parody blaawg review: blaawg theory by Dejan

As the proletars of the future, we must resist the easy temptation of the web's obsessive cycles, pointless debates, feedback loops and highly addictive porno. As dr. Fossey succintly explains, these things CORRUPT the pure proletarian heart, whose historic Revolutionary Desire dissolves in the internet's diabolical circuits - the drives of seduction, hedonism, tits, ass, and fornication.

Distracted by this virtual capitalist Sodom, we as the proletar subjects of the future fail on our historic mission - mounting the Resurrection of Comrade Stalin from the love handles of Comrade Slavoy Zizek. We DEVIATE, comrades and comradesses, from the path of freedom. Instead of washing our own laundry, we allow the corrupted Capitalist Machine to do it for us.

What's clever about Dejan's parody is that it doesn't just exaggerate Jodi Dean's analysis, but it exaggerates one aspect while forgetting about another aspect.

Essentially, the parody sets up a contrived choice for the sociologist studying American people, between seeing Americans as:

a. dispossessed and disenfranchised proletars

or

b. comfortable and enfranchised citizens

Jodi Dean's picture of Americans as belonging to category a. is portrayed as ridiculous (I don't know if this is Dean's real position: I haven't read her book. I'm just going by the parody). Consequently category b. ought to be correct. But really, somewhere in the middle would be more correct, because most Americans don't have real political representation, and quite a few are really immiserated. The desire for middle class Americans to have political representation really doesn't necessitate them identifying themselves with nineteenth century factory workers.

But, in a daring dialectical twist, Dejan pretends to have forgotten that Dean's apparent category of barelife proletars presupposes a social technology productive of a proletarariat. A second contrived choice is established concerning the degree of autonomy of Americans, who might be:

a. free to choose freely

or

b. constrained in their choices

Dejan allows that Dean's analysis assumes a. rather than b. and that the Americans really want everything they get, from spectacular wars for the benefit of Dick Cheney to abstract digi porn. They are no longer interested in sex with other humans, prefering the endless autistic reprogramming of the fragments of the human sexual past. In reality, most Americans must be fairly constrained in their choices, but some of them probably do really want it.

If we map Dejan's categories onto the sexuation graph, you can see what I mean.