So Jim dropped in to see me the other day and chided me for not blogging in a while. In response, I’m offering something kinda up his alley. Early in Multitude, Hardt & Negri describe the question of “how class struggle can be transformed into social war” or “how the interimperialist war can become the occasion for a revolutionary war” as “old, tired, and faded” (89). These two propose instead a “form of organization” that can “deploy the full power of today’s biopolitical production and also fully realize the promise of a democratic society” (90). The question is, if we buy the first part of this argument—that we really have entered a new age of biopolitical production—and I find this persuasive (even if I’m hesitant to go so far as to say that “The political times and the mode of production have changed” [50])—does the latter part actually follow? That a shared goal of democracy is adequate as an organizing principle for revolution (or rather the term they prefer, insurrection)?

So let’s concede that much of our labor now is biopolitical or immaterial. Let’s even accept that new subjectivities are available (and older subjectivities now unavailable) as a result of our present, immaterial forms of labor, given that biopolitical production suffuses our lives. To take an example, we meet and interact with friends on MySpace through a labor that produces profits and property that MySpace can claim rights over. We (laborers) may or may not think of our energy and time spent updating and loading pages as work, and we may or may not recognize our effort as production. But clearly the host appropriates some benefit from our presence there.

"it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him—it doesn’t matter how far back he begins—and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”

I've added the emphasis, but really, this needs little commentary. These are the words of the minister Julius Peck in William Dean Howells's little read novel Annie Kilburn. And they say it far better than mine.

This is really just an excuse, recognizing how much I'd written in an email predicting the AI winner, to make my energy a little less wasted. Somehow.

So in a rant against American Idol, I emailed Doug to say:

Since I still have a conference paper to write before Thursday, I'll confine myself to short scathing commentary: Since America has voted...and once again has shown that it has no appreciation for talent, but does have its finger on the pulse of sales--or rather, has its sense of voting precisely calibrated to sales, which is precisely what consumer capitalism has made available and ineluctable--my guess, very much to my disappointment, is that Jordin sells better in the American Idol format than Blake. Now that's not to say that (a) the American Idol format is the same as record sales format (which is why Daughtry, e.g., has sold better than Taylor Hicks--and why this week's results will tell us little about who will sell the most records), (b) that I'm happy about my choice, or (c) that I'm sure about my choice.

I sorta think Blake's a punk, but I find him a helluva lot more interesting and talented than Jordin. And I sorta blame her for Melinda's departure because I think given two singers of the same genre, America chose (1) the whiter of the two and (2) the prettier of the two. And I know America chose the more mediocre of the singers.

But I think Jordin will prolly pick up nearly all of Melinda's votes--and that she's prolly already picked up all of LaKisha's votes. And given that she's never been in the bottom three, Blake wouldn't seem to stand a chance. Though I'd be highly surprised if Jordin's even in the same league as Blake when it comes to entertainment value Tuesday, sadly, that won't matter, if I'm right.

Greg wrote me the other day about "corporate grammar." Happily, he'd found "the iron-clad grammatical rules for talking about registered trademarks"! The "authority" in this case is Adobe, specifically the company's injunctions about Photoshop--prohibitions against verbing the title, abbreviating the title, or even using it in its possessive form.

Interestingly, a commenter (Prairieman) on Plastic's sidebar takes Adobe as a legitimate authority, even while noting how usage will always exceed prescriptions:

Read and have a chuckle. I mean, it is a really nice thought guys, but I think it is a little late to change the linguistic habits of the American people. Kind of like you're never supposed to say "ain't".

But the best thing about it is Adobe's rationale:

By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.

Would that all claims to "proper usage" were so brazenly upfront about their interests.

An April 26 mass emailing from Texas Representative Pete Gallego asks recipients to "Donate to help Eagle Pass today." Rep. Gallego writes:

Yesterday, Eagle Pass and parts of southwest Texas were hit hard by terrible storms and a destructive tornado. Today we honored those in the community who have lost their homes and loved ones in the recent storm.

I have a fondness for Eagle Pass. Years ago, the community helped me establish my political career. I was privileged to serve Maverick County for 12 years before redistricting and it is the home of Pete P. Gallego Elementary.

It is always difficult to understand and handle the loss of life especially when it is caused by the sudden andp destructive hand of Mother Nature. With the strong leadership of county and city officials and the helping hand of local and state-wide neighbors, I have no doubt that the community of Eagle Pass will get through this difficult time.

In the wake of this tragedy we are working with the local community, state agencies, elected officials, and the federal government to assist any way we can. Can you help too?

Now, this is generous of the Representative, and I'm all for compassion and charity, but isn't there something really annoying (perhaps irresponsible) about a politician asking individuals to donate to help in a community recovery effort? Isn't it his duty to make sure the state has an adequate Emergency Management Agency to handle such problems?? Isn't the privatization of disaster recovery yet another way of letting ourselves and our government off the hook for thriving on systematic exploitation?

I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English, writing a dissertation on class, language-arts pedagogy, and realism in nineteenth-century America. I teach in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.

