"We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of metropolitan modernity, more so even of post-modernity. In a consumer society, where general-purpose money has eaten away every bond of community, where alienation -- and even narcissism -- is defined as normalcy, where nature is seen as something apart from and below us, the very personhood of each of us is deracinated and left to drift through the retail landscape like a grieving banshee. Planned obsolescence applies even to our identities.
We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of superficiality, but those billions who are doing the paying -- far out of our reified view -- are getting a clearer idea all the time.
Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as disembedded as we like, but we are invariably physical -- diaphragms heaving incessantly, articulating gases in our guts, dissipating heat, concentrating urine, sloughing off dead cells, yawing and eating and scratching and sleeping and fucking and finally, dying."
--a Stan Goff, penning a piece that will doubtless get appreciative guffaws from the dimmer segments of the Frederic Jameson and Stanley Fish constellations.
Note: It gets more, er, embarrasing:
"I study Rosa Luxemburg, Alf Hornborg, Robert Connell, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mao Zedong… and I study the academic research and the social theory and science and philosophy. Because simply understanding the final argument of the gun is not enough. We soldiers need to understand before and after the gun, and we need to understand -- as much as we can -- where our personhood is rooted in social constructions and where society is rooted in the biosphere and how there is no clear line of demarcation between biology and symbols. We need the context.
So as a leftist I build this bridge toward my brothers and sisters under arms. I don’t judge… I can’t."
Don't, dear sir, don't!
Posted by Gregory Djerejian at April 13, 2004 11:47 PM