Re: [-empyre-] Tactics and Strategies

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

I love the CAE - I think it's a wonderful thing. So I wonder what the sincerity
level is their valuation of "slacker Luddite".



===================================================
CAE also wrote a great text that takes this idea of appropriation of  
time/resources at work titled "Slacker Luddites." Their idea of SLs  
is expressed as:
<quote>The slacker Luddite delights most in misappropriating the  
technology, and in turning the authoritarian codes of the workplace  
inside out. H/is mission is not to destroy the material aspects of  
work - this would be as misguided as the actions of the originary  
Luddites - but rather to destroy the symbolic order that confines and  
alienates the individual. This is not to say that an occasional  
intentional freezing or crashing of the technology never occurs, or  
that such actions are not of interest; however, these tactics, when  
done under the sign of slack, are only a means to a very limited end.  
All high-end slackers know that it is the hallucination of the  
workplace that must be destroyed, not that which conveys the  
hallucination.</quote>
=======================================================

Right. Uh huh. Sure. 

Change bedpans in a geriatric ward day after day and talk about the
"hallucination of the workplace". Risk life and limb to smuggle yourself into a
foreign country in order to work 12 hours a day in a field picking
strawberries, and then talk about the "hallucination of the workplace". Weld
the steel bodies of cement mixers day after day and talk about the
"hallucination of the workplace". Walk a beat in some rotting slum and try to
keep the more addled and/or violent members of the local citizenry from
murdering each other and talk about "hallucination of the workplace". Scrape
bubblegum off the floor of a large department store and then talk about the
"hallucination of the workplace". Empty truckloads of paper into a hopper at a
factory where the air is so blue with asbestos you can't see the end of the
hall way and talk about the "hallucination of the workplace". 

Of the above job descriptions, I've worked three of them. I will leave it to
your imagination which three. 

There is nothing hallucinatory about the workplace. The individual is not
confined by a "symbolic order". 

Bullets are not symbolic. They are supersonic lumps of lead. The individual in
constrained by force and power. If the "symbolic order" is defied, the bullets
come out.


Henry Warwick