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- vespa0
hehee thanks kuz
gorn soda, anything *puts kettle on, fetches soda's slippers and pipe and pulls up another chair
- ********0
is that true then Kuz?
- mrdobolina0
haha
- ********0
yes, but keep it to urself ;)
- toe_knee0
heres a good aussie story i pinched from another forum vespa
"Walking through a shopping centre around Christmas time last year. We'd just bought and opened a case of Bundy & cokes. So we're walking past the scene with Santa and all the kids and their mums, and my mate yells out, "Oi Santa, you wanna Bundy?"
Santa, obviously forgetting where he was, yells back "Fucken oath I do!"
The looks on all the mums' faces were priceless "
- mrdobolina0
bundy?
- toe_knee0
rum
- vespa0
hahaa toe_knee you're making me all homesick
'kenoath maayte santa needs a bundy baaaaad
- ********0
Another symptom of the historical passage already in process in the final decades of the twentieth century is the rise of so-called fundamentalisms. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the great ideologues of geopolitics and the theoreticians of the end of history have consistently posed fundamentalisms as the primary danger facing global order and stability. Fundamentalism, however, is a poor and confused category that groups together widely disparate phenomena. In general, one might say that fundamentalisms, diverse though they may be, are linked by their being understood both from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences of primordial identities and values; they are conceived as a kind of historical backflow, a de-modernization. It is more accurate and more useful, however, to understand the various fundamentalism not as the re- creation of a premodern world, but rather as a powerful refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course. In this sense, then, like postmodernist and postcolonialist theories, fundamentalisms too are a symptom of the passage to Empire.
Often today in the media the term "fundamentalism" reduces the variety of social formations that go by that name and refers exclusively to Islamic fundamentalism, the complexity of which is in turn reduced to a violent and intolerant religious fanaticism that is above all "anti-Western." Islamic fundamentalism itself, of course, takes various forms and has a long history extending throughout the modern era. Islamic revivalism and reformism were strong at different times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the current forms of Islamic radicalism bear distinct similarities to those previous movements. Islamic fundamentalisms are most coherently united, however, in their being resolutely opposed to modernity and modernization. Insof ar as political and cultural modernization has been a process of secularization, Islamic fundamentalisms oppose it by posing sacred texts at the center of political constitutions and religious leaders, both priests and jurists, in positions of political power. In terms, too, of gender roles, family structures, and cultural forms, an unchanging, traditional religious norm is commonly meant to stand against the progressively changing secular forms of modernity. Counter to modernism's dynamic and secular society, fundamentalism seems to pose a static and religious one. In this light, then, as an anti-modernism, Islamic fundamentalisms seem to be engaged in an effort to reverse the process of social modernization, separate from the global flows of modernity, and re-create a premodern world. The Iranian revolution of 1979, for example, would from this perspective be seen as an anti-revolution, resurrecting an ancient order.
Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long U.S. tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the "uncivilized" world.[12] The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem.
These common characterizations of fundamentalisms as a return to a premodern or traditional world and its social values, however, obscure more than they illuminate. In fact, fundamentalist visions of a return to the past are generally based on historical illusions. The purity and wholesomeness of the stable, nuclear heterosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists, for example, never existed in the United States. The "traditional family" that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family.[13] It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The "return to the traditional family" of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order.
Similarly, the current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: "Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam 'fundamentalist' except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur'an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammed. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought."[14] Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on "original thought" and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist "return to tradition" is really a new invention.[15] The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalisms might be better understood, then, not as a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony-and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. "Ifmodern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period," Akbar Ahmed writes, "postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism."[16] Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory- postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes: "The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western . . . Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force."[17] Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense "anti-Western" since the religion's inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution.
This marriage between postmodernism and fundamentalism is certainly an odd coupling considering that postmodernist and fundamentalist discourses stand in most respects in polar opposition: hybridity versus purity, difference versus identity, mobility versus stasis. It seems to us that postmodernists and the current wave of fundamentalists have arisen not only at the same time but also in response to the same situation, only at opposite poles of the global hierarchy, according to a striking geographical distribution. Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind of liberation but by others as an exacerbation of their suffering. Certainly, bands of popular support for fundamentalist projects-from the Front National in France and Christian fundamentalism in the United States to the Islamic Brothers-have spread most widely among those who have been further subordinated and excluded by the recent transformations of the global economy and who are most threatened by the increased mobility of capital. The losers in the processes of globalization might indeed be the ones who give us the strongest indication of the transformation in progress.
- vespa0
kuz that wasn't a story - got any more or would that just be plain greedy?
mrdobolina sir, won't you tell me a story in an american accent? something involving big cars and country music would be marvelous.
- ********0
Vespa - try this. It's a transcript of emails bettween me and a mate when concieving my website.
http://www.determinedmoth.org/mi…
PDF. Small...
- soda0
heh heh heh...
well actually there isn't a great deal to tell. My mate, lets call him... Koz, lived in a shared house with an endless supply of swedish girls (they would stay for a few months at a time) and he eventually would have his way with them.
One girl he was seeing took the ending the relationship badly and moved out. The night the second girl moved in (into the same room as his previous) he 'welcomed' her into the house in the oldest way possible. Only happened the once apparently and around the time of the first girl telling him what happened the second girl also revealed her condition.
I think he managed to keep both parties in the dark about it for a while... until the first girl moved back into the house...
- chossy0
Oh my, what a sad wee story. When you get home order a takeaway pizza and get a trashy movie. Lie on the couch and be a bit selfish works for the chossy.
