Re: trade in signs, identity, and trust

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Mon, 10 Aug 1998 22:53:08 +1000

I'm currently pondering the paradoxes inherent in the personification of
policy.=20

Identity is a commodity. Michael Jordan earns more than all the Nike
factory workers world-wide. David Bowie and Pavarotti are floating their
identities on the stock market.=20

And, still, autobiographies are the subject of scientific (???) cynicism
unless, of course, they are immersed in the nomenclature of
autoethnography, critical ethnography, ethnomethodology, or
autophenomenography, etc. Even so, they are accepted with marginal validity.

History is revisionist, as, necessarily, is autobiography.=20

It's disturbing to me that, under the illusion (delusion) of autonomy, I
make sense of a largely heteronomous life retroactively. Herein lies one
meaning of (irrational) rationality.

In a world where the forces and relations of productions, mediated, as they
are, electronically, are collapsed as one, so exchange-value becomes the
mediating value and quantitative measure of all relationships, thus
rendering - however abstractly - incommensurable things - all things
commensurable.=20

Phil Graham
pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
Motto for a brave new world:
ABSOLUTEM OBSOLETUM =96If it works, it's out of date (Stafford Beer, 1981)
Stop the MAI http://www.avid.net.au/stopmai/