Here's one abstract of my dissertation:
A recent unit of my Intermediate Expository Writing (RHE 310) course considered language variation. My students read extensively in scholarship about Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English, discovering, for instance, that the Linguistic Society of America regards Ebonics as “systematic and rule-governed,” “fundamentally regular,” and, linguistically speaking, not in any way inferior to what we typically call “Standard English.” The students were persuaded that popular beliefs equating Ebonics with “bad English” are misguided, and they recognized that teaching Standard English as “correct” English or even as more socially functional reproduces the unfortunate, exclusionary, and factitious distinction between the “standard” and the “bad.” Nevertheless, these students overwhelmingly concluded that the best thing to do for Ebonics speakers, if they want to succeed, is teach them Standard English.

When I observed that discovering some practice to be flawed and continuing to do it anyway is not the traditional goal of education, my students expressed a feeling of impotence to change longstanding assumptions and habits about Standard English. Not only undergraduate writing students feel this way, but that they do presents us most immediately with a dilemma in the language arts discipline: as a precondition of conventional economic and social success, Standard English must be made available to our students, and yet in fulfilling our pedagogical mission, we help sharpen the distinction and increase the distance between those with access to privilege and those without. Hence the need for our discipline not to ignore the power of language standards in our culture.

In the season one finale, with Deadwood's annexation imminent, Al Swearengen struggles to avoid an outstanding warrant charging him with murder. Coming under the jurisdiction of the US government, Al would be subject to federal laws, whereas to this point, Deadwood has operated under a peculiar structure of lawlessness, which is no doubt structured, but structured in such a way that its absence of law in large part determines the structure itself. The following conversation between Al and the US Magistrate takes place:

Al: Did young Adams deliver my message...[that] as to bribing you further with help with that warrant against me, beyond the $5,000 you've already pocketed, the gist was "Fuck yourself."
...
Clagett: That would be imprudent, Al. A failure to properly value your freedom in the promising days ahead.
Al: Maybe you don't value keeping your fucking guts inside your fucking belly enough.
Clagett: Those are the days behind us.
Al: No, those are the days to my fucking left. [points to Dan Dority, his henchman]
Clagett: I didn't generate the warrant. My disappearance won't quash it. You can't murder an order or the telegraph that transmitted it. Or those that are content to put food on their table by being the instruments. It can't be done.

Originally a bribe was to take care of the warrant, but after the first payment, the magistrate extended the demand to make it an ongoing blackmail. Which is to say that though murder won't quash a warrant, money will.

But the real difference between Agamben and Marx is that the former would, I take it, say that the magistrate is right because the law, having been constituted by an act of sovereignty, can't help but continue constituting its own sovereignty (the indistinguishability of constituted and constituting power). Hence, the order (a power constituted by the sovereign) can't be murdered because it constitutes its own orders (telegraph transmissions). But this is only to focus on half of the magistrate's claim. The other half needs a Marxist analysis: what ensures the transmission of orders is the people who work for "food on their table"; it is the economic relation that determines the purview of power and guarantees its effective expression.

James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
* * *
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.

It being Father's Day and me being directly asked (actually, it was anything other than direct, but that's as much a story for another day, as it is typical) to attend church with my parents, which I hadn't done in a few years, I agreed to go. Now there are all kinds of things to say about this church, but I'll bite my tongue. Except on this point: the sermon consisted of reasons fathers should provide support for their families. (In fact, the pastor is partial to alliteration and anagrams to help his listeners remember his points, so what a father should do is Love, Lead, and Lift his family.) But the point of my post is the story about how one father didn't, and disaster followed.

To wit: Many years ago a young man grew up in a small German town, a youth dedicated to his synagogue. His father, a merchant, moved the family to a larger town in a predominantly Christian region and joined a Christian church. When asked by his son why he had abandoned the religion of his past, the father answered that it was better for business. The boy gave up his commitment to Judaism and later moved to London and wrote Das Kapital [seriously, he said it in German]. He said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses. And my father showed me that true belief doesn't exist." The boy's name was Karl Marx, and he went on to found a philosophy that would grow to control half the world. It would lead to wars and oppression.

Now apart from the wildly inventive quote, there's some accuracy to this story that impressed me. What didn't impress me was (1) the all-too-easy conflation of Marxism with global war and destruction and (2) the attribution of weakness to a father who basically did lift and lead his family (not to mention [3] the careless slippery slope along which Heinrich Marx becomes responsible for global disaster--but that's just my rhetorical objection).

Twice within the last week, friends have told me they were offered jobs with greater salary or benefits (or both), but that they felt more or less guilty leaving their old companies. In one case, the friend has turned down the offer because she feels an obligation to the employer who funded some additional professional training, training in which she just happened to meet the employer who offered her a better opportunity. But she refused the better opportunity out of loyalty.

In the second case, the friend hasn't yet decided. Her current employer has treated her neither particularly specially nor particularly badly. And the agency making the offer affords her better work, she feels, as well as better pay and a better location. Yet she's torn because she knows she's the most competent employee at her job and that the employee will be in a lurch without her. But of course it's not her fault that the employer is so badly organized that contingencies aren't in order. Nor is it my friend's fault that her job consists in basically underwriting the very activity she'd like to (and ostensibly is employed to) regulate. Thus, her decision should seem obvious. Yet, she too feels some level of loyalty to her current employer.