Lest we forget was Re: On toilets

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Yoshie,

I agree that a proper balanced judgement on the pomos has yet to be
reached.  We are still to close to them.  My own opinion is that here in
Australia at least they have served to disorient and depoliticse a whole
generation of students.  I keep repeating that when the CIA begin
assassinating pomos then I will be impressed.

Now I readily grant that they have looked at a range of phenomena that
Marxists have neglected.  However as their premises and conclusions were
largely as you say incorrect I am not too inclined to say that they have
contributed that much of value.


Even much more important than their contribution to toilet studies etc has
been what they have by and large refused to look at namely social
class.  As for Foucault I cannot abide him at all.  His work on the
positivity of power for instance has underpinned the sell outs that Tony
Bennett and his followers led.

Still I will admit that I speak as a partisan.  The pomos wiped the
Marxists out here in Brisbane and it was a fairly brutal
performance.  Those of us who refused to join the rush were labeled as
'dinosaurs' and our work ignored.  That is still the case. so my dear
Yoshie, being Irish I am less prepared to forgive and forget than you
appear to be.

BTW I trust you understood that the point about Bakhtin was that his theory
of the historical role of the lower bodily strata was very much a
masculinist if not a misogynist one.

regards

Gary