industrial landscapes, biographies

Informative Note: Code-Name “Slaughterhouse- Modern Times”

Radu Cosaşu

Sixty years have passed – the time, so Malraux would claim, necessary for becoming a real man- since I was downgraded to the “lower echelons” as an unskilled worker for the factory Modern Times ; I had been an editor of the Youth’s Spark, I had to pay for an uncle, a dancer from Vienna (though I cannot ask you to believe me: this is what I wrote in one of my short-stories) whom our services exposed as a spy; they told me that an ordeal, a test would be necessary in order to prove my allegiance to the cause; I did not flinch; I was 20 years old, I had passed an exam in Vulgar Latin with a fabulous specialist, I. Fischer, who had advised me to continue my studies because, he said, I might have a call; but I wanted to prove my commitment, so I would put on some worn-out (though not torn) trousers, I would take tram no. 1 on which “Slaughterhouse-Modern Times Route” was written and get off at the last station; I would enter the factory carefully punching my card at the gate so that I would end in the hands and care of a rather stern, severe foreman, master Dinu (this is how I called him in one of my short-stories, but you don’t have to believe me: he could have had another name). He wasn’t at all old, or wise, or a great teacher in this “school of life” as the literature of the period demanded – even less so “politically just”, he wasn’t supporting the powers that be, nor ignoring them, he did not insist on any ideological education, he wouldn’t play any Hegemonic or Working Class stuff with anyone; the essential thing was that he had no trust, and for quite a good reason, in my qualities as an apprentice, he wouldn’t entrust me any piece of work, he kept me around him, in complete silence and from time to time he would send me to the garage to fetch some tool or another; which I joyfully did: as there, at the desk, I would always meet a vigorous, luscious girl and one could tell from our glances that we were fond of each other ; but take heed– as one of my aunts told me, a decisive advice – I do not brag, I tell a story.

In this short-story that I’m telling you of and which was about my life at Modern Times – life? what life? six months only, from the spring of 1950 till the autumn of the same year when I left for the army, singing down the streets “Other fate we do keep in our hearts” – I invented an entire conflict with master Dinu, a very intricate conflict, which wasn’t particularly asked for by anyone, making out of him a shrewd but intrepid worker, a “reactionary” but dignified person, a conflict to which the 1973 censorship had no objections, but which Paul Georgescu, with his devastating irony, dismissed as a piece worthy of a socialist Cuore.

I am telling you all this not because I want to fool you into reading my short-stories- I never asked this favour from anyone, cross my heart …- but because I want to announce, in case you didn’t know already, that these days the factory Modern Times has been demolished. This is the only news item which distracted me from rereading once again Dostoyevsky’s (or Dosto’s, as our youngsters now call him) Notes from the Underground. A piece of news which did not appear on the telly, or on any of our front pages, but nevertheless I found it here, somewhere at page 9 of The Sunday Truth, under the title “The Modern Times Factory: a goldmine for metal scrappers”. Two sentences may provide the whole picture: “Children, grandfathers, parents, all of them are rummaging through the mud and the remains of the building searching for the smallest pieces of metal they can find. Because they cannot carry everything on their backs, they call their friends or relatives to come with their carts and cars”. At the end, an old employee of the factory confesses to the reporter: “And now they tell me that everything was wrong. Everything? I feel like bursting into tears”. Though, as a former employee of the Modern Times Factory, I don’t feel like crying. Once again I do not flinch, I do not sob: as if in front of some unsearched-for Phantasmagoria that crosses our lives … I do not demolish it. This is what I wanted to let you know, this morning when it’s snowing with that particular intensity which might spur you into asking you lover to teach you philosophy. Tomorrow morning, if the snowing stops I’ll fetch a cab and see that place which is now empty.

(any clumsiness in style or expression is part of the translator’s contribution)

texte, frate !!!

