Prolefeed

I could be a dime novel and be very kicked about it, I thought this morning while I was marvelling about how every lived experience has a theory of -ism attached to it. This morning’s -ism was social constructionism/constructivism. But the dime novel thought came from elsewhere, I suppose it came to me because I had been looking for a precise definition of mass culture this cultural theorist called Stuart Hall kept talking about in one of his essays. The dime novel wasn’t what he had in mind. He was concerned about postwar workingclass Britain. And how mass culture was changing it. Nostalgia does wonders to practices, doesn’t it? A sufficient patina of it and everything once reviled/unappreciated/inconsequential appears to increase in significance until one might get tricked into thinking of it with much the same fondness and familiarity as one thinks of a long deceased neighbour who got his cheap thrills throwing his garbage covertly over the boundary wall into one’s property.

Oddly enough, all I kept wanting to do while I was thinking and marveling was to retreat into the fin de siecle greys and excesses of some generic Victorian Gothic I must have been dreaming about right before being woken up by the vibrating phone-alarm. I always feel the vibration first and only then become unwillingly aware of the offensive ringer. Often in my halfsleep I wonder, scared, if I’ve suddenly woken up deaf.

I hate to sound uncool-ly post-structuralist but the idea of a margin of understanding is muchly comforting. It makes me think of Derrida. And yet its very comforting. Last I broke my head over his thought was because I got very interested in what Saussure had to say about semiotics. I don’t particularly recall it having been a comforting experience. Quite the opposite, I think. Perhaps the discomfiture stemmed from the alltooeasytofallfor nihilism it all invariably led foolish neophytes like myself to. Why did I use that word? That was such an ugly word. Very green and scummy. But not half as nice as an epiphyte, though even that word is ugly, but it reminds me of orchids and not its own ugliness and that’s why I think its endeared itself to me. But there was this one word I really liked while I was reading Derrida. Not because of what it signified. But just the word. Aporia. I haven’t thought about it for a very long time. But we look for it, even if we don’t know what its called, don’t we?

I lost my thread completely. I had something to say about the production of meaning. Something that was vaguely comforting. You may not decode what I encode and thats perfectly fine. Even if that led to a multiplicity of meanings, there’d still be some that are hegemonic, unless I render myself completely incomprehensible, which I’ve a creeping feeling I already have. But its comforting nonetheless.

But yes, gimme gimme bread and circus and I’m only too happy to indulge myself in my false consciousness. I will go reread some HP7 now.