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partly, i liked the davis piece for the grand canyon thing at the start--the inability to process it, the difficulties with getting a sense of dimension to something that is, in a sense, right in front of you. at one level, the story is about the kantian sublime, that sense of falling when confronted with the really fucking big. but at the other, wedged into the piece, it's about the outstripping of a conceptual apparatus by the emergence of the new. that's more or less how i have been thinking about the mutation that's underway in the ideological and material organizations of contemporary capitalism--that we're in a strange period of a kind of collective cognitive dissonance--not so much that the mutation in the ordering regimes is like the grand canyon relative to the sensibilities of the first people who saw it, but more that the mutation is as much a frame of reference problem as it is a material/organizational one and that frame of reference problem is what is primarily being performed. like across the board.
it includes the observer.
so don't think any off the shelf approach is going to be coherent, but at the same time it's difficult to imagine what the alternatives really are---elements taken from what has worked in the past will probably be cobbled together and that cobbling together will produce an assemblage that will bit by bit produce the constraints that will enable the fabrication of slightly different assemblages that will sooner or later begin to work out a different logic for thinking the overarching organizations of what exists. another way of saying this---one of the many assumptions that's been eaten away of late is that there is a Leader who surfaces with an Alternative Way of Seeing fully developed inside that Special Skull which is connected to some God and which will "save us"---so the modality of staging the political process particular to, say, television (which is the central ideological relay system in the states) has been outstripped, but it persists nonetheless--and you see it unfolding--the 2 year obsession with the sporting-event/election has in a sense an extended exercise in adapting patterns of legitimation by staging them as now located in the transition out of the bush administration. the consequence of that is the euphoria surrounding obama's election--not because he necessarily has a better idea of how to proceed than anyone else, but rather because he now embodies a legitimacy that had been transferred into the movement-out-from-under the bush period---which is also why i think a mc-cain victory would have been a Problem, and a Big Problem. an unintended consequence of this is the opening of a space in the context of which mutation and the reassertion of the same are coterminous. in that way, the development of ideological assemblages as a mode of collective coping can happen within the existing system, but with consequences for the ways in which the world is staged that i think are being ignored up to this point.
i think this makes sense....
in this context, i think the social movements that zinn dreams of would function mostly as the left traditionally functioned within capitalism, as an external feedback loop. a counter-discourse or discourses stretches the boundaries of the dominant discourses, provides them with space to not only be relativized (and with that opens the possibility of being overthrown) but to operate with sets of co-ordinates outside itself that can be adopted as an aspect of system adjustment. this function is what i think the american hysterical fear of the left has always missed about it---and it is a function that i don't think many social movements, particularly not more revolutionary movements (once they exist)--find a rewarding element in imagining what they are about and what they do.
but they're necessary, it seems to me, as laboratories almost.
so i think this stuff points toward a scenario that can at least be thought about as the american ideological monocropping system falls in on itself at the level of cognitive framing devices...
i think obama and the new administration is in a far better position to act constructively within this situation than a republican administration would have been.
i think also that the politics of spectatorship need to end.
i gotta go.
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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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