Notes from the road...

"bubble factories"

re: gopal, stationary state, yes (magdoff and sweezy on financialization; crotty; brenner?) but with some unforeseen consequences:

1) the late 20th century middle class is formally proletarianized but not to the point of a loss of real reserves. crises/crashes are a shock to this system, serving to justify austerity budgets, union busting, etc. financialization and proletarianization are co-constitutive, but the point isn't to increase the middle- or long-term profitability of firms, only to generate bubble conditions--both in miniature (indiv firms) and in the macro field (national and international institutions)

2) timeframe for capital much shorter than in previous eras of boom/bust, since the production of bubbles is active and widespread, and has the function of shrinking productive capacity as capital attempts to profit from its own falling rate of profit (!). communization possible in the US (definitely) and western europe (sort of) since middle class still has reserves but formally misaligned with work conditions; possibility of broad-based refusal of work. elsewhere, 

stationary state of contemporary art? has anyone written on this?

facebook/twitter as enclosure of a commons -- bourgeois revolution in tunisia, egypt.

Contra Hardt/Negri, it's not labor that forces capital to restructure, but rather the dialectic of capital approaching and surpassing its territorial/dynamic limits (limits of the market), expanding its reach, prolonging its vampiric existence, internationalizing, intra-nationalizing ("colonization of everyday life"), etc. The history of capital is its subsumption of labor; there's nothing special about the 20th century in this regard. Capital works by rupturing local economies, breaking ties of affiliation, rerouting flows through the apparatus of surplus-value. Doing this often entails "clean-up" costs, typically shouldered by the state, which serves to knit together the threads of a social organism at the level of national myth. In the 20th century, the rise of spectacle culture in the West is simply the radicalization of the task of phony mediation which can no longer be performed at the level of the state. What's unique about the post-1945 period of capitalist expansion is that the fault lines and discontinuities of the global market are so exaggerated as to rule out all forms of nationalist mediation--hence the imperial quality of political mythology in the American half of the American century. This is what's meant by the real subsumption of labor to capital. In the 20th century, capital sets out to forcibly adapt the human subject to new forms of being--though new only in terms of capitalism's own history, resulting from a merely subtractive operation, capitalism minus the social contract. First, the combination of cinema and lawless war; then later, when cinema finds ways of picturing the real state of the postwar market, the hegemonic rise of television, which returns the semiotic of the market to a state of relative order (though at the price of fostering an open season of political fascism--an opportunity seized, though only infrequently, by elements of the activist Left).

In the 20th century, the process of labor's subsumption to capital takes a radical turn: in order to capture the full working life of the worker--and beyond that, her future as well--it is no longer possible to rely on myths of national belonging; it becomes necessary to articulate a second-order semiotic that both obscures the operation of the market and substitutes for it any number of alternative symbolic systems. In the moment of "real" subsmuption of labor to capital, the world market is strictly delimited, codified, digitized; its representation is as a circuitry distinct from all other forms of mediation. The salaried middle classes purchase the right to spectacle--the right, that is, to ignore the market--by signing away the last vestiges of their real autonomy.

Idea for an essay: Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne