As you can see from my reading list, I’m a fan of the blog Stuff White People Like. I’m also White (proof: I like all of the things listed here, with the exception of Manhattan, which I haven’t got around to visiting. I ‘did’ South America before Europe, you see.). So, apparently, are most of the folks who dig the site, to the point where the (white) author is soon to release a book with Random House. To some extent the whole trajectory of this blog takes on an outline of ressentiment; configured by Fiona Probyn as a “giving that is always already a taking”. The self-reflexive white subject (self-reflexivity being, undoubtedly, something else that White People Like) recognises themselves with some shame, laughs at themselves (such is their white humility), generates a similarly motivated following of white compadrés. The blog author gets a book deal. The white readers buy the book. And at the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether power, or at least capital, has shifted any; although I guess that’s the edge of irony, and humour …
Yo denuncio estas injusticias y envio mi apoyo y amor … por los dos compañeros y la lucha que continua …
“… whatever happens, the kids have got to go to school, the adults have got to turn up to work, there’ve got to be police and we’ve got to have measures that stop the booze and the drugs and everything else which leads to the horrible things that we now know was happening.”
- Former Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, here.
Subcomandante Marcos confesses: “It was all a performance art piece.”
Oh, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, you’ve already been writing my thesis for years, and so much more beautifully.
OK, I know I’m the only one who finds lolsaints (lolcatholic, perhaps?) an idea of terrible hilarity; but I couldn’t help making just one more, for the occasion ;)
I will not make any more lolsaints. I will not make any more lolsaints.
Young Liberals making recordings of lefty lecturers: do they really think we can’t tell which ones they are? Or will they perhaps disguise themselves in faded surf brand t-shirts a lá the undercovers at the G20 protests?
Put another way - this guy generally stands out in a Political Economy lecture:
(NSW Young Liberals President - from the Daily Telegraph article on the same issue)
“The axiomatic distinction between the utopic on the one hand and the utopian on the other can be described in terms of the latter as a perversion, a rigidification of the former. The utopic is a disposition, a manner of speech, an attitude, a procedure in semiosis, even if that procedure necessarily bears a proximity to the Kristevan semanalyse, the semiotic critique of the semiotic. Utopia is a fixed form. This analysis flies in the face of that line of interpretation that sees Utopia as heteroglossic. The heterological character of the discourse characterises the utopic. Utopia is the monoglossic face of the utopic. In Kristevan terms it is thetic, according to the categories of Roland Barthes it is doxic, a monologic discourse invariably constructed in terms of ideas by which contradictory and inevitable exclusions are defined.” (…)
“The utopic is the disagreement that Utopia cannot sustain. Utopia is the dream of perfect control, of both culture and nature. The definitive totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have utopian motivations, motivations resulting in the figure of perfectibility. Utopia is spoken in the language of domination, and speaks it.” (…)
“The utopic is marked by an excess of signification, Utopia by its formalisation. In the totalised ideological mise-en-scene that is late capitalist language, the utopic is the space of the displaced discourse, the internal exile of the concept.”
- Bernhard Sachs, ‘In the General Gouvernement of Semiosis/Against Utopia: Utopic Articulation as Act’, The Office of Utopic Procedures, West Space, 2002.
Brought to you courtesy of one ‘falco258‘.
