Below. Several months ago, I started this post, but never finished, then looked at it today and decided I'd post it as is, on account of; late capitalism is still in my craw, stuck or not, I'm not sure.
LATE CAPITALISM
Characters we know and love; Willy Loman and etc. What do I MEAN when I say that Leftism has permeated the culture? Let me, if I may, for a moment of your time, visualize this aforesaid permeation from a skeptical point of view, rather than that of, “Oh, goody, here comes the Revolution”.
There is a monster that has taken over much of the body politic today that is as plain as the nose on your face. That is if television news is in front of the nose on your face, morning noon and night…….with it’s own starfish-like method of landing on, suffocating, sucking; now we are switching metaphors and it’s an Octopus but anyway, we call it Leftism but it is also many things including Pathological Altruism. It came out of culture, [German Philosophy], seeping into poetry and prose, painting theater and film. Our parents told us about “The old Left,”; we, as children, saw it happening in television. Paddy Chaevsky comes to mind. And we heard about it in theater; Brecht comes to mind.
Television…, the story there is that the New York commies went to Hollywood and couldn’t break in. A Red scare blocked them …and TKTKTK television, well from the beginning, and motion pictures, ...through television? And anyway; anti-Stalinism gave it a big push, maybe it’s biggest push, but that was after FDR who; well now we see that we are giving a history of Leftism; which I guess is what we really have to do is give the history and the structure and give a consolidated metaphorical symbolic illustrative overall picture if I may be so bold of the monster, its Iconic figures, ie the Fabians, H.G. Wells, and etc. as well as its opponents; see Amity Shlaes..tktktktktktktk
Television “Morphed” into something else; a giant which merged with Hollywood, putting TV commies in the drivers seat of both.
To deconstruct the joy, or the Jouissance, in the contempt for the very idea of late capitalism with the help of Lacan, and Chris Langan....what Late Capitalism refers to is the trickling down of the impulse to profit, as that impulse creeps into every nook and cranny thereby creating economic pressure on consumers, and despair on the part of those concerned with achieving equable wealth re-distribution. Materialist desire is amped up to the maximum.
Late Capitalism continues to function, belying Marxist predictions. Intellectuals like Zizek scramble to reinvent dialectical materialism. At the same time, right in front of God and everybody, China has created a completely anachronistic Communist-Capitalist state.
Meme, trope, modern, post modern, (the two used separately) precursors, as in Scout, as in Tonto….
Nonsense as a product,
Surrealism as a product and as a performance…,
Performance, as a product…(everyone is selling something, everyone is a pitchman.)
Surrealists as “Progressives”, and as people who “Weren’t interested in money!!…, (Except for Gaia). [the wife not the planet..].
Autobio - I woke up in the seventies began to peek at the NYRB.
Post Modernism was beginning to reach a blinking, stoned America.
Mode of Production; ie Performance; as in motion pictures and the telly, and ie; Psychoanalysis of Textual Form.
Real Estate - Subdivision, Piece of the Action, parcel…Landlocked, right-away, lease on, just renting, mushrooming of prices, cabals, things like snake-oil pitches and testimonials are not necessarily tools of Late Capitalism but they don’t disappear with time, they trickle down into the Late period; that in which we lie, suffering; or not.
Close your eyes;
Ghost of Andy Warhol;
Was that Bianca? My God it was. She and a smartly dressed not bad looking but nondescript man driving a Land Rover rolled down the window to ask me directions as they came up alongside me from the opposite direction while I was stopped, in a puddle, it was raining, at a stop sign, in Sag Harbor, aka The Hamptons.
Wind swirling, Shadbush stiff against the weather. Romance never sated, hunger and deprivation swirling in an indestructible gut. A ghost of Warhol and the phantom thump of Mick Jaegger’s song. And Mick is right there. .............. ...and then sleep. Deep deep sleep. Seconal sleep; overpowering the fading acid trip. Daylight. The next day, an empty estate. Everyone has gone to a bar.
Meme and trope. Post-modern and then some,
Auto salvage turn to dust. Remoulade and frozen pie crust,
Forced to live in Key West after all the Hemingways are gone,
We won’t know how it turns out until her kids are old.
And they won’t talk.
Low brow and middle brow; Willy Nelson; example; Angel flying too close to the ground.
NOTES:
Pavlov and Rebecca West; a romance. (Rebecca putting on her makeup. Pavlov shows up in a horse-drawn vehicle, not impossible in 1950, though impossible because he was dead), I couldn’t see what happened after that but I dreamt about it for four years to the effect of having a complete history of the affair to my complete satisfaction, to wit: Never was there such an orgasm of understanding. True love is like spaghetti, best served cold and washed down with a good-enough Burgundy, by Gallo. Nothing else will do.
A list of names that I sometimes confuse - Max Beckman, Walter Benjamin; Robert Conquest, John Gunther; Noel Coward, Cole Porter; Balzac, Zola.
Music that I sometimes confuse; More, the theme from 'Mondo Cane', and 'A Day in the Life of a Fool', from Black Orpheus.
Late Capitalism Triggers....,
Global Warming
Population Bomb
The Bourgeouise
Snobbery
The Vulgarian
The Middle-Brow
The Nouveau Riche
See; Robert Osborn and Marya Mannes
But then...........suppose it’s not late-Capitalism but something else?
