Leaves fall in Spring (3)

Thunderclap Newman. The bourgeoisie is not comprised of middle class functionaries bellowing at rugby matches and rowing regattas, nor those weekending away from it all in their Suffolk holiday cottages. Nor is it synonymous with the capitalist class - it exists in an antagonistic relation to capital, but being bound to the capitalist lifeworld, its antagonism is structurally constrained from seeking out a path to abolition. Quite the opposite, its object is its self-reproduction in alienated relation to its world. The bourgeoisie is not a sociological category in the strict sense but an eruptive symptom that flares throughout history, a pseudo-subject conjured in moments of social crisis. The bourgeoisie is the state confronting itself as a failure of class integrity; it is a feud within the nomenklatura between generations, orders and factions. It is the complex of post-Enlightenment analyses, representations, enthusiasms, street protests, demands and institutional measures that are invoked fully formed by the third and fourth estates gathering under the image of an escape from blind necessity. The bourgeoisie not only invented the national flag as the meant-metaphor for enlightened management of the realm of freedom, it manifests itself as the national flag incarnate, at bay, at the end of the conveyor belt, at the moment before tumbling into the athanor of indifferent process. It recurs throughout history: as a surplus of differentiation within uniform process; at ever the same thresholds of transition between modes of governance; as the permissible expression of crisis; as the representation of an exit from constraint. The bourgeoisie seeks to escape abstracting process even as process seeks to get away from it. The two modes of repulsion are incompatible, and result in imbroglio. Politics, the name of the bourgeoisie's escape is always its politics: the representing of forces, of subjects, and values on terms of making new and casting off as these occur in the imagination of a mayfly. Its ensuing demand for change is a reaction formation directed against the wrong type of change where those who seek the overthrow of this government thereby desire to ring fence their own status. Then, the rate at which politics is present in a social body, is also the measure by which blind economic force has failed to incorporate that of itself, which in its alienated self consciousness, separates as the voice of revolt. As the moment of crisis passes, as the transition of power is assured (by whatever means and in whatever form), the bourgeoisie departs the stage - its revolt the concluding performance at the end of a cycle of capture