2006-11-21 - 3:35 p.m.
An urge for maintenance and preservation is not as strong as the desire to create or destroy, living away from that Tribe called Sweden anyway. I guess it all depends on what model exactly you're preserving by placing your hand over your heart.
Slavery was privatized and still is privatized. Subjecting citizens to the collective cruelty of people who have been abandoned by their mothers sounds like no paradise. The only answer would be when Hamlet says to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery." The best nunnery would still be a 19th Century Venetian one, meaning orphans coddled by the truths of whores.
Emerson's world of self-reliance where everybody would be free to be their own poet. How many francs must your dead father leave for that? Where's Waldo? Being resurrected by suits.
This congress is called a lame-duck congress. First of all, why is the press still comfortable using the word lame? Secondly, why must everything always change? Things can change for the bad just as quickly as for the good. If something good is in place, say the Constitution, then it doesn't need change frequently, spaced-out modifications is all that piece of hemp-parchment needed.
The notion of privacy was about as bourgeois as marriage and love. The irony of privacy is the more it's name is invoked as the high good, the more it recedes. The only privacy needed is a small room to go record the joys of the group but it's true when there is no group and your room is hell, the idea of privacy would only be disconcerting. Low-earning workers take the bourgeois notion of privacy to their paycheck stubs, nobody is willing to discuss it. Keeping secrets is good for keeping power but when you have no power why keep secrets? When secrets are unleashed in the form of earnings and an awareness of uneveness in working volumes, this may incite rebellion, caused by an awareness of expoitation.
In a free-society everything must be kept a secret when there are no longer any secrets. The public is monitored, mailed traffic-violations because of an increase in frequency of power-concentrated gazes. The ticket comes after the person is caught speeding off to shift work. The money goes back to fund the power. Private-life is morally dictated, the state must intervene and limit, medicalize, legalize relations in order to sanction a limitation of jouissance, the realization of which, might cause a decrease in shopping. What is kept up, is the illusion of privacy and control. The lower classes monitor and criticize celebrities (those modern aristocrats) as if to demonstrate and participate in exposing their practices while the true forms of power are happy to have the public distracted. If the public had more time to speak with one another and not fear their fellow citizens (who more than likely want to eat them for supper owing to the bi-monthly cannibal stories) it might potentially expose the secrets and power concentrations that really cause personal deprivations, the thing that drives them into the pallid, low-calorie pleasures of celebrity worship in the first place.
Worship in the form of religion, state or individual people is the lowest form of self-disintegration and oddly enough speeds up as self-help books become popularized. The notion that the individual should be able to help themselves was the promise of liberal Enlightenment thought, but when America (like the future Iran) became a group of individual-specialists, cut off from the collective, ideas of the good-life have turned into commodification fetishes. When autonomy recedes, you try to save it by resurrecting the words of people who wrote in a very different social environement or by placing the concept on a pedestal next to some award that accompanies a coupon.
Art survives in commodity form but it still carries out it's intial and most sublime purposes, like philosophy, as critisism. If art is able to be critical of the current path of society in serious, ironic and comedic ways, then not all is lost. The danger is that popular novels like to go along with fear-mongering, creating characters who are filled with perverse sexual fantasies and just happen to also be poor. Poverty no longer exists, this is not to say in the same way that original blues music did not exist, I mean that, in order to escape poverty, the person must not actually escape poverty but instead escape the signs of poverty. The body as a semiotic structure, oft betrays the signs of class. Grooming habits, ways of speaking, body gestures are perhaps more difficult to overcome but the fashioned body, even the cyborg body can help overcome the more insidious class signs.
By purchasing the signs that are not the truth, the vortex is escaped, without the "purchasing power" the cocky kayaker is sucked back into the void, probably until the Messiah comes.
In a free society, you can never be sure of yourself, despite what Dr. Phil says. At any minute, disaster could strike. One broken arm without health-insurance, good luck. The teleology of the Judeo-Christian system requires, neccesitates some sort of disguised rapture in the form of apocolypse...and so when you read a story, anticipating the end, the story might be so disappointing (no conclusion) that you'll try to make one up anyway. There was a beginning and so there must be a conclusion according to that tradition that undergirds everything from Congress to Romantic Comdies. As the teachers at writing schools say, if the character does not undergo some kind of transcendence or at least change, then was it really a story? Even the author will not feel that the story is good sometimes and so the reader can be sure to follow. It comes as a vague feeling, "something just doesn't seem right."
