Good evening, Mark.
> Rob, I've never really understood why a clever chap like you, goes >in for this
>demotic and mostly incomprehensible pseudo-aussie dialect->babble. Most Australians
>under 30 are right here in London, in any >case. We socialise a bit and I can tell
>you, they don't talk this way.
Well, only some people think me clever. Alas, everyone who knows me thinks me
vulgar (if that's what you mean by 'demotic'). And poo hits fans in both the
US and the UK to my certain knowledge (indeed, when last I was in England I
remember someone - Ian St John? - calling a nasty incident after a match when
a spectator struck a manager - Brian Clough?. 'That's the first time I've
ever seen the fan hit the shit!' he gleefully announced). Perhaps a little of
my Dutch penchant for body functions has melded with the colloquialisms I
picked up when I was learning English in Australia years before your young
Antipodean chums were even impure thoughts. I don't know. Anyway, I talk to
myself in my head as I compose my posts, so I tend to write like I talk. Does
it really matter?
>They live in Earls Court and work in every pub inside the North
>Circular. Some of them (they are from Melbourne) live right next door >to me.
Well, I did most of my Australian apprenticeship in Tasmania. An altogether
different milieu, as I'm sure your neighbours will enthusiastically confirm
(ignore their tales of rampant in-breeding and foul weather - they're just
stories we put out to keep mainlanders off our patch). Do like Melbourne a
lot, though - a real cosmopolitan crucible.
>We go to Epping Forest and pick mushrooms with them. They tell us
>intelligently about their travels and I am very envious.
Do demotic colloquialisms imply a lack of intelligence, then? Now I'm just cross.
> He's on this list, btw, like a few other Aussies.
We've lots of computers here and not a few good red-green types, so that's
good to hear. As they're not me, I imagine they wouldn't write quite like I
do. Probably no bad thing, I admit, but so what?
>Unfortunately, this is either untrue or irrelevant.
Don't know whether to go for the vulgar liar option or the vulgar irrelevancy
tag. Thanks for giving me a choice, though.
>Yoi simply ignore what is staring you right in the face: the whole >vast
agglomeration of dead labour, ie, infrastructure, whose servants >our masters
are, and we and they are in thrall to that.
We're not so different from other people, are we, Mark? I take a more
autonomist approach than you, ye Cambrian Cassandra, and this might be just as
well, as a glimmer of productive hope might then be discerned.
I'll go some of the way with your dark pronouncement, but I'll follow the
autonomists in concluding the thought. Negri has it that, "in a rotten
society, we are all rotten: that is precisely why we are struggling for a
different society. To struggle against a rotten society is to struggle
against ourselves. There is no innocent subject here, no room for puritanism
or authoritarianism." (Pinched that from a Holloway critique just posted over
at Aut-op-sy, by the way)
Sure, emancipation from alienation and despoliation needs some hard thinking
and organised practice (perhaps Negri does play a bit fast and loose with the
actual pragmatics of transformation), but if we decide at the outset that we
(or, worse, 'they') are incapable of slipping the odd ideological leash when
palpable crisis shows itself, then we're, well, fucked.
Biliously yours,
Rob.
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
