Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins

[Keith Davis]

Right on. Nice bite.
On Jan 4, 2012 11:17 AM, "Ian Livingston" <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Surely we need to expose bad government, bad
> > history, bad business, bad education... But exposure, the camera is a
> > gun, the mob is a statement, protest is a position, has inherent vices
> > that we must guard against. Exposure is a limited means not an end.
> > And it is hardly the only method people can employ to resist tyranny
> > and corruption and all manner of abuses of power. The sit-in, the
> > staying put at the work station, but stopping or slowing down or
> > sicking-out production, is a form of control. Give it with exposure
> > and new forms of control will relace it. see Zinn PHUS
>
> Okay, I'll bite.
>
> Yes and no.
>
> Exposing bad stuff is important, focussing on bad stuff perpetuates
> it. Resistance increases force. What needs exposure is
> solution-oriented thinking. To quietly turn away from the temptations
> of merely personal gain and choose to work for the good of all
> includes working for what is good for the self. The error of
> interpreting Bartleby as a sort of hero makes someone else a villain.
> Bartleby just drops out, chooses nothing, is lost in nihilist
> unimportance. It is of far greater value to subvert the force of bad
> ideas by generating impetus behind good ones. It's easy enough to see
> what's not working. Read history in balanced doses, philosophy and
> religion the same, and fiction. The trends in social evolution are
> apparent enough. What works is plain as feces on a sidewalk; what
> doesn't is the whole damn street where the traffic'll run ya down.
> Like a bull terrier, Alice, once you have your teeth sunk into a
> muffler, that's all you seem to be aware of. Zinn is only one among
> many. Unclench, get out of the street, look a little further.
>
> Strikes work, but at an enormous cost. Buying from retailers who do
> not buy from corporate beasts works even better. If you want to kill a
> giant, you have to sap it first. Don't work for 'em, don't buy from
> 'em--especially not stocks. Buy locally produced goods wherever
> possible. Grow, make your own when you can. All that stuff you already
> know. It's unfortunate that computers are a significant part of the
> problem, because they are also an important part of the solution. But,
> rants about the nasty-ass traffic in the middle of the street do
> nothing affirmative; letting people know there are options to chasing
> cars can, however, be helpful. The Occupy movement started out saying,
> "hey, look at all the traffic you're chasing. That's fucked up. We'll
> sit here like feces on the sidewalk and point out some alternatives."
> The press successfully derailed the early movement by focussing on the
> homeless who became attached to the camps with the onset of winter and
> portraying the movement as being composed of the homeless and
> feeble-minded, without even a nod to the fact that no one needs to be
> homeless, however feeble-minded, when there are more vacant homes than
> there are homeless souls. The solution to homelessness is simple, put
> working folks in homes and give up their empty apartments to the
> homeless. Find jobs for people. People used to get paid to clean up
> the streets. That helped keep otherwise unemployable people working
> for the greater good. It is clearly useless to increase unemployment
> and homelessness....
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Could be a defense of Pynchon's vision of privacy, yes?
> > Nice.
> >
> > From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> > To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:26 AM
> >
> > Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
> >
> >> Maybe not educate as much as expose.
> >
> >
> > Haven't we enough exposure? Is not the Public too much in the public
> > eye; we have become a nation of exhibitionists & voyeurs, a nation of
> > sloganeering revisionists who call themselves historians, a nation of
> > Jersey Shore Yahoos subjected to the analysis of Jerry Springer arm
> > chair psychologists, a nation of Margaret Mead's peeping in on
> > Polynesians life over the trailer park fence, a nation driven by the
> > primitive intinct to reach out and touch and groom clansmen, but a
> > nation that has fallen in love with shadows of narsisisstic
> > communication.  Expose this. Expose what? Expose yourself. It is not
> > capital or the system that makes automatons of free people. It is
> > exposure. The extra ordinary human contact,  that humans need, it's
> > that private investigation. The Inherent Vice, our peeping and
> > exposure, while a natural vice, has evolved at an un-natural speed and
> > has grown to big brother proportions. Look at me. Look at you. Look at
> > what they are doing now. Surely we need to expose bad government, bad
> > history, bad business, bad education... But exposure, the camera is a
> > gun, the mob is a statement, protest is a position, has inherent vices
> > that we must guard against. Exposure is a limited means not an end.
> > And it is hardly the only method people can employ to resist tyranny
> > and corruption and all manner of abuses of power. The sit-in, the
> > staying put at the work station, but stopping or slowing down or
> > sicking-out production, is a form of control. Give it with exposure
> > and new forms of control will relace it. see Zinn PHUS
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>
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