I am feeling too receptive to new ideas to write anything of my own these days. Here are some things I have liked.
First, something upsetting, but juicy.
This domination increases as the system is charged with neutralising the symbolic retaliation by buying it back through wages. If, through labour, the exploited attempts to give his life to the exploiter, the latter wards off this restitution by means of wages. Here again we must take a symbolic radiograph. Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its labour power from the worker and exorts surplus labour), capital gives labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the capitalist). In German this is Arbeitgeber: the entrepreneur is a ‘provider of labour’; and Arbeitnehmer: it is the capitalist who gives, who has the initiative of the gift, which secures him, as in every social order, a pre-eminence and a power far beyond the economic. The refusal of labour, in its radical form, is the refusal of this symbolic domination and the humiliation of being bestowed upon. The gift and the taking of labour function directly as the code of the dominant social relation, as the code of discrimination. Wages are the mark of this poisonous gift, the sign which epitomises the whole code. They sanction this unilateral gift of labour, or rather wages symbolically buy back the domination exercised by capital through the gift of labour. At the same time, they furnish capital with the possibility of confining the operation to a contractual dimension, thus stabilising confrontation on economic ground. Furthermore, wages turn the wage-earner into a ‘consumer of goods’, reiterating his status as a ‘consumer of labour’ and reinforcing his symbolic deficit. To refuse labor, to dispute wages is thus to put the process of the gift, expiation and economic compensation back into question, and therefore to expose the fundamental symbolic process.
Hot damn. That was Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage Publications, 1993. p.41.
And something not-so-upsetting. Still juicy:
Because the Body is Made of Water
A thimble full of moonlight
Drains onto the forest floor–
Milk through a colander.
.
The branches ignore those splashes.
The oaks ehre, like hairy hands
Shuffle against each other.
.
They fight for who gets to keep
And brew the fluids of the night.
I do not believe he who hails,
.
Love is having her all to yourself
Or her who swears, I know him
Completely. The water body
.
Eats the image, beams back
From a funhouse mirror
A blurred pillar of light.
.
We forget to check
The magician’s left sleeve.
I would like to know
.
Why we never catch all of anything,
Why we worship reflections.
Occasionally, a new image enters my stock of archetypes. Water is one I’ve had for a while, but which I had forgotten in the last year and a half. The vibrancy, vitality, reproduction, expiation. One of my friends scribbled some notes when he was high on weed a couple days ago, and it was about water. He showed me the paper yesterday, and, although it was a page’s worth of incoherent ramblings, I was moved. I can identify nothing else that so fully encapsulates that fear/anticipation binary. Eviscerated sharks. Propulsions.