>Doyle
>So I want to shift this inquiry slightly to the concept of decadence.
I
>will put a social context upon the term, decadence. It seems to me
that
>as the stock market goes into a bear market, the present era will
>close. The whole Reagan shebang will look like the past soon enough.
>So that period is decaying in my opinion right before our eyes, and I
>would call that decadence.
But to the general population decadence is a
>bullet aimed at the marginalized. Primarily if my social sense is
>right, against homosexuality as a sign of "decadence". I reject the
>traditional forms of identifying decadence, which curiously Carrol Cox
>seemed to address recently in some kind of off hand remark about
>decadence too. We are in a period when a social order is decaying, but
>I want the whole idea of marginalization opened up so that us working
>class types get a better understanding of the directions which will
free
>us from the goddamn oppression. And that is what I think Doug is
>getting at in an economist sort of way, when he tries to tease out what
>is so bad about temping.
>regards,
>Doyle
Some provisional drawings out:
A first tease. Along the line you've cast, I would say that the one group's prejudice is projected on the other's sexual proclivities thus judged decadent. It seems to me that today the idea of two men having sex causes a bit more distress than two women. Old news, ours is a heterosexual male fantasy dominated culture. I mean, isn't it? So, the prejudice is bound up with certain masks (the moral judge, the character estimater, the health designator) behind which is intolerance rooted in fear (which is ignorance). Unfortunately, one cannot think straight if one is afraid. So the fear and ignorance feed off each other, and are self-propagating. The question we might ask is how to address someone who is afraid (say a straight white fundamentalist Republican male named Trent Lott), and, as came up in a recent Foucault, thread, the "war model" won't always do, it being bound up with a certain economy of fear.
A second tease. The war model played a large part in the Reagan era, and has been transposed to the pseudo-globalized Clinton era as we have materialized in today's bombings and the "Vietnamization" of Colombia. For Reagan let's say the cold war model. Two dynamics here: "bullishness" as accumulation and plunder, with speculation the medium of desire; and the enemy model: the bodily pure capitalist vs the grotesque alien or communist or homosexual. My tug here at "decadence" comes down pretty much to a question of identity. Does identity tend to attract, to accumulate a surplus social capital to one group, thus setting it up to set it's "riches" against another (fear the mediator)? National identity, religious identity, bodily identity: when one group gets comfortable with it's social capital, it may fear losing it's position, which sets it up for conflict with a competing identity formation. Maybe the decadence you write about above is a collective decay or implosion among identities (I'm being very abstract here). Here I would distinguish identity from solidarity. Even more so, I would dream of moving from an "us v. them" formation to a "yes-and-no" formation.
And a last tease, towards temping. Let's say the identity that commands the most social capital is that of the "successful carreer" versus the failure drifter, wishy-washy spineless slacker-fuck temp. Perhaps the decay of the social order you mention means the decay of the career way of life. If so, this is great! If ambition and market competition is largely driven by individuals competeing for "success", the stupid fuckers, and from this angle it is, then I am all about temping. But the indeterminacy of identity that appeals to me with tempness is still too much at the mercy of the overdeterminedness of the culture of success and the dictates of the higher ups in the office: maybe this is what we mean by "marginalization" Tempness is wonderful, temping sucks.
Any thoughts?
-Alec
______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com