archive : s0metim3s

Following some discussion around the blogdimension, Ben kicks it up a few notches in the debate on V.

Tomorrow is upgrade day. I start transferring all my files over to a new system box and new software, which I anticipate will mean no longer having to endure the whining and groaning of the hard disk and thinking it’s about to explode, emails getting chewed up at my end or getting marooned in cyberspace when I send attachments, and the computer freezing up at higher bandwidths as like a rabbit caught in headlights. The Win98 and a p233 system is well past its use-by date.

And, not least, like Jay Leno, Penelope Cruz, Saddam Hussein, Harper Lee and Jessica Alba, tomorrow I miraculously upgrade to a year older than I currently and officially am said to be.

Following the recent Long Sunday blogweave on Spivak … wait, there’s more …

Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx begins at his funeral, thus setting the scene for opening remarks on Marx’s legacy. Wheen writes:

The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro - the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith.

And yet, the 20th century came to a close with the declarations of a triumphant liberalism that had, it was said, brought history to an end and, thereby, exhausted the legacy of Marx in that purportedly faithful expression of Marxism as raison d’etat.

Jane Jacobs, was one of the first, if not the first, chroniclers of this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal, passionate defender of the flaneur and the multitudinous life of the street, foot people and, of course, the city itself as a form of life.

EuroMayDay06 - alas, still too European for me. (See below, for a comparison with AU)

One lunches in London … and tracks “down the last communist cells … [appreciating] fully the extent to which Marxist ideology hides behind the mask of postmodernism … [and those] generally of postmodernist and thus Marxist origins … our children … [threatened by] Foucault [who] was a promiscuous masochist whose areas of interest were in torture, drug-use and totally anonymous sex … sexually transmitted disease …”

Update: For more on the above, there’s always the foucault-list discussion, under ‘media rant about foucault’. And it is/was, of course, Blog Against Heteronormativity Day - though I’m not sure how the above segues with that, to the extent that there are some undertones of ‘good gay versus bad gay’ that routinely cut across politics in AU.

xposted to Long Sunday, and as part of the discussion on “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” taking place there.

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak’s most ‘difficult’ or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.