- vespa0
thanks moth:) i liked the "childs swing all but eaten by the gravity of depraved mind sets that crack their enamels while chewing it"
- ********0
pfft, sorry vespa, but neo-marxist theorising is much more interesting than ur chlidish stories :P
The Ideology of the World Market
Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities. As the world market today is realized ever more completely, it tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state. In a previous period, nation-states were the primary actors in the modern imperialist organization of global production and exchange, but to the world market they appear increasingly as mere obstacles. Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is in an excellent position to recognize and celebrate the overcoming of national boundaries in the world market. He contends that "as almost every factor of production-money, technology, factories, and equipment- moves effortlessly across borders, the very idea of a [national] economy is becoming meaningless." In the future "there will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, as least as we have come to understand that concept."[18] With the decline of national boundaries, the world market is liberated from the kind of binary divisions that nation-states had imposed, and in this new free space a myriad of differences appears. These differences of course do not play freely across a smooth global space, but rather are regimented in global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures. Arjun Appadurai captures the new quality of these structures with the analogy of landscapes, or better, seascapes: in the contemporary world he sees finanscapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and so forth.[19] The suffix "-scape" allows us on the one hand to point to the fluidity and irregularity of these various fields and on the other to indicate formal commonalities among such diverse domains as finance, culture, commodities, and demography. The world market establishes a real politics of difference. The various -scapes of the world market provide capital with potentials on a scale previously unimaginable. It should be no surprise, then, that postmodernist thinking and its central concepts have flourished in the various fields of practice and theory proper to capital, such as marketing, management organization, and the organization of production. Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which global capital operates. Marketing has perhaps the clearest relation to postmodernist theories, and one could even say that the capitalist marketing strategies have long been postmodernist, avant la lettre. On the one hand, marketing practices and consumer consumption are prime terrain for developing postmodernist thinking: certain postmodernist theorists, for example, see perpetual shopping and the consumption of commodities and commodified images as the paradigmatic and defining activities of postmodern experience, our collective journeys through hyperreality.[20] On the other hand, postmodernist thinking-with its emphasis on concepts such as difference and multiplicity, its celebration of fetishism and simulacra, its continual fascination with the new and with fashion-is an excellent description of the ideal capitalist schemes of commodity consumption and thus provides an opportunity to perfect marketing strategies. As a marketing theorist says, there are clear "parallels between contemporary market practices and the precepts of postmodernism."[21]
Marketing itself is a practice based on differences, and the more differences that are given, the more marketing strategies can develop. Ever more hybrid and differentiated populations present a proliferating number of "target markets" that can each be addressed by specific marketing strategies-one for gay Latino males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, another for Chinese-American teenage girls, and so forth. Postmodern marketing recognizes the difference of each commodity and each segment of the population, fashioning its strategies accordingly.[22] Every difference is an opportunity. Postmodern marketing practices represent the consumption cycle of contemporary capital, its external face, but we are even more interested in the postmodernist tendencies within the cycle of capitalist production. In the productive sphere, postmodernist thinking has perhaps had the largest direct impact in the field of management and organization theory. Authors in this field argue that large and complex modern organizations, with their rigid boundaries and homogeneous units, are not adequate for doing business in the postmodern world. "The postmodern organization," one theorist writes, "has certain distinctive features-notably, an emphasis on small-to-moderate size and complexity and adoption of flexible structures and modes of interinstitutional cooperation to meet turbulent organizational and environmental conditions."[23] Postmodern organizations are thus imagined either as located on the boundaries between different systems and cultures or as internally hybrid. What is essential for postmodern management is that organizations be mobile, flexible, and able to deal with difference. Here postmodernist theories pave the way for the transformation of the internal structures of capitalist organizations. The "culture" within these organizations has also adopted the precepts of postmodernist thinking. The great transnational corporations that straddle national boundaries and link the global system are themselves internally much more diverse and fluid culturally than the parochial modern corporations of previous years. The contemporary gurus of corporate culture who are employed by management as consultants and strategy planners preach the efficiency and profitability of diversity and multiculturalism within corporations.[24] When one looks closely at U.S. corporate ideology (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, at U.S. corporate practice), it is clear that corporations do not operate simply by excluding the gendered and/or racialized Other. In fact, the old modernist forms of racist and sexist theory are the explicit enemies of this new corporate culture. The corporations seek to include difference within their realm and thus aim to maximize creativity, free play, and diversity in the corporate workplace. People of all different races, sexes, and sexual orientations should potentially be included in the corporation; the daily routine of the workplace should be rejuvenated with unexpected changes and an atmosphere of fun. Break down the old boundaries and let one hundred flowers bloom![25] The task of the boss, subsequently, is to organize these energies and differences in the interests of profit. This project is aptly called "diversity management." In this light, the corporations appear not only "progressive" but also "postmodernist," as leaders in a very real politics of difference.
The production processes of capital have also taken forms that echo postmodernist projects. We will have ample opportunity to analyze (particularly in Section 3.4) how production has come to be organized in flexible and hybrid networks. This is, in our view, the most important respect in which the contemporary transformations of capital and the world market constitute a real process of postmodernization.
We certainly agree with those contemporary theorists, such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, who see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market.[26] The global politics of difference established by the world market is defined not by free play and equality, but by the imposition of new hierarchies, or really by a constant process of hierarchization. Postmodernist and postcolonialist theories (and fundamentalisms in a very different way) are really sentinels that signal this passage in course, and in this regard are indispensable.
- vespa0
kuz stoppit your gonna make me cry
- ********0
vespa smells
- soda0
jesus kuz, you must be bored...
- vespa0
waaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!