Who are all these people? perhaps I'm out of it (the idea of a "pleasure
principle" in guiding human life was fairly new & unsettled in the UK I
left for good in 1970), but I don't really recognise who is being
alluded to, apart from this media hologram called Kat something. If
there are such "opinionists" , are they of any interest? The
conversation on the blog you link to seems rather, well, sixthformish
debating society stuff - Go and read Lenin before you dare to argue with
me!
The pleasure principle is another matter anyway, being rather vague even
in Freud's original formulation, since the expectation of pleasure as a
motive must rest on some form of conceptualisation of the future
possibilities which, if guided by experiential logic, must recognize how
unpredictable the occurrence of pleasure can be, it being the potential
accompaniment of an unlimited variety of acts (as George Herbert said
rather camply, "a servant with this clause/Makes drudgery divine" ;-) )
; it would hence seem very logical to organise one's life on other
lines, otherwise one will just surfeit on the old trusties, which will
begin to lose their savour without the open horizon of experience. "I
know what I like and I like what I know" obviously leads to some form of
mental & emotional stasis, not to say death. Listening to Beethoven
symphonies endlessly without, say, trying Schoenberg & [enter preferred
names] would, for example, seem self-defeating.
Mjay
Dominic Fox wrote:
> More on aesthetic quietism here:
> http://antigram.blogspot.com/2007/03/kat-brownism-or-political-consciousness.html
>
>
> I agree strongly with Badiou that there is a significant ideological
> conflict in progress here, between the "democratic materialism" of
> opinionism (which in spite of apparently according equal merit to
> every point of view and position of enjoyment, does so under the aegis
> of a violent antagonism towards any and every attempt to go beyond the
> pleasure principle - a deeply hostile and resentful will-to-ignorance
> that seeks to preserve at all costs the perfumed garden of its
> innocence) and the "materialist dialectic" that insists on the
> interval between bodies and languages opened up by truths. The symptom
> of this struggle is the frenzy with which the opinionists will declare
> their indifference to "politics", assert their right to their opinion
> and their enjoyment (which are practically synonymous) and pronounce
> on the irrelevance of any and every attempt at critique, onto which
> they immediately project their own impatience and aggrieved
> ill-temper. "Why are you so angry? What's the matter with you? What
> can't you just sit back and enjoy, obediently?"
>
> Dominic
>
--
The art of being civilized is the art of learning to read between the lies. - Kenneth Rexroth
|