slothrop
what i can tell you is the hegel of iéna & heidelberg, the karl marx of the british museum & the louis althusser of rue d’ulm & the psychiatric hospitals has a pertinence & a place in my work – my daily work in cultural intervention – that grows & does not diminish
i can weep in wonder & utility – today – when i read from hegel’s phénoménologie de l’esprit or the philosophie du droit, as i can with almost all marx & close to everything of althusser but especially his lettres à franca – they do not constitute in any sense for me – a theology – but a material practice that is tested under the most difficult & precarious conditions
they are for me – my song – the sing – throughout my days – & my world is the less perverse for their efforts. they have taught me of man of laws & of essence
to use again the analogy of music – you may remember the songs of tim buckley – ‘sweet surrender’ or ‘i must have been blind’ – resonant with the deepness of his material life that i often find reflected only – & with poignance in the texts of the thinkers i cite
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 22:46 utc | 103

All this would be infinitely easier to talk about if I was a Republican.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 8 2005 22:51 utc | 105

slothrop, I mean only this: when we say “‘capitalism’ is….,” or “capitalism exists when….,” or “capitalism works when…”, or “socialism is….” (Jérôme, on 6 January @ 05:34 PM), we presuppose a finite set of predicates which are recognized and understood by all, and which enable our agreement or dispute. And then, because we don’t always stop to wonder what “classes” (or “ideologies,” or “systems”) are, we tend to take these terms as facts to be found in fields governed by laws, forgetting that they are thoroughly problematic, and were so regarded by Marx himself. He sets standards of circumspection and speculative daring that defy exhaustive analysis, and he also offers some promising (hence “messianic”) suggestions for further development in words and deeds. I get a big rush when reading this stuff, and have to warn myself to slow down. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, no sooner does he mention class warfare between two mighty opposites, than he introduces that strangely labile and risky remainder, the Lumpenproletariat. We can, if we like, clear this hurdle with a crisp and confident definition, but if we do that, we abandon Marx’s own precautionary move.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 8 2005 23:02 utc | 107

alabama
as usual, well said by you.
Class is insufficient. Now we have ‘elites’ the welfare state, trade unions, etc. The field of investigation, the totality, is gigantic, and the toil to understand it ever ramified.
But the basic model of exploitation is correct. We can always expect the reproduction of cheap labor somewhere to make the immense quantity of goods. Today, malaysia; tomorrow, lawrence, KA.
it’s easier to be a republican.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 8 2005 23:47 utc | 109

my mind wanders…reading about capitalism and Dogville, I seque to The Saddest Music in the World, by Guy Maddin. His hommage to the silents reminds me of some moments in Greed, and thus Fran’s post.
Breaking the Waves made me weep out loud. I like Bjork much more than her movie with LVT.
Is there a human nature? Are we both animals and shape-shifting gods of our own imaginations?
Wilco is on Austin City Limits tonight. Last time I saw them, they were trying to divorce Uncle Tupelo. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Thanks for the excellent reads, b real, DM, and Fran, again. When I wrote something similar about danger of the religious right in America, I was called a drama queen by an esteemed scholar.
The more esteemed Heidigger got some things wrong.
Jerome, the mixed European economies seem so far from America when the word capitalism is mentioned. American conservatives have been predicting the demise of Europe for so long…but they didn’t see the fall of Russia coming.
Just recently watched Goodbye, Lenin. A statue of Lenin flies by, beneath a helicopter, and on to the west.
Alabama, thanks for the explication.
New letters from Mary Wollstonecraft were recently discovered that reveal her trip to Scandanavia were undertaken to help Imlay recover silver that was being sold to finance the French Revolution. Instead it was stolen. The revolution proceeded a pace.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jan 9 2005 3:08 utc | 111

Just when you think that American’s couldn’t be any more fucking stupid …

Posted by: DM | Jan 9 2005 7:42 utc | 113

I have opened a thread here at Le Speakeasy to continue the discussion

Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 9 2005 8:51 utc | 115

Many thanks to all above, Moonshine for the Mind.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 9 2005 9:09 utc | 117

De- I liked the film very much, most especially because its goal was to be “small” and about humans in all their conflicted glory. Seems to me that a big part of the “message” is that ideologies do not matter as much as the people they are supposed to serve, but the reverse is what usually happens.
Governments lie and are indifferent, people lie and they and others live the consequences (because it is the mother’s lie that created the then current reality.)
I have long considered that most mainstream American films present a sort of fascist aesthetic with the superhero mentality and glossy perfection of larger-than-life “important” characters who have to save the world from itself.
American films fetishize violence as a solution to problems, and as a form of beauty. Conflict is not within the human heart (beyond a superficial “set up” to create sympathy for a protagonist that feels like it was drawn from a market checklist..hmmm…oedipal hogwash? check. two weeks to retirement? check.) Spectacle is all that ultimately matters in those films. All conflict is external. Violence sells.
In “dramas,” women are angel/whored, if they are considered at all, and nothing seems to have changed much in terms of dramatic form since the era of restorative three-act plays more than a century ago.
Goodbye, Lenin had none of these features (the special effects were not made to be noticed), and for that reason alone I enjoyed it. But most of all, I suppose I enjoyed the movie because it reflects my inability to romanticize any ideology.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jan 9 2005 14:13 utc | 119

