°Enthusiasm
A very nice, thoughtful piece by Tom Roberts, Laboured Enthusiasm, asks - among other things - whether an economy based on beleif can admit doubt. He also makes the point that it’s not so much that market forces drain enthusiasm, but that the collective productions of the amateur economy of enthusiasts transforms “into atomised fields of financial competition”. But i’m left asking the question of what remains indigestible in all this, which is not simply reducible to the antitheses of ‘collective’ versus ‘atomised’. Because, surely, belief is that which binds ‘collective expressions of enthusiasm’ to ‘atomised competition’. Without the former, there would be no delivery of a niche market for the latter. Jason Read’s answer to ‘What is indigestible?’ goes something like: ‘that which exceeds the conditions of production’. I would have liked Roberts to have explored something of those ‘doubts’. Then again, this has me thinking of Sloterdjik’s Critique of Cynical Reason And, also, wondering whether it’s possible to talk about an excess of belief, or as Zizek might say: the potential subversiveness of taking people (or a politics) ‘at their word’.
//
Not working, wandering [May 25, 2005 @ 5:35 am]