Introduction

I will be writing about my personal relationship with the characters on Jersey Shore.


I am writing about these characters because I like them, and because they remain human in spite or maybe even because of their participating in late capitalism.

In this sense Jersey Shore is the forefront of the anti-capitalist struggle.


This is to say, they are the forefront of the struggle in me. Because they infect me with the spirit of capital, which I grew up on, which feels like a good addiction. I am interested in what these characters do to my body.

Snooki

I am in love with Snooki.






She is loud; unafraid; the underdog; and I am a sucker for the Snooki in any leftist or capitalist woman.


I want to "fix" her, to reach in and grab the capital up out of her.

But I also want her to take advantage of me when she is drunk,


to lay in beds with dozy drinks
and bend each other over sinks.


That is the relation I have with capital.


We take turns: I wield
and am wielded,

and I know that I am sick!


I keep coming back to capital, because it is nice

to hold on to things.


Because we die, and I want to hold on to things.

Snooki 3

I am interested in the way you infect me,

in the way you connect with something I am fighting deep within me.


O it is indirect, my love,
but we are destroying our world, it is true.







MTV is destroying our world,

but only as an emanation of capital.


MTV is a juggernaut of capital,

one of many juggernauts...



Do not confuse the vessel with the disease!


Though MTV produces culture,

destroys culture (takes up market space, pushing out other cultures),

produces young people


and destroys them.


It does not destroy people,

only the people within people,


replacing it with its own version of people.


Is this still people?


Of course it is still people!


It is the creation of new people.

The Situation

Many people blame Jersey Shore for capitalism,

that people have turned material into people.


They protest (too much!):


Where did culture go? O woe is me!! This junk

is terrible.


The implication is that they, standing on the outside, are better than these fools on Jersey Shore


but I say to you cultured people: these fools are better friends to me

than you will ever be.


I wear their bare feet in the junk
and know that there is love & stuff
inside our spider sac

of capital...


It is a warm and glowing womb — my childhood —

they dance & fistpump all night recreating it.


Surely these are our cultural producers,
and we should thank them

for being entirely constituted by capital,

for, Neo-like, taking it on




& still remaining human.


Mike, are you not the situation

of our own egoistic hopes, and fears

and logic?


You try accumulating girls

like your high employers pile up capital,


a capital which is based and created on you

and creates you. You produce new


human men in turn. You are an avatar

of masculinity! The gym, the tan, the laundry


of my radical, unsentimental dreams:


Mike — I enter you
and fray upon your seams.




When you break into pieces
(all pixelated in stock quotes and in prices)


like Mr. Anderson,

missing me in one place, you find me in another.


How can you be sure that I am not capital?

That this voice, as it seeks to intercede


&, through its rhythms, enter & destroy you


is not a new frontier of capital?



And in English, too!



Surely these words are a form of capital.