The Accumulation of Slack :: Slacking Slack Slacker papers

The Accumulation of Slack I want to begin with an apology. This newsprint may be little more than a tissue of puns punctuated by obscure cultural texts. It was composed quickly after a new cancellation from this panel, I volunteered to pick up the loose. (Yes, that was the first pun.) Now, in proper Freudian fashion, I will follow that apology with an accusation in 2003, the study of shirker culture sounds dangerously close to turn up of date, or at least out of fashion. We critics must have become shirkers ourselves, content to re-analyze piddle fads when we ought to be braving untrammeled new ground with the gender politics of Eminem, or the fetish scene of American Idol. But fortunately things are non so simple. There is an advantage to a certain historical outgo taken from ones subject, as it is especially easy for cultural criticism to ticktock caught up in fad-chasing. Rather than striving for a tauter, tighter connection to the sure mo ment, then, lets enjoy the hi storical slack that has already accumulated between slacker culture and ourselves. If we wish to create more a description of men than manners (35), then for us as newly outdated slacker scholars the same doctrine applies that Sir Walter Scott famously gave about the setting of his Waverley Considering the disadvantages inseparable from this luck of my subject, I must be understood to have resolved to obviate them as much as possible (35). Unlike Scott we may non do this by throwing the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors (35) as Scott did. Instead, lets fix for a moment on a enquiry. What is slack? What is this substance that those devilishly ironical slackers so earnestly want to accumulate? What are the structural characteristics of slack, considered as a substance circulated in a metaphorical or sure economy? Should we seek slack, or avoid it? It seems to me that this set of questions is the best federal agency to approach a political and e conomic evaluation of the slacker phenomenon. I want to suggest a few answers by recital contrastive representations of the economy of slack, along with some familiar Marxist cultural criticism. The question of the political economy of slack is an excellent example of a broader dynamical in cultural studies, in that the initially tempting, apparently orthodox cultural-studies reading of slack (which I am about to construct) will turn out to be precisely wrong in its zeal to construe slack as a form of liberation.