[lbo-talk] The Necrosocial

Asad Haider noswine at gmail.com
Sat Nov 21 15:35:04 PST 2009


There is, though, a cultural/ideological theme that Agamben might be addressing, since it had been aired before in the Italian left, dramatized in Pasolini's Teorema, which begins with a boss suffering a nervous breakdown and handing the factory over to the workers. The workers wonder, as they are interviewed by the media, what will happen if the bourgeoisie succeeds in making everyone a bourgeois.

By making "luxury" goods widely available, by aggressively promoting car/home ownership, by convincing workers to describe themselves as "middle class," capitalism has perhaps universalized a petty bourgeois *consciousness*, while retaining exploitation of labor-power. I guess you could conduct an opinion poll to get empirical data on it, and you could make theoretical arguments against it, but it seems like a fairly reasonable hypothesis. It certainly is one way to theoretically describe why tea party participants and Sarah Palin groupies are so vehement in opposing the interests of their class.

By the way, though I object to the neo-situationist tone of the "Necrosocial" article, why leap towards attacking people who don't like college? You don't have to be an ungrateful snot-nosed kid to hate college. I hated it because instead of entering a community of people who were excited about reading theory and engaging with politics, I entered a community of poseur grad students and cynical professors who drained Marxist theory of any political meaning (that is, when they deigned to read it; there were exceptions, of course). Add in a stubborn bureaucracy that promises you money but then just takes it away, and a really unpleasant social scene dominated by frightening white rapist fraternities and the people who love them (the English department may have been politically correct, but everyone else sure as fuck wasn't--I'm talking Klan-themed parties, girls getting expelled for being raped by frat-house drug dealers), and you have a very nasty four years.

Of course, the bourgeoisie probably deserves its own degeneracy, but some of us went to college surrounded by rich kids because we were lured there by financial aid packages that successfully distracted us from the endless loan burden we would end up bearing. To return to Pasolini, I often felt like one of the innocent country kids in "Salo," barking like a dog and eating the shit of the perverts who owned the mansion...



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