Posted by The Happy Tutor
Scruggs on the Wealth Bondage project as a whole. He gets it about right.
I think the Dumpster crowd are people who chafe at institutional
constraint, at the deep damage that institutions and collectives
generally do to people. They’re the ones who refuse to properly
introject the institution’s demanded self-conception.
Let's put it more strongly: The Dumpster is where you end up when you get tossed out, as trash, from academics, from polite society, from boutique services for the affluent, from philanthropy, from whatever elite or inside group you might have some claim to belonging to. The Spectral Dumpster is what drove you in college, or grad school, or from year to year in your job, and may still drive you. The Dumpster is where you have been tossed, fear being tossed, or will be tossed, if you do not internalize and reproduce the norms of Deconstruction, Wealth Planning, Episcoplianism, Journalism, or whatever way of making a living and a life, whatever way of going along to get along, whatever way of fitting in rather than fucking off, sustains you and makes your resume read like a success story, however, sad and dingy. "Reading formations," "Life Worlds," "Language Games," "Epistemes," "Schools of Thought." To inhabit those happily, with a certain smug pride, a sense of belonging, a proprietary interest, is Wealth Bondage broadly considered. To the extent that we on the inside, or on the recent "outs" with key components of Wealth Bondage (finance, economic theory, philanthropy, journalism, politics, lobbying, think tank thinking, critical theory) can be conscious of our "habitus," of the game we play, of the rules of decorum that we observe and enforce, we can render that game visible, by shaking the frame of that discourse, we have done a service to our fellow citizens. Shaking the frame is art, the work of it, as a monkey driven mad by optimization of its behavior in the lab, shakes its iron cage in insane frustration, not because it changes anything, but because he simply cannot push the button again for another food pellet.
Scruggs is right that I been appalled not just at the inability of academics in the liberal arts who have wandered by here to come to terms, fit language, with Wealth Bondage, but also the inability of even close friends in other walks of life, to break a smile, or break stride as they pass the Dumpster. Are they unable to think themselves out of their own disciplinary membrane, the amniotic sac of their professional life world, or are they afraid that if they punctured that sac, they might be forced out into the cold hard world, that of the Dumpster, where we have nothing but our wits, bum wine, and one another to console us?
The Dumpster is a place where when you are left for dead by your own tribe you go to make light of what agonizes you. The Dumpster is the coffin, they let you sleep in, before your hanging. It is where garbage is temporarily stored after being discarded, before it is compacted and burned or buried. The Dumpster is where society puts its human trash, lest it stink up the place. The Dumpster is for failures, broken people, those for whom another chance would just be squandered like all the prior chances and the last chance, delivered as an ultimatum.
I live here, the other guy, the successful one with his pathetically earnest resume, does not. But he knows, like anyone else in Wealth Bondage, that he lives in comfort on borrowed time, with the proviso that he keeps his mouth shut and nose clean, and that any day, when his affinity for Wealth Bondage is discovered that he too will drink the sorrow share for conduct unbecoming an Officer of Wealth Bondage and thereby calling the institution of Wealth Bondage into disrepute. We are all fungible assets, useful today, useless tomorrow. Producer or consumer, educator or executive, clergyman, beggarman, celebrity, or thief: The Dumpster is our fate. Best not to talk about it. I am sorry I brought it up.
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