Limited, Inc.

I like to think of Marx in Brussels, that capital of compromise, sitting in Le Cygne – apparently his favorite estaminet – thinking about the course of events. The young Marx, who felt that the course of events was going in his direction, rather than the older Marx, aware that events are tricky and baffling things. Both, though, already feel – such is my novelistic intuition – that the scale of their thought exceeds the scale of their audience. This is, perhaps, the great modernist anxiety – exactly at the same time that the popular press brings an unparalleled audience to certain writers, it seems, capriciously, to exile others. And yet, what is the correlation between the embodied work and the scale of the readership? In one domain after another, one sees that intellectual production is standardized and put on a schedule for the widest possible use, while at the same time it suffers an interior trivialization as it is wrenched out of the relationships – that mode, ultimately, of conn

Someday, when historians look back on today’s communication technologies, they will marvel at the lag between our cut and paste technology, which is state of the art, and our sad blog commenting machinery, which gives you small squares and limited amounts of characters to work with. Now, as those of us who are longwinded, garrulous and quarrelsome – in other words, the philosophers and philosophes manques among us– well know, our best arguments tend to get diluted, chopped and lost as we pursue our labyrinthian arguments in this wilderness of faulty mousetraps. Thus, I’m replying to Duncan in a post. Although LI has long become a blog in which the private language provides all the dim lighting – like a dying lightbulb in a refrigerator, spastically blinking on and off every time you open it – most of the time, I do try to be at least a little clear. But this will make no sense if you haven’t followed our argument in the post before last. So, Duncan… I heartily agree with your opening

Readers should check out the comments in the last post, between Duncan and me. One thing we bring up - to disagree about - is Amie's essay on The German Ideology, which LI is especially proud to have published. I hadn't read it in a while, I was impressed not only by the text, but by how much I have taken from it. Today I believe is going to be a special day for Amie and Michel, so I figure it is time to bring out Les Rita Mitsouko : ..les amants le font de coeur parce que l'union fait la force... ...et leur traits s'uniffiront jusqu'à se ressembler... ...pour le pire et le meilleurs jusqu'à y creuver leur forces... ...ils marchent sans sourcillier d'un pas irrégulier...