The soul needs to have sex with animals. The deep, hard, sweating, and crushing kind of animal sex that connects every fiber and bone of the body to the goat. (dd)
The controversy is over whether intellectual labor is a lesser form of work, somehow less authentic, less useful, less moral. Manual work, especially the kind done by men, gets set up as "real" work, and everything else is done by spoiled pussies......
But I am deeply grateful that fate or accident or whatever allowed me to pursue work that I find interesting and may at times even be construed as a positive social contribution. I'm very grateful that I don't have to spend my life digging ditches or cleaning bedpans, both of which are socially useful but which I'd find as pretty indistinguishable from a prison sentence if I had to do them 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Maybe it's just my decadent petit bourgeois temperament speaking. (Doug)
Chuck, it is the "elemental and fine" that triggers the negative responses (Carrol)
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Okay. That post was supposed to be off-list. But now I own it. I am not sure I own it all the way down to goat fucking. But, one can't just ignore Daniel Davies leering at my pets. I would have picked a nice plump sheep or big sloppy dog. Goats are little bony and I suspect they don't stand still. From my limited forays in this direction I would suggest a good washing, blow dry, and trim. Our four legged girls are usually quite crusty, when they come in fresh from the yard. Names with an overly sweet sound like Jessie, Janey, and the like help reassure them it's not all just about the sex. Lots of petting and kisses after help too.
Geeze, some people will do anything to get out of working in financial markets. I was advocating climbing or working casual construction labor as an antidote to the totalizing mental effects of hot breath capitalism and the over weening ploys of the bourgeois in a post-modern world. I was not suggesting sex with animals. But now that you mention it, I do see some therapeutic value there.
Anyway, there is a level of solidarity among people who do hard manual jobs and a significant part of that is looking at foremen, managers, executives, engineers, consultants, architects, academics, jerks in suits with manicures, with a murderous rage. I was engaging that solidarity as a gesture of thanks. And, I share that murderous rage in some moods. How about if I blow your brains out and piss on them? How would that suit you, your grace?
I discovered I liked manual labor accomplished with a lot of skill and a certain style. It suited me. And, then too, we live in a socio-economic system that is built up on and is still completely dependent on that kind of labor--despite all the pretense that this isn't so.
On the other hand the entire capital infrastructure along with its socio-cultural figurations as the bourgeoisie is engaged in a war against its own foundation in labor, especially heavy, skilled manual labor, and hence deprecates, dis-respects, abuses, exploits, and trashes that foundation in every conceivable way it can. In fact, Capital and its entourage takes its greatest pleasures in this sport. So, the list got a glimpse into my class resentment which is the reciprocal to that sport--a kind of hostility, dripping in an implicit violence. Class war is real and not a mere theoretical potential.
It happens I have a double dose of that resentment, since I never expected to end up where it have. From my former academic orientation and expectations, I became my own worst nightmare: Oscar Wilde condemned to a life sentence at hard labor. Here is a quick example. During the 1968-9 academic year I was working as a carpenter apprentice remodeling the UC Chancellor's office (California Hall), while I was finishing graduate school in Art. Part of the time I was down in the streets throwing rocks at the cops, part of the time sitting in art seminars discussing minimalism and post-minimalism, but during work, I was up on the roof nailing plywood, or stripping forms down in the basement. This goes to Yoshie's description of her father.
I never expected to discover in construction some of the arts of labor, and find in them a world that could be completely inhabited and engaged, much like the traditional visual arts. In fact, learning how to make art, is essentially a refined form of all the labor upon which it depends. The later incarnations of that skilled labor tradition are now referred to as the trades, mostly reduced to the construction industry, engineering proto-type shops, and more recently computer aided design technologies (the hidden, unseen world that produces mass media is full of these skilled trades). The skilled labor is still there either explicitly or welded into forms and systems where it can be re-extracted or resuscitated and then practiced as a skill out of context---where it appears as art. Smith's Cubi, Warhol's silk screens or di Sivero's constructions, Irwin's interiors and spaces.
