Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
> >Quoting Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>:
> >
> > Why should they do any damn thing but get by day by day?
> >
> Because getting by day by day isn't enough, it doesn't feel like enough.
>
<< Doug: And most people do more than just getting by, day by day. They
go to
football games, Tupperware parties, church, and watch TV.>>
(sigh)
Precisely.
Perhaps the fundamental difference between daily life in capitalist society and in pre-capitalist societies is that the present is emptied of meaning -- that is the meaning (motive) of an act is no longer present ("visible") in the act itself but is exists only in the future. The meaning of the action (at work) of the data-entry clerk or of the high-paid software engineer consists not in the work but in what the wage will (at some future time) buy. Hence time away from work requires _time-killing_ activities (often, not always) permeated subjectively by the desperate will to believe that these time-killing activities have some intrinsic meaning that will redeem the time.
Has anyone ever done a cultural/social analysis of Tupperware parties? Or of why "regular season" games (professional baseball or football) are so much more important than exhibition games? At one time "sporting contests" were ends in themselves rather than taking their meaning from a future event (the final championship). When did the cultural institution of "The Season" (in athletics) come into existence as a unified whole, reducing individual games to parts of a (future) whole, having no intrinsic "meaning" of their own?
Carrol