of sexual communion.
Continuing night in the night of sleep.
Rain falling ceaselessly.
Word dream, solitude, deepening, unreachable.
In the tunnel, crawling, hands feeling a wall.
Deadness in the groin.
Arms around a man's neck.
Plunging a knife into neck cords.
Who will not bleed, nor die.
The electric bulb of a room in childhood.
4.25.68
The emotional plague
Reich said
He said it and they murdered him
It was as simple as that
And who even now believes it
Inside or out
4.26.68
The impossible realized
The madness accepted as his own
After the night's vigil
Climbed into sunlight
She chose a flower and gave it
They walked the park at dawn
Green hill and the white
Cylindrical oil tank
Stared over water to the world
Slept the day till nightfall
4.27.68
The light...
They sat on the steps in it
her arms around him
Their moment past
One could have said
they were kind to each other
*
The nostalgia of a life
too far off to be considered.
A tree consoles us, a squirrel, a poem.
We are pierced with a momentary memory.
We weep, beat on the bed, fall exhausted;
borne on the slough and crest of the wave.
*
Together they wake and sleep,
break bread, partake of the sun
Together in calamity
And he is sick with it
rooted and rotted
4.28.68
thrust of counter force
rising against death in the genitals
engine of charge discharge
watcher of events and men
expresser of disparity
man of inward force
for whom everything is closed
soldier of anger
who is shut in solitude
cruelty and hell of the mind
one person in the world
driven off by him
watcher
strengthener of hatred
what is there where love is not
Re: i hate to do this
Date: 2003-10-21 12:20 pm (UTC)i think the connections are pretty explicit in text.
i also really like the reference to Wilhelm Reich. Dunkan Makavejev's "avant-garde" film about him, WR:Mysteries of the Organism sort of makes the same point about Soviet Revolutionaries in a particularly violent explicit way: the Soviet ice-skater in the movie can't feel love which in the movie is metonymic with jouissance and sexuality and life force so he cuts off the head of his object of affection with his skate. Of course, the context in that movie is getting at something else, deeply rooted in the political moment when it was created, namely the critique of Soviet Communism and valorization of Yugoslavian "alternate route" communism; to me both are symptomatic of the kind of predicament I described, so the division the movie proposes is a false one, but it's interesting nevertheless.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-20 11:45 pm (UTC)sublimating through theory?
Date: 2003-10-21 01:22 am (UTC)first, and this is prefaced by highlighting my initial bias, i'd wholeheartedly stand behind someone like lyotard and point out the danger of reinscribing criteria for judgment of one discourse within another, as, from that p.o.v., it's really not applied theory. especially when both theories of value structure more aestheticized utopian ideals, and the "origin" you're describing i assume is something specific and likely more complex, and can't exactly be recontextualized with something like historical materialism. or at least shouldn't, as such all-encompassing grand narration is what made marx bad in the first place. of course, your method of illumination (somewhat harshly) precludes the postmodernists so this point is moot, though i think it fits here, at the risk of sounding like a blanket negation.
this may be uncharitably anal, but here's a simple example: in an exchange theory, the commodity exchanged must necessarily be fixed and measurable in order to retain the inscribed value, tested against and further legitimated by the "desire" of the rest of the polity. given the different logic of what's exchanged in a polity and in a love relationship, the model seems incommensurable with the terms of a love relationship, "as commonly understood."
if you stay within these two models, it seems like you're predicating the "possibility" of a love relationship on finding either the real, functional, or non-alienated value of some unit of exchange, privileging simmel because his modernity operates well, according to a functional inner logic of value.
but it might seem as if in simmel's utopia, the relationships on a macro scale are legitimized only through a polyamorous exchange, by which a solid valuing of sacrifice, desire, etc. can be realized. in a demystified, technical sense, this doesn't seem to translate well into a common model of love. i might be grossly misunderstanding your whole argument though and it's really late.
anyway, the categories by which you determine who is dedicated to perfection, in any context, beyond those who deliberately identify with old Marxism, would be interesting to hear. ;)
Re: sublimating through theory?
