Peter: the necessary counterpart to criticism of one's own position --
which I urge and celebrate -- is criticism of the relative positions of
others. Social relations are (you will disagree) a totality: my own
leisure is determined in its quality by the access of other people to
other structures of leisure. I don't claim this as an advantage
necessarily, and of course never did. I would claim neither that my own
situation, as a student, nor that of the typical citizen you describe,
should attract any concept of advantage necessarily. Here again we
diverge. I don't accept for a moment that the modesty and
after-hours-style commitment of the 'typical' poet you mention is in fact
'typical' of anything; the perennial attraction to exemplifying this or
that isn't something that I have much room or time for. Fabulously one
can knit up a phenomenological take on a dwindling candle, a couple of
evening hours, something about how light dies down. Readily one can trace
onto this satisfaction the concept of a typified citizenry. The melody of
temperance and patient self-examination drifts by the window like the lazy
gnaw of a lawn-mower on sunday. Without a gauge of material evidence,
what could you -mean- I wonder. Because after all: it is only the idea of
-circumstances- that can be thought typical (I sit and ponder as anyone
might sit and ponder: same upholstery); it is never the account of
symbolic capital that gets cross-matched (my pondering is within the field
of cultural production; most pondering is the social echo of that
field). Perhaps it is extreme to maintain this. But the quality of
leisure in either case finds its material outcome very differently: in
production, and in socialization. The two are combined dialectically, of
course; but couldn't be so were they not distinct.
I -do- believe in questioning and overturning the image of advantage
through sinecures, and all the anachronistic schedules of success that
image implies. Also I believe in subjecting all the softly-glowing images
of The Good Citizen to that question likewise, and even more so, the image
of the fairly good, committed but after all human, citizen. The great
mogul of history he say, Can't all sit in our attics on dislocated ejector
seats, Can we.
k
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