Well there's a few slips in what I wrote. I do not exactly know how many people Fletcher Challenge employ in New Zealand nowadays, I would need to look it up, but it would be at least 5 percent or so. They are a very large multinational by now, like, they would own forests in Canada and Chile etc. My sister worked for a bookstore chain they owned, and the forest I once worked in could well be owned by them now.
The "bluish light" in the Blondie text could be of course not just a bit of Reichian orgone, but also a light on a police car. Also, I think the movie was "9 and a half weeks" not "9 and a half hours". > > I am sure Jurriaan, you would not necessarily say the following statement > is definitive:- > > >the operative core concept of bourgeois intelligence is basically your > >ability to manipulate people into doing what you want, using abstract > >knowledge, plus your ability to seduce people and consolidate social networks. No I do not think it is definitive, and I said deliberately, "at the risk of crude caricature". You talk about a lot of issues which are very difficult to generalise or abstract about, like love, trust, intelligence and so on. I am still interested sometimes in the philosophical-logical problem of universals, but more particularly in the use of universals. The point here being, that although there may be no universals, we do often assume them and use them anyway in language and logic, and not always for the best reasons. It's also a consideration in the semiotic or hermeneutic analysis of ideology. The "basic contradictory quantum foam of human interaction" ? I do not know what exactly you mean here. All I know is, if you want trash, you can have trash. And if you want to avoid it, you have to do something to avoid it. > It is partly because there is this complexity inherent in human interaction > that it is important to focus back on the legal basis of capitalism in the > private ownership and control of the means of production, as the key issue. Well, what intrigues me here is the sheer revolutionary impact of modern information and communication technology, which often renders the old superstructures inadequate of otiose. The reference to ideology in pre-class societies I made is (from memory) George Thomson, The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society. George Thomson was actually a really interesting sort of scholar, but I think he is by now mostly forgotten. The idea he works out in a chapter concerns the specific way in which so-called primitive peoples or tribal societies develop interpretations and explanations for the world they live in, along the familiar Marxian theme of people-people relationships and people-nature relationships. I cannot remember now the exact argument, but I think it had to do with the fact that "nature" could also be reified, that divine, magical or human characteristics could be attributed to non-human natural phenomena, and he had some interesting formulations of that phenomenon. I do not have his texts handy here, I am just working from memory. At one point in the 1980s, I became really interested in studying the historical-anthropological origins of the political state and civil society in human history, to check out some hypotheses Marx and Engels had about that, which have been described by Draper and Mandel, and I read stuff by Lawrence Krader and political anthropologists on that. The idea being that rather than theorise speculatively, you had to look at the problem historically and anthropologically. And I came across George Thomson at that time. In many ways, anthropology is a rather speculative science, because the evidence is often patchy, but it is often a good antidote to reifications in economic theory. This relates directly to the discussion of sociobiology, incidentally. "The fundamental assumption of sociobiology is that 'similar' behaviours are manifest in animals and humans... and that they must therefore have similar origins (genetic programmes). This assumption suffers first of all from a confusion of analogy (similar traits due to similar functions) with homology (common genetic ancestry)... Sociobiologists, moreover, draw very sloppy analogies between distinct animal and human behaviours, projecting anthropomorphic motivations onto animals, who are said to exhibit 'xenophobia', 'altruism'and 'spite'... Furthermore, like the other biologically determinist theories, sociobiology tends to ignore the variability that exists among cultural systems and cultural behaviour." (Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson (eds), Women's Work, Men's Property, Verso, p. 6). J. Regards Jurriaan