Date: 2003-10-21 12:36 pm (UTC)you say:
in an exchange theory, the commodity exchanged must necessarily be fixed and measurable in order to retain the inscribed value, tested against and further legitimated by the "desire" of the rest of the polity
that is a Western, market-legitimated version of exchange theory. in cultures where gift exchange is a way of life, business is not compartmentalized into an "sphere" and thus cannot be abstracted in such a way that fixed standards emerge. the desire is always a complex nexus of status aspirations, saving face, gaining power, etc. the Kula system in the Trobriand islands is a good example: necklaces made of shells are exchanged, with a lapse in time; they make rounds, in a way. Nobody gets to keep them, but the particular transactions, and the particularly powerful individuals who may present them at a particular time, endow them, gradually, with more and more status. shells-as-objects retain value only as long as they remain in circulation, and it's always contextual, and never "fixed."
That is separate from my argument about Simmel though. Simmel proposes "monetary system" and "exchange" as two separate categories existing in Metropolis, whereas to Marx everything--labor, objects, humans, emotions, all collapse into commodity fetishism that is supposed to perish under the wheels of the transhistorical locomotive of revolution. A system that holds the possibility of exchange has rich potential for exchange that is non-standardised, symbolic, and rooted in desire--which in Metropolis may very well be "transcending alienation," for example. I don't understand where you get necessary polyamory.
The way I see it, basically, Simmel's Metropolis, is more or less what/where we are now. We are all modern, although we'd like to think we are postmodern. You can't be postmodern because that's not anything, it's a deconstructive system that cannot exist without the basis of modernism. Simmel, to me, is an accurate analysis of how things are; confused, alienated, but still rooted in desire. Marx is all about how things "should be" at least in the incarnation of his present-day acolytes (who are, on the whole, a lot less smart than Marx, and also refuse to read any post-1930s Marxist analysis). It's easy to lump everything in the world into the category of "commodified" and thus "false," and become the kind of person who "loves humanity" but treats people like shit.
and who are you, by the way?
Re: sublimating through theory?
Date: 2003-10-21 02:01 pm (UTC)your idea and example of value is very novel and makes me want to know more, although i think i'm missing something. your description of exchange value does not at all contradict the western "market" version, as no value in the market is fixed, only the commodity itself is; market value is also obviously contingent upon gradients of desire, saving face, etc. in short, demand. i think the contradiction between these systems lies in the added tier of symbolic exchange that is absent in the Trobriand example, and property.
re: polyamory -- i brought this up because the terms of your performative romance, "as commonly understood," requires two people in love, whereas simmel's metropolis is only legitimized by a macro exchange theory of value, which requires a very non-intimate social process. i don't think it works on a micro level unless you abstract it and loosen signifiers like "exchange," "desire," "value" etc. i assume i'm misunderstanding though.
my overall point which got muddled is this: it seems as if you're saying you prefer performativity over some transcendental or immanent version of love, which makes sense to me. sinthome's poem fleshes out a good reason why. but it also seems you're consciously trying to legitimize your preference via simmel's model (i would say it's sublimating), while doubly critiquing some archetype of a hurtful person, and i don't think the "possibility" of romance you're envisioning needs, or is able, to be validated via simmel's metropolis. i find your writing and this justification of love to be quite amazing, despite the fact that i personally would ascribe to something else.
one last thing: some could disagree with your definition of postmodernism as deconstructive critique that depends on modernism, as there are reconstructive postmodernists (jameson, lovibond, laclau and mouffe, flax, maybe someone like rorty, etc.). it's a contradictory tradition, and the whole critical break with history is not universally accepted.
anyway, just wanting to learn a bit. thank ya.
Re: sublimating through theory?
Date: 2003-10-21 06:49 pm (UTC)i don't agree with the lyotard critique, by the way; i never liked it. while it could be valid as a critique of any totalizing system that sublimates all other discourses into itself, it is inherently problematic because a) any articulation or discourse is necessarily conveyed through language, which is a discourse in and of itself, and thus any explanation of anything is necessarily a second-order one. To me, that makes metaphores of systems for each other possible and desirable; as long as the model is not a fractal one (system analyzed a small fraction, isomorphic to the total analytical system--which is, essentially what Marx & Engels or any orthodox Marxist feminist did to gender relations).
