Still Alive and Well

Sometimes it's kinda hard to tell but Im still alive and well! I hope I can interest some of you in renewing your regular "readership" on this blog, I thrive on your input and the discussion it (usually) stimulates. I leave blogging in the summer because my job completely absorbs me and my time and Im also starting to think it is an unconscious mechanism for maintaining what little sanity I have left. I see very little media and spend very little time around a computer for a few months and there is definately something "healthy" about that.(another discussion,perhaps, for another time)

On the other hand I still believe in the power of this new medium(blogosphere) to further the revolutionary project to which I am wed and so I look forward to another fall and winter of sharing my thoughts and perspectives and trying to build a movement for radical change. And So:

Much of my research lately has centered around the contradictions (conflicts?) between existence in capitalist society, culture and (their motor) political-economy and living what I describe as an Authentic Life. One aspect of this contradiction is described well in the phrase "a shift in the structure of experience" which I found in a poem by Anne Winters called The Displaced of Capital

"A shift in the structure of experience..."
As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning
the city is ever alluring, but thousands of miles to the south
the subsistence farms of chickens ,yams and guavas
are bought by transnationals,burst into miles
of export tobacco and coffee; and now it seems the farmer
has left behind his plowed under village for an illegal
partitioned attic in the outer burroughs.Perhaps
he's the hand that emerged with your change
from behind the glossies at the corner kiosk;
the displaced of capital have come to the capital

Used without permission (sorry) google it and check out the rest

She speaks of the more obvious manifestation of such a "shift" while I have been contemplating the more subtle and to me more frightening shift described in the Marxist-New Left tradition as alienation and explored in depth and labeled The Spectacle by Debord and others. Several questions arise when we speak of this change in the "structure of experience", questions at the heart of much violent conflict and "resistance" to modernity. These questions are about power and the control of meaning, about who and what mediates between us and authentic experience and about the role of an individual as producer, consumer and citizen in a post-Enlightenment,post industrial world.

We all realize the obvious forms of mediation as we are propagandized by a corporatocracy and it's government agents, we all know about the procedures of Madison Avenue, the New York Times and Tony Snow. But how deep reach the tentacles of the "lifeless, bright ,sameness" of the Market? How do the "deadly solicitations" of a commodified culture affect our ability to reason, to find meaning or develop an ideology or philosophy to live by? How is our language , history and even spitituality transformed by commerce and commercials, business and busy-ness?

Just a few light topics to get things started again fellow thoughtstreamers!