> Date sent: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 15:14:08 +1100
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Extra Credit Assignment
> What a lovely idea, Jim!
>
> Haven't seen the film, but here are a couple of sickeners:
>
> 5) The Titanic was a commodity, produced with exchange in mind, and
> therefore had to be pretty. Sufficient lifeboats for projected passenger
> manifests would have broken the commodity's seductive lines (apparently
> true, the designer actually removed the necessary lifeboats from the
> initial plan - it's in his notebook). A triumph of exchange value over use
> value?
>
> 6) Once the integument is burst asunder (the hull), nothing can stop the
> sheer weight of the vast excluded (the water as prols; the bulwarks as
> seemingly invulnerable 'trenches and fortifications of the bourgeoisie'))
> from sinking those who would ride upon their backs (as the sea reclaims its
> dues, the expropriators are expropriated).
>
> 7) It was that virtuous thing, competition, that made Titanic sink. The
> trans-Atlantic blue riband is capitalism in microcosm, and but for this
> competition, the Titanic would have been a few miles south, travelling at a
> few knots less.
>
> 8) The watchman saw the berg and warned the bridge, but the captain could
> do nought. As the mass of the ship and the energy of the coal were beyond
> the skipper's whim, so is capitalism's historical trajectory beyond the
> control of the capitalist.
>
> I better stop - I'm losing my grip.
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.
>
>
> ************************************************************************
>
> Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.
>
> Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH)
> Fax: 02-6201 5119
>
> ************************************************************************
>
> 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
> lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill)
>
> "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
> into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
> the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
> the form of capital." (Karl Marx)
>
> ************************************************************************
>
Response: Wonderful prose and excellent critical thinking. I just
hope my students do as well. Perhaps add the whole surreal carnival
atmosphere ,frivolity and self-indulgent/centered narcissism among the
ultra- rich as they were headed directly toward a date with destiny
while thinking they were making another kind of history (passengers
on the first voyage of the unsinkable).
Shit, now I'm getting carried away.
Jim
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