...but Foster is cool too....

So my history professor, Joseph Fracchia, previously unbeknownst to me, is a marxist whose academic specialty is basically historical materialism. I talked to him during a mandatory one-on-one conference with him in his office about Das Capital upon noticing his amazing book collection. He apparently has written a few books on Marxist philosophy which look interesting, but one is in German. We get to read Marx's chapter on primitive accumulation from Vol I of you-know-what later on in the class, and we just read Pierre Clastre's essay Society Against the State. Clastre is an anarchist anthropologist whom I was introduced to through Fredy Perlman's Against History, Against Leviathan! So, we have some wonderful readings.

We also just read a piece about how life in the middle ages was more passionate with more violent extremes of good and bad (manic depression I believe is the modern word for such healthy emotions); The Violent Tenor of Everyday Life or something like that. This led into a discussion about how in our society today, people are incredibly regulated and bored. I tried to stay out of the discussion until my points had already been made for me by others(!), then I would butt in to clarify (I hope?) what we had been talking about. Lots of people came independently to the conclusion that technology mediates us from direct experiences so our lives have become increasingly mundane. Thanks to the prof, we also touched upon the fact that work used to be more closely connected with play and socializing and it was more of an autonomous activity in some societies; that work today sucks was the consensus, of course. The theme of alienation was central to the discussion though the word itself was never actually used except by me.

Of course, we were not romanticizing the feudalism of the middle ages, but the critique of the system we have now was very awesome; the extremely radical analyses of the Situationists and even the primitivists are apparently very intuitive, at least to liberal honors college kids. Rock. Anyway, I gotta go see bell hooks speak tonight, so adieu. Expect a post on her talk later today...