Utopian-Sized Irritation

I was reading this book that I need to review. It made me a little bit mad, being yet another one of those books that goes on and on about ‘potential’ for change, to be found in some elitist practice or other. This practice (or: ‘set of practices’) supposedly leads naturally to a new way of perceiving, usually now rendered through the very fashionable categories of ‘arts of the self’, ‘technologies of the self’ or ‘enchantment’, and then – oh l‡ l‡… siehe da, fiat lux, and change just happens magically. Lacking imagination, I am not sure how we get from the ‘potential’ to actuality, and no one even loses a sentence about this. It is like having a talent for violin-playing, nurtured between the age of 8 and the onset of teenagerhood, and selling oneself as the world’s greatest revelation on the classical violin. You will agree it takes a bit more.
The larger context was, and here is why I thought the book might be interesting, that our choices of consumption and our loyalty and, yay, ‘activism’ (entre guillemets) to certain causes and organisations will change both (behold!) the (survival) problems medium-sized agricultural/food producers face both in the north and the south (not to speak of the excessive power the food industry has gained), and the environmental problems industrial agriculture is causing. The book proceeded to avoid mentioning just how this is done for this respective organisation, and circled around the consumer’s need for (listen to this) heightened pleasure in her life, trailing a whole array of great thinkers’ opinion on pleasure. Grrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Call me an old cynic in the wrong place (a village in Romania, in case you forgot) for even considering political change as needing a bit more than that– I think I may have said to some of you, I got the fieldwork I deserved: with my obsession of the state, and politics, I ended up in a place where this has not so much importance not so much as a good in itself, but with reference to the question as to how to best circumvent the laws that emanate therefrom, in the light of them lacking enforcement and control of a (relatively) inefficient (some would say, corrupt) state (this is the rage-shell writing, and she gives a f*** about style and won’t apologise about it!).
Call me middle class, but I keep believing quite in spite of myself sometimes in some kind of public sphere that is not collapsing into private interests all the time, and from which somehow people can manage to find, if not consensus, the law of the strongest, or, lacking fist power, the boring majority. And thus, I find considerations that seek change separated from the legislative body, or, at least, involving some non-governmental lobbying body that respects itself, irritating, especially if they use a fizzy quasi-new age vocabulary. I also find Habermas and critical theorists irritating, mind you!
Call me a never-quite-happy cow, but I find that a lot of academics are too much in this kind of vocabulary and they annoy me a lot, especially if they call themselves anthropologists (which, to be fair, the people from the review did not). I am excited about the many ways in which I will break this promise I now make to myself in my thesis and in the long string of books to follow thereafter, haha. No-nonsense anthropology is the ultimate goal, not self-titillation.
And no, I will not tell you the title of the book, because you will laugh at me for agreeing to review it… hehe! And like any academic-en-herbe, I do not like to be laughed at, especially at moments of scepticism as far as my proposed career path is concerned. No, I do not want to really be an academic, I am just doing a PhD because I like the immediacy of its returns! Honestly. Yours, rant-shell, still really interested in how social change works, and secretly laughing at how worked up she can get over books about utopia…

P.S. I ended up being a lot nicer in the review and a bit overly aware of my attitude of rejection. Not a good way to read an argument if you’re already against everything they’re going to say, just because you don’t like a certain bit of their framework…