Plumtree's Potted Meat is a tumblelog.

Couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” Foucault asks hopefully. Yes, no doubt, but as Alex Callinicos observes, “To invite a hospital porter in Birmingham, a car-worker in São Paulo…or a street child in Bombay to make a work of art of their lives would be an insult—unless linked to precisely the kind of strategy for global social change which…poststructuralism rejects.” Truly, poststructuralism’s critique of modernity (for instance, Foucault on liberal penality) towers over its normative vision, with its pathetic appeals to…the pleasures of capitalist spectacle, and an aesthetics of existence redolent of the second cappuccino before the seminar.

James Holstun, from “Foucault, the New Historicism, and the Base Curiosity of the Plebs.” This, from an article that earlier used the phrase “the salon fascism of Yeats and Marinetti,” is the first time I’ve ever truly LOL’d from an assigned article (for both the truth and hilarity of this quotation).