By 1956 the industrial workers represented only 23.7% of the Romanian labour force; in a period of 21 years this number would mount to 53.4%. Similarly in 1981, for the first time ever, Romania’s urban population outnumbered its rural inhabitants. With very few exceptions, such as the Czech Lands, this kind of development could be seen in all “really existing socialist” countries, bringing a largely rural population within the confines and the supervision of a modern impersonal state system of negotiating social reality; an achievement which, despite the enthusiasm of the pre-war modernising elites, still represented a far-off perspective before the war.

Leaving aside for a moment the racket of the totalitarian paradigm, the modernising tendencies of state socialism can hardly be disputed. Within the Academia, the obvious modernisation brought forward by these systems offered, especially within what has been called the Revisionist School of Soviet Studies, the opportunity to propose a modernisation model which, by taking head of the changes in Eastern Europe, could very much eschew what has always been the issue of contention related to modernisation: the role played by capitalism. The idea of an alternative non-capitalist path to modernity(3) deriving from the particularities of real socialism, although far from the thorny confusions of the Sonderweg thesis, and regardless of its refurbishing effects in comparison with Friedrich-Brzezinski and the likes, provided a theoretical framework which, with some Foucaldian or Bourdesian tinges from time to time(4), marked the return to a Weberian modernisation theory in which bureaucracy, state formation and elites analysis were the main points of the agenda. In this sense, delving into state socialism continued Weber’s analysis of modernisation as rationalisation through instruments such as bureaucratisation, etatisation and other mechanism of institutionalising what one might call purposive-rational action. In some of these studies, the stress put on these topics were legitimised as deriving from the particularities of the area, such as top-down modernisation (5).

No matter how disputable its claims or how different its representatives, this tradition of inquiry(B), however, produced a body of texts which, due to their empirical insights and theoretical subtlety remains essential, especially in comparison with a Marxist strand of “really existing socialism” studies muddled in the defensive position of saving the socialist ideal from the dangers of Stalinism, or engrossed in enlarging Trotsky’s and Jan Wacław Machajski’s insights into New Class theory and state capitalism.

However, the problem undermining this unrecognised and perpetual return to Weber (6) was that it became increasingly difficult to relate the development of socialist countries with that of Western capitalism otherwise than presenting them in parallel sequences, with nothing but some rather too empirical encounters on the way (the Cuban crisis, the 1970s oil crises etc). Similarly, the post-1989 changes and the easeful return to an “overt” capitalism could hardly be conceptualised otherwise than through the quasi-biographical historiography of elite-theories or Bourdieu’s prosopographic notion of capital (7). Consequently, the concomitant appearance of the rhetoric of production efficiency and personal accountability in both capitalist and socialist countries in the 1970s(8) could hardly be included or explained in the Idealtyp conception of socialist systems(9).

In a way, the truth is that the modernisation without capitalism was accomplished in these countries and in this sense they did represent alternative non-capitalist systems. What this presupposes, however, is a definition of the capitalist mode of production in terms of market and private ownership, focusing on the (re)distribution of wealth alone(10). In this sense the attention given to state structures (formal or informal) present in most of the accounts of state socialism is indeed justified, as it keeps in line with the “traditional” approach to capitalism itself, analysed in terms of distribution rather than production: the socialist state accomplished the function which is usually consigned to the market and to private ownership in capitalism. Consequently, the stress put on the elites’ interactions within the state (seen as developing from the specific mode of production specific to “really existing socialisms”[11]) or on class struggle (seen as deriving  from private ownership and the market) can both be seen as partial analyses having as common characteristic an one-sided perspective: a too narrow focus on distribution mechanisms which tends to personalise the relations of production(12) by always finding a social group (a class or an elite) as the specific historical subject of change or, at a lower level, as the culprit(13).

As a result, the discussions about the intellectual and bureaucratic elites, the one concerning the “Socialist middle class”, came to resume the problems and the dilemmas that traditional class analyses faced starting with the 1970s, including the discussion about the managerial or professional class(14). In a way, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “retreat from class” can be noticed not only through its substitution with identity categories but also in this replacement of class relations with analyses of various social groups (managers, professionals, elites)(15) that are not grounded in a preliminary discussion of the specific mode of production seen as a whole through its two phases: production and distribution.

