Seven Red

We just moved to a new place, and I more or less moved half our stuff myself in order to reduce the moving costs. But that’s not cost free, either physically or in terms of opportunity costs. In any case, one of the costs has been the continued neglect of this here blog. I’ve found it’s hard to blog when you’re carrying boxes of books down three flights of stairs. Harder when you’ve done that all day. Now that we’re set up, I wanted to add this random post to convince myself that I am still adding posts, and that I haven’t given up on this blog in the same way I’ve given up on the Mets’ season (you’ll notice the really severe slide started as soon as I put up a Mets blog post, by the way). Meh.

So,

A. The Wisdom of she – Only people who understand percentage get rich. Very few people understand – really understand – percentage.

B. Soundtrack for the Moon Landing, 40 Years Later – NPR was having a moongasm today. I think one of the big breaks between my generation and my parents’ generation is general feeling about the moon landing. Put plainly, we really don’t care all that much. But hearing the ecstatic recitations on NPR today, I was struck by how much some previous generation does care, and does still get worked up about the whole thing. The moon! I mean, can you imagine? So, a top five songs for the moon-landing-iversary? Suggest other, dear Reader:

5. David Bowie, A Space Oddity (obviously, but for something new, try Natalie Merchant’s cover on the Live at the Neil Simon Theater album)

4. Peter Schilling, Major Tom

3. R.E.M., Man on the Moon (double obviously)

2. Modest Mouse, 3rd Planet (from “The Moon and Antarctica” album – and you could take the whole album, for that matter)

1. Billy Bragg, The Space Race is Over

The #1 jam is the transitional moment – the confused space between those who care and those who don’t care:

My son and I sat beneath the great night sky
Gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
He says, “Why did they ever go?”
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cuz where in the hell’s that at?
Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone
I’ll never get out of my room
Now that the space race is over
I can’t help but feel that we’re all just going nowhere

The Billy Bragg song really captures it for me, and has for awhile. The space race is over. This was the second theme on the radio today: nobody cares. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the end of the outside signaled of course by Derrida (il n’y pas hors-texte), and worked into a geopolitical register by Hardt and Negri. Empire is the end of the space race, the impossibility of exit, in its traditional, spatial sense, anyway (it’s no mistake that its cover features a shot of the Earth from space). That’s already what the sad contrivance of Billy Bragg’s lament names, though in this very specific way:the problematic of immanence. And the moon landing would serve to date the demise of exit fairly well, and would be in line with other datings of the so-called postmodern (Jameson’s abandonment of the gold standard comes close enough).

But maybe push it back a bit. Just before we moved out, exited, our old place, we saw Revolutionary Road, several months late, as per usual. It’s really of a piece with all the great exit literature of the period, and it all spells a similar desire struggling with the immanence of capitalist society. From The Organization Man to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to The Lonely Crowd, these are 50′s narratives of exit, or confronting the problem of exit’s demise. In Revolutionary Road, “Paris” may as well be the moon – it serves the same function as the moon serves for Billy Bragg. Of course, the 1950′s version is now clearly lunacy, but it culminates in the space race in the first place.  But the shift to “don’t care” really shows the new phase of the transition, one in which the anxiety about spatial exit has been eliminated; the moon landing fails to register after the baby boomers because Empire is already consolidated spatially. (A few years ago I heard an interview with Billy Bragg while we were driving in the car; my mother-in-law, a mathematician, was in the back seat. Bragg made a much more forceful case, recalling how shocking it was that mathematics could do that, could make one get to the moon. Three huzzahs from the back seat. His English accent helped too, I expect. I think this is right, and part of what he wants to say). So Billy Bragg’s quite right in a number of way, but chiefly this: where in the hell’s that at? The old labor philosophy – trained in the spatial logic of the line and the factory gate – can only ask this question. And gaze up in wonder.

But this is really the anthem for a labor movement that’s utterly finished.

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