Recording Surface

From David Graeber’s “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years“: (more…)

Doesn’t it seem like kids’ movies, or those movies marketed as kids’ movies, are the only ones really interested in depicting and scrutinizing what it means to work? (more…)

While I’ve been working through most of Faulkner’s novels — the latest was Light in August, which lacks the formal inventiveness of his most famous books but, especially in its exposition of race in the interwar South, is as good as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying — I’ve also been reading some of the Faulkner criticism published in the last decade. Surprisingly, to me at least, the work is generally pretty vibrant. (more…)

(Since I’ve been reading the proprietor of Yoknapatawpha County a lot lately, I’m instituting a new feature: Tuesday Faulkner. But please, as with most things around here, don’t expect any regularity.)

Under English common law, people seeking immunity from prosecution could find refuge in a church, where they could safely stay for up to forty days, after which time they had to declare either their innocence, in which case they would face a trial, or their guilt, which earned them eternal banishment from the country. Both the sacred place of refuge and the legal process became known as sanctuary, which of course derives from the Latin word sanctus, meaning holy. Sanctuary, then, was the place and the process in which the accused were afforded a respite from the law, in which the holy entity of the church suspended the state’s juridical functioning. (more…)

I watched the Clinton-Obama debate last night, the first one I’ve tuned in for. It’s pretty funny to see the two of them trying to convice people that there are actual differences between them when clearly there aren’t: both are DLC-beholden, centrist Bill Clinton-oids. Which is to say, ideal CEOs of the neoliberal state. The candidates themselves think that their positions on health care are, as Obama said last night, “substantively different.” Indeed. Clinton’s plan makes people who are unemployed or don’t receive insurance from their employers buy government insurance that they can’t afford so that they can pay copays they can’t afford so that they can maybe eventually receive care from a doctor. Obama wouldn’t make people buy government insurance and take on the burden of premiums and copays, but if they don’t and they show up at an emergency room to receive treatment, they will be fined, severely, as he made clear last night. These are the politics that are inspiring such great passion among Democrats this year.

(As an aside, it’s hilarious to hear Clinton rail against medical profiteering, since the lone accomplishment of her health-care reforms of the early 90s was to set in motion the process by which HMOs and drug companies, those mind-bogglingly profitable administrators of life and death in the United States, came to rule the delivery of health care.)

Some people think it’s significant that the two finalists for the Democratic nomination are a woman and a black man. Apparently the candidates don’t, as race and sex seem to be off-limits topics for them. That is, unless you count Obama’s passing references to his growing up without a father (read: I’m just like every other black person) or Clinton’s intimations about her essentially nurturing nature (read: I’m just like every other woman) as vigorous discussions of race and sex. Obviously, I do think race and sex are significant, but the discursive terrain on which this discussion is taking place is so debased and idiotic — Clinton’s voters and supporters are racists, and Obama’s voters and supporters are sexists — that it’s hard to find any purchase that doesn’t entail buying into the banality. The debate about the intersections of race and sex inspired by Clinton-Obama, a debate that should be about difference and dissenion, has already, in its singular way, erased difference and dissension. It’s now about who is the better American.

The Thomas Frank inside of me wants to get worked up about the awfulness of the Democrats. But that would be insincere. They are, after all, just doing their job. It would be like getting angry at leopards because they have spots.

Anyone visited Generation Online lately? I was able to load a page on Thursday, but when I tried to reload on Saturday because of a program crash, I got the message that’s still up there today. I’ll be very, very sad if this is a permanent thing.

Famous Names edition: (more…)

Sorry for the lack of posting. I’ve been working on a couple of Big Things, but I’ve also gotten out of the habit of writing regularly. So over the next few days I’m going to post a series of little things. They’ll probably be fragmented, not comprehensive, and incomplete and have blind spots, but hopefully they’ll be coherent. Just experiments to get myself back into shape. First one coming shortly.

My regular erratic posting will resume shortly. Promise. I’ve spent the last ten days or so preparing for, taking, and recovering from a trip, and just now I’ve returned home after taking a kid to the emergency room. But things should return to normal now. And I can resume posting, which will almost certainly include something about The Departed, which I watched, finally, last night.

Meantime, if you are smart, you’ll read Roughtheory’s fabulous series of posts on the first chapter of Capital, the latest of which here, and Scandalum Magnatum’s insightful notes on Keynes, the latest of which is here.

Things I’ve read recently:

The Commoner’s new(ish) Editor’s Blog has a report on Mario Tronti’s talk at the Historical Materialism conference, though it’s really more of a critique of the messianism in some theories of the multitude. And speaking of an “emphasis on processes rather than mainly on goals,” Zapagringo notes the one-year anniversary of the forming of Regeneracion, a “revolutionary childcare” organization in New York City. And speaking of commons, Anne Nimus has a fine article about copyrights and how the Creative Commons repeats Romanticism: “In an uncanny repetition of the copyright struggles that first emerged during the period of Romanticism, the excesses of the capitalist form of intellectual property are opposed, but using its own language and presuppositions. Creative Commons preserves Romanticism’s ideas of originality, creativity and property rights, and similarly considers “free culture” to be a separate sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world of material production. Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of “creativity” and “originality” have been inextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commons is no exception.” (via nettime)

Meanwhile, Blair and Howard have had it with migrants and their ways (via here and here, respectively).