The coming Glorious Revolution

[Brad Mayer]

Very funny ;-)  Actually, Derrida represents the terminal "parasitic" decay 
phase of this "counterrevolution" in public discourse.  At the same time, 
is was a revolution in the (capitalist) means of intellectual production, 
generating the inevitable overproduction of intellectual objects, some 
useful, others useless or even harmful, in the service (largely) of 
academic industry.  Desperate to keep up with the ever widening torrent of 
these objects, the intellectual participants in this process have often 
lost sight of the difference between the _production_ and _presentation_ of 
intellectual material - a simple notion famously expounded upon in the 
introduction to the Grundrisse.  I'm sure this distinction has been 
observed by many others as well throughout history.

The net effect of the overproduction on the public aspect of discourse has 
been counterrevolutionary.  This would not be the first time capitalist 
overproduction has had a counterrevolutionary effect - look at the 
over-proliferation of TV, automobile and suburb, to cite some salient 
examples.  What to do with the inheritance of all this crap will be a real 
problem for any post-capitalist society.  But I digress - the point here is 
that this is an objective process, not a conspiracy of "bad" 
intellectuals.  The solution is not to "go back" to traditional forms of 
public presentation, but to create new forms out of the new material.  This 
is actually one of the tasks of the reconstruction of the working class and 
socialist movement - one that faces us _immediately_, and not at some 
forlornly remote point in the future.  The enthusiastic (re)creation of our 
public language in connection with real struggles will be a healthy source 
of optimism and a antidote to the cynicism that pervades American 
leftism.  Until then, there is no free speech without real public speech 
that ruptures the daily repression of social space almost totally occupied 
by privatized discourse here in the US.

  But did you read Kagarlitskys' article?  He is currently on a speaking 
tour in the US and will speak at UC Berkeley this Friday (04/06).  I plan 
to go - wanna report?

-Brad Mayer
Oakland, CA


>Right. And if it weren't for Jacques Derrida, the revolutionary
>moment would already have arrived!
>
>Doug

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I wander through each chartered street

       Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet,

       Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,

       In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,

       The mind forged manacles I hear

-Blake, at the beginning of time
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