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Underground > Head Shop >

Loltheorists [PICS]

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Disco is My Class War

15:37 / 22.05.07

My fellow Head Shoppians, it is my duty and my great honour to introduce you to Loltheorists. We are taking requests, and if you are yourself of the lol-making kind, you could do no better than to contribute, here or in the livejournal community itself.

It all began with Marx, here, but obviously that was troll kitteh, not theorist kitteh. So we migrated to livejournal.

A better use of a fellow's PhD stipend was never found.

17:38 / 22.05.07

17:57 / 22.05.07

All Acting Regiment

18:38 / 22.05.07

On the one hand, LOL. On the other, er, less than super use of the headshop here, guys. Conversation, please? Unless we're talking aobut ways of sumarising a theorist's main points. Even so.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:50 / 22.05.07

I'm sorry; fond as I am of teh lolz, I'm going to have to put in for a move. I do hope you don't mind.

21:36 / 22.05.07

Kittehgenstein accedes to your will.

21:58 / 22.05.07

IZE DISRUPTIN UR KLASS WIV LOJIK!!

23:07 / 22.05.07

23:19 / 22.05.07

23:20 / 22.05.07

WTF?!!?! FUKIN NETCHZA CRSP0ST!

UR IN MI BASE STEELIN ORL MY THOGHTS!!?!?@

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

23:31 / 22.05.07

23:41 / 22.05.07

Disco is My Class War

05:36 / 23.05.07

I'm really sad that this thread got moved. Right now the Head Shop is full of threads which don't seem to engage at all with anything critical, let alone encourage people to take on philosophy/theory stuff as fun or related to their actual lives. Most HS threads are slow-moving and they don't seem to spark people up, asidfe from the occasional troll or contentious thread.

Besides, who says that Kitteh theorist pics are 'not serious', or not designed to be theoretical? Surely the goal is to make one's pics relevant, as a ludic-but-serious interpretation of someone's work, legible in themselves.

I'm not having a go at the mods who asked for this to be moved, but I think it should be moved back. If threads like this were encouraged to take place there, maybe the Head Shop would actually show some signs of life again, rather than this snail's pace descent into emptiness.

I guess I feel pretty territorial about the Head Shop, and sad that it's not a space I feel like contributing to much anymore, and this was my way of attempting to liven things up. Evidently the desire to keep everything in its proper place -- humour in the Conversation, 'serious stuff' in the Head Shop' -- is more important. But I really disagree with it.

06:15 / 23.05.07

Would you consider any of the above to be a fair-minded critique of say, Marx or Nietzche's work, though?

All right, they set themselves up as 'philosophers', they had so-called 'big ideas', they wouldn't have known a good time at the fun pub, or McDonalds, or Pizza Express if it had bitten them in the ass, the old fuddy-duddies, but still, must they be pilloried for this?

I'm not entirely sure if even Albert Speer deserves the lolcats treatment.

Disco is My Class War

08:14 / 23.05.07

Why do you assume that making lolspampics of major theorists is dissing them?

I love Nietzsche and Marx. I doubt that anyone dorky enough to want to make these pretty obscure graphic jokes would really do it for malicious purposes. But hey, if you feel that you have to defend the poor philosophers and their sepia images, go right ahead. Then we really can have a discussion about whether one can communicate Marx's position on the Paris Commune in Kitteh. I'm up for it.

Disco is My Class War

08:20 / 23.05.07

Also, if anyone had called Marx a philosopher he would have laughed in their face.

08:49 / 23.05.07

I think Marx might have sighed quietly, really - he had bigger fish to fry.

That said, I'd be totally up for a discussion about Marx's position wrt the Paris Commune, in lolcat - It's not something I know too much about, to be honest, but I can learn, I can grow.

In the meantime, while I'm attempting to get up to speed, I think this would be an excellent subject for Barbelith to get its teeth into; THEYS WANTED TO SIT AT THE HI TABLE, AND ATE THE FUD, BUT WAS THEYS DOING THE RIGHT THING? And such.

