The question of 'over pay' and the question of the signigance of refusing to stand for the national anthem seem to me to be unrelated. The NBA's position on the issue is, I think, quite illustrative of the ideological content of contemporary ritualized practices. The NBA, of course, is quite aware that whether or not Chris Jackson stands for the anthem he will not 'beleive' in the legitimacy of the american state. They don't really care what he beleives. I would guess that if he took to writing newspaper articles and giving talks on the impotence of the american nation, the NBA would not take any action against him. The position of the NBA could be reduced to the following principle- whatever you may beleive, during the game cerimonies you must act 'as if' you beleived in the legitimacy and desirability of the american state. The 'as if' component to such practices illustrates for us their fetishistic nature and ideological function. As Slavoj Zizek has noted for us in the first chapter of THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY (see also, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO) it is this 'as if' dimention to practice that results in fetishism. We misrecognize our relations with other people as being relations betweens things, thus commodity fetismism and aleination. Of course, we know that we are really relating with other people, somebody actually produced this stuff we are buying. The act of exchange, although, mandates that we act 'as if' we did no t know this. The exchange value a given commodity posseses is a function of its equivilance vis-a-vis We assume that the given commodity already posseses this exchange value outside of its relation with other commodities. When we engage in the exchanging of commodities, The system is shutting down and I have to log out, I will finish this message tomorrow, sorry. Peter Bratsis CUNY GRADUATE CENTER. another commodity. During the act of exchange, we act as if this exchange value, although, already and necessarily a property of the given commodity. We do not sit and count the labor-time that the given commodity has absorbed in order to
