That’s how I ran my PhD seminars back in the USA. The title of the first seminar may as well have been “who fucking cares?”

One approach is to skip the stance that your work is “political” but another is to make it political in some other way.

Exactly. Generally speaking, works in the humanities or parahumanities aren’t going to have directly political effect. So you have to think about other ways, their reasonableness, their possible / probably efficacy.

Actually, I’m going to return to your comment in a post – hopefully this morning if I get a chance.

Joy Division vs. Morrisey? That’s a pub conversation I was having 20 years ago!

I don’t think that overstating your contribution is going to change, I do think that there might be more convincing models than the older discursive/cultural ones.

It will not change that you hope your book is a smash hit and changes everyone and everything, but it will probably not be, and yet still it might matter in some way.

We could write a different intro / conclusion argument than “this will fight biopower / neoliberalism / technology / humanism”. One approach is to skip the stance that your work is “political” but another is to make it political in some other way. The dominant line at this time remains that culture and discourse are where practices/representations/ideology subsist, so there is some agency at those locations. This is why I consider Judith Butler’s work important at all (rather than totally overly legalistic and textual), because it intervenes at the level of language and representation where a considerable amount of the problem actually is.

Now I’m imagining a helpful seminar that would be called “who cares?” and would have, as reading, one essay that had a point that was valid (eg zombie movies have some relationship to colonialism and work and debt) and then the rest is all different ways to recuperate that fun stuff into Impacts In The World.

I often think of the idea that poetry can be taken up by a movement, as one of the weakest possible defenses of why we should make poetry. Like I should go to the store in case I am hit by a car and then get to sue and win a pile of money.

“the time is right for new narratives to be developed and propagated [just not by us].”

I’m going to return to the issue of the list in a later post. It’s more complicated than both of us are making it.. You do have a really good point, but there’s more to be said…

I agree with you about your list…