prøg pub tribunal: jerüsalem årty choke division

apawboy reminds me we also discussed the good (and bad) sides of wales, and whether j0n s4v4ge lives in a castle

i. hear each other = choose a quiet pub! you should have put yr foot down!!
ii. all communities have unconscious hiveminds or they wouldn’t be communities
iii. however i am SO BUSTED on the “fantasmatic Dissensus accusation” as i have not read it beyond fragments for months myself, and certainly did not know you were off it! (actually you said something abt “dissensian debacle” in yr earlier email didn’t you — i meant to ask you abt that); it was a shorthand for thing that pisses me off, which i think you ARE a bit guilty of selectively

i think there is a remnant of baudrillardian totalist rhetoric in yr phrasemaking — that’s what i’m reacting to mainly (bcz he is a reactionary cynic, which you aren’t) (it’s HIS nothing-is-possible-anymore that i’ve grown to distrust and hate);

i’m sorry you had a bad night on fri and i’m sorry you were ill and feeling rubbish; nevertheless despite this, i enjoyed it and didn’t think “nothing happened” or that i turned into a vegetable — not least bcz of the random element of meeting that other matt, and being annoyed by him at first and then coming to hear his rhythm and picture… if we’d organised totally to avoid risk elements (haha = if woebot knew a better pub) then that wouldn’t have happened… and if you’d this is really horrible let’s go somewhere else, then we could have done that — that’s the tie-up i suppose, that yr “attack” doesn’t actually happen at the point where it’s needed for YOUR PSYCHIC HEALTH

(and of course part of the story here is that for YEARS i was very hostile to any kind of organised socialising — oh noes it was a TRAP! — and i made myself really really miserable and isolated; and discovering that actually i’m allowed to step out and choose my surroundings and companions to keep me energised and undepressive was a hughe change in my life)

(what i realised was that i was quite bad at setting up the parameters for the social adventure all by myself — i need to use something that already exists as a jumping-off-point, and i had taught myself to distrust all “things that already existed”: so i became a bit more tolerant of them, and frankly the boundaries i’d set MYSELF just seemed to epxlode outwards)

academia = well, you tend to justify pop-cult work by reaching out to theorists; work is good when it accords with zizek’s insights, or whatever (rather than when it clashes with them) — you’ve demonstrated previously that these theorists are “non-standard” as academics, and “outside the academy” and whatever, and that’s fair enough — but they are all WRITERS with a basis in PHILOSOPHY. “Academia” goes back to Socrates and his little drinking gang hanging around under the trees trying to explain the world in terms of first (metaphysical) principles.

their dismal PRODUCTS = you and me and simonR and marcello and… e.p.thompson and christopher hill and… i too always say “well, i’m not an academic”, but no one listens

why am i allergic to negation? well unlike the essay they round off the sentences i quoted aren’t “critical”, they’re just rhetorical — and it’s true that i favour materialist exploration of “how it works”, and what are the useful and the dark sides WITHIN any given institution, that’s just how my mind works, i get bored with discussions that respect the shape and name the world at large gives any phenomenon or institution

but on the other hand when i DO “attack” something — like you a bit here, or anyway this setnence, and the “dissensus hivemind” — or even persons which i am very reliably and openly hostile to (like terry eagleton or baudrillard or nick broomfield) — i can be VERY EASILY made to feel bad about it, as i am doing now here

i’m just not cut out to be an attack monkey, i think — i am generally unconvinced by attack-work (simon is at his worst in this mode; so is benW) — but of course that also means that if there’s something that niggles me abt someone’s work it builds and builds and then explodes in a form they don’t recognise — this happened with simon on FT a couple of years back (i mean, i was right abt what i said, but completely unnecssarily hostile); and now it’s kinda happened here a bit with you :(

May as well post the following here as it always makes me chuckle, and definitely speaks to my temperament, if nothing else — Alexander Cockburn in the Nation in 1985:

I open my mail. I find a letter from the International Socialist Organisation. It begins:

You don’t get far by making people feel bad. My father used to quote sadly the old Communis Party recruiter back in the 1930s: “Brothers and sisters, even as I speak our comrades in Latin America are writhing in the torturer’s thumbscrews, our comrades in India starving in the the stinking jails of British imperialism, our comrades in Africa groaning under the book of the oppressor. Brothers and sisters, join the Communist Party.

thompson and hill came up at length in the discussion except i confusingly kept calling hill “keith thomas” — who ip had not heard of — so we had to nail down the luminaries of the school and why they mattered