Comments on: Paris and Me, Part 2

By: The Happy Tutor

The Happy Tutor — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 14:05:02 +0000

Thanks, Mike. My own ego swells enormously when cited like this in an academic study. My dream was to teach, and to find myself in any way included in conversations about the teaching of writing is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Thank you.

On the Zuboff, I wonder if her vision is not that of an infantilized consumer, surrounded by courtiers and servants who cater to her every need. The closest thing to Zuboff’s Utopia in real life today is “The Family Office” for wealthy famlies. The family officer does, so the joke goes, “everything but walk the dog.”

The “State of Beulah bliss,” as Wm. Blake called it.

Giving kids all they want, or their parents, does not conduce to real growth. There is something to be said for real hardship and coming up through life by your own efforts. Yes, Zuboff loves the self-actualizer, but the self actualized may be infantile.

I read her work as a 21st century apology for consumerism. Life becomes a wonderful experience manufactured to each consumer’s taste. We live in a bubble made just for us. Not mass delusion, but delusion tailored to our specific weaknesses. Circe and her sailors turned hogs. What we need is sterner stuff drawn from, say, your favorite Roman authors.

Thank you for including me in your paper.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 01:17:19 +0000

Hm. Upon looking at it again, the last part of that comment needs some unpacking. Something to work on, I think: I know where it’s going, and I need to spell out the reasoning.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:13:02 +0000

Chris, I think you’re right about including “egocasting” in the title: it’s such a fun, telling term, and Christine Rosen deserves plenty of credit for it. Thanks for the praise, as well, but you’re right in that it’s a multidirectional phenomenon, which I think may be where Rosen misses the mark by just the tiniest bit in her essay. (Or maybe it’s just incomplete?) As far as substantiality goes: could we not see a possibility where “being” is “consuming” (and remixing and recombining and reproducing); might that not be one of the implied hallmarks of new-economic subjectivity? As you can likely guess, I think the answer is “yes, but”: and the “but” exists as the demarcation between the global north and the global south; the technorich and the technopoor.

Hardt & Negri remark that Hampshire County, Massachusetts, where I live, was the site of the early American republic’s Shays’ Rebellion, where farmers took up arms in response to the excessive debts to which they were subjected — and were summarily executed by the emergent American democracy. Metaphor has its limits, but such historical examples are sobering reminders of the class divide, and of what happens under changing social conditions when one class sees their own situation as luxurious, and another class sees their own situation as desperate.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:34:35 +0000

Very nice stuff, Mike. I of course love the nod to Polanyi. Now…titles.

I like egocasting in there. There should also be an acknowledgment of the fact that it’s not just egocasting, but ego stroking via infinitely individualized marketing. There’s a pushme-pullyou/feedback thing going on. As we’re told, again and again, in a thousand ways, that we’re the only one whose preferences matter, we instantiate that belief in our increasingly intense & multifarious navelgazing. Meantime, I’d argue, we become less and less substantial in our being, and more in our consuming (or, at least, our potential to consume).

Selling Brand Me; Buying Brand Me? [I'm assiduously avoiding the MLA colon]
Egocasting and the Signal:Noise Ratios of Class Identity

I really don’t have anything to offer, but maybe this’ll offer something in the way of a brain jolt.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:00:53 +0000

Thanks, Donna: the somewhat revised version — I’m still tweaking it — is here. Tonight’s been a bit of a long night: nothing like having your computer break the night before your Computers & Writing presentation. Feeling frustrated and frazzled, but I’m thinking that my co-presenter and I have enough going on in common in our presentations that I might ask her about combining them into something for Kairos.

I’ll be glad when tomorrow’s done.

By: Donna

Donna — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:25:25 +0000

Very provocative stuff, Mike. This is part of your C&W presentation? I’d be really interested in reading the whole thing once it’s done.