[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> In Defence of a Modest Proposal

[Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>]

McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu> writes:

> The Napoleonic grandeur of radical thought from Marx to
> Debord has an intrinsically anti-democratic cast. Its a question
> of making the masses into a tool for a mission not of their
> making. People's actual wants and desires are to be discounted
> in favour of what the intellectual desires that they desire.
> Of course there is always a 'theory' or a 'method' to legitimate
> this divergence on the part of the self-appointed vanguard
> from any notion of consensus in politics.

At what point do I stop being one of the masses and become an
intellectual?  At what point do my political desires become the
desires of an intellectual, rather than the desire of one of the
masses?

After writing these questions I tried to answer them myself. I could
come up with no satisfactory answers.

I tried to differentiate based upon the degree of alienation from my
labor that I experience as a white-collar worker, but that didn't pan
out, since I don't think that my present occupation overdetermines my
class allegiance, or even the extent to which I'm alienated from my
labor.  Even if it wasn't, that would just an example of class
differentiation, not the seperation of the intellectual from the
masses.

Then I thought that perhaps it was defined by the abstraction of an
"intellectual" political desire from the day-to-day needs and wants of
the working class.  But many of the people I know who would not be
labeled as intellectuals; mechanics, salesmen, retail clerks, factory
workers, waitresses, are quite capable of articulating their political
desires beyond the immediacy of their day-to-day needs.  So I felt
that was another dead-end.

-- 
Craig Brozefsky                             <craig@red-bean.com>
In the rich man's house there is nowhere to spit but in his face
					             -- Diogenes


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