Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 15:28:28 +1000 (EST)
From: "Glen Fuller" <g.fuller-AT-uws.edu.au>
Subject: RE: Globalization and Community


Eric,

> I remember reading about a poll that was conducted here where people
> were asked if they thought they were in the upper 1% of the wealthiest
> Americans.  Something like a third of those interviewed thought they
> were.  

Ha! A relatively recent major work into the the lives of 'regular' 
Australians found the opposite! More people associated with a working 
class 'sensibility'. According to the authors they were certainly 
not 'working class' according to any structuralist heuretic when 
analysed in terms of an opposition between capital and labour. Must 
have something to do with being a society born from convicts...

> America is a nation founded upon the myth that everyone belongs to the
> middle class. Here there is no rich and no poor, just normal 
Americans. 

A paper by Jon Stratton (one of my old prof.) and Ian Ang (the director 
of the research centre I am linked to) talk about the impossibility of 
the US having a conception of 'official' multiculturalism as Aus does. 
Something to do with the US national identity being entirely 
ideological (an entirely ideological conception of 'normality'), so I 
can understand where you are coming from.


> My impression is that a love of cars and the practice of modifying 
them
> has always tended to be associated with the blue collar workers here.
> The rich invest in stocks, bonds and real estate. The poor wear sharp
> clothes and take short rides in their fast machines...

Yes, the same in Australia, up until the 1990's information-knowledge 
economy explosion anyway. The neo-marxist line about modified cars is 
that they represent the unalienated product of leisure-time labour. The 
post-marxist line I will be arguing is that this 'product' commodified 
as a style allows for the unleashing of desire/anxiety of the 
alienation experienced in everyday life. Or something like that... 

Central to this notion of mine, however, is a particular understanding 
of spatial relations and the resultant relations of mobility. Another 
front of attack I think lays in the control of (material) mobility, 
forming a trialectic with consumption and production (a tweaking of 
Lefebvre, why did he focus only on space!?!?! when flows are the 
movement of something through space and time! Ahh!). 

The 'owning' class of mobility is the logistical class, they determine 
what goes where and when (I am slightliy tweaking Virilio for this 
idea). The reason why I am trying to work through this rather esoteric 
idea of a mode of control is because I can see an ideological relation 
at play in mobility, and my research subjects are partially resistant 
to this 'imaginary' but only through a hyper-rearticulation of the 
logistical mode of control (determining who/what goes where when, often 
the who/what, where and when are illegal). That is, I could see a 
certain resistance on the part of my car-dudes (not only on the street 
in a narrow sense, but utilising the whole of the 
urbanised/automobilised environment) and correlative repression by the 
authorities, but it wasn't strictly a form of production or a form of 
consumption, however it certainly involved a form of labour. Of course, 
I am heavily influenced by the SIers too, particularly the derive 
(drift), which I read as much of a resistant act against commodified 
mobilities (logistical flows) as fragmented (urban) space. From what I 
have read it seems as if logistics as a 'Marxist' line of 
enquiry/critique hasn't had much of a focus, however mobility in the 
sense I am using the word certainly rose with the industrialisation of 
society (trains, shipping, etc), and has expanded into different 
avenues with social relations produced through post-industrial modes of 
production/consumption (planes, democratised automobile ownership, 
internet, telecommunications, etc all the things Virilio has been 
crapping on about rather obtusely for years). One of the jokes I tell 
people is that traffic is the little 'socialist' society that almost 
everyone has to participate in. It was not the means of production that 
was 'socialised' but the means of mobility. Of course this is untrue, 
as it is more a stalinist socialism that a post-marxist version!

> A book I have, but haven't read is Michel de Certeau's "the practice 
of
> everyday life" This may have some relevance to the topic you name.  

Yes, the 'everydayers'! I have been getting stuck into Lefebvre, and I 
read Certeau years ago but I must return to it as a number of feminist 
spatial theorists pick up on his 'tactics and strategies' (when, for 
example, discussing the negotiations that occur in the 'mall space'). I 
am certainly influence by Certeau's notion of the 'rhtythms' of the 
city.
 
> I never heard back from you about the differend.  Did the guesses 
Steve
> and I made have any relevance or were you looking for something 
else...

Well I was reading Bourdieu at the time and I was thinking about the 
similarity between Lyotard's differend and the conditions that allow 
for (and precipitate) bourdieu's symbolic violence. I was waiting for a 
copy of The Differend to arrive through my libraries document delivery, 
however somthing happened and I had been waiting for nothing, in the 
mean time I figured out the jist of Bourdieu anyway.

Cheerio,
Glen.

-- 
PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney