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it does not bode well if it's the case that meta-questions (why do you think as you do about the world? why do you construct an imaginary world in that way so as to be symmetrical with that thinking? etc) cannot be answered within the realm of political discourse.
it means that political discourse has been reduced to a commodity, something that's about some fatuous bourgeois notion of "identity" in the way trainers are in the way shampoo is. it also means that we operate in a context that has nothing at all to do with democracy or anything remotely like it.
we're in some consumerist soft authoritarian set-up, a kind of extended experiment in advanced neo-colonialism with an exacerbated version of the political problem that neo-colonialism puts into motion--diffusion of the Other, diffusion of power. from which follows a diffusion of any coherent oppositional political orientation. not to speak about outrageous things like movements.
it's a sad situation, one that seems more or less characteristic of fading empires, that there is a point at which political discourse turns to wood or to mud and leaks back down onto the people who articulate themselves and their sense of the world through it, that the dynamism of meanings slows that people retreat from the open-endedness of being-in-the-world and shut themselves up in a version of the Stable, the Identical With Itself, the picture-world...
personally, i think all discourse is political one way or another, even an imploded political discourse is political to the extent that it represents/performs the results of shifts in social/cultural arrangements around that discourse (which would be caused to implode, which would not simply implode)
but if we can't address meta-problems from inside a political discourse then it's pretty clear that the particular political discourse (that we live inside of) has become a form of domination, one in which we are commanded to talk about how free we are and how happy everything is within the warm glow of that freedom and how that glow draws Everybody from Everywhere to want to Come Here in the way any other steaming load of shit draws flies.
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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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