Re: On toilets

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary wrote:

>Yes Lou is being encouraged somewhat by the culturalists.  I too was
>not sure that the toilet thing was not a hoax.  On balance I decided
>that it was dead serious.  For all their talk of parody and pastiche
>etc postmodernists take themselves with a deathly and deadening
>seriousness. so I can see a whole issue/conference on the toilet.

I sympathize, but I think that one can overdo quarrels with
post-modernism & academic scholarship in general.  While it is true
that Marxism can provide a better theoretical framework than
post-modernism & that the premises & conclusions of post-modernism
are incorrect, I think that some of the "vibes" coming out from posts
on this subject originate not just in political & theoretical
disagreements but in the bad old competitive one-upmanship, which is
one of the main sources of all sectarianism, or as one of my
cyber-pals puts it "dick-slinging."

Another worry is that while Marxists are correct to reject the
_premises_ & _conclusions_ of postmodern scholarship, we are not in a
position to reject all their empirical findings & sociological
insights.  Especially in women's studies, gay & lesbian studies, and
social histories in general, much interesting work has been done by
those who have been influenced by Foucault, Barthes, etc.

>My own thoughts here are that I would approach this matter from a
>Bakhtinian perspective.  Dear old Bakhtin was badly bowdlerized by
>his American and European disciples.  However his was definitely a
>celebration of the  historical role 'lower bodily (male!) strata' -
>dicks and ass holes to the masses.

Yes, dicks, cunts, & ass holes to the masses, but competitiveness can
be destructive of eros & friendship.

>There is a very good Australian  documentary by Robyn Anderson and
>Bob Connolly - First Contact.  It tells the story of the arrival of
>three Irish Australian adventurers in the Highlands of Papua New
>guinea in the 1930s.  Like Stanley in the Congo, the Leahy Brother
>carved a bloody path through the highlands murdering and exploiting
>and robbing the masses.  the indigenous people at first thought the
>Leahys were Gods or their dead returned.  they learned soon to their
>cost the true nature of the white colonists.
>
>In the film an old man talks of the experience of being a boy and
>seeing the Leahys.  One of the brothers went into the bush to have a
>shit.  the locals gathered round to see what he had done.  the
>verdict was 'their skin may be different but their shit smells just
>like ours'.
>
>that for me is the precious radical moment within the film.  It is
>also a reminder that people of power are fundamentally no better
>than the rest of us.
>
>I doubt though that this levelling down was what the pomos had in mind.

I agree with you here, though one can't nail all post-modernists onto
the same stake.  In fact, compared to more conservative scholars,
post-modernists have tended to be the ones that are more alert to the
master-slave dialectic in colonialism (their fault is culturalism &
left-Hegelianism without sublation -- a dialectic at a standstill as
Walter Benjamin put), and some of them seek to combine post-modernism
with a version of Marxism (a failure in my opinion, but I give them
some credit for trying, unlike out-and-out neoliberals).

Back to shit (and our exchange on the Bhaskar list).

One of the chief problems of modernism (post-modernism is just a
variation of modernism) has been the erection of the philosopher-king
in the world of shit (while at the same time thinking that it
dethroned the philosopher-king scatologically).  Think Ubu Roi with a
toilet-brush, for instance.  Aristophanes's _Clouds_ is better:

*****   Student: And yet last night a mighty thought we lost
                Through a green lizard.

Strepsiades: Tell me, how was that?

Student: Why, as Himself [Socrates], with eyes and mouth wide open,
                Mused on the moon, her paths and revolutions,
                A lizard from the roof squirted full on him.

Strepsiades: He, he, he, he. I like the lizard's spattering Socrates.   *****

Or turn Hegel against Hegel.  We must be prepared to err
wholeheartedly, instead of pursuing the perfection of wisdom _now_.
The owl of Minerva flies at twilight.  History has yet to come to an
end, so it follows that wisdom is denied us.

And this is the way to regard the whole of Western philosophy (the
best of post-modernism included).  Only great minds can commit great
errors that can illuminate the whole of the universe, and records of
great errors help us understand the ensembles of social relations
better than parsimonious "totalities" that small minds conjure up.
And Marxists can be small minds, you see.

Yoshie