Consequently, it might be the case that a return to the production area might provide a common ground on which both the continuities with the post-1989 period and the parallel to the capitalist system could be conceptualised in a systematic way. This would entail a reassessment of the incredible feat realised by state socialist regimes through the integration of an immense rural population within an industrialised production system. However, this reassessment would centre not on the creation of a new working class in a Thompsonian manner(16), but on their socialisation in and through a specific type of labour which the socialist regimes shared with their capitalist counterparts, namely abstract labour(17). If it is true that the industrialised mode of production cannot break away from its capitalist legacy,(18) the industrialising enthusiasm of the communist regimes throughout the region meant that integrating a large rural population into such type of production also meant the unintended absorption into the social life of one of the key elements of capitalism: its practice of labour.

If one follows the particularities of the labour process as it was envisaged by the communist political elites, it seems as if the appropriation of Marx’s ideas, far from allowing them a deviation from the capitalist path, permitted a more clear-cut and evident introduction of labour in its capitalist form: as a structuring principle of social mediation(19). The swift displacement of the rural population into new areas of production meant that, to a large extent, the only form of social relations that could develop were those revolving around the workplace and the hierarchies which it imposed (20). Far from being mere propaganda, the stress put on work within the communist public sphere reflected the way in which labour could be posited as the central model of social synthesis(21): it was economy and the workplace which now became the main instrument of socialisation, especially for the population from the first and second generation of urbanised workers.  In a sense it was one of the specificities of state socialism to make obvious through its official discourse and propaganda(22) what had already taken place in Western capitalist societies though in much more subtler forms: the fact that labour and economy could easily become not just productive activities but social mediations, taking place of the overt social relationships in which work had been embedded before capitalist modernisation(23).

Even within the technicalities of the labour legislation from the period the same representation of work as a self-defining, self-mediating value is given. Choosing as means of evaluating and consequently remunerating labour what the Romanian Labour Code called “a scientific analysis” of the necessary labour time(24), state socialism managed to bureaucratically introduce within the social space a form of abstract value whose relationship with material wealth became more and more distant. In this sense the problem of command economies was not just the sheer randomness of the anarchy of the plan(25), but also the fact that the bargaining debacle for state resources was based upon a layer of labour which could be conceptualised, managed and discussed because of the duality of its nature(26).

The intensity with which this process was carried out can be seen in the stress put on adopting this model for activities and trades usually absent from the official definition of the work-field (câmpul muncii): the professionalisation and regulation of intellectual activities through union-type organisations(27) or the taxing of the Romanian Roma fiddlers (lăutari), despite the difficulties of the system in assessing the work of those engaged in this kind of tasks(28).

The system’s program to propose labour as a principle of social mediation meant was, of course, part of its modernising tendencies. Unlike in the case Western capitalism, however, the voluntarism of such an attempt meant that economy could not be divorced from the public sphere: the public discourse of the socialist period was fraught with the necessity of making economic experience concrete, of laying the production process open to public debate, of teaching “the masses” about the economic underpinning of the socialist system(29). In a sense the inclusion of the economical into the private sphere or into a contradictory notion of civil society was never present in state socialism(30). Rather on the contrary, its educational task had at its centre economy because it had to make socialism comprehensible to a large mass of people in order to obtain any form of legitimacy.  In this sense, through its way of regarding the economic realm as a political issue that is to be discussed within the polis, state socialism was indeed part of the Marxist tradition. What is of interest in this is not whether this attempt was successful or not, but the way in which this ideal of a working class who would be able to understand and actively participate at the decision making process of a complex economy was carried out and the false theoretical assumption on which it relied: that economy could be reduced to its (re)distributional phase.

What was political about economy in state socialism was the way in which the goods were redistributed, the access to social facilities, the issue of prices or the problem of consumer goods, etc. All these are of course important political issues even if only one should look at the way in which the price of meat could determine the ups and downs of working class movements in Poland. What was hardly ever an issue was the politics of production themselves, the nature of the labour process and its status as a social activity.  Consequently it is not very surprising that the management of the labour process in the socialist states strictly followed the same pattern as the one from the capitalist West(31).

