Skip to main content

The Great Moving Right Show

 I really liked this week's readings, especially The Great Moving Right Show, and its connections to our current U.S. political landscape. I had so many notes in my margins that spoke directly to what is, and has been, happening and I really look forward to discussing in class! In particular, I want to talk more about the contradiction(s) Hall discusses in The Great Moving Right Show. Hall writes "It is always the case that the Right is what it is partly because of what the Left is" which seems tied into the contradictions within social democracy and the overall moving right show (391). Still, it seems like this contradiction can simultaneously be the spot of revolution - is a contradiction also a possible vacuum (Cruz, 2015, p. 436)? Hall writes, "When, in a crisis, the traditional alignments are disrupted, it is possible, on the very ground of this break, to construct the people into a populist political subject: with, not against, the power bloc (384). Is this the same terrain on which forces against the power bloc can organize? How do we push the contradiction to a vacuum? 

I'm also interest in talking more about consent. Can we ever not consent? Don't we all, in varying degrees, consent (we have jobs, use money, etc)? Does consent actually exist then and, if so, where does the revolution come from resistance?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...

Week 5

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma