What in the hell …

This is. November. There’s a lot to be said back and forth about the concept of martyrdom, but it’s still important that our dead be remembered. (After all, as Benjamin noted social democrats point us toward the future in order to rob us of our past, of the hatred it provides and the strength that offers.) Utah Phillips says on one of his records somewhere that we need to also remember people who were just trying to get by, just do a job, and still ended up in unmarked graves. In november we remember not only folks who stood up and got shot down, but people who were cut short for all sorts of reasons. It’s tempting to quote Vaneigem - survival is dying slowly, suicide on the installment plan - and so to univeralize the condition, but that risks blunting the point.
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The new issue of ephemera is out. It’s a webjournal affiliated with a unit in the management program at Leicester University. I don’t understand that, though I do have cynical intuitions about why a business school would care about these matters, intuitions which I’d like to expand into analyses at some point in a way paralleling recent discussion at the Archive, Going Somewhere, Post-Hegemonic Musings, and elsewhere about cultural studies. For the record, though, I don’t take those conversations to be an attack necessarily on people employed in the enterprises under discussion (we all reproduce the capital relation to some degree), but more a call for some sophrosyne. Others may disagree. Anyway, new ephemera out. Co-edited by a friend, and I’ve got a hand in three pieces therein (a bit of nepotism perhaps, one can never be sure, but I don’t mind - I’m still proud to be involved in those pieces.) Comments of course welcome.

Long Sunday is a group blog who are kindly hosting a symposium on Benjamin’s critique of violence (which Craig at Theoria was kind enough to make electronically available).
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No, it’s not a post on indexicals. Worse, it’s bit of navel gazing metablogging. Mea culpa.
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Class composition refers to the present condition of the working class in all its ambivalence and potential. The working class exists in various determinate conditions, conditions which are nevertheless always changing.
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Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Fate and Character” begins by presenting a common idea: “if, one the one hand, the character of a person, the way in which he reacts, were known in all its details, and if, on the other, all the events in the areas entered by that character were known, both what would happen to him and what he would accomplish could be exactly predicted. That is, his fate would be known.” (Selected Writings v1, p201.)
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Or, what in the hell is a camp? Or, what in the hell can homo sacer do?
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I read something by Saussure recently. Found it dull. There’s a bit where he talks about language existing in individuals, and that the structure is composed of individuals speaking.
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