echoes of PoMo madness, extravaganza a mi piacci

Ever condemned to my voyeuristic, web-jouissance, I got all juiced up at JPE/Brad's dirty pillow-talk with a certain Jim (I don't have trackbacks, so I don't think I can PING!! them). I couldn't resist my own musings on his very apposite and s-s-stimulating questions. I'll take the third:

<<3. Which ideological state apparatus most clearly reifies Weber's thesis of the protestant work ethic?>>

I love it! Love it! Jim's response that all ISAs are implicated is astute (esp for a neophyte), and to some extent I must agree. But in the interest of narrowing this down to some (false) clarity and (violent) fixity, which one will I choose? I suppose I'll go with trade unions. Such orgs and their discourses help foster the economic mindset outlined so well by Weber. To be sure it starts with the family and the church (Family ISA or Cultural ISA), but such unions crystallize in their policies and traditions the dynamics that ultimately contribute to the 'iron cage'. Such unions act as "disciplinary" sites, forging the next gen of proletarians without the critical consciousness. Workers are smoothly conditioned into the supportive role of the dominant economic order. This is why Lenin had such trouble with such pseudo-socialist movements in his efforts to get the vanguard going. Though supposedly there to protect the workers, they really reinforced captialism by solidifying the binarism between worker and industrialist. Trade unions can only exist with the present system; in a sense both feed off of each other, mutually affirming the other in the Manichean dance--though the power difference must be remembered: the system can continually ingest more fodder while the unions keep raising workers up for feed, the system wins every time (pace Hardt and Negri). Such unions are the secular version of the Calvinist sect.

But I've realized why the question has been so difficult. I think it is because it is misleading. I think, rather, that aspects of the Repressive State Apparatus better convey Weber's thesis, and, when brought into conversation with ques 2 re: biopower, make for frutiful consideration. The fear of judgment and hell, the frantic need for justification, Calvