normally I'm opposed to poking rabid dogs with sticks, but...
Okay, no, this is just too funny. It's too over-the-top crackpot for me to take it remotely seriously. (And it's not as if the rabid dog in question is a mere fence away, thanks to the internet...) This nutcase makes James *Dobson*'s rhetoric look centrist and coherent.
Here is the comment I left on on the foam-flecked blog post:This is hilarious! It reminds me a little of those spam e-mails made up of jumbled-together search-result text, only it's (almost) all complete sentences. I'm curious, are you schizophrenic, and if not, where did you learn to emulate their paranoiac faulty-causal and reifying constructions so well?
On that note, I have a friend who teaches university-level logic and debate... would you mind if I pointed him to your brilliant satire here, since it contains examples of nearly every argumentative fallacy there is?
I came across Untergehen In Das Unbehagen: Going Down From My Mountain To The Brokeback Monsters quite by accident, using Technorati's spiffy blogs-search engine to look for ...something else *entirely*. Really, I can't quite imagine the search terms I'd have to have chosen if I *were* trying to find something like this thing.
One of the neat things about a Technorati search is that it tells you how many other blogs link to each search-result post. At least when I came across it, the number of blogs linking to "Untergehen auf Brokeback Monsters" was zero. My comment on it was the first.
Being not unmindful of the opportunity here, I decided I should encourage as many people to join me in mocking Mr James G. Poulos as I can get. Feel free to link your friends and family here (or directly to the blogspot page). Permission to metaquote is granted.
Just in case the glory that is "Going Down From My Mountain To The Brokeback Monsters" should disappear, the internet being the fickle beast it is, the full text is here:
When I wrote that Brokeback Mountain perfectly epitomized the bi/pan-, not homo-, sexual movement, I hesitated to add the indictment below. I am now certain of it. It is central to the theory of the present social order/disorder.
The "gay rights" effort is a fiction. In order to destroy fixed sexual identity, the radical techno-orgiasts had first to convince straights that gays were "just like them," only without the sexual heterogeny. But the ultimate mission is as contrary to fixed homosexuality -- and permanent union -- as it is to fixed heterosexuality and its permanent unions. Gay marriage would be created to destroy all marriage; you can hear it in the rationale that straight marriages are already such regular failures that any exclusionary sacredness has long been self-surrendered. Marriage is to become, like everything else, contingent: a phase/phrase in a networked social construction of flesh, the social embodiment of slang language.
The anti-Rieff is Hardt/Negri. In their book Multitude they diagnose as well as Rieff in My Life among the Deathworks a third, anti-culture; only Hardt/Negri like it, want it, enworld it. They are prophet-orgiasts -- the destruction of fixed sexual identity is the absolute spirit of their entire program. And they identify, most hideously, that the possibilty of that destruction has been most advanced by the advancements of capitalism, which has digested industrial labor and now seeks to eat "affect" or "immaterial" labor. (Once again, Fox buys MySpace.) Or as Rieff puts it, "Needs themselves have become primordialities that are obviously fed by consumer culture (Deathworks 182). But capitalism, breaking its own fetters of Rieff's faith-founded second world, creates by the logic of Hardt and Negri's Empire the counterlogic of Multitude, which I am developing more precisely (and critically) as Smithereens [see these pages for starters], the culture-populace wherein to each their own Leviathan. The 20th century was the era of wars over the means of industrial production. The 21st century will be that of wars over the means of biosexual production. Human identity itself is at stake. "Thus begins the process of inversion which third culture elites have continued: the transformation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into the pursuit of the freedom to transgress and the happiness of transgressing (Deathworks 176.)
So, come upon Hardt/Negri as they cite the monstrous Judith Butler, as vertiginous and death-dealing in person as she is on the page. "Judith Butler," reads in Multitude, "articluates the richest and most sophisticated theory against the body and also develops clearly the performative processes of constitution." See? The future of Smithereens is radically anti-indentity, anti-individual. It wants the repressed power of social fleshmass to be freed from the non-common body, to be unleashed in a permanent revolution toward the pleasure of what Rieff calls the "freedom to be shameless." But this "freedom" must be forced. Rape must be voluntarized; self-rape (Deathworks, Fig. 35) undertaken. Justice becomes defined as unnatural, against life. Mark these phrases well -- they are a declaration of war against you: "Queer politics is an excellent example of such a performative collective project of rebellion and creation. It is not really an affirmation of homosexual identities but a subversion of the logics of identity in general. There are no queer bodies, only queer flesh that resides in the communication and collaboration of social conduct (Multitude 200)."
