What in the hell …

There are many, no doubt, and it’s all a bit beyond me at the moment (among other things, I’ve got yet another fucking cold, and it’s fucking snowing here). As a start I think this piece by Michael Novick is worth reading.

As in, is it a commodity or no? Good conversation on that subject here. I mentioned this in a comment on another post here but I figure it merits it’s own post.

I’d been meaning to get back to the Colonel re: her comments on this post here but hadn’t yet. I was re-reading her remarks there when I suddenly remembered Keir mentioning to me that at some point Negri had used the term “biopolitical entrepeneur” in ways similar to his remarks on immaterial laborers and multitude. I did a bit of looking, and the term appears in a piece of Negri’s from 1998 called Exile. (I have a paperback copy in Spanish someplace.) I recopied the text here. (more…)

Just now I was briefly looking back over that post at NP’s that I mentioned before I noticed a comment from Carl. He asks “How much of this analysis has analogies in feminism?” and says “since patriarchy is to feminism as capitalism is to marxism, Catherine MacKinnon is to patriarchy as Lukacs is to capitalism. The similarity being that for both, the oppressive system is speculatively totalized and then reinserted as such into the practical analysis.Is patriarchy a historical enough notion to get dialectical, even contingent? If patriarchy, like class struggle, has always already existed in some form or another as the essence of social relations, how does analysis of it not become a procrustean bed?”

I find this really provocative and want to think more about it. (Well grubbed, Dead Voles!) For now, this post is just a placeholder (one of many) to remind myself to come back to this. I think this ties in to the post I’ve not yet written about Heidi Hartmann and the notes I never posted about Dale Tomich. The issues include theory construction and the status of theory in empirical work (on that, note to self, post notes on Frederick Taylor on what he calls indigenous vs analytical categories). There’s also I think a potential political stake here but I’m not 100% sure on that. (I’d also like to hear more on Carl’s question about whether “the apparent victories of liberal feminism can be seen as intensifying the essential dominance of patriarchy.”)

That’s what Susan Buck-Morss’s new book is about. I’m very excited to read it. I wish it was already out. I hate waiting.

Soon I’ll put up my notes on her article which served as the basis of the book.

If you want to know what happened during the RNC protests, see here. Fucked up.

Check it out! The idea is that you write 500 words a day every day in November. I did this last year on my lonesome, sort of, and didn’t realize there was this thing. I feel pretty good about what or at least how much I wrote back then. I don’t have the time and energy to do it this time around, this month. Too wore out and stressed this year.

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All of that aside, I voted for the first time ever today. I’d meant to vote before but never managed to so, due to apathy or incompetence or whatever. I decided this time around that it really does matter who wins the election. I’d always thought before that it didn’t matter. I think the world will be better off if Obama wins than if McCain wins. That’s not to say that Obama will do great things for working people, far from it. (I wrote an opinion piece recently at Ericco’s prompting, for our IWW branch newsletter, arguing that our organization’s stance as neither electoral nor anti-electoral is a strength. Our emphasis is on building a working class organization and movement, the rest is not our bag.) I was talking to my pal Jefferson about this on the phone today (he gently accused me of having drunk the Obama kool aid, though eventually agreed that I’m write that we’re better off if McCain loses). He said that he thinks the Bush administration may have left a huge gift to whoever is the next president. All they’ll really have to do is not be Bush. After things being so terrible a lot of us may be like “gosh, it’s not terrible lately! wow, I forgot how that feels!” Which means that little will have to happen. That’s one option. Another is that Obama is awesome (I doubt it) but the economy and all that is totally fucked and he’s a one term president. I’m sure there’s other options. I don’t feel that optimistic either way, not at the institutional level. Good things won’t come from above.

Hell if I know. (more…)