Greetings Economists, On Dec 6, 2006, at 8:51 AM, Mark Lause wrote:
but there will be no serious change that will not reflect the interests of the societies owners that will not involve the mobilization of a majority of the people. People angry and disappointed with the workers for not having made a revolution last year...or last generation...or last century...can complain about its irrelevance ad nauseum, but it doesn't address the reality.
Doyle; This morning I was thinking about the issue of how people structure their behavior in intimate surroundings. For example, with dysfunctional families, the patterns are rigid, and difficult for people to stop doing. That's because the feelings shape the behavior rather than the intellect. Now we tend to give intellect as the road to freedom, but the work to free oneself from a sect or bad social being is about the work to free oneself from an iron cage of emotional constraints. In the developed countries certain aspects of life such as relative standard of living are established, so it's the freedom to associate in such a way that a person gains power as a part of emotional attachments that is missing. That's a labor process to free oneself. It can be invisible from the outside so that we say the person is in the closet, or don't ask and don't tell is the measure of the freedom. Which accepts that say in the military if you admit to being a Muslim or Gay the outside forces of interaction between people then appears and the process of 'knowing' you will have consequences. So the freedom to be Muslim is about how that plays out when other people 'know' you are Muslim. Hence the scarf is an admission of certain concepts of your approach to connecting to people intimately. Religion then creates iron bars of behavior in every day interaction that take a huge amount of work to free oneself from. So for example the very rich can afford the resources to build a little world where being gay is done and grows to some degree. But poor working class people have far less scope. So individuals carry around these knowledge frameworks that fit into the architecture of a social system. They reflect the productive forces in society. For example in the family communicating is still face to face and via talk. But the TV offers a wide cast different type of information production that is often more interesting than that which the individuals in the family can do with each other. So the children and the parents bury their heads in the tv out of hunger for mental resources that free them from the chains in the family relationships. The chains being the narrow ways in which intimacy plays out in families. These narrow ways are related to how much one knows. But knowing many languages so that one could hope to intimately connect with another culture is still a bit of a major challenge for knowledge production technology. Broadly speaking knowing others increasingly demands we see, not talk, about knowing them. We need to see them in the under wear doing intimate things, not talk about them being in their underwear around the house. Because we need to feel the intimacy that is implicit and possible with the photograph or movie. Hence Paris Hilton has a value that is unexploited simply because the population can't produce enough intimate pictures to render Paris so banal or ordinary in the sense of intimate knowledge as to have lost exploitation value from seeing her crotch. And her pals who go without underwear for the paparazzi similarly trade upon 'knowing' intimacy' via pictures. This supplants talk. This creates new challenges to intimacy. The person who wears the headscarf wants to live up to a way to be intimate or exposed to the world that is 'modest' and equal feeling. The photo then redefines how that happens to be seen. It is not the word, modest, it is the seeing intimacy that matters. Any photo of intimacy becomes empty of intimacy rapidly if it just shows people who are 'strangers' with their coverings carelessly arranged or drooping because someone using the photograph must have 'real' intimacy. You know, direct social contact in which you are free to touch a social contact, 'you know down there' (how poor words are at giving an image). Free to pick up the underwear they tossed on the floor, and put it in the hamper. Massage their foot. The person who is just a photograph is not intimate. The intimacy in a photograph ultimately is the same intimacy of talking about doing it, but not doing it. Real intimacy then is information that includes local every day contact. People who favor modesty favor a kind of contact that does not injure another. The injury being hurt feelings. In business this is called GIS or geophysical information services. See IBM's initiative to create University level services sciences to see how this is being conceptualized in the economy. Wearing a headscarf is absurd in such a service economy. thanks, Doyle Saylor
