E-lite elites

Two recent articles take on this question of 'What is elitism?' or 'Who are the elites?', stemming from an unmistakable swell of anti-intellectualism in political, social, and aesthetic discourse. Is there a real disconnect? What happened to the "power elite?" Who is actually dictating and public taste and defining social/commercial attitudes? Scholars? critics? or big budget marketers?

NY Times: Defy the Elite! Wait, Which Elite? -by A.O. Scott

n+1: Revolt of the Elites -from the editors of n+1

'Da Bomb'

Flipped through the latest issue of BOMB Magazine today at B.A.M. Great interviews with Adam Pendleton and Rae Armantrout. Excellent literary supplement as well. Jotted the following notes:

"I couldn't say whether the Situationists failed or not. My feeling is that when you contribute, there is no failure. It's like an unspoken law. I like your use of 'provoke.' When you provoke you have contributed. When you become a part of what happens next you have contributed." -Adam Pendleton, in conversation with Thom Donovan

"Of course, there are so many hallmark readings of a person like [Rosa Parks], because it is more convenient to deradicalize her than to radicalize her. She becomes a hero. And to be labeled a hero is one of culture's ways of depoliticizing you. You become part of what culture has dealt with. In this sense, one should always strive to be the opposite of a hero." -again, Pendleton (emphases mine)

Julian Assange = the Language Poets?

I love when (self-assuredly) clever conservatives highlight similarities between vastly different political philosophies (in vastly different political contexts) in order to expand the net of blame. Anarcho-Libertarianism can take many different forms, and in response to many different sources of social inoculation/coercion. My own dissenting feelings take aim at the corporate bodies that manipulate government institutions and orchestrate fruitless wars. And while I count LangPo as a major reference point, or historical nexus, between the present and the radical Left of the 60s/70s, I don't consider them my sole ideologic influences. You'd think conservative (pretend-) pundits would want to spend this much critical energy on demanding explanations from the U.S. government. Is it really enough just to conclude that our leaders are corrupt? Is that all it takes to rally the (merely) anti-establishment?

Essay: What is Julian Assange up to?

History never was, only Now is... scoot over, Fukayama

"History, so conceived, was inexorably culminating in nihilist catastrophe—in the form of inter-imperialist war and barbarism for the Left, or as The Decline of the West for the Right—and the will to confront this inescapable decline was, non-dialectically, the will for an absolute rupture from it. This took the form of projects of transcendence, the creation of a new man, understood either as the construction of an unprecedented universality, communism, or as a return to the vanished origin, fascism. It is important to note that Badiou never implies that this idea of creating a new man could or should ever be resurrected, for it was 'undoubtedly a bad project.'" -Gopal Balakrishnan, The Historical Absolute, on Alain Badiou's The Century (from Lana Turner, No. 3)

Balakrishnan casts some warranted doubt on Badiou's efforts to find "the real" in the shape (not contents) of the Subject, which so far sounds like a cheap neutralization of clashing, temporal ideologies. But I haven't read it, yet. I can appreciate the further atomization of relativism, and indicating the quasi-absolutism of mythologies like "History" and "periods," but I think there is more to analyzing contingent experience than the mere form of communications. Are the (yes, contingent) numerical and visual data subject to a formal consensus-or-nothing test, as well?

Blindly co-opted, complicit Barthesian, or too lazy (impatient) to explain why so?

"Nobody will deny that there is such a thing, for instance, as a writing typical of Esprit or of Les Temps Modernes. What these intellectual modes of writing have in common, is that in them language, instead of being a privileged area, tends to become the sufficient sign of commitment. To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under the pressure of all those who do not speak it, is to proclaim one's act of choosing, if not necessarily one's agreement with that choice. Writing here resembles the signature one affixes at the foot of a collective proclamation one has not written oneself. So that to adopt a mode of writing—or, even better, to make it one's own—means to save oneself all the preliminaries of a choice, and to make it quite clear that one takes for granted the reasons for such a choice. Any intellectual writing is therefore the first of the 'leaps of the intellect'. Whereas an ideally free language never could function as a sign of my own person and would give no information whatsoever about my history and my freedom, the writing to which I entrust myself already exists entirely as an institution; it reveals my past and my choice, it gives me a history, it blazons forth my situation, it commits me without my having to declare the fact." -Roland Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero"

(The real excuse is that Roland Garros devours more of my attention at the moment)