We're All Starbuck*:The Barista as Worker and Cultural figure

The Double Shift had its moment on Brooklyn Coffee Shop 

 My first job, my first real job, was barista. Before that I had babysat, and done a bunch of odd jobs around the daycare center my mother ran, painting, assembling cots, making meals, which involved a lot of fish sticks and mac and cheese. It was my first real job in the sense that I had to apply for it, and received a paycheck (along with tips). I worked at Arabica: Coffee and Tea on Shaker Square (otherwise known as Chic-abica) during high school and on breaks during my first few years of college. This was before Starbucks came to Cleveland,  and thus before fancy coffee drinks went mainstream. While Arabica offered all of the espresso drinks, cappuccinos, mochas, lattes, etc., as well as various roast coffees from around the world, our average customer did not know about many of those things, and just wanted a "regular coffee." (which meant they got a medium roast coffee in a medium cup). Iced Mochas were popular though, basically as close as you could get to a milkshake without admitting that you were drinking a milkshake. I was a barista before coffee became the beverage that it is now. More importantly, I was a barista before a barista became a representation of work and a cultural figure.

Society is a Scam: On the Proliferation of Cons in Contemporary Life

 

A detourned Calivn and Hobbes cartoon going viral

When I was a kid we received a chain letter. It was sent to our house. It promised untold riches and bountiful luck if we sent money, I am a little unclear on the details, and warned of misfortune and calamity if we did not. I remember that it was adorned with all kinds of images from the world magic, strange symbols, evil eyes, and the like. It was absolutely fascinating. I also remember, a few years later, a friend of my father's bought a VCR from a shady looking fellow on the street. It seemed like a great deal, which reminds me of one of the first rules of cons, make the mark feel like he is in on it. When he got it home he opened the box to find a brick wrapped in a newspaper inside (VCRs used to be heavy). This were both scams, cons, and they seemed to be incredibly exotic and isolated incidents. My father must have told that VCR story at countless parties. Cons and scams were few and far between. 

Discontinuity and Continuity: On Reading (and Rereading) Lazzarato

 

War and Money is Part of the Pile of Books that I am working on

Philosophy is filled with famous breaks. The break between the young and mature Marx, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Kehre, Foucault's transition from archeology to genealogy. Sometimes such breaks are declared by the philosopher in question, other times they are discovered, or perhaps invented, by readers and interpreters who have no other way of making sense of a philosopher. Which means that breaks only become legible, only become visible, when enough people read them, or worry about how they fit together. I have often thought that those of us who write philosophy, or theory, should think about our own writing when we read others. I say this because I imagine that most of us do not have radical breaks, but odd intersections of continuity and discontinuity as we try to think about whatever in the world we try to think about. 

Through A Google Glass Darkly: On The Draw

 

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see. 

Structured and Structuring: Lordon and Éwanjé-Épée on Race and Class

 

As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately come to mind when perusing the history of communist thought. Or all of the sections, the long discussion of race and class is the most interesting (and the reason why I agreed to translate it).

Society Effects: Living in a Society from Marx to Spinoza (and back)

 

Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of modern life (in the name of saving others), or perhaps it started with smart phones, which are perhaps the greatest anti-social technology since the automobile. Personally, I think that the increased anti-social tendency is in some ways a reaction to Covid, I think that the idea that we had to treat everyone, even employees as human beings in part generated some of the massive reaction against sociality as such that we are living through, but that is a digression you can follow the links to. Whatever the causes might be, the Hobbesian war of all against all seems to have trickled down into a series of ever frustrating micro-aggressions of everyday life.

Irreplaceable: The End of Hampshire College and Reproductive-Rift

 

Picture of me being handed my diploma by Greg Prince, 

then President of Hampshire College

The slogan "You will not replace us" gained broad recognition after the infamous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It was the distillation of what has come to be known as "Great Replacement Theory" one of the pillars of the modern white supremacist movement. The idea is that the well documented demographic shifts which will make this country more diverse and less white, are not just the cumulative effect of different marriages, births, and migrations, but are some kind of grand conspiracy. Aside from the obvious racism, I have never understood the existential crisis behind this slogan; we all will die, and to some extent we all will be replaced.

Sentences that Make Books: On Du Bois and Hall

 

In the past few months I have been thinking more about "racial capitalism," or, more to the point, one I alluded to, but did not develop in The Double Shift, and have posted about here, about the intersection between the hierarchies produced in the labor relation and the hierarchies of racism. On what could be called the racial division of labor. 

Revolutions in the Revolution: On Jaquet's Révolution Transclasses

Chantal Jaquet's first book on what she called "transclasses" took up the subject of non-reproduction, of people who move from the dominated to the dominant class, in part because she argued that such transformations were perhaps the only way to grasp the conditions and forces of social transformation in times that were bereft of revolutionary movements. "In the absence of change on a collective scale, questions of the causes, means, and limits of individual non-reproduction are crucial." The movement from class to class makes it possible to grasp the larger transformations that make revolutions possible.

The Affective Constitution of Knowledge: Or, What Bias Feels Like

We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK, and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from one of my favorite shows. However, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a column by Lydia Polgreen, that offers a different account of at least one institution, journalism.