jane dark's sugarhigh!

passage from mike davis interview

From "Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control":

There is absolutely no reformist government anywhere in the world that can deal with the serious and major issues of urban inequality, because it will not take on property values, land inflation etc. Until you start talking about confiscating the incriminating land value or socialising land or systems of limited equity in land, you cannot control the city, you cannot achieve any real equality in it.

basic questions for marxist literary analysis

Is M-C-M' a narrative motion? The answer to this question is not at all as apparent as it may first appear.

One might answer in the affirmative by rehearsing Lukács' Theory of the Novel, in which the return of the individual to the social whole after his bildung narrativizes M-C-M' (though the book is written before his Marxist turn and does not frame things in this manner). The Lukácsian model narrative, however, is more properly analogous to an Althusserian reproduction of the relations of production. Thus at best one can argue that modern narrative shows the preconditions for capital's self-valorization.

Conversely, M-C-M' character as at once change and not-change might seem to defy the category of narrative. After all, it is not clear that change is itself narrative (as in the case where the same "change" is repeated ritualistically and reset so as to be repeated again). Certainly motion isn't intrinsically narrative. Is increase narrative? Or is such a belief itself entirely ideological? Moreover, Debord's account of "frozen history" (itself routed through Lukács) suggests that M-C-M' is fundamentally anti-narrative, much as Marx suggests that history begins when the M-C-M' cycle comes to an end.

It may be that the best one might propose is that narrative is an imperfectly-wrought mechanism for inspecting the lifeworld of M-C-M', as well as being in its contemporary form one of the formula's many effects.

fait divers economiques

• as 2046 makes clear, hotels are the hookers of the housing market.
• war hawks, technocrats of neoliberalism, or both. Shocked — shocked — by Obama's stern move to the right post-election. Didn't see that coming at all.
• "At the level of intention sure speculators and hedgers are different but from the perspective of what they do I'm not so certain, the distinction between speculation and hedging might be specious; people just like to talk about speculators so they can have someone to blame, some story about causality, it's like Jews — I mean that's what the Jews are for right? as the secret causal principle of economy gone wrong — when people say speculators it's pretty much the same thing, they really mean to say Althusserian structural effectivity but for whatever reason they just can't bring themselves to say that out loud or even to themselves."
• there ought to be a law against history.
• wait, where is the money for the stimulus package coming from again?

sanctify

There can rarely have been a better allegory for the melancholic misery of American electoral politics than California's Proposition Two:

The proposition would add a chapter to Division 20 of the California Health and Safety Code to prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.

I spent a bit of time weeping over this proposition, though the source of my despair concerns empathy for animals only in some fractional degree.

I am just a bit leery of the category of empathy for animals, not because I think it's misbegotten but because the imagination that animals have "thoughts" or "feelings" which are analogous to those of humans leads to all kinds of mistakes; every time someone tells me why it's okay to train animals to do stuff, or to sit on top of horses, they make some kind of appeal to the animal's inner nature, and what it wants and what its idea of a good life is, that isn't finally persuasive. That said, if you are determined to vote, vote yes on 2 (and no on 8).

Then weep, if you have any empathy at all. What you will have just voted for is this: that animals, which have no real protection from the power of humans, should be granted some nominal degree of "freedom" and "dignity" which involves, in short, a few inches of mobility in the relatively brief period before they and/or their offspring are destroyed and consumed by profit. No debate on the latter point. What their lives are for, we shall not consider, for that has been long ago decided. Salve your conscience thusly: that the strong should by all means continue to prey on the weak, but that certain relatively minuscule palliatives should be proffered during the productive process. Palliatives which are surely real, and which just as surely sanctify the larger process, and the predation of the owners upon the caged and the crated.

And then vote for a president. For better cages and crates. Call this "progressive," even call it "left." Sanctify, sanctify.