A little part of me dies on the inside everytime I admit to seeing this movie.

One of the arguments that Poster made that I was particularly fond of was that sometimes working within constraints (ie. “the system,” and yes I think the scare quotes are warranted in this case) is okay, productive, or even desirable. Poster writes that “the "postmodern" position need not be taken as a metaphysical assertion of a new age; that theorists are trapped within existing frameworks as much as they may be critical of them and wish not to be; that in the absence of a coherent alternative political program the best one can do is to examine phenomena such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our embeddedness in the present.” Sometimes leftist politics feels like it has become the Liberal Olympics – a test of who can stage the more radical revolution. It’s not that the rev is always bad and all but I think sometimes leftist politics forgets that sometimes you have to do your work while being “trapped within existing frameworks” and even resist and challenge those frameworks at the same time. It seems totally possible to me that a person challenge a system from within the confines of that system so long as they understand that they work within that system. I am much more troubled by the act of living in denial about how one is part of and sustains the systems which they challenge. Which reminds me of a scene in The Devil Wears Prada. I can’t find a clip of it online but I found the lines online here. The premise is that Fancy-pants designer Miranda hires not so fancy-pants Andy to be her assistant. Andy thinks (proudly) she is the antithesis of the fashion world. In this scene Miranda points out that despite her very intentional desire to resist the world of fashion, she is quite involved with it.

Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.