I’m getting to be an expert in bicycle-portage. Today I cycled home up a long hill, with a backpack, two large bags dangling from my handlebars, clutching a curtain rod in my left hand. I can’t afford to spend money on cabs, and I cycle to school already, so I just keep piling stuff on until I can’t carry anymore. Which hasn’t happened yet.

I was telling my students about the Republican talk show host who called for the aborting of black fetuses in the U.S. to bring down crime rates. That is, he said it would be “morally reprehensible” but that it would work. So, we can accuse ‘em of being hereditary criminals, but we can’t kill ‘em. Which makes sense – who would do all that prison labour?

On Sunday I saw a boy of around 10, wearing a t-shirt that read:

To-do list:

- Pamela Anderson
- Jessica Simpson
- Britney Spears

This made me sad, despite the brilliantly sunny day.

On artists and social engagement:

Anyone maintaining a sophisticated stance above or outside things is also taking sides, for such indifferences and aloofness is automatically a support of the class currently in power. George Grosz

On art and commodification:

My ambition is to be a man sterile for others; the man who sets himself up as a school disgusts me; he gives his gonorrhea to artists for nothing and sells it as dearly as possible to amateurs. Picabia

Maita mentioned Foucault on knowledge, and how it gets split up in useless ways. Thanks for your comment, I quite agree. This sent me scrambling for more material on the subject, and alienation generally. Here’s what Franz Jakubowski, 1930s Left Oppositionist, had to say about it in Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism:

The notion that individual spheres of thought and knowledge are independent of each other and of their socio-economic base is ideological… Purely contemplative knowledge is ideological. But the whole superstructure of human ideas, too, is ideological, as long as these ideas maintain an apparent independence of the… superstructure and …base.

But ideology, while being a false view of the social whole (i.e. capitalism) isn’t false from a particular, bourgeois class position; the ideas

correspond, objectively, to his [sic] (the individual’s) social being. In Marx’s words, “the individual who receives them through tradition and upbringing may imagine that they form the real motive and point of departure of his own activity.”

And they might act on those ideas detached from the material foundation of society. They might, for instance, believe in The American Dream, that everyone can make it if they try hard enough. They would vote, legislate, criminalize and fight wars accordingly. Thus

The superstructure of bourgeois society would therefore seem to be ideological, even in the narrowest sense of the world. But ideology is not an abstract fantasy. It is a part of the social reality of capitalism which Marxism seeks not only to criticize theoretically but also to overthrow concretely, in practice.

I guess I've moved a little ways from critiquing grad school. But not too far. Our 'knowledge practices' aren't neutral; Jakubowski is saying that our separation into rigid disciplines (far more advanced now than in 1936, when he was writing) is actually a reflection of how capitalism divides the worker from her work, social labour from private profit, etc. And lots of grad students will go on merrily repeating that division, nestling snug within their chosen sub-sub-genres, safe away from the scary world of wage labour outside. Except, of course, they find just-as-intense contradictions within mental as in manual labour, because there's nothing 'outside' capitalism. Which is why Jakubowski says we have to fight it. Or, when that feels like too much, we have to watch lots of The Simpsons.