Triple Canopy has an article up linking the development of American megachurches and that of the massive, modular corporations that have come to dominate the contemporary economy. There’s not too much novel in the piece, but one thing that struck me is the link between what we might call the “google model” workplace and newer, “lifestyle” churches. Both implement a policy of appealing to the selves of employees or worshippers: business, in what I see (and probably have written on here) as, masking over exploitation by installing pingpong tables, stress chambers, allowing work on personal projects, and the like, in an effort to appease higher demand “knowledge” workers, while churches cut and cater manners of giving sermons and masses to the personal inclinations of parishioners. You want more acoustic, folksy masses, or would you like a hiphop infused one? We have both! And on the same campus!

There’s also a couple of interesting things on the evolution of cubicles, modern office layouts, and the like. I’m inclined to look a bit closer at what was alluded to in a remark about cubicles being more attractive to businesses, initially at least, because of potential tax breaks.

Of course the most striking thing is how both institutions, the megachurch and the megacorporation, employ the individualistic sensibilities of their dupes in order to better suck them dry. In the end, efficiency conquers anxiety over concerns about propriety, or older aesthetics of authority.

So, we’re going to add a couple people to this blog, starting with DT. I read through Capital with D and it was a great experience, so I, and you, are lucky to have him here. Keep an eye out for his posts.

I find the notion, quaintly experienced with religious fervor by many radicals, that the alienation defining human existence is both caused by capitalism and to be abolished by some future revolution to be ludicrous. And when it is used as a rubric to critique the practical activity of politically engaged groups — whether they are unions, student collectives, or whatever else — it instantly shifts from being laughable to being the most idiotic sort of reactionary mysticism. Suddenly, the mundane concerns — like a reduction in the work week, pay increases, or, god forbid, universal health care — that might motivate a mass movement, or be used to measure its concrete successes, become nothing more than a reinscription of the form of life which is to be overthrown. But for what? Heaven knows! — and it’s really common for religiously inflected rhetoric to surface when the revolution’s supposed outcomes are discussed. There will be no more work! There will be no classes! There will be nothing save our free association! The dead will be raised!

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming (yea, that’s already happened) and before getting back to it, I’m going to ruminate on poetry — specifically, what I think it ought to be. I recently went to see a poetry reading combined with a string quartet performance at one of NYC’s bourgie hipster spaces. The string quartet was exceptionally technically accurate; the Bartok and Beethoven they played, if a bit lacking in performative soul, was spot on and error free — clean enough to bore me. The poets, however, were by and large lackluster, even on a technical level; save one, that is.

The lady who began the evening had obviously practiced long to develop a specific sort of reading voice, one that was as cavernous and large as she was petite and unremarkable. It moved me near to giggles, especially with the inflection and manner she employed to hone it, to drive its urgency home. There’s nothing like hyper-pronounced diction to suck the soul out of a speaking voice. Then there came an old man whose whiny poems, replete with the word “whats” and penny-ante sophisms and lacking any example of a close examination of the world as it exists outside paltry abstractions, made me fidget and drink my beer ever quicker. Finally there came a lady who, thankfully, could actually write a poem and whose reading voice was not farcical. She had one turn of phrase that was something like “the key is stuck in the lock again. I can turn anything into a self-portrait,” and which I really enjoyed. Generally her language was interesting, intimate, and engaging, so I have a new poet to look into.

But the experience of the evening — rather, what experiencing what was lacking about it — made me think about why I had written poetry (which I used to do a lot more often than now), and what I would have done differently than these people. It strikes me as rather slovenly to ‘read’ your work; memorize it. Most likely you aren’t going to perform an epic (unless you are the whiny poet going on about Russian balet and television cameras), and the imagistic little ditties that are in fashion now would not cost too much effort to commit to memory. It also occurs to me to write things that people would want to hear. Confessional episodes and Deep Reflections on things are fine; but they’re a dime a dozen, and if they aren’t interesting I should be able to throw my drink at the stage. If poetry’s going to be worth an evening, it needs to do something ‘interesting’; of course working out what that entails is a bigger problem.

Well, I have neglected this blog. So it goes. If I still have a few trawling readers out there, and esp. to those few people I owe comments — I will return! Sooner rather than later, and with more acidity than before. Such is the process of aging, the continual rubbing raw of life.