a hundred horses pound outside my house in a provincial city cut off from a world i knew by heart. every which way. look that up in the journals. that is your work. i place my head by the door listening to sound of stamping feet. they are waiting to perform a dance i have choreographed. i am not eager for this rendezvous.
knowing knot i am tying i stretch a principle or two to understand invention but i am no wiser than i was before the flood. you can take that as gospel.
adoring all agendas that you have brought before me i start writing in a scrapbook with pictures of historical figures. they are neither important nor accurate but that is not my project. that is another exercise altogether. i was told i was once a prince but i do not believe that because i can look at my feet and recognise where they have walked.
labouring with laments all through a night i barely remember the days now. that night stays clear. so clear. it all began in an evening when the crowd had performed for one another. i lay on ground while something tore me apart. it went on. all though that night i wept as a child. trying to forget the pain of the body. nothing worked. trying to sleep but only remembering. trying to wake from all this. nothing worked. i walked into a machine and it told me a story i knew was true. then i was taken to a large house with so many rooms full of strangers. i stayed there for three days and three nights while the pain remained. i was given a junk to sail to china but i broke that boat into bits and what was left of my body remained. i talked to ghosts. the fourth day began with a walk in the white light. something stopped. there were many hands placed within me. so too machines. something happened. it is still a mystery.
breaking down again on the road to another light i might have caught if i had not been looking in another direction. i had gone underground with women who wore a wasted cloth. it was said the atmosphere was magical. i found it otherwise. i remember old men digging earth in tunnels and children carrying the soil in bags to some other place i feared to think about at that time. they were building cathedrals, though, as they were being built, they were also being burnt down as soon as they were constructed. while they existed they were the most exquisite things but it is true that i feared them as structures. at the time it was not the only occurrence i had my eyes on. no. no. not at all. in these tunnels there were old warships that had been transformed into camps for people who were covered in numbers – they all held on to each other. they clearly belonged to one another. everyone worked. worked at something. they were all trying to find that which i was looking for at another time but they could not have known that. as a i walked with my group of women – we passed figures that resembled angels – those that appeared in the imaginations of renaisance painters but everyone was covered in scars as if they had been through some catastrophe. i recognised in each face features of my own. that was not vanity simply the realism i pôsessed at the time. i seem so removed from that now. it was somewhere underground that all this began. i knew that then. i know that now. there were several seas down there amongst these people and they seemed to cover earths i could never cross in a lifetime. though i did and in such a short time. i was always guided by the women and sometimes when something was too much for me they took my face in their hand and averted my eyes from that sight. truly i had seen nearly everything before but at this moment and at this time it was accumulated into a firestorm i knew i was living. yes i was living. that was the most certain of facts. there was something in me that never wanted to leave but at the same time i had a yearning for departure. if i am to be frank i have always had a yearning for departures. it is also true to say that i was fascinated by such an accumulation though to some eyes it had the appearance of a film set run by a mad god. that was not my opinion. sight was never the first clarification. there were small towns here that were populated by personnages from another time. that time i cannot and will not explain. here and now. then or later. at some time or other i knew it was time to go home. wherever that was.
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 9 2005 17:33 utc | 121

I also love John Sayles film work. Personal favorites include Matewan and 8 Men Out. I think Passion Fish, which I also loved, has 2 of the best female characters ever created by a male writer. Feminine perspectives on this are, of course, welcome.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Jan 10 2005 2:19 utc | 123

there was a vivid sequence in theo angelopoulos’ ulysses’ gaze too, where the disembodied giant statue of lenin is loaded onto a barge and lingeringly drifts the danube(?). as expected from theo, there are quite a few lingering images in that film which resonate w/ me long after the lights stopped projecting their patterns on the screen. last night i finally got around to watching zhang yimou’s first action flick, hero – itself filled w/ dream-like and dream-inspiring imagery. but there were also some powerful words in there i wish we heard expressed ’round these here parts. actually, i’ve had a tough time the past few years in being able to watch film, at least fiction. so tough to watch movies anymore for amusement – to a-muse is to divert attention & stop thinking – and these times beckon our full attention, at the very minimum. and then there is this ugly reality of spewed-out movies, in the consumer sphere at least, used to rewrite history or condition the masses for autocratic control & mindless indifference. my fiancee is zambian & she asked me yesterday in the grocery store wtf the deal is with all the consumer goods packaged w/ shreck glaring at you. perhaps the day will come when some auteur films a sequence w/ a disembodied shreck statue being sent down the river. or flushed back to the cesspool from whence it rose.

Posted by: b real | Jan 10 2005 4:35 utc | 125

it’s strange the regard d’ulysse is the only angelopolous i have difficulty with – i found it too self conscious in a way i don’t in his other films – the narratives a little too obvious – the acting heavy
my favourite is the travelling players & voyage à cythere
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 10 2005 18:08 utc | 127