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eribrav: that's an interesting question to me, anyway, because it never crossed my mind to play the market. much of the way i am interested in the various constructs that we call "the economy" follows from my trying to wade into what i guess you'd call a "post-marxist" frame for radical political action. i put post-marxist in quotes because i don't really see what's taking shape conceptually as that oriented toward marx, but that's another matter. i come out of an academic background and am still a bit oriented toward producing at least some stuff in that space. so the markets i suppose i've played in are those in which types of writing circulate, and i've had some success in there. but i'm thinking about your question more as i write this. i wonder why you ask....
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a subtext in the op--which i had forgotten about---is (again) the problem of ideology or conceptual framing. the cyclical metaphors the article outlines and criticizes have the effect of evacuating the present, and as a consequence eliminating the open-endedness not just of this (at best) transitional phase in the ideological framing of the various modalities of capitalism.
organizationally these changes are well advanced and if there's a fundamental problem here it is that the implications of these organizational/geographical mutations have outstripped the conceptual spaces that had been used to deal-or more often not deal---with them, to think them out, to stage implications, to work out ways to address them---so political language, which links to wider conceptual games, cannot adequately stage the social world it confronts. it can't do it. we are in a fundamental cognitive problem. it's hard for me to see much coming of it other than more problems, deeper ones.
not only are the conceptual games in trouble, but the situation is compounded not only by the specific inabilities of the media apparatus to do anything beyond repeating the problem, but all the more by the tyranny of "the normal"---the requirement that continuity be asserted and maintained at the expense of questions that would disturb it. in this you see one of the basic political functions of contemporary mass media--the dissemination of reassurance through the construction of fictions of normalcy. apparently folk have come to rely on a basic underlying narrative of continuity relative to which all other narratives are staged (you know, stories about "problems" or "crises" or "tragedies" or whatever)...and the operating of the existing socio-economic order relies on this reliance. this was one of the incoherent criticisms of the dominant media floated from the right during the earlier phases of this transition--that the problem was the disruption of these continuity stories, which was creating what it purported to describe by bumming people out. it's almost like this idiotic interpretation got traction, so now we're in this bizarre space of enforced and largely fictional normalicy.
which has paralyzed efforts to actually address what is happening.
all we've seen is half-baked stop-gap moves whose entire purpose is to enable the reassertion of narratives of continuity.
this isn't over, btw.
i really see this as the united states moving through the period of collapse of empire, a sad, pathetic dreamspace in which no-one seems capable of looking at what's happening, everyone retreats into routine and hopes that what they sense might be the case turns out not to be the case. a world of denial and unmarked disintegration.
running away from the present, running away from all forms of open-endedness...
one of the best short views of this sort of situation with respect to the centrality of stories about normalcy is in "the harder they come" in the exchange between the head of studio one and the chief of police over the latter's plan to interrupt the top 40 to make an announcement about jimmy cliff's character, that he is a Wanted Man.
a fine long performance of the implosion of empire is robert musil's the man without qualities.
have a look at it sometime.
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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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