Doug Henwood has put up an edited version of his panel discussion from Left Forum on his website. In it he discusses what is currently going on, in the bowels of Washington and in the minds of revolutionaries, with regard to the banking industry. We are not, he argues, on the brink of a revolutionary moment when the banks are seized and the means of production handed over to direct producers; what’s more, we are not seemingly even on the eve of a progressive movement, if the lack of mass protest and the insipid tea party movement are any indication.

Henwood makes some interesting remarks about how the radical movements of the 60s and 90s coming at the end of long boom decades while the downturns of the 50s and today seemingly have failed to produce a broadbased movement of people angry enough to take to the streets. What we have instead, he claims, is people hunkering down and longing for the status quo ante. Oh, and tea-bagging (which I find somewhat amusing on its multiple superficial levels, but most of all the whiteness of the white faces that are screwed up into a rage over taxation without representation). 

Most interesting for me however, is the point that Henwood makes at the end of his paper about a “creeping socialism.” This sort of socialism is the kind that would start with a local association, say, purchasing an apartment building, setting up a cooperative ownership framework that allows people to buy in at a fixed rate, and serves to re-enter a bit of property into a sort of commons. Similar sorts of things could be done with all manner of the things required for life, from public utilities to groceries. Henwood claims that he suggests this sort of tactic with a bit of disappointment. But I don’t see why this is disappointing at all. Give that we’re already skipping around the vast piles of shit that a post-scarcity society produces, this  seems an incredibly effective way to proceed. The fact that he has to qualify it, I think, points to an older divide in the leftist tradition on the nature of historical change. One side sees the world inverting in a moment, when finally this or that idol rears its head; the other sees change as an ebbing and flowing with the gradual pooling and dissolution of individual efforts.

I think that the two articles by Geoff Mann and Robin Blackburn in the most recent NLR are indicative of these strains, and I’m going to write something up demonstrating it. Broadly, I would call the respective sides idealistic and pragmatic. But more on that in a bit.

I recently finished the Ignorant Schoolmaster. It was quite a read — full of a spunky, insistant, assertion of intellectual equality — and is really a bit inspiring, and just about made me want to go over to my shelf, dust off the top of my Greek grammar and flip through some Herodotus. A thing like that, I think, would really be the point, or would be to make Rancière’s point for him. But some people — I’m specifically thinking of a couple of blogs I read recently, and a couple of the reactions some of my peers had — seem to find the notion that human intelligence is equal as laughable. Which it is, if you don’t really know what Rancière is getting at when he says it.

Intelligence being equal doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get the same IQ score, or the same grade on a calculus test, or even draw the same meaning from Middlemarch — not these things at all. What Rancière is trying to convince us of here is that intelligence is merely the capacity to engage meaningfully with the world, and that any one who has learned to speak is equally endowed with it; differences that show up via whichever metric you choose come about after the fact and are, as he repeats often, in his opinion, merely the results of differing levels of effort. And the capacity to speak really is just an example; but I’ll leave it alone for now. The simple fact that people have the capacity to engage the same object is enough, for Rancière, to argue that they share an equal intelligence. This is what intelligence is for him: the ability to make sense through intentional interaction with things. And what makes it equal is the things in common. If you and I share access to some thing, then our intelligence, our capacity to work with it and fashion some intelligent — directed, sensible, meaningful — response to it is equal. Neither one nor the other is superior.

So, if a person wants to act in an intelligent manner, if she wants to exercise her common intelligence, all she has to do is look at, pick up, study whatever object — whether it is a book, movie, dance, poem, election result or painting — and pick out the things that are in it, respond to them, and use them as what they are: elements of sense. Anyone can do this; the only thing that it requires is the will to direct attention.

One of the more startling things I encounter in grad school is the broadly held belief in a renascence of belief. This is either presented as inevitable or desirable, and in all cases it is terrible fashionable to think that some sort of religious feeling is necessary for meaningful human life. Authorities are generally what is used to stabilize whatever flimsy argument is being put forth about modern man’s ache for fullness: Rousseau, Bellah, Taylor, Hegel, et cetera. Myself, I don’t ache for a Jesus-plenum. In fact, being around all this lax chatter has made me positively anti-religious — more so than I have been since I ditched my faith as a teenager. I find theological pronouncements obnoxious, and the way that many of the radical hipsters seek to meld political engagement with religious sentiment I find disgusting.

So, it was with great pleasure that I read Gallup’s recent press release on the trend toward decline in religious belief in America. Religion shows a long-term decline; the number of non-religious people is rising — 1 in 10 at this point, more or less; the world becomes disenchanted. Oh well. Get over the loss of belief and do something worthwhile.