Archives and Feelings

I think this is precisely Gramsci’s point — the factory worker and the sculptor may both be intellectuals or artists, but only one has the *function in society* ––the class position, the privilege––that makes it his or her assigned role. Just as it no doubt requires a certain class status or aspiration to see oneself as able to choose a social function or calling.

And, regarding the university as machine, Ferguson would have it even more strongly: he would say that the liberal multiculturalist concern for development of identities is part and parcel of the university as machinery of capital, since it refocuses students’ energies on individual identity rather than the potential for redistribution of resources.

Great articulation of the temporality of the classroom.

Coming back to this, I’m thinking about whether this discussion of taste might be interestingly put in the kind of terms Mel Chen uses in her discussion of the boy licking the train…

Another possible citation for you, if you pursue this, might be Siane Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, which deals with various literary affects––and the sizeable subdiscipline of food studies, about which I know relatively little but which seems extremely interesting.

This is, overall, an attempt to expand on my first writing assignment, channeling the concept into some practical form with some practical justification.

Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual is of one who is part of the subaltern group committed to opposing and transforming the social order first; intellectual work is developed with and for the group, rather than in an institution outside of it. So Nafisi’s commitment to the interests of women, which goes beyond her institutional role, might be a kind of organic intellectual work. The distinction between organic and traditional intellectual often doesn’t fit neatly onto the real world, though…

What do we gain by using the term labor––why might it be important to recognize what we do as *work*?

Yeah, when we read it in class some of these critiques came up.  They have a lot of textual support, too.

But that doesn’t mean its not a good text to tackle issues with – actually, it may be the best way to deal with them.  after all, we can sometimes get the best critiques out of texts we *don’t* agree with.  It really shows how the cultural scripts differ from the actual truths.

Addressing the first part of your comment, there is a binary between bad-old times and good enlightened now, but I think there’s another possible binary between the good, golden past and the present troubled times.  I mean, so many historical moments get romanticized, likely because those past things were good to some, and those who would or think they would benefit are those who romanticize them.

And yeah, looking at every ill does sometimes does come across as polarizing all groups into subsets of ills.  It becomes too difficult to speak generally, then.

Very nice!

I like the examples you’ve chosen to reflect on.  The idealization of certain times or actions (often historical) is rampant, and it seems to be an important tool for disseminating happiness scripts, both those of perceived history and the now in which they are created and disseminated.

The female troublemaker and the feminist killjoy… I agree just the act of not enjoying, or not wanting the thing they are ‘supposed’ to want can be itself a killjoy (it doesn’t have to be starting arguments, though that’s fun too).

I’m not sure how much the subject (middle/upper class women) is simply problematic and how much it is simply the script, the happiness script of the culture.  I think that probably didn’t sound right.  I mean, given the racial, class and gendered nature of happiness scripts, I wonder if this film might be a site for finding problematic elements in the cultural happiness scripts, and not itself a problem choice for such a script because of its exclusions.

I can see how well you’d do with these texts – its really fascinating to me.  popular culture is rich with layers of meaning, and so can be carefully analyzed… but it is also dear to students, so they should care (very much) about how it is analyzed.  This combination can be a very powerful tool!