1.       1.Analysis of the super-structure is in dire need of a “localization.”  The standardization of globe viewed as a purely antiseptic process—dissolving the mythological fertility of natural, indigenous territories beyond capital’s “synthetic” reach—has worn itself out.  This is evident in the overly “utilitarian” works in cultural/globalization studies that recycle the same facts that forbid new interpretations while simultaneously pleading for now-time employment of information in politics.  Most of this fact-driven work draws its source-data from the most abstract, cosmological of registers that can nonetheless pass as “empirical.”  The statisticization of indigenous communities, for instance, basically re-articulates the role standard-of-living indexes have in producing an image of the world via a content-less McWeltanschauung.  We need to turn the globe in on ourselves, not seek it out in the peripheries.  

2.      2. Lukács reifies reification when he affirms Taylorism and takes it as truth when it claims to penetrate into the worker’s soul.  Critiques of globalization fall into a similar trap when they confirm that transnational corporations have homogenized the globe.  That capitalism hinges itself on standardization is nothing new. And, “a mode of thought completely anchored in an awestruck repulsion of the existing system, crudely reduces all reality to the existence of that system.”  This quote, Thesis 202 of The Society of the Spectacle slightly altered to read repulsion instead of celebration, articulates the pseudo-critical distance observed in pop-leftism today.  

3.      3. A kind of textual and performative repulsion of the system amounts to the denial that states that their desire somehow escapes capital; and this is what grounds their epistemological claims and the practicality of their solutions.  (In high school, I remember making silk-screened patches proclaiming “Trust Your Desire” or something like that take from a book published by the anarcho Crimethink collective.)  Desire is not a primal current immanent to the globe but not to capital; it is not to be trusted because, like the effects of capital, its effects are inascribable to a rational, willful agent.

4.     4. Observing the detours of our own desires within global capitalism would bring a specificity to critique that is lacking in the kind of negative hagiography of the other as the apogee of a flat, capitalist despair.       

   

Here’s a nugget of rich corporate-theologico televangellism brought to you by the local superstructure.