Capital presumes its own superiority over Labor, and then takes up the terminology and words of Labor, and pretends these are its own. This switch is at the core of Capital's neoliberal propaganda. So for example, firms `produce', are said to be `efficient', `money makes the world go around', and other such blather--when quite obviously capital does no such work, produces nothing concrete but oppressive organizations it terms free markets, and the sun's gravitation along with the mass/momentum of the earth makes the world go around. Okay, all this might be obvious, but its worth a reminder.
Capital can be assaulted from `above' through political power and intellectual critique and we spend most of the list discussion on endless varieties of these.
But Capital can also be assaulted from `below' too. One of the ways is through learning to function within extreme limits of physical work and play. In their extreme forms they can be turned into a hostile assault on the capitalist propaganda that capital produces something (the big lie), and it can be made to put capital and its presumptions into an absurd light.
There is a kind of elitist, fuddy-duddy-ness, a pretension and air that goes along with Capital's illusion of constituting the world, when in fact, Labor constitutes and constructs the world. These airs are quite disturbed by the presence of the gritty materiality of Labor, and annoyed at being reminded that their little pink fingers have never actually performed any work at all--in fact, they possess no manual skills whatsoever, except performing a perfunctory sort of hand writing with illegible gold-filled pens, scribbling platitudes or directives, and then decorating them with expensive knick-knacks.
Arrayed in the accouterments of its own pretense, the ceremonial sanctity of Capital can be raped, stripped down to its rather pathetic human scale which resembles something akin to the quick sketch that David did of Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. One of the ways to strip Capital is to command your own labor and one of the most frightening things you can do to demonstrate this command is to switch arbitrarily between under-production to over-production and then back again. The only way you can do that is not only command your labor, but dominate it, by dominating its means, which is the body. It's well understood that you can withhold labor. It is less well understood that even more frightening is expressing labor's potentially prodigious productive overcapacity. In either case, Capital hates irregular and uncontrollable Labor.
But it goes deeper than that, or it is more intimate than that. The ceremonial sanctification of Capital, the holiness and reserve of business, is also entombed in virtually every aspect of bourgeois life--that is they are melted together in a psychic and social unity that is abstracted as social value schemes, laws, rules, regulations, and customs. These proscribe regular hours, regular meals, regular domesticity, regular families, regular sexuality, regular speech, regular declarative sentences, sensible imagery, a clear bland voice, well mannered demeanor, everything in moderation, controlled, and controlling exchanges of reward and punishment, endless little politenesses, deferences, little gestures of decorum---in short middle class life, sociability, sensitivities, and sensibilities.
An extreme physicality or materiality either as uncontrollable Labor, or as inconceivably dangerous Play is like an animal, a crude, outrageous, out of scale, out of norm, assault on all the refinements that Capital and its bourgeois foundation use to assure itself that the world is really in its complete possession and control. While some social figurations in race and gender function to disabuse Capital and its middle class apologists of this pretense, threaten it so to speak, so does uncontrollable labor and dangerous play. These in an intuitive and reactive form, make adolescents, especially lower class minority adolescents, unemployable and feared. (They seem to function pretty much same way for us old, nasty, hostile art majors tool)
But all this war is endlessly engaged in a process of commodification and subversion. For example one of the latest SUV ads, chopped in a frenzied montage, played against a faux rap, shows images of a climber whose fingers are taped (a way to keep hand damage minimized in hard jams, and/or stay off tendinitis) reaching over the lip of a rock edge, inter-cut with upside down images of road racing cyclists, and the hard gritty sweat of construction worker's faces. The obvious associations imply that the buyers of this tin marvel, are somehow engaged in these activities as rebels, and if not directly, at least can borrow in the revolt and physical dimension simply by driving or styling themselves in this well insulated and over priced piece of shit cocoon.
Chuck Grimes