marxist nerd adult comedy here

from an email list i won't name because i don't know who would or wouldn't want their identity revealed. and Human Subjects is the order of the day, people.

>From Engels: "Hungary, Poland and Russia are the only countries in Europe where invasion is impossible in winter."

Wow. If only Hitler had read some more Engels!

-(Poster 1).

^^^
(Poster 2): Actually, I'm kind of glad he didn't (smile).

prisonship self-cleaning survey utensil

is it more precious - more presumptuous - to describe your dreams or your bowel movements in conversation with another?

do you ever describe either? do you never describe neither? to how many people? are the people you talk to about "elimination" the same people you talk to about being back in junior high but, like, with elephant hands or whatever it is you people dream?

aren't dreams waste matter, or dirt (i.e., "matter out of place"), even if we mean "waste matter" in the elevated manner of Julia Kristeva's "abject?"

bonus points: who's ever dreamed of going to the bathroom? who hasn't? high praise to anybody who has fallen asleep (and dreamed a memorable dream) while going to the bathroom.

The Weeked Comes, The Cycle Hums

The paradox of class at the millennium, in sum, must be understood in these terms. Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions. While it can never fully succeed, its advance over the "long" twentieth century has profoundly altered, if unevenly in space and time, the phenomenology of being in the world. Formative experiences - like the nature of work and the reproduction of self, culture and community - have shifted. Once-legibile processes - the workings of power, the distribution of wealth, the meaning of politics and national belonging - have become opaque, even spectral. The contours of "society" blur, its organic solidarity disperses. Out of its shadows emerges a more radically individuated sense of personhood, of a subject built up of traits set against a universal backdrop of likeness and difference. In its place, to invert the old Durkheimian telos, arise collectivities erected on a form of mechanical solidarity in which me is generalized into we.

In this vocabulary, it is not just that the personal is political. The personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotioanl valence. By extension, interpersonal relations - above all, sexuality, from the peccadillos of presidents to the global specter of AIDS - come to stand, metonymically, for the incoate forces that threaten the world as we know it. It is in these privatized terms that action is organized, that the experience of inequity and antagonism takes meaningful shape.

- (from) John and Jean Comaroff, 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12(2):291.

Enabling, but not fully explicable

People’s practices have variable possibilities, democratic as well as nondemocratic. They draw their energies and orientations from the social imaginaries and institutional arrangements within which they are embedded at a given historical juncture. One might, following Charles Taylor, define “cultures of democracy” as a regional subset of the larger social imaginary, the enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents. This regional imaginary is further marked by the primacy of the “political” in a people’s engagement with the world. In our times, not abruptly but following an enduring historical trajectory, a people’s mode of being political is imagined and constituted primarily within a democratic idiom. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unshakable link forged since the onset of modernity between the idea of democracy and the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Therefore, the boundaries of the political, always under contestation but not always identical with the democratic, are expressed in and through the practices of the people. The stress on “practices” is deliberate because they are, aside from their pragmatic and phenomenological valence, inscribed with (as in a habitus) and articulate (as with symbolic forms) a people’s collective values, sentiments, and understandings (as with theories). In short, a people’s practices might be regarded as an indispensable hermeneutic key to deciphering their political imaginary.

- Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "On Cultures of Democracy" in Public Culture 19 (1).
(Note - I am okay moving from talking about "politics" to talking about "the political (as such)"... but I am not sure about the definite article in "the democratic.")