persuasion + exploitation = sales
Sales may be malignant or benign, but it is always exploitative.
May 2012
24 posts
“For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments is this upsurge —taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities —of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predictive traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times. Deluze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market.”
—Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (via autochthones)
Basho:
Bird of time —
in Kyoto, pining
for Kyoto.
Everybody repeat after me: science is a system of metaphor.
Waking to bustle,
sunset still. This day could be
anywhere … and is.
Heraclitus - fragments from LOGOS (THE WORD), pt. 2
37. If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them.
38. Souls smell in Hades.
39. Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; and the parched is moistened.
40. It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires.
41., 42. You can not step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you.
43. Homer was wrong in saying: “Would that strife might parish from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayers were heard, all things would pass away… .
44. War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.
45. Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.
46. It is the opposite which is good for us.
47. The hidden attunement is better than the open.
48. Let us not conjecture at random about the greatest things.
49. Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.
50. The straight and the crooked path of the fuller’s comb is one and the same.
51. Asses would rather have straw than gold.
51a. Oxen are happy when they find better vetches to eat.
52. The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive.
53. Swine wash in the mire, and barnyard fowls in dust.
54. … to delight in the mire.
55. Every beast is driven to pasture with blows.
56. Same as 45.
57. Good and ill are one.
58. Physicians who cut, burn, stab, and rack the sick, demand a fee for it which they do not deserve to get.
59. Couples are things whole and things not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn assunder, the harmonious and the discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.
60. Men would not have known the name of justice if these things were not.
61. To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.
62. We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.
64. All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep.
65. The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.
John Maynard Keynes on the Stock Market
… comparing it a competition in which the participants have to pick out the prettiest girls from a hundred photos:
It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks is the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipation what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.
— J. M. Keynes, from General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, quoted by Zizek in Living in the End Times
Zizek:
What if the self-referentiality inherent in the market game is so strong that the X around which price oscillates is not given in advance but is generated by the very market process? What his means, in somewhat simpler terms, is that in the market, it is not the best (e.g., the prettiest girl) which wins.
— Zizek, Living in the End Times
You can understand the allure behind a gold standard, even if you marvel at the naiveté which actually believes that gold is more immune to manipulation than currency … that gold is somehow more real than currency.
Charles Olson - The Songs of Maximus: Song 2
all
wrong
And I am asked—ask myself (I, too, covered
with the gurry of it) where
shall we go from here, what can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves?
Play
The Poet Lets His Tongue Hang Down (from Gunslinger, Book IV)
Ed Dorn
Ed Dorn reading from Gunslinger 1974
Hey, you punks! Get off my lawn!
II.
THE age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
THE tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects—after Samothrace;
We see το καλόν
Decreed in the market place.
Faun’s flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint’s vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
τίν’ άνδρα, τίν’ ήρωα, τίνα θεον,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
— Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Ezra Pound Goes Bonkers for Want of Sound Money
Kinda like if James Joyce and Ron Paul underwent a mind meld.
The Cantos are awesome. Completely, mindbogglingly, amazing. And completely frustrating, because his answer to the hegemonic horrors of his time is idiot populist racism. He got it about half right, but the half he got wrong he got very, very, wrong. Every time he mentions the gold standard, or Adams, Jefferson, & the founding fathers, I get McNaughton paintings flashing before my eyes & I start to see red. Then I have to put the book down.
Oh well, back to Zukofsky for me.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley excerpt below.
Every so often, I wonder to myself why it has been so long since I have done an acoustic show. Then I schedule one. Then I try to play one. Then I remember why I don’t schedule them.
Fortunately, I always remember to bring a Tele and an amp, just in case. I always start out with the best of intentions, but when even my hammer of a right hand on a metal-bodied resonator can’t be heard over the knuckleheads at the bar, it becomes time to turn on the amp. Last night, after watching what Keenan went through (seems to happen to him every time), I didn’t even bother with the resonator. Actually didn’t bother with much of a set at all: just a long version of “Fever Dream” with Keenan on percussion, a version of “Amazing Grace” poked through a couple Buddha Machine loops, & that seemed like a night. Knowing when the situation calls for a 20-minute set is a lost art.
There is a bar down the street which has a small back room where they put music. The bar itself is out front, so if you wanna have a beer and chat with your friends, you aren’t necessarily in the middle of the action as far as quiet music is concerned. Maybe I’ll try again there.
Or maybe I’ll just keep playing on the front porch, & y’all can come by with a six pack if you want.
The Minutemen
I have a set list from a Minutemen show from the Hoosier Ballroom in Indianapolis from sometime in ‘87 (I think) during the summer of 85. It keeps falling off the wall & down behind my amps, which makes it a pain in the ass to dig out. I keep thinking I need to get it framed, or something, but a framed set list seems really cheesy, especially a framed set list from a punk band, and even more so if that band is a bunch of flannel populists like the Minutemen. Suppose it’s worth it to preserve the thing, though.
So anyway, I’ve decided to recreate that set. Here it is, in the order that they wrote it down all those years ago. Enjoy.
DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics: dagNotes: We. The Problematic Traditional. The struggle to become popular offers cover for the desire to be correct. →
dagseoul.tumblr.com
I get annoyed when bloggers reblog crappy memes about POTUS, Democrats, Republicans, white people (although I love teasing white people, so carry on,) war and peace. A complaint about Obama, for example, that includes a meme about war and the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t really communicate anything…
OWS Needs to Forget About Student Loan Forgiveness
I’m not up to date with the numbers, but this should suffice …
The average college student graduates with around $10,000 - $15,000 worth of debt. If you’re racking up much more than that as an undergrad, then you’re going to a private school and you need to SHUT THE HELL UP.
Post-grad work, be it medical, dental, law, etc., really ups the ante: you folk are probably in the hole somewhere in the $100,000 - $150,000 range by the time you are done. Like I said, not 100% up-to-date numbers, but I think I’m in the ballpark.
Sounds pretty oppressive, huh? Now you know why Occupy Wall Street wants their student loans forgiven.
Then again, when you get that piece of paper, you can expect to increase your lifetime earnings somewhere around $900,000. If you get that second piece of paper, you can expect to jump up $1,300,000. If that second piece of paper is a “professional degree”, you can expect to leap up by about $3,200,000.
So, if you get your college degree, just consider that your tithe to the capitalist gods. No, wait: a tithe is generally 10%, which would be $90,000 … so yeah, a lot less. Essentially, when you get out of college with your bachelors, you owe one kinda crappy used car. Now, if you come out with an advanced degree, you’re more in the range of an Mercedes CL63 AMG, or a Tesla roadster, but that still is (at best) only slightly above the 10% tithe rate.
Or, to say it directly, there’s no way that student loans, on the average, are repressive. There’s no way that this is an issue that Occupy Wall Street should address.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe that a college-level education in non-vocational disciplines should be open to anyone who can qualify free of charge. This country would immediately become a better country if everyone could get a real education for free.
But I can’t be expected to give a shit about the average college student’s debt burden unless the average college student divorces his education from the capitalist system. In other words, you don’t get to have your cake (vocational training) and eat it too (free vocational training).
This is exactly the kind of issue that labels OWS as a bunch of spoiled brats, as opposed to true revolutionaries. ”American Spring” indeed.
