Dialectical Materiavrooom, vrooooom!!!

[lapsedmodernist]

One of the response threads to slit's wonderful post about Andrea Dworkin somehow stumbled into a discussion of intertextual integration of Marx, Che and Ayn Rand (via the territory of my favorite subject, carding for books the way you would for alcohol or cigarettes).

I am reposting what I wrote there to my own journal, because I want to make a game out of it.

So, an amalgam:

Howard Roark laughed.

His rock-hard phallus was vibrating against the surging body of the sleek, black motorcycle, propelling him through the land where injustice bloomed all around him.

The proletariat of the granite quarries of the world had nothing to lose except their shackles and he would make them realize their potential. After all, A was A and no one could argue with the objective logic of the unstoppable locomotive of dialectical historical materialism.

"Damn you look hot on a motorcycle," said a thin icy blonde. "Please rape me now." "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," shrugged Howard Roark and obliged, not even descending from his vibrating motorcycle.

I couldn't help but notice that they are all kind of the same, stylistically and metaideologically, but that is not the point of the exercise. The point is, make your own amalgam. I am going to suggest a few here: Ayn Rand, D.H. Lawrence and Gustave Flaubert. Ayn Rand, Paul Theraux and Jacques Lacan. Ayn Rand and Paulo Coelho. Ayn Rand and J.R.R. Tolkien (possibly redundant; maybe it's the prolonged discussion with theophile on the subject, but I can't tell those two apart anymore).

Thank you for playing. Your reward is here. Because
The sky is gay
It's also sometimes gray
But mostly it's gay.

In repressive desublimation news,

Comments

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

YOUR EYES?? MY BRAINS!!! MY TASTY, YUMMY BRAINS.

[paracelsus.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I can't participate because I haven't read Ayn Rand but I'd like to express my support for both the carding books and literary mash-up ideas.

Just wait for my Freud/Pirates of the Carribbean mash-up: Beyond the Treasure Principle.






Whoa. Tough crowd.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

Ayn Rand's Fountainhead is some of the best propaganda for a doomed and evil philosophy that I've ever read. :(

Handing it to people is like handing them a loaded gun. From my perspective you have to at least tell people it's loaded and which end it fires out of.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I think there are positive things to be gotten from her books (at least for me), but they do have a tendency to overimpress fifteen-year olds. I would apply what you posted above in equal measure to AR and Marx's Manifesto.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

Well, I've always been much more of a Marx sympathizer than a Rand sympathizer. On the other hand, Marx apparently beat his wife...

Regardless, Marx is certainly less subtle than Rand. Marx makes no pretenses about his goals and ideas. Many people pick up Fountainhead as readily as they'd pick up a book by Jackie Collins. I think with Rand you have to do some of the work that Marx does for you - explain how she is creating an imaginary world to demonstrate her philosophy, and point out that things don't always necessarily work out the way she suggests.

My father was enraged by Andrea Dworkin, though he used to suggest that men should lose their right to vote for every year that women didn't have it. I never really figured out her deal, aside from seeing her fume on some interview show once.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Regardless, Marx is certainly less subtle than Rand. Marx makes no pretenses about his goals and ideas. Many people pick up Fountainhead as readily as they'd pick up a book by Jackie Collins. I think with Rand you have to do some of the work that Marx does for you - explain how she is creating an imaginary world to demonstrate her philosophy, and point out that things don't always necessarily work out the way she suggests.

Well, Marx wrote non-fiction and Rand wrote fiction. And I think anyone who took any English class in 9th grade masters the basic narrative and rhetorical devices that make a novel a novel and know to read it in code, as a metaphor. I mean, if you read an Ayn Rand book as "reality" (and I don't mean that in terms of internalizing objectivism, I mean if you don't understand that on a semiotic level this is a fictional world and Howard Roark and John Galt are fictional characters), you have bigger problems than being an objectivist. I think in that sense one could argue that Marx is more dangerous because it's not fiction, it's a "utopian" charting of the course of history, crudely reduced to talking points that takes itself very seriously without any buffer like "this is fiction."

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean, but I think I disagree. If one presents a simple statement of fact, it's easier to reject than a vague mindset which permeates everything. If I say "people are bastards", you can react with "well, that's not always true." But if I don't come out and say it, but just simply let it color everything I say, you're more likely to believe it - because you're never given a chance to outright reject it.

