> In message <v03130301b4481a00f29b@[140.254.113.75]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
> <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>
> >I'd say 'jouissance' is akin to Keynes' comment on the game of professional
> >investment: the point is to 'ape unreason proleptically' (qtd. in Henwood,
> >_Wall Street_, p. 206).
>
>
> I tried to argue that jouissance is just a particular theorisation of
> the surplus, where it is unproductively consumed in my pamphlet Need and
> Desire in the Postmaterial Economy. I mean that sense in which the realm
> of non-coerced playfulness, under Capitalism, could only refer to the
> ruling class' monopoly over free time.
I'm not sure if I get this - are you saying that 'jouissance' is essentially a glorified description of the ruling class' 'coupon clipping'?
And what do you mean 'the ruling class' monopoly over free time'. I seem to have some (not enough) free time, but I am not a member of the ruling class.
>
> On another tack, there's lots of stuff about redefining work as play in
> management theory.
Indeed. Kind of like the current culture of computer work, where sweating at the code-face is called 'creativity'. I've tried to explain to my friends that the image of the eternally creative computer engineer is simply 'second-order Taylorism' (by analogy to 'second-order cybernetics', where the individual is included as part of the machine).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.