The Accumulation of Slack :: Slacking Slack Slacker papers

The Accumulation of Slack I want to unhorse with an apology. This paper whitethorn be little more than a create from raw stuff of puns punctuated by obscure pagan texts. It was composed quickly after a late cancellation from this panel, I volunteered to pick up the slack. (Yes, that was the first pun.) Now, in priggish Freudian fashion, I will follow that apology with an accusation in 2003, the topic of slack culture sounds dangerously close to out of date, or at least out of fashion. We critics must have become slackers ourselves, kernel to re-analyze stale 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 not so simple. There is an advantage to a certain diachronic distance taken from ones subject, as it is especially easy for cultural reprehension to get caught up in fad-chasing. Rather than striving for a tauter, tighter continuative to the current moment, then, l ets enjoy the historical slack that has already accumulated among slacker culture and ourselves. If we wish to create more a definition of men than manners (35), then for us as newly out-of-date slacker scholars the same doctrine applies that Sir Walter Scott famously gave about the setting of his Waverley Considering the disadvantages intrinsic from this part of my subject, I must be understood to have obstinate to avoid them as much as possible (35). Unlike Scott we may not do this by throwing the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors (35) as Scott did. Instead, lets muddle for a moment on a question. What is slack? What is this substance that those lifelessly ironic slackers so earnestly want to accumulate? What are the structural characteristics of slack, considered as a substance circulated in a metaphorical or real economy? Should we seek slack, or avoid it? It seems to me that this set of questions is the outstrip way to approach a poli tical and economic evaluation of the slacker phenomenon. I want to suggest a few answers by reading material different 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 dynamic in cultural studies, in that the initially tempting, apparently Orthodox cultural-studies reading of slack (which I am about to construct) will deviate out to be precisely wrong in its zeal to check slack as a form of liberation.