Quentin's Weeknotes 10/5/19-10/11/19
This Week:
- I finished reading Landscapes: John Berger on Art. As with all essay collections, it was varied, but I came away with a profound respect for Berger’s deeply humanistic vision of Marxism and his sincere belief that art should be disentangled from property.
Just in time for Halloween, I found this wild 1959 children’s/novelty record called “Monster’s Rally." The cover art, which was what attracted me at first, was drawn by the legendary EC Comics/Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis! I stuck around for such winning songs as “The Dracula Trot” and “Take Us to Your President”- I read this great essay by Gabriel Winant on the origins of the term “Professional-Managerial Class” and its implications for the growing fight between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders' Supporters. Drawing on the politics of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, Winant argues that the term (coined by the Ehrenreichs) is meant to encapsulate the complicated ideo-technical mess that greased the wheels between labor and capital in the Fordist 20th century. Now that that fordism (and the post-fordist neoliberalism that replaced it) has basically fallen apart as a political-economic formation, the “PMC” is fragmenting and fractions of it respectively gravitating towards various political solutions, some of which seem contradictory. Winant ultimately argues that political differences between Warrenism and Sandersism are meaningful, but perhaps less signficant given that both candidates are drawing support from an increasingly frustrated and fragmenting social strata. It’s long, but worth your time.
- After being bewildered and amazed by an excerpt of it in the Vandermeer’s massive anthology “The Weird”, I started reading Reza Negarastini’s “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anomalous Materials”. It’s dense and strange, so wish me luck as I fall down an oil well.
