Dialectic solution to PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE? -- CAUTION: THEORY AT WORK

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Subject: Dialectic solution to PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE?

Author:
Dave

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Date Posted: 17:06:20 11/01/02 Fri

I've enjoyed reading your messages. Although I want to resist the binary opposition Bauman creates and doesn't seem inclined to complicate, I find the argument in the book hauntingly compelling. The logic of his chapter on Pelican Bay sounds like something from science-fiction, and yet it's so plausible. The growth of prisons all over this country does seem to move in direct proportion to unemployment.
One of the most interesting ideas I've heard in class recently is the insistence, at least from some writers like Jameson and Bauman, that resistance is futile. I was really intrigued by Paul's comment the other day that he wanted new metaphors that get away from the assumption that global capitalism is some kind of siege or plague. (I was curious to hear, Chris, about the book you mentioned.)What then is a constructive way to think of it? How strict is its control over us? I found de Certeau useful for formulating possible ways to think about creative responses to what looks like absolute domination. But I'm having trouble settling with that, mainly because my sources of pleasure don't require nearly so ingenious an explanation. Fine to point out that a woman working to raise four children on her own invents remarkable tactics for coping with her oppression; but I simply can't imagine that such pleasures amount to much in comparison.
I suppose de Certeau would agree, but I'm not very clear on the dialectical move he makes: "The system in which [consumers/immigrants] move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere. Because of this, the 'strategic' model is also transformed, as if defeated by its own success: it was by definition based on the definition of a 'proper' distinct from everything else; but not that 'proper' has become the whole" (40). Strategy relies on physical space from which it dictates to the others, but when all space belongs to the strategists perhaps the power will fall apart. The trouble is in part that this argument requires de Certeau's definition of power. What if power doesn't need its own space? Foucault seems to suggest that that's old-school power. Anyway, what can de Certeau mean by this "cybernetic society"?
I guess that's enough for now. I'm glad to hear other readings and answers to any of these questions.
Dave

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