mis clases de conciencia

In the factory of American universities I don’t think many get to experience the ideological transformation that perhaps has been taken for granted by students either in other countries, or here before the 80’s (damn you Ferris Bueller and your society of the spectacle, your nihilist neo-liberal post-modern wasteland.) I am referring to the experience of stumbling on some Marxist scholar in the works cited page in some random course’s syllabus and then after checking out a few books and holding up in the library stacks for a few days, emerging as a radical (please! Gasp not ye faint of heart, I mean the blubbering elitist “why don’t the masses rise up already, what part of praxis don’t you understand??” type radical). I luckily got to spend a semester in Mexico City at a very liberal (I imagine radical back in the glory days of the 68 generation when its brutalist panopticon campus didn’t seem dated, but certainly not since NAFTA and its shitty subsidized American intellectual imports (we actually brought up sam Huntington one time!)) grad school and it was the perfect greenhouse for indoctrination. The book I read, specifically, was David Harvey, who supposedly was a huge star of the school of urban studies (back in the day (the leitmotif of this blog entry)) but now whose Marxist Geography was now dated ( so said the apocryphal advisor wearing a corduroy suit and horn-rimmed glasses). In fact, the whole school seemed caught in a dowdy time warp: my spatial studies teacher making us read long sections of Karel Kosik’s “la totalidad concreta” and drawing diagrams explaining ‘lo fenomenologico’ as a venn diagram. Anyways, David Harvey, well after reading social justice and the city (I could feel the class of 68’s zeitgeist rattling its chains and reading over my shoulder) I moved on to his “limits to Capital” . It is a strange book because you feel like you only understand it backwards. I felt like I had no idea what was going on but barreled on anyways, only to have figured out the gist while on the next chapter. (Harvey would chime in saying it was the theurgic logic of dialectics at work). I remember reading an interview about he first came to Marxism while addressing housing problems in Baltimore and how he attended a Das Kapital study group. What a perfect image of how I wish college had been (that is the lame semesters spent having to listen to professors talk about the “marketplace of ideas”, democracy as being somehow subject to procedural definitions and the pitfalls of substantive theorizing (Lenin scoffs from the grave, fuck that, I scoff now), and the end of history (this is the way the world ends: the absolute idea munching on some fries at Mcdonalds and humming its favorite amy winehouse single)). The closest I came to it was hanging out with some scruffy kids watching a movie about the SDS in the library basement. But now, thanks to the magic of the internet, this is possible (although in an ironic twist, alone in front of a computer in Monadial solitude). May I introduce:

http://davidharvey.org/

Where you can get personal lectures from the legend himself in a fire engine red cashmere sweater ! Let me know when you’ve taken the whole course and are ready to bitch about Praxis