Sympathy for Olive Garden

Nothing has changed at Olive Garden since the last time I visited, in 2003 in Momence, Illinois. There had been a long gap between my previous visit, in the late 90s in Flint, Michigan, but I found it to be much the same in that 2003 visit as it was during my childhood and adolescence. The decor, the service, and the food were all the same. The breadsticks were basically the same, as was the salad — with the precisely two small jalapeños and a lone olive. The menu had obviously changed to some degree, but the same old favorites were there: the “Tour of Italy” combo (The Girlfriend’s choice), chicken alfredo, pasta primavera.

And I’m going to take a risk here and admit: it was all pretty damn good. Not the best Italian food I’ve ever had, but definitely a nice dinner. When you think about the scale of the operation, it becomes even more remarkable.

Runaway train, never coming back

In Jameson’s Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic, one reads the following:

But we must initially separate the figuration of the terms base and superstructure—only the initial shape of the problem—from the type of efficacy or causal law it is supposed to imply. Überbau and Basis, for example, which so often suggest to people a house and its foundations, seem in fact to have been railroad terminology and to have designated the rolling stock and the rails respectively, something which suddenly jolts us into a rather different picture of ideology and its effects. (pg. 46)

It certainly does! Why had I never heard this before?

Structural questions

In recent days, I have become confused about the problems facing the US economy.

Among liberal commentators, it’s more or less accepted wisdom that the stimulus was too small. The underlying premise is that the problem facing the economy currently is a lack of aggregate demand and that adequate Keynesian “pump-priming” could thus get things moving nicely again. Meanwhile, the deficit spending required would pay for itself as a growing economy increased government revenues. In general, I have tended to find such views convincing.

Many other commentators embrace the view that the high unemployment we are experiencing is “structural” and that the only thing hiding it for the last decade was an artificial housing bubble.

Unemployment and bare life

In lieu of a post, here’s a quote from Jameson’s latest, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One:

It is in keeping with the latest form of this dialectic–the exposition of that “general law” whereby industrial productivity generates overwork and unemployment simultaneously–that we make a final tour of these ultimate spaces of capitalism, in which we confront a form of “naked life” far more deeply rooted in the economic system itself than Agamben’s hopeless inhabitants of the concentration camps. [A footnote continues:] Agamben’s pseudo-biological concept in Homo Sacer proves in reality, like those of Foucault, to draw on categories of domination [i.e., as opposed to exploitation] (as it would have been difficult for it to do otherwise, given his example of the concentration camps). This is why the destitution of unemployment is the more fundamental and concrete form, from which such later conceptualizations derive: what is concrete is the social, the mode of production, the humanly produced and historical; metaphysical conceptions such as those involving nature or death are ideological derivations of that more basic reality. (pg. 125)

(I highly recommend the book, by the way.)

The cunning of reason

I’m starting to think that my liberation theology course is being haunted by the ghost of Hegel, because every time I think that I’ve explained the dialectic to them, the next book we read overturns what I’ve said.

(It makes me think that I need to read Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, and indeed if any of my readers are journal book review editors who could hook me up with a copy in exchange for a review, you know how to contact me.)