Innit vs. jus chillin: a socio-inguistic analysis

"Innit" signifies an urge to belong, to confirm group membership by making sure that you're understood and by using the same language as the rest of the group. There's some social function to "innit".

"Jus chillin", on the other hand, conjures images of utter social alienation as Marx wrote about it, of mindlessly biding time until one's death by way of gobbling up multi-coloured snacks plopped in front of a plasma screen splashed with glamour, violent deaths and other mental pollution.

Daniel Bell's The Economy of Desire (review)

Programmatic and original books on social theory are always far and between. Much of what is published out there are elaborations and interpretations on those few. Well, that's how science works, quoth Thomas Kuhn (1962). A shocking bulk of what is published in arts, humanities and social sciences is based on nicking poorly understood flashy concepts from adjacent disciplines and bloating them into published volumes. 

Daniel Bell's The Economy of Desire is basically an amalgam of a couple of concepts that Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari came up with 30 - 40 years ago, this time with a Christian spin. While concurring with the grand three on most points, Bell plugs in his religion as a possible saviour from the capitalist economy of desire. Coming out as a religiously-inclined scientist is not as shocking as it was in Evans-Pritchard's time, so Bell goes on freely with many rather plausible, as well as not so much ruminations on Catholic alternatives to capitalism. None of those is, however, examined critically, as a social scientist worth their salt would do. They simply end up taken for its face value and exalted for their ostensible moral superiority: fair trade is great because it is fair. Right. By the same token, green-washing would  be great because it is green. No surprise then that what we get from Bell is that Catholic morals are great because they are Catholic. But  then again, what would you expect from a professor of theological ethics at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary?

I, for  one, would be the last to decry incorporating spirituality into scientific method. What I strongly object to is, however, is sugarcoating unexamined social practices with unexamined religious spin, particularly coming from an organised religion, which is a patently social constructed human organisation that needs a bit of social deconstruction itself.

The phrase that caught my attention amongst all that do-goody Catholic anti-capitalism was this: "Christianity... is a counter-discipline that heals desire of its sin-sickness". For me, it was like a wolf momentarily dropping its sheepskin. Creeps. In other words, we are advised to replace the capitalist super-ego with Bell's favourite Christian super-ego to let it control our life and everything we do. Rephrased once again for those unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, what we are dealing with here is a mere competition of rival prescriptive systems eager to worm into your mind and reign you from there, one hegemony for another. So how is swapping one psychic parasite with another going to benefit the humankind? There is actually a historical precedent: Jesuit Reductions for natives in South America. Who knows, filling the jungle with Baroque cathedrals may be a better option than the modern slavery-consumption cycle (aka, "work hard, play hard").

Simulacra sex

Recently, earthlings have been living under the tyranny of images imposed on them through various media outlets, which shape their expectations of life. When it comes to sex, for example, they keep looking for an exact match of such an image in their brain: the right abs, the right breasts, etc. When they've found a match, they then proceed to fucking that image in the brain, masturbating into or with the help of the other person. Enacting the right sequence of image-induced actions, as Baudrillard's attributes of visible  happiness, is supposed to achieve the prescribed jouissance, and, perhaps, it does. However, to someone outside that tyranny of images, it simply comes across mechanistic and, well, masturbatory.

Frog-boiling: sound familiar?

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

Taste and class: fieldwork delivers a blow to theory

The other day, during a lunch break in an inter-collegiate training seminar in central London, Bourdieu's Distinction, my favourite manual for understanding life on Earth, revealed a gaping chink in the armour.

Just when I thought that I had a good cover and was blending in just right, tucking in my home-made organic brown rice and free-range piperade, two of my lunch buddies, very high-rolling international PhD students from uppity families, went down their candy bars and cola with a child-like gusto, exactly the kind of  food that I, in my ignorance, deemed the staple of the less-educated earthlings. What's more, my declining to partake in this veritable feast of high fructose corn syrup, xantam gum and flavourings identical to natural, was met with gasps of sheer surprise.

- I've never met anyone who would turn this down.

What I learnt today: although class is sure a handy principle of macro-level analysis, individual cases of protein-based social life will defy it, time and over again.

Grabalization

A concept of anything being up for grabs for anyone who knows how to bring down trade barriers or melt down financial markets.

Where is the "invisible hand" pushing us?

It may not be fashionable these days to quote John Sydenham Furnivall, however, when the Euurocentric tinge, the air to breathe of his era, is ignored, his is pure wisdom of a scientist and a hands-on administrator. 

"Everyone would pay twopence rather than threepence for the same thing; that is rational, a matter of universal common sense....but at the same time, unless kept under control, it reduces costs by eliminating all human qualities that are not required to maintain life."