08:55 / 23.05.07

(Not meaning to seem sarcastic, there - the debate in question could, quite conceivably, be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.)

14:28 / 23.05.07

IF U CARNT HAEV FUN WIV A THEERIE IT AYNT WORF SHIT

13:22 / 25.05.07

If threads like this were encouraged to take place there, maybe the Head Shop would actually show some signs of life again, rather than this snail's pace descent into emptiness.

A kind of weird second life, or afterlife, perhaps the period of quiescence was a cocoon, the old HS was just a larval stage and it's becoming something new and different. A moth, perhaps, or a theory heavy facebook.

Anyway heer iz ma lol theerist;

14:14 / 25.05.07

All Acting Regiment

14:40 / 25.05.07

In a world in which we are encouraged to mock and disregard these people by Capital, creating silly meme pictures out of them simply goes along with the status quo.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:11 / 25.05.07

I can't tell whether you're serious of not, Ex-Legba.

15:17 / 25.05.07

16:17 / 25.05.07

16:20 / 25.05.07

lolcat as speech function - is what is truly being signified part of the utterance, or is it an invisible set of contextual clues?

And if the latter, can there be consensus as to what these clues indicate?

Is it truly a form of ridicule? How is this ridicule constituted?

Ex

16:29 / 25.05.07

Allecto - believe me, a trepidation about the commercialisation and disempowered circulation of radicalism-as-image is preventing me from cracking open the fonts on Audre Lorde, as we speak. (I have no idea if you're serious, but what the heck.)
bell hooks said, and it often gives me pause, "Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive." I have no idea whether she'd find my reduction and re-circulation of her stuff in lol form as co-opted.

There's also a whole thing about gender theory in particular as image, and in gender and race theory of bodies as intrusively present for female theorists - Gloria Steinem grabbed more attention as a feminist than less 'presentable' women, Dworkin's appearance is often attacked as though it were an element, or a demonstration, of the wrongness of her writing, Angela Davies becomes a posterchild for a particular politics but more people see her picture (and read things into her picture) than read her writing.

So I've been mainly lolling things which seem less problematic to reduce to images (who knows what Martin Heidegger looks like? Sorry, Heidegger fans) or things which I like and support.

Which is a shame, because my fingers are itching to produce 'MASTERZ TOOLZ?! NU-UH'.

16:47 / 25.05.07

For the Classics majors.

Oh, man.

K ΘΞ βαι

16:50 / 25.05.07

who knows what Martin Heidegger looks like? Sorry, Heidegger fans

Curiously enough, a bit like a Nietzsche with a smaller mustache (at least in his younger years).

Visual text.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:29 / 25.05.07

Is it truly a form of ridicule? How is this ridicule constituted?

It is possibly a form of ridicule, in that Kitteh, with its resemblance to the early efforts of a small child to learn language, could be seen as infantilising--a common technique used to dismiss an opponant. Reducing your interlocutor to the level of a child (ill-informed, irrational, incapable of expressing meaningful ideas) etc.

18:19 / 25.05.07

But are the theorists interlocutors?

And if not them, then are their ideas interlocutors?

*

18:45 / 25.05.07

Even ridicule is a form of dialectic.

Kitteh also functions to render harmless ideas which may be seen as threatening by translating them into a structure which is familiar in two senses—both an oft-used meme, and speech so informal as to be seen as infantilising.

19:37 / 25.05.07

Kitteh FT disarmamentz of ideez!

(0r teh empowrzment ov them!!1! if we can wantz hav them az owrz plz!?!)

20:54 / 25.05.07

But in the case of a theorist, is it a translation, or simply a referring-back-to?

20:57 / 25.05.07

In other words, is it disarmament or dissemination?

I often find the two go hand in hand, but I'm still not sure what to make of that.

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