[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[john sobol]

A few thoughts...

One of the things that parenting teaches is that  "I want a shit job 
for peanuts" is simply not a viable attitude when you have dependents. 
In fact, not only is not 'viable' but it is - unless one happens to be 
a true saint - basically immoral and dumb. Which is not to say we 
should all be trying to get rich, but no decent parent seeks to be 
genuinely poor without a very, very good reason. And dealing a tiny 
little symbolic blow against capitalism, is not, imho, one.

There's a reason that students lead a lot of revolutionary movements 
and it's primarily that they are free to act pretty much without 
consequences. Real flaneurs make dubious dads. (or moms)

With regards to the gendering of attention, no doubt you are right 
Judith in arguing that continuous partial/peripheral attention is the 
psychological condition of mothering. But along with that liminal state 
there is also a unifying psychological condition, a 'diffuse 
awareness', to bring back a term that was associated with our 
discussion of CPA, maybe also identifiable as 'women's intuition', a 
passé term that nonetheless has many contemporary formulations in 
various feminist traditions (tho obviously not all).  Maybe these two 
modes are related. Maybe they are the same. (Not saying they are, and 
not meaning to be glib, but throwing it out there.) Maybe the networked 
age of Continuous Peripheral Attention trains multitasking men too in a 
kind of sympathetic consciousness that while not exactly 'situationist' 
in scope, nonetheless  intrinsically resists some of the top-down 
brainwashing of capitalist hyper-linearity.

Ok...before I get massacred, I want to say that I'm really just 
thinking aloud here...

cheers
john