Bisexuality, pansexuality, are key to the anticulture. They must be, ultimately, enforced; acted out. Enforced sexual acts are rapes. Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision, his generation's most egregious deathwork, is illustrative. It is a deathwork most conspicuously in its comprehensive play-acting at being a lifework. Its message is declared by Rieff's seeing, unknowing eye: "the third world view of social order as essentially a condition in which someone is to help liberate someone else and, in the course of doing so, liberate himself (Deathworks, 166)." A person's call to another for liberation is the anticulture's version of the neoconservative Iraq project -- rape. Alice, the bisexual sister of protagonist and author surrogate Dwight Wilmerding declares "Rape Me" to be Nirvana's masterpiece, and Dwight agrees: "it was in my opinion the last album's most exciting song." "And what is he protesting darling?" asks the siblings' mother. "The culture," Alice replies. Half a page later, she is made to say: "I sleep with girls and boys. So what?" The destruction of sexual identity -- the decision to have sex with, in theory, anything -- is a necessity of the anticulture. It is the required act of the revolution, no less than joining the worker's union once was: F---ers of the world, unite.
The radical eradication of fixed identity by the techno-orgiasts threatens the United States, but, more severely, Europe, where second-world authority is in a far more advanced state of decay. The corpus/corpse of the European social psyche has been bitten by the zombie (Hardt/Negri err by calling it vampire (Multitude 193)) longer ago than the American. In the United States authority still commands large followings. The zombie, which is idolized in Duchamp's Etant donnes (Deathworks, Fig. 22), has bitten Europe long enough ago that the re-animating sickness is almost upon it. The postmodern paradise of the leisure class has risen and it is hungry. When its constituent zombies are blown apart by attacks of radical-repressive second-world faith totalitarians of Islam, the living dead psyche of Europe will crack, pulled into the woid (world/void) of the al-Qaedic totalitarianism: see what your emancipation has reaped you?
You reap yourselves. Thou are become death.
[posted by James G. Poulos @ 3:35 PM]
I can't help but be further amused that self-proclaimed "Essayist, free lance, & career academic" Poulos, seemingly so proud of his dubious bit of blog fame, plays so fast and loose with basic rules of usage involving little things like capitalisation of articles mid-title. But, well, as anybody who knows me can tell you, I really am anal...
edited to add: For clarity's sake, I am not suggesting anyone actually *argue* any point with Poulos (though I'm also not telling anyone what to do; what's the fun in that?). It seems fairly clear that'd be a lost cause. I just think anybody who says things like he has publicly deserves to be laughed at publicly -- long and loud.
Here is the comment I left on on the foam-flecked blog post:This is hilarious! It reminds me a little of those spam e-mails made up of jumbled-together search-result text, only it's (almost) all complete sentences. I'm curious, are you schizophrenic, and if not, where did you learn to emulate their paranoiac faulty-causal and reifying constructions so well?
On that note, I have a friend who teaches university-level logic and debate... would you mind if I pointed him to your brilliant satire here, since it contains examples of nearly every argumentative fallacy there is?
I came across Untergehen In Das Unbehagen: Going Down From My Mountain To The Brokeback Monsters quite by accident, using Technorati's spiffy blogs-search engine to look for ...something else *entirely*. Really, I can't quite imagine the search terms I'd have to have chosen if I *were* trying to find something like this thing.
One of the neat things about a Technorati search is that it tells you how many other blogs link to each search-result post. At least when I came across it, the number of blogs linking to "Untergehen auf Brokeback Monsters" was zero. My comment on it was the first.
Being not unmindful of the opportunity here, I decided I should encourage as many people to join me in mocking Mr James G. Poulos as I can get. Feel free to link your friends and family here (or directly to the blogspot page). Permission to metaquote is granted.
Just in case the glory that is "Going Down From My Mountain To The Brokeback Monsters" should disappear, the internet being the fickle beast it is, the full text is here:
When I wrote that Brokeback Mountain perfectly epitomized the bi/pan-, not homo-, sexual movement, I hesitated to add the indictment below. I am now certain of it. It is central to the theory of the present social order/disorder.
The "gay rights" effort is a fiction. In order to destroy fixed sexual identity, the radical techno-orgiasts had first to convince straights that gays were "just like them," only without the sexual heterogeny. But the ultimate mission is as contrary to fixed homosexuality -- and permanent union -- as it is to fixed heterosexuality and its permanent unions. Gay marriage would be created to destroy all marriage; you can hear it in the rationale that straight marriages are already such regular failures that any exclusionary sacredness has long been self-surrendered. Marriage is to become, like everything else, contingent: a phase/phrase in a networked social construction of flesh, the social embodiment of slang language.
