i+come+with+agenda

I was at the gym this weekend. On the elliptical—oh such a good workout. The ellipticals, of which there are maybe a dozen, are lined up in two rows facing three TVs that hang from the ceiling of the Mueller Center. The TV on the far right does not work—it fades in and out, in a thoroughly ghost-like manner. In fact, I often wonder how long the damn thing has been like this and if anyone has ever cared enough to inquire about it being fixed. So Saturday afternoon, it’s about 1pm when I walk into the gym and there is only one other person on the elliptical. It just so happens to be Andrea Pratt O’Donnell, one of the most amazing women I know. I hop on the elliptical next to her. She is reading several of the magazines provided by the Mueller Center—yes, she had several open at once. We chatted for a minute before I turned on my dear roommate Sarah’s iPod, which I still don’t know how to use and so end up not using most of the time I bring it with me. The TVs were on, as usual. No sound, as usual. Football on one screen. CNN headline bullshit (//StarTrash//—can you believe it? On CNN?) on the other. After watching both for half my workout, and noticing the vast similarities between the two, the cinematography and language in particular, I began to think about how damn narrow TV is, culture really—a thought I have often had about TV, probably one of the most common thoughts to be thought. I mean, the images of the football players on the ground, slowly, one by one, lifting themselves and others off of the human pile-up, until you get to the last guy, the guy with the ball that everyone was after, and he stays on the ground for a few extra seconds, obviously worn from his epic journey and some other clichéd repetition straight out of Greek literature. Dear me, what other possibilities are there? Then I tried to picture what I would put on TV—oddly the first thing that came to mind was some hippy, circle shit with a parachute, dancing, and drumming; as if I’m not as stuck as everyone else. But seriously lets bring this back to Logan’s question from last night: Do we work the system or work out of the system? I mean, we all know we can’t work out of the system—we have Foucault to thank for that, [|Cynic]al bastard (and one of my favorites!) But really what can Grosz and Darwin do for our discussion of political theory and systems? All this talk of anarchy, democracy, communism, capitalism, and so forth, even demoarky, “for to represent culture through one of culture’s own products” (48), well then Liz what do you want us to do, wiggle paint with leftover food products to make things work? [And I’m thinking of Arendt’s notion of work from //The Human Condition// here]

I want each person to come to class tomorrow with something from “the natural world of forces that provides the energy and impetus for the self-overcoming of life that constitutes the very heart of radical politics.” (49) //**[I'm bringing the circle]**//

Also: What is Grosz talking about when she talks about “condition”? “If nature is not the other, the opposite, of culture but its condition, thenn the relations between them are much more complicated than a binary division implies.” (46)

“We need to understand what is outside the cultural—indeed we need to understand, contra Derrida and following Deleuze, that culture and representation have an outside, that they are not all-pervasive, that they are conditioned rather than conditions—in order to provide more complex and accurate models of the cultural." (48)