Evil Politicians! Film at 11!

[Craig Clark]

 David Casseres <casseres at apple.com> writes

> Incidentally, I think it's wrong to let Them hijack the name of 
> individualism.  I think the real American ideal involves free 
> individualism in daily life and politics, much more than in business 
> enterprise, and on the part of actual individuals, not the corporate 
> hierarchies that They always turn out to have in mind when They preach 
> "rugged individualism."
 
Setting aside for a moment the American chauvinism which is 
(unintentionally, I am sure) implicit in what David has said, I think 
he's absolutely right. One of the few major arguments I have with 
Marxist analyses of capitalist society is the assumption that the system
is underpinned by bourgeois individualism. Bullshit. Individualism is 
anathema to a social order that reduces us all to the status of 
consumers. We are socialised into seeing ourselves as members of a 
niche market, rather than as individuals. 

I believe TRP is deeply troubled by the suppression of individualism in 
late capitalist society. I have in mind Oedipa Maas's meditations, late 
in _CoL49_, on the idea that entropy equals homogeneity. Diversity - 
both at the levels of communities and individuals - is a healthy 
state for a State to be in.



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"