I found the Fountainhead to be brilliant propaganda along those lines - I had to force myself *not* to buy the hidden premises. It's easy to make fun of Marx, with his pompous and disprovable assertions. Rand is sneakier. Fiction is a sneakier motif. Marx is about as subtle as a jackhammer.

Obviously people don't really believe that Ayn Rand's characters are real people, but they can believe that her picture of the world is a real picture. I mean that they buy it in terms of internalizing objectivism. Almost every objectivist I've ever encountered read the Fountainhead and didn't notice it was propaganda - and would argue with you that it wasn't. I think a lot more Marxists recognize Marx as propaganda - just as "correct" propaganda. I also think it's easier to deprogram a Marxist drone than a Randite one - because Marx relies on logical arguments which can be challenged, whereas Rand is insinuative - Marx threatens like a wolf, Rand like a virus.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

"Propaganda" means something else to Marxists than it does to non-Marxists and you touched on it when you used the term "correct propaganda," which in some ways is oxymoronic. Marxists are as objective as the most die-hard objectivists. Marxist philosophy pivots around the objective and inevtable course that history MUST and WILL take, propaganda is just conveying that Truth in accessible form.

I also think it's easier to deprogram a Marxist drone than a Randite one - because Marx relies on logical arguments which can be challenged, whereas Rand is insinuative - Marx threatens like a wolf, Rand like a virus.

I disagree. Marxist logical arguments are of the same ilk as objectivist logical arguments. Inherently they are both totalizing systems and any argument you use against them is subsumed by the system. Marxist version of history and society is "objective"--what logical arguments could you possibly bring that argue with the basic paradigmatic assumptions about labor and value and historical progress? If you argue on a personal/aesthetic level you have "false consciousness." If you use history to support your counterarguments, those historical moments prove nothing because those interventions weren't done properly according to the Marxist blueprint (like the Soviet Revolution--the country jumped to feudalism to socialism + industrialization and it's SUPPOSED to go from capitalism to communism, THAT'S why it didn't work out). Rand's world is equally "objective" in a way that preepmtively counters any arguments. You are either Logical, A is A, Selfishness is Virtue or you are a second-hander, brainwashed by altruist agenda. At the core both systems are tautological and structurally no different from the fundie "true believers" setup in the post-rapture fundamentalist Christian series "Left Behind."

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

You are clever and fun to argue with.

Personally I think that many of Marx's arguments are correct. Where he falls short is failing to recognize two essential facts:

1) That as technology increases past the industrial age, quality of life tends to rise for the average worker; and
2) Capitalism, while a ravenous beast, is not a blind one - and it is capable of recognizing and dealing with threats to itself with carrot or stick.

If the industrial age lasted forever, Marx would have been spot-on. Industrial capitalism was insanely brutal, and foolish to boot. Marx himself pointed out that Communism would never work in Russia, though - because as you point out, any good Marxist drone knows that Russian Communism was an imperfect Messiah.

Anyway, in my view, it's much easier to poke holes in the Communist Manifesto than in the Fountainhead, and the Fountainhead is much more readable. Both, in my view, make it more dangerous. This may also be a case of being raised in two different worlds - in your world, Marx was infinitely more threatening, whereas I grew up in a world devoured by rabid Reaganism.

You do have a point, regardless, in that Marx's directness makes it easier to chant as a slogan. A good Marxist is a lot clearer on what he's supposed to say and do than a good Randite. Which is admittedly a threat on its own.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Just wait for my Freud/Pirates of the Carribbean mash-up: Beyond the Treasure Principle.

PLEASE post that! Post it here.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for introducing me to _slit_. Will friend immediately (and consider directing my "but boys aren't like that! especially not *my* boyfriend!" students to her).

[cascadianista.livejournal.com]

I totally pimp her out too. heh

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

She is great, an amazing writer.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

uhuh, he sure did. Orange juice raped my father so that makes him gay. Because orange juice is male!!!

insanity test

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh, and you can check if you are losing your mind here

http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/insanity_test.htm

[cascadianista.livejournal.com]

It's way too early for me to grok much of the surrounding text, but the Rand slash was hilar. :'D

Seriously, Atlas Shrugged was cool when I was 13 and surrounded by idiots, but now, ehhhhhhh not so much. I did take one thing from it though, the idea of altruistic selfishness. That sort of works for me.

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

Loving the mash mix writing idea... though in the case of many of my favorite writers, I think many of them borrowed from one another already.

As for nightmare combinations, you could really have a great day thinking them up and writing excerpts. You could even do some gut wrenching mash genre themes: Henry Rollins, Lydia Lunch, and Jello Biafra.

Hemingway and Camus.
Milton and Blake.
Erica Jong and Daniel Quinn!

Now if I can only think of something I can write without commiting seppuku.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Everyone is thinking up ideas but no one is writing actual amalgams >:(

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

well, between work, and doing my taxes at work on my employer's dime/time, I have my hands full.

I also havent been much into writing for a while and have been sticking to authors whose ability laps mine (at least) ten fold, so attempting to mush them together would only make me feel stupid.

If I could actually write a Naborkov/Joyce/Pynchon blend, I wouldnt be stuck in an office job, ya know?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

That wasn't a diss directed at you, I apologize. I just wanted people to play and no one was playing!

If I could actually write a Naborkov/Joyce/Pynchon blend, I wouldnt be stuck in an office job, ya know?

Howard Roark was a Genius and also an Ubermench and HE worked in a granite quarry!

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

So are you saying I am lacking in the genius or in the Ubermensch?

;-)

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

I can't believe nobody took the bait.

Ayn Rand and Bret Easton Ellis:

I started to create the definitive new style of American architecture, but halfway through I was like, whatever. I climbed to the top of the quarry, lit a Camel Light and winked at the hot blond diving naked into the swirling pools below. I would not succumb to mediocrity even if it could score me some really good coke.

Holy shit, that's hard.

Let me do some actual work, and then I'll start in on Ayn Rand, Milan Kundera and Sid Vicious. Ayn Rand, Jonathan Safran Foer and the Pope. Ayn Rand, David Gates and whoever wrote the Gossip Girls series.

The possibilities are endless.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

thank you, klingrap.

This made me realize that Randian elitism totally = coke. On a larger scale I am beginning to realize that all books are really the same.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I like Ayn Rand and Milan Kundera.

In Eastern Eurapeanese there is a term, "sedlovostya" which, roughly translated means "living second-hand at the expense of someone with genuine talent for what they do." It is not remarkable that this one word signifies such a complex nuanced concept so precisely because some countries have to compress more history into their language than others.

I have been thinking about Howard for many years now. He had met Dominique at a party. They scarcely knew each other when he raped her. He thought little of it at the time, but in that world where gravity is fractured in mirrors, a chain of events was set into motion that deposited her into his life even as she was vanishing from his mind."

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Ayn Rand and (early) Philip Roth:

Doc, why this compulsion to build things? I can't help myself: I see stone, I've already got a tower up in my head the size of New Jersey, conveniently sub-divided into quiet and liveable rental units. You pay me, you don't pay me: it's like I always have to do good whether I get credit for it or not. Oy, the headache I get watching some schmuck throw his money around on an extra balcony! Doc, you try chasing tail when the slimmest pair of haunches this side of the Mississippi's slipping off with some goyische newspaper guy with a name bigger than Karl Marx. What, is our hour up already?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I love it. More, do more!

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Guess....

I saw the best minds of my generation, and they weren't as good as mine.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

BRILLIANT!

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Not to sound self-satisfied but - yeah, it totally was, wasn't it?

(that was a mash-up of Ayn Rand and me)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

AR would never qualify with "not to sound self-satisfied" ;)

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

After his first great building project had been destroyed, he'd had to change his name. Start over. Work once again to bring the benefits of industrial development to the slow-witted and hidebound. And now it was all gone. "Sharkey" could not believe it.

Saruman looked about the ruins of the Shire's new mill and shook his head. Once again the idiots and eco-terrorists had wiped out the efforts of a man of genius. The clean, sleek lines of the modern building were wiped out, to be replaced no doubt by more gaudy green-doored caves. The massive factory complex, which provided gainful labor to a slothful class of former agricultural workers, to be turned once again into "common land", encouraging waste, sloth and socialism.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Ha! I especially like the terse, curt sentences.