I still don't understand why in your argument the Simmel model defaults into polyamory. I think the Simmel model is a pretty apt one for how things are right now, and I don't see flourishing of institutionalized polyamory except among some confused freshmen at my old college and self-selected communes.
Finally, again I have to ask you to introduce yourself. I allow anonymous postings on my journal because some people who post regularly on here, like MJM and Seltix among others do not have livejournal accounts, but it really irks me when people leave unsigned posts and then fail to introduce themselves at my prompting. I find it kind of rude. Obviously you can glean a lot about me from my journal, while your comment is completely disembodied and lacking the most basic contextual signifiers. I don't aspire to some sort of neo-Platonic discourse of "anonymous minds" dialoging in cyberspace, so please mind your manners and introduce yourself.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 09:07 am (UTC)about lyotard, yes there are many legitimate criticisms that can be levied against him. i think yours is based on my bad use of terms -- i should clarify and say the critieria of judgment and the modus operandi of one discourse cannot be realized in another discourse. sure, they can and should be represented by other systems, although i'm not sure how language is a discourse in itself (?).
about polyamory -- i was only using that as an example of how, by being anally accurate, love would function superimposed over the metropolis example. you're saying the "possibility" of love can only be realized in exchange of signifiers of desire, such that exchange creates value which is inscribed in the relationship. however exchange valuations, in simmel's example, are necessarily intersubjective (as per the definitions above regarding purchasing power). thus love, if it is made possible through this valuation, would rely on other people. also, outside of exchange, a love relationship would cease to exist, or at most be locked in some latent state of desire. long winded way of illustrating incommensurable discourses.
if you're using metropolis not as a model to legitimize love-in-exchange, but just as a metaphor of preference (i prefer people who believe in metropolis alienation, i am hurt by people who think love is commodified) then i totally missed your point and wasted your time writing way off the mark.
in my own experience of being in love, it requires exchange of desire (obviously not just tangibles -- far beyond that) to be satisfying and to function, but there's another dimension of desire that makes this different between people. it's there for some, not for others, and performativity actualizes the relationship as mating, but not as love. so my characterization has to do with that desire and its breadth within potentiality, and i rely on more psychoanalytical models to elucidate that. it also depends on a mirroring in the other person, and lasts beyond the cessation of exchange, regardless of any sour grapes or representational violence that would then be applied. but i definitely agree with both your characterization of those who sublimate into unrealizable fantasies, and your intricate model that any relationship, particularly one in which love can be played with and enjoyed, requires expression of desire via exchange.
very nice.
bye
~ lcm
no subject
Date: 2003-10-23 09:33 pm (UTC)oy vey, i feel like all this got away from my original point, which was playing around with theory a bit, resurrecting simmel out of unfair old theorists' nursing home, and an intellectual drive-by shooting at people who deal with their issues via marx and revolution, rather than freud and the couch (not that that model is much better, but whatevs.) the point there being that completely internalizing a marxist system where feelings are commodified produces a neat excuse for always deferring "love" out of praxis and into some sort of future utopian narrative. admittedly, that last bit is personal in the sense that it's one of the many extremely annoying ways that i find hardcore "revolutionaries", (both historical figures and the ones i encountered at my small midwestern progressive college) just retarded. i hate the discourse of "love" that accompanies that political mentality, so i was trying to deconstruct its source of origin and compare it to another work about "modernism" because what is marx, really, except the howl of modernism dressed up in neopositivism and projected into some future zero year utopia?
i am sitll not sure why you seized on performance so much. while obviously one can talk about love in terms of performance theory (esp. the enactment of the symbolic dimension), performance theory has as little to do with simmel and orthodox marx as it does with, say, hegel. i mean, i can talk about performance but that introduces a variable into my argument that's not in the texts i am playing around with. or if it is, it's only in the very pomo sense where everything is performance and performance is everything.
you are wrong about polyamory. i think i see what you are getting at w/r/t simmel, but the "value" does not need to be created quantitatively by adding other people to the mix in a polyamorous way. the standards and loci of production of value can be (and are for the most part) temporal, rather than quantitative; rooted in personal histories, and comparisons that are inscribed along this axis. other people come and go with years, that can create a dialectic of value and alientation in a more organic way than some mathematical polyamorous formula.
p.s. w/r/t your reply before--richard rorty to me symbolizes everything that's wrong with postmodernism. jameson, while very smart, couldn't look past his linear thinking and really engage with the symbolic level of "commodities." and it's not enough for every pomo writer so say that "while others believe that postmodernism breaks from history, I don't" (a common straw-man construction so popular in academia); with the exception of maybe Barthes and a few others, the whole postmodern canon to me seems to have slipped out of an ethical way of writing theory the way a lizard slips out of old skin, because their relationship with "history" is such that they pull it to them with one hand, and push it away with another.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-24 03:11 am (UTC)I still think you're missing what I mean re: polyamory. I think you're saying that I'm claiming it's the de facto state of romance in modernity, while I'm only using it as a simple deconstructive example following that logic. I don't believe it at all.
"value" does not need to be created quantitatively by adding other people to the mix
This is what I meant by your needing to abstract the model and loosen signifiers like "exchange" and "value" if you want to add inject love into the machine. Now, I haven't read the text so I am arguing from a limited state of ignorance and am likely very wrong, but I have the impression that Simmel, in talking about exchange value, is referring approximately to the definition you gave to meekgirl. Right? It's the classic definition of exchange value, and exchange value was the other half of the binary you introduced. This definition relates to a multidirectional, intentional desire to acquire other things, and I believe it's (assumed) quantifiable in relation. Am I right or am I way off?
I also don't know now why I seized on performance. I did know, but I'm so tired right now I don't want to retrace my line of thought. :) insomnia..
I guess the reason I caught this post in general, beside a rather obvious one, is the nature of the alienation you describe. I seem to maintain a certain conception of love that is, I suppose, pre-modern, in that it is a desire characterized by a kind of potentiality in exploring the richness of another's subjectivity. Of course, everyone from Kant, Lacan, etc. onwards has been dealing with some permutation of that problem, and then there are people like Kristeva who say that the only ethical stance is to concede to the unknowability of the Other and develop a communicative framework by which to realize that unknowability. I agree with such projects on a fundamental level, but part of me still resists what floats at the periphery because I think that kind of alienation has been unnecessarily hyperbolized into an unhealthy normative system. One that may or may not follow from the logic of psychoanalysis and modernity (one reason why Habermas is appealing to me).
the standards and loci of production of value can be temporal ... other people come and go with years, that can create a dialectic of value and alientation in a more organic way.
This is the result of the alienation you describe, which I can relate to, though I think the psychological implications are unusual. For instance -- a dialectical approach. While I believe transformation and change are obviously assumed in models by Freud, et al., a dialectic between lack and (presence?) in terms of what's desired seems very progressive and kinetic. I think a more robust model would not overemphasize this sorta postmodern idea that nothing is fixed, that the origin doesn't matter, noting that some loci of desire tend to be somewhat established, particularly the important, deeply-rooted ones that have origin in formative experiences. In some areas, establishing new dialectically-mediated desires is a very palatable idea though, and it definitely makes sense in certain contexts (a la Deleuze). Also interesting to imagine. But it smacks of preferencing postmodern play at the expense of other considerations, which sometimes is symptomatic of other issues.
Also this alienation unsettles me a bit because in the romantic sense it seems decidedly non-intimate: the contra party is important but fundamentally interchangeable. I feel it may have ethical issues, also if extended beyond the sphere of romance, as it seems very subject-oriented.
Anyway, no need to answer this as I'm going way off your original topic, and responding to all these tangents can be tedious in your journal. How do speculative conversations find their natural conclusions?
Marxist theory and love
Date: 2003-10-21 10:58 am (UTC)Re: Marxist theory and love
Date: 2003-10-21 12:00 pm (UTC)Re: Marxist theory and love
Date: 2003-10-21 12:11 pm (UTC)Do you think current conceptions figures have transcended those movements and labels now? Not to suggest complacency, but that we've recast these women and how they've defined their art forms? My friend Sheri-d studied with di Prima, and Sheri-d has a fascinating concept of "neo-spinsters" in her work--one that remains autonomous, sexy, expressive, and beyond the liberated/bourgeois dichotomy, I think.
Re: Marxist theory and love
Date: 2003-10-21 12:41 pm (UTC)