“Does Marx distinguish between productive and unproductive labor?”
I wish I could say the middle age, British, adjunct professor’s voice reverberate in the room, but too bad this cramped space was originally designed for music practice.
Silence reverberates in the room as everyone looks down at their thick block of Capital. Outside a tiny window, barren branches sway in lukewarm January wind, blocking my view of the adjacent building.
“Jonathan?” Now the self-identified Anarcho-Maoist softens his tone. Jonathan is a good kid, but even he averts the Englishman’s bespectacled glance–before uttering a few dry blinks and half an awkward smile. Meanwhile, Emily flips through the assigned chapter vehemently.
The (adjunct) professor teaching fellow reads out a page number, then a few lines of dense, terse writing.
“So, someone tell me if Marx thinks there are different kinds of labor?”
“Uh, there isn’t ?” Jonathon volunteers, still blinking.
“Damn, how much did you guys drink last weekend?”
Now laughter fills the holes in all five sound-absorbing walls to the brim. Bodies frozen in silence shake loose in giggles.
The teaching fellow resigns and begins a minilecture, chalk-on-blackboard style. It’s admirable he held on to the ideal of class discussion for more than a semester. After so many failed attempts.
//////
I pretend to do important business things while waiting for Eve to finish talking to him after class. She definitely has a crush on him.
You gotta admit, love is powerful. For someone who hasn’t done any reading since the last paper, Eve has a lot to ask. What do you think of this sentence? Is Marx still relevant? Oh also, what do you think about the Zizek-Peterson debate?
“I didn’t see it, what do you think?”
“Oh… they were both blabbering. It was really bad. Zizek makes no sense at all. It’s like he’s reading from a paper with random patterns. Peterson didn’t even know Hegel was. Maybe he was googling it on his laptop.”
“That sounds about right. Excellent critique.”
Writing Notes:
It was difficult to construct a narrative in which a meme is somehow actively involved. This made me reflect on how memes are usually circulated without comments beyond “haha” and subsequent emulation. However, I notice that a lot of our speech and personal opinions are shaped by this silent consumption. In the case of the recent WW3 meme wave, it seems memeing has substituted for opinion and response.
I added the I perspectives during editing, took it out, and put it back in. The piece reads somehow a lot more critical and harsh without a self-described narrator. When the “I” is added in, however, the narrator seems a bit sarcastic. My intention is not to condemn but to describe people and phenomena, but I enjoy the sarcasm so I kept it in there.
Week 3 Reading Assignment: Melanie Walton
Although the events of “Sabrina” are horrific, I found it interesting that there is a sense of “everydayness” that runs throughout the story. This can be seen through the drawing of the characters, the color scheme used, etc. For example, I found that most of the characters did not have very distinct facial features. At first, I found this very jarring because it was hard to tell characters apart. It was as if everyone had the same face with different colored hair. But then, I realized that this could be because Drnaso wanted readers to focus on how the story could happen to anyone. Specifically, there is a focus on becoming desensitized to tragedies because so many occur. It is then very easy for the readers to put themselves in the place of the characters. I think the drawing of the characters aid to this.
Even the background designs and the color scheme are very plain, dull, and not as detailed. It just makes everything feel very normal. I don’t think I’ve seen it done much in any of the graphical novels that I’ve read (which is limited). I find Chloe (M)’s point about the moments in the novel in which the normal color scheme is interrupted to be very interesting also. For example, she talks about how Calvin has a dream about Sabrina’s murderer and it is in black and white (which doesn’t happen for many other scenes) and yet it is not a very accurate description of what happened. I found that the representation of the interpretations of the events of Sabrina’s death was very well done. They all occur through some normal medium (radio, emails, etc) against very normal, dull color schemes/ backgrounds. So, comparing this to Chloe’s point, new information changes our perception of events and this is shown in dreams and everyday settings, but using different stylistic choices.