The anti-Rieff is Hardt/Negri. In their book Multitude they diagnose as well as Rieff in My Life among the Deathworks a third, anti-culture; only Hardt/Negri like it, want it, enworld it. They are prophet-orgiasts -- the destruction of fixed sexual identity is the absolute spirit of their entire program. And they identify, most hideously, that the possibilty of that destruction has been most advanced by the advancements of capitalism, which has digested industrial labor and now seeks to eat "affect" or "immaterial" labor. (Once again, Fox buys MySpace.) Or as Rieff puts it, "Needs themselves have become primordialities that are obviously fed by consumer culture (Deathworks 182). But capitalism, breaking its own fetters of Rieff's faith-founded second world, creates by the logic of Hardt and Negri's Empire the counterlogic of Multitude, which I am developing more precisely (and critically) as Smithereens [see these pages for starters], the culture-populace wherein to each their own Leviathan. The 20th century was the era of wars over the means of industrial production. The 21st century will be that of wars over the means of biosexual production. Human identity itself is at stake. "Thus begins the process of inversion which third culture elites have continued: the transformation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into the pursuit of the freedom to transgress and the happiness of transgressing (Deathworks 176.)
So, come upon Hardt/Negri as they cite the monstrous Judith Butler, as vertiginous and death-dealing in person as she is on the page. "Judith Butler," reads in Multitude, "articluates the richest and most sophisticated theory against the body and also develops clearly the performative processes of constitution." See? The future of Smithereens is radically anti-indentity, anti-individual. It wants the repressed power of social fleshmass to be freed from the non-common body, to be unleashed in a permanent revolution toward the pleasure of what Rieff calls the "freedom to be shameless." But this "freedom" must be forced. Rape must be voluntarized; self-rape (Deathworks, Fig. 35) undertaken. Justice becomes defined as unnatural, against life. Mark these phrases well -- they are a declaration of war against you: "Queer politics is an excellent example of such a performative collective project of rebellion and creation. It is not really an affirmation of homosexual identities but a subversion of the logics of identity in general. There are no queer bodies, only queer flesh that resides in the communication and collaboration of social conduct (Multitude 200)."
Bisexuality, pansexuality, are key to the anticulture. They must be, ultimately, enforced; acted out. Enforced sexual acts are rapes. Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision, his generation's most egregious deathwork, is illustrative. It is a deathwork most conspicuously in its comprehensive play-acting at being a lifework. Its message is declared by Rieff's seeing, unknowing eye: "the third world view of social order as essentially a condition in which someone is to help liberate someone else and, in the course of doing so, liberate himself (Deathworks, 166)." A person's call to another for liberation is the anticulture's version of the neoconservative Iraq project -- rape. Alice, the bisexual sister of protagonist and author surrogate Dwight Wilmerding declares "Rape Me" to be Nirvana's masterpiece, and Dwight agrees: "it was in my opinion the last album's most exciting song." "And what is he protesting darling?" asks the siblings' mother. "The culture," Alice replies. Half a page later, she is made to say: "I sleep with girls and boys. So what?" The destruction of sexual identity -- the decision to have sex with, in theory, anything -- is a necessity of the anticulture. It is the required act of the revolution, no less than joining the worker's union once was: F---ers of the world, unite.
The radical eradication of fixed identity by the techno-orgiasts threatens the United States, but, more severely, Europe, where second-world authority is in a far more advanced state of decay. The corpus/corpse of the European social psyche has been bitten by the zombie (Hardt/Negri err by calling it vampire (Multitude 193)) longer ago than the American. In the United States authority still commands large followings. The zombie, which is idolized in Duchamp's Etant donnes (Deathworks, Fig. 22), has bitten Europe long enough ago that the re-animating sickness is almost upon it. The postmodern paradise of the leisure class has risen and it is hungry. When its constituent zombies are blown apart by attacks of radical-repressive second-world faith totalitarians of Islam, the living dead psyche of Europe will crack, pulled into the woid (world/void) of the al-Qaedic totalitarianism: see what your emancipation has reaped you?
You reap yourselves. Thou are become death.
[posted by James G. Poulos @ 3:35 PM]
I can't help but be further amused that self-proclaimed "Essayist, free lance, & career academic" Poulos, seemingly so proud of his dubious bit of blog fame, plays so fast and loose with basic rules of usage involving little things like capitalisation of articles mid-title. But, well, as anybody who knows me can tell you, I really am anal...
edited to add: For clarity's sake, I am not suggesting anyone actually *argue* any point with Poulos (though I'm also not telling anyone what to do; what's the fun in that?). It seems fairly clear that'd be a lost cause. I just think anybody who says things like he has publicly deserves to be laughed at publicly -- long and loud.