plugs for blogs/the ranter within

I'm plugging the blogs that give me hope, -- they've inspired me to rant
in public, in a sort of controlled way. There is a lot of discussion out there -- and it's funny-- It iis properly political -- rather than sycophantically and phobically correct. People, some young and some old, are grappling with the question of democracy without falling into the various traps of the culture wars. I'm also recommending The 18th Brumaire of Karl Marx this week as required reading for dark
times. It's all about how a vicious opportunist used a gang of thugs to seize power from the people and abolish parliament by trading on terror and the name of a famous relative!

very funny, very smart on W
skippy the bush kangaroo


just what you need as a major media antidote
pandagon

critical thinking at work
slacktivist>

when things get nasty
eschaton>

this one is so big it's out of hand, but it is the mother of all blogs
dailykos

and an (or another) academic who blogs
michaelberube

you think you got it bad?

People have been using the term deconstructing to mean -- demystify, explain, I'm going to tell you how it really is and a lot of other operations that seem, well in hindsight, just  teensy eensy bit tendentious AND condescending. Recently, some one sent me something, like When bad girls do good theory-- I'm joking, that's not what it's called, but I read this essay about deconstructing trauma, bad girls, theory, Avital Ronell, Rodney King, trauma, 9/11 with disbelief.

Joan Hawkins, its author at some point likens the injustice of the Rodney King trial to the violence done to Avital Ronell when one of Hawkins' students called Ronell a "deconstruction slut." Hawkins writes "In my classroom what happened was the eruption of the same (and this is what surprised me) reductive narrativizing strategy which the students recognized and critiqued in the Simi Valley trial."

Hawkins and Cornel West support identification with marginalization as a politics, which West has famously called a "politics of difference," described as " identification with the demoralized, the demobilized, the depoliticized." Identification may be a tactic (and it was the dominant one for a certain kind of will to power in the academy in the 90s), but it is not a politics, nor can it ever be.

I've had to deal with my share of theory boys who are disturbed by the flamboyance or the seductiveness of female professors or theorists, and Hawkins and her class are correct in describing this particular attack as mean-spirited sexism, but comparing a gross miscarriage of justice in the Rodney King trial to "the eruption of the same reductive narrativizing strategy" behind calling Avital Ronell a "deconstruction slut" betrays one thing: Hawkins' attempt to defend, flatter and give dignity to a powerful professor by constructing her as a putative victim. In the entire article Hawkins reserves her criticism for a person from whom Hawkins and Ronell have little to fear -- an angry, resentful theory boy student whose misfired provocation is in many ways a bad imitation of the gestures that won fame for Hawkins' heroes and heroines.