Tending to regard fair redistribution as the essence of socialism, the communist states had managed to create a gap between the political realm and labour, between the public sphere and the workplace. Similar to classical 19^th century capitalism, if the political was the realm in which one could talk and discuss, labour was a problem of determination, conduct and muscles, the material side of reality which the political (as a sphere of social rationality) could organise and wield at will. Within this gap the labouring activity was relegated to the baffling, mystifying realms of psychology, of the individual and his/her misdemeanours.  It is for this reason that discussing the nature of the labour process or of the worker’s place in production always veered into discussion about “socialist ethics” and not social conditions, about the worker’s personality and not his/her status as a manual worker: the moralising, pillorying articles from the official press(32) about slacking workers and loafers are based on the common assumption that the work process was more a matter of individual personality  rather than social determinacy, that it said more about his/her inner self than about his/her environment.

What characterises state socialism is the exclusion of labour for the political realm, rather than of the economical as a whole, it is the obstinacy with which it considered work as a psychological problem, while nevertheless preserving its function as a measure of value. It is on this common ground that it meets its capitalist counter-part: just like capitalism it depends upon labour although it fails to politically include it otherwise than through symbolic means (Socialist Realism) or disciplining measures.

Part of this failure derives from the naiveté of believing that redistribution is in itself sufficient for attaining socialism, that the social structures (classes, inequalities etc) derive not so much from impersonal economic process but from the stubborn will of some people who hold on to their private property, monopolising the means of production to their own purposes; that the failure of socialist politics was a consequence of the insufficient internalisation of socialist ethics(33). The lack of consideration for the more complex structure of capitalism, for the impersonal traits deriving from seemingly innocuous processes such as industrialisation, made it an exaggerated avatar of capitalism itself(34).

It is, however, a naiveté deriving from the myth, implicit to any redistribution policies that, once private property has been abolished and a common good has been put into the centre of the political and social life, proper dialogue and the politics ensuing from it can create a just society through their inherent qualities. In a way, if liberalism rests on the assumption that economy contains within itself self-regulatory mechanisms the can abolish social injustice, state socialism preserved the other side of the utopia: that politics and the rationality of political dialogue could necessarily bring about a classless society. What one needs to do is to simply gather all the social actors and persuade them (in a way or another, carrot or stick) to act rationally and just.

__________________________________________________________________________

(3) See for instance Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain.

(4) I am referring to the Kritika and the post-Kritica coterie for the Foucauldian framework or, in the Bourdesian case,  Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi, and Eleanor R. Townsley.

(5) Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley, but also Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics, and Society.

(B) to a certain extent, yes, I am building a straw man, putting together various research traditions which might have nothing to do with one another.

(6)  Certainly  Szelenyi proved to be the most vehement (and convincing) advocate of such a return.

(7)  Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley.

(8) For an analysis of the Soviet policies regarding labour management Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982; but more importantly Murray Yanowitch, Work in the Soviet Union: Attitudes and Issues, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985.

(9) for this always sought model of socialist systems Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

(10) Moishe Postone, Rethinking the Critical Theory of Capitalism.

(11) Verdery

(12) For the difference between relations of production and relations in production I use Michael Burawoy’s The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism, London: Verso, 1985, p. 32.

(13) One of the most common questions popping out after 1989 in most of the former socialist countries where “who are the winners of the transitions?”. example: Bertram Silverman, and Murray Yanowitch. New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

(14) See for instance the debate sparked by Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s article “The Professional-Managerial Class” The article as well as some rejoinders to it can be found in the book edited by Pat Walker Between Labor and Capital, Boston: South End, 1979.

(15) Michael Kennedy, for instance, provides an analysis of the Solidarity movement (and, to a larger extent, of what he calls a Soviet-type Society) in terms of its interaction between the working class and two types of professionals (physicians and engineers): Michael D. Kennedy, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

(16)Such a Thompsonian perspective can be found in Kenneth Strauss’s rather nice book Factory and Community in Stalin’s Russia: the Making of an Industrial Working Class. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 1997.

(17) as it might seem obvious, for this post m. postone is my hero: Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993; but also other contributions.

(18)Postone, Rethinking ….

(19)Postone, Time, Labor, and … , pp 148-152.

(20) See Kotkin’s analysis, especially the chapters “Peopling a Shock Construction Site” and “Speaking Bolshevik”.

(21) As Daniel Barbu remarks the inclusion of individuals into the work-field became the basis on which the appurtenance to the community was recognized: “In other words, their [the citizens’] political status was given by the individual participation to the building of the socialist society and not by the acknowledgement of a basic constitutional agreement: work was social contract of state socialism” in Daniel Barbu, Republica absentă. Bucureşti: Nemira, 2004, p. 102. As art. 15 of the 1952 Romanian Constitution puts it: cine nu munceşte nu mănâncă.

(22) The issue of Socialist Realism and its apologetics of labour is a case in point. The fact that this rhetoric of work has been rather efficient is obvious from the post-1989 continuation of the campaigns against “idlers, slackers, and other generally harmful elements”; see for instance Cristina Rat’s article “Retorica statului asistenţial” [The Rhetoric of the Welfare State].

(23) Postone Time, Labor, and … , p. 150

(24) See “Law No. 10 / November 1972. The Labour Code of the Socialist Republic of Romania.” Buletinul Oficial, no. 142 (1972).

(25) Burawoy, Michael. The Politics of Production, p. 160. (which is basically built on János Kornai’s stuff).

(26) Postone, Time, Labor, and … , p. 152.

(27) For the Romanian case see Lucia Dragomir’s book L’Union des Écrivains: Une institution transnationale à l’Est. Paris: Belin, 2007.

(28) Ioana Macrea-Toma, Privilighenţia. Cluj-Napoca: Ed. Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2010, especially chapter I.7 “Finance Resources” and I.8 “The Distribution of Resources”.

(29) Amongst the numerous examples: Victor Bârlădeanu, “Izvestia astăzi” [Izvestia Today]. Presa noastră, no. 1 (January 1960): 11-12, in which the author praises Adzhubei’s Isvestia for the way in which it managed to render abstract economic processes comprehensible to the working class.

(30) Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, Ch. I.“The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism” (pp. 19-49) and Ch. II.8 “Civil Society and the Politics of Identity” (pp. 238-264).

(31)See Yanowitch’ Work in the Soviet Union …

(32) See for instance the “România liberă’s Social Investigations” [Ancheta România liberă]  column from the second most important newspaper in Socialist Romania România Liberă, or the T.V. show Reflector.

(33) Cf. Nicolae Ceauşescu’s “Propositions for the Improvement of the Political and Ideological Activity and of Marxist-Leninist Education of the Party Members and of all Working People, 6 July 1971” in Ana Maria Cătănuş (Ed.) Sfârşitul perioadei liberale a regimului Ceauşescu: Minirevoluţia Culturala din 1971, Bucuresti: Institutul Naţional pentru Studierea Totalitarismului, 2005. pp. 121-137.

(34)  In a way Burawoy’s analyses conveys the same impression, of state socialism as the “obvious, gawky  exploiter,” incapable of the refined legitimation strategies of capitalism: “… the central appropriation of the surplus is managed directly and visibly by organs of the state at the point of production. Workers all over the country define themselves in relation to a common exploiter.” and Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs, The Radiant Past, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992.

planuri

“Socialist planning is not total planning, but it is the dominant mode of social, political and economic action, to which individuals, households,localities and enterprises must adapt. Moreover,socialist societies should not be considered planned societies but instead “societies with a plan,” (Sampson, “National Integration through Socialist Planning”, 58)

de la un tip cu care de obicei nu sunt de acord

“The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South [...]
The political problem, then, has to be reversed. We cannot start from an analytic agreement on the existence of the world and proceed to normative action with regard to its characteristics. The disagreement is not over qualities but over existence. Confronted with the artificial and murderous division of the world into two—a disjunction named by the very term, ‘the West’—we must affirm the existence of the single world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration.”

bucuresti ’45

manna-hata

in afara de universitari pe care nu i-am intalnit niciodata, in afara de trupele pe care live nu le-am auzit  niciodata , in afara de cartile pe care le cumpar foarte rar si de autorii lor,  nu am intalnit nimic  american care sa  ma faca sa vreau sa-i vorbesc mai mult decat prin saluturi schitate si zambete.  si asta nu neaparat dintr-o vaga credinta prin care noi, romanii, deodata scapati de complexe si cu o istorie  in spate (nu?), copiam dispretul continental pentru starbucks etc ( si sa nu vorbesti de ipocrizie). credinta in cum ca femeile din state sunt urate  si nu se machiaza (????????)

dar adevarul e ca o singura persoana si un pic jumate din alta  m-a facut sa ma innec de admiratie si amandoi erau americani. lasand-o pe ultima la o parte  din motive de clarificare, prima persoana a fost da, chapeau bas, : un monstru de eficienta oratorica si de inteligenta brici, educata, taioasa si spunand “voi, cei din europa de est” nu pentru ca el era din america si noi din europa de est, ci pentru ca el era un tip foarte inteligent si educat din america si noi, da, din europa de est.

insa in dispretul meu inca neinteles pentru anumite produse americane intra si cel  pentru “marele roman american”. marele roman american se ocupa, fireste, de america.

cred ca sunt doua variante: cea cu eroul singur, un pic distrus, un pic ironic, cu o capacitate de auto-analiza incredibila, mascata uneori de dezastrul de diferite naturi (financial, sentimental, etc) prin care trece.picaresc el se plimba prin diferite parti ale americii (chiar si vertical, si aici apare the sociological depth), vede sau ne lasa pe noi sa vedem starea americii: e un soi de test case in care, ca intr-un cristal new york-ul si los angeles-ul sunt cuprinse in aceeasi imagine panoramica. din cand in cand e evreu si atunci istoria pluteste deasupra americii si a noastre: vedem, pe marginile carti, pe marginile constiintei noastre sau a eroului peisaje verzi, dar intunecate din ucraina, dintr-un oras polonez, o yeshiva din Kaunas, si copii zdrentuiti ajungand in fata statuii libertatii. alteori e din midwest si intreaga civilizatie american, daring but true to its origins, se afla intrupata in el.

se poate insa sa fie o familie: si ca intotdeauna, dincolo de casa mica dar confortabila dintr-un acelasi oras din midwest, dintr-un acelasi cartier din chicago/ new york, se vad disfunctionalitatile, calitatile si pericolele ce ameninta america, sansele sale, presedintii sai ale caror trasaturi se amesteca pentru ca e aceeasi istorie mereu prezenta, in care washington il trage la raspundere pe reagan, in care parintii cetatii coboara din nou si se amesteca in societatea orgiastica contemporana. viziunile apocaliptice se aduna in paharul acestei familii,  iar culorile steagului sunt puse la indoiala, lucid, sintetic, cu un umor lin, de serial.

incepand din anii 80 apare societatea capitalista, post-moderna in care imaginile televizorului iti divid imaginea la infinit divid scriitura in mii de stiluri va sa zica, in care totusi realismul critic al inceputului de secol e prezent ca un tata al patriei ce, in dosul ironiei, iti spune adevarul: crud, violent, dar lucid, astfel incat iti pui la indoiala propriul tau statut, propria ta pasiune pentru oprah, propria ta pasiune pentru serviciul tau la o compania medie, dar care o duce bine, propria ta asigurare medicala si colegiul ales de copii tai.

romanul coboara in viata personajului intr-un moment aparent banal, la intretaierea unor strazi, in mijlocul zilei de lucru, in timp ce iti duci copii la scoala. criza insa este prezenta, analiza misca pana cand cititorul simte ca ceva e in neregula. si totusi, acest “ceva e in neregula” reuseste prin problematica crizei, prin ceea ce criza latenta (dar vizibila) a personajului problematizeaza sa adune (in acel prezent continuu al istoriei americane) ca intr-un ghem intreg trecutul personajului, intreaga sa familie, intreaga sa copilarie, intreaga sa experienta, aduna in fond AMERICA. problema pe care personajul o traieste este reflectarea continua a problemei americii/AMERICII, fie a prezentului americii fie a acelui ghem istoric. si atunci intervine totul, inclusiv postmodernismul mijloacelor de comunicare in masa.

in fond, ce faci tu, cetitorule, citind acest roman american, decat sa suferi prin jocul, prin socul lecturii acea stare de criza latenta, ce-ti problematizeaza propria viata, ce problematizeaza viata ta care, la fel ca in cazul personajului, este AMERICA? “it occurs to me that I am AMERICA”. si de aici oglinda: mii de cititori problematizand aceeasi AMERICA in mii de apartamente sau case din midwest, din st jude, ei doar o reflectie a acelui personaj misterios traindu-si his mid-life crisis.  caci in fond: ce este AMERICA, decat problematizarea continua a aceleasi americi?

si a zis-o un parinte celebru: “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” de unde reflectia, oglinda si ironia blanda, de sitcom, aceeasi auto-ironie.

si de aceea nu mai pot citi si las la jumate carti, chiar daca sunt un pic bune. fara roth, bellow, white noise-uri si alte rahaturi. de aceea nu pot sa mai citesc din “the corrections “mai departe de p. 247. mi se pare nedrept, pur si simplu nedrept sa creezi un gen din astfel de romane. e foarte nedrept, e foarte plictisitor.

Debout ! les damnés de la terre Debout ! les forçats de la faim

si pentru ca de doua zile scriem un lucru urat, plictisitor, complicat si pervers si care nu ne place si pentru ca locuim la etajul trei, sa o lasam de inima albastra

1. ca o amară, mare pasăre marină
nenorocul pluteşte peste căminele de nefamilişti din
strada olteţului 15.

aici nu stau decât doar cei ca noi. aici
viaţa se bea şi moartea se uită.

şi nu se ştie niciodată cine pe cine, cine cu
cine şi când şi la ce.
doar vântul aduce uneori miros de fum şi zgomot de arme
dinspre câmpiile catalaunice.

când urci la noi, amice, ai grijă: la uşă o să te
întâmpine pă-
duchele de san-jose, e paznic aici, o să ţi se gudure la
picioare, o să-ţi zică dă-mi nene cinci lei să te trec
apa, uşa
e-nchisă, ăştia mă lasă mai tot timpul afară, m-au întemniţat
afară;
tu nu-l crede, amice, tu nu ştii, a venit ieri administratorul
l-a făcut şef peste tot palierul, el e cel care cârmuieşte
acum
camera asta, corabia asta blestemată de sub care apele
s-au tras
şi a rămas încremenită aici, la etajul trei.
deci plăteşte-i, amice, el e cârmaciul, se clatină mereu
ca-n vechime când vasul sălta peste ape.
iar dacă-njură ascultă-l cucernic: el când înjură
se roagă. aşa cum fac toţi aici.
aşa ai să faci şi tu curând.

aici nu stau decât doar cei ca noi.
aici viaţa se bea şi moartea se uită.

numai în rare clipe de căinţă şi credinţă, noaptea,
zidurile se subţiază, se alungesc, se înalţă
ca un giulgiu tremurător îmbrăcat de un trup nelumesc.

dar nu se trezeşte nimeni şi dimineaţa căminul e iar o
cămaşă boţită din buzunarele căreia ieşim numai noi
numai noi şi atât.

aici nu stau decât doar cei ca noi.
aici viaţa se bea şi moartea se uită.

icoane năbădaioase

“Procesul de restaurare e foarte simplu în momentul în care venim la biserică şi ne lăsăm în mâna restauratorului… dar noi suntem icoane năbădăioase.” (http://femeiacrestina.blogspot.com/)

si dintr-o data

astazi: anul doi de facultate