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there is this naive perkiness concerning class here, the kind of thing that confuses the possibility that you have of getting into a car and driving from one spatial expression of social class in the states to another with class mobility. its a version of the stuff that garrison keilor makes fun of whe he introduces lake woebegone, the place where "everyone is above average"....it doesnt say much of anything about class from an analytic viewpoint, but says a whole lot about how class is staged ideologically in the states.
ideologically in the marxist sense of the term, the crudest marxist sense, the one that means "false consciousness".
on the other hand, it is i suppose possible to live entirely within that ideology. if it wasnt, it'd just collapse.
so when i see these "whaddya going to do?" memes, i kinda laugh.
if you need them to maintain a certain optimism, then go for it i guess.
on the other hand, when i think about making stuff as a device to maintain curiousity about the world, i am engaging in an act of sublimation (freudian term. warning will robinson) as well. and while at the political level, i can say that i prefer one form of sublimation to another and can present a raft of arguments to back it up, emotionally i am not sure which one is better really. or even if the question of which is better makes any sense.
basically, i think strange famous is right above.
but this is not an actual conversation about class as a category: its about maintaining a distance on what you find around you that you think wrong or abhorrent so that you dont make what you think or say self-defeating because you become a vacuum, a tedious element in the great "everything sucks school," mister or ms buzzkill, the drag at every event.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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