Cain contra LMNO

[Cain]

Unfortunately, it appears LMNO remain wedded to a theoretical model that fails to serve the ends of a genuinely liberatory scholarship but rather produces one more tired iteration of essentialist, fundamentally patriarchal discursive modalities.

LMNO (and their soi-disant "radical" cohort) make quite a show of celebrating the inherently disruptive cultural productions of the Paleo-Erisian Internet (PEI), particularly those regarding dissolute Bostonians and their impertinent Rhode Island interlocutors. However, these sorts of ostensibly emancipatory critical reconstructions in the final analysis remain quite literally toothless. As they must. A scholarly praxis capable of truly interrogating the vexed interrelationship between the dominant MSM narrative and the unruly linguistic subversions of the PEI would surely not rely upon a oversimplified binary construction of "give and take" as occurs in LMNO' strained cultural archeology. Rather, what is needed is an approach that is rhizomic, palimpsestic, that produces a critical problematic instead of yet another instantiation of an illusory teleology which, for all its triumphalism, ultimately denies agency and authentic subjectivity to those subaltern voices it allegedly intends to champion. It smacks of nothing so much as a muddled intentionalism.

What would LMNO make of the following specimen retrieved from the as yet underexplored trove of documents pertaining to Charlie Brooker's TV Go Home site -- a resource of whose existence LMNO seem wholly unaware, despite their self-claimed "expertise" in this area? Yet here we see on display all the commitment to social justice, swearing, and mockery that in truth characterized this moment in history. It is in this direction that future scholarly effort must be directed, not into the fallow fields of a sprezzatura entirely devoid of jouissance.

[LMNO]

Egads!  A broadside across the bow!



Your Anglophilic diatribes will not prevent my retaliation!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Oh, this ought to be good.   

[LMNO]

Cain seeks to protect himself against the overpowering forces of nature. This he achieves—subjectively though not objectively—by mysticism, superstition and animistic concepts of natural processes, including his inner, psychic processes. Thus Cain believes himself able to increase soil fertility by erecting phallic sculptures or to banish draught by urinating.

This situation remains basically unaltered until, at the close of the Middle Ages, the ancient beginnings of a scientific comprehension of nature took on a serious character and began to threaten mysticism. In the course of the great bourgeois revolution a violent battle broke out against religion and for rationalism: The time approached when science would be able to replace mysticism in explaining nature, and when techniques would be able to replace it in satisfying the human need for protection (second phase).

But after that, Cain, once he had come to power, turned around and created a contradiction in the cultural process: On the one hand, he furthered scientific research with all possible means, because it advanced economic development; on the other hand, Cain turned mysticism into the most powerful tool for the suppression of millions of wage earners (third phase). This contradiction finds its tragicomic expression in such things as scientific films on "Nature and Love" in which each section has two series of titles, such as: "The earth developed over millions of years due to mechanical and chemical cosmic processes," and below that, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

And there sit the learned academicians, astronomers and chemists, placidly watching this idyllic harmony, convinced by Cain that "religion also has its good sides." They are living examples of the separation of theory and practice. The consistent keeping away of scientific findings from the masses of people, and "monkey trials" as they occurred in the USA, create and maintain humility, lack of criticism, renunciation and hope for happiness in a hereafter, belief in authority, recognition of the holiness of asceticism and the inviolability of the authoritarian family.

The freethinker movement cannot make itself felt as a counterforce because it uses inadequate means; that is, only intellectual arguments. Cain, on the other hand, enjoys the support of the state power and bases its mass-psychological influence on the most powerful emotion, sexual anxiety and sexual repression. This powerful emotional influence has no counterweight of even an approximately equal strength.

To the extent to which the freethinkers engage in sexual policy, they do it again intellectually and usually within the narrow limits of population politics. At best, they include the advocation of economic equality of woman. But this has no effect against Cain's powers of mysticism on a mass basis for in the majority of women the will to economic independence is unconsciously inhibited by the fear of the responsibility for sexual freedom which inevitably goes hand in hand with economic independence. The difficulties of handling these emotional situations force the revolutionary freethinkers to push into the background the questions of "Weltanschauung." They feel that treating these questions often results in the exact opposite of what was intended. This standpoint is justified in that there is no emotional force of corresponding power with which to oppose mysticism.

[Triple Zero]

Cain, I think he just called you a Pagan hippie.

I'm not entirely sure, though.

to you both, anyway