> t byfield wrote:
>
> >i'm real bullish on the cultural front.
>
> Do tell more...
gee, well, it seems to me like i've seen some pretty convincing stats supporting the 'theory'--like i need one of those to make this point--that a major reason productivity is so goddamn high is that everyone's putting in double-plus-unfun extra hours. do you really think they'll just keep at this indefinitely? not on your life. there's a major slack attack backlash brewing, imo.
oh, and people will keep on being svengalicized by bedtime stor- ies about overnight twentysomething millionaires? i'm *so* sure. i expect there's some major-league volcanic bile building up on that front, too.
all this counting down (precious resources, vitality, attention span, time, etc.) and counting up (dick-swinging computer specs, stock market, 'growth,' etc.) fairly reeks of the kind of mania peculiarly suited to a period understood to be delimited. golly, i wonder what that limit might be?
hm, yes, and the proliferation of afterologies in criticism and commentary: what do they speak of if not a fixation on ends and boundaries? would it really be so surprising if, in a decade or two, it became clear that 'the end of history,' 'the end of com- munism,' 'the end of the nation-state,' etc. turned out to be a series of anticipatory exercises? and, surely, if they have any latent content whose sense will become clear it's in their pref- atory potential: 'ah, so *that's* why it ended...'
all this emphasis on 'Y2K,' this ubiquitous, fanatical pedantry about how the new millennium 'really' begins 01012001, this sub- tle distortion of more usual patterns of thinking about what be- gins and ends with a new year (a year? decade? century?), these strange conjunctions wherein every shitty 'new' product is 'the shitty product for a new millennium' 0T1H but no one is willing to talk openly and earnestly about their hopes for a new period OT0H--this all, and much, much more, reeks of some very strange cultural undercurrents imo.
we've spent the last century doggedly proving beyond any or all doubt that X or Y aspects of 'modernity' constituted a decisive break with a (therefore) primitive past. yeah, right.
the beauty of historical periods is that they have less empiric- al existence than *any* other cultural creation. and yet we *do* seem to be rather obsessed with them, don't we?
cheers, t - can't wait to denounce stupid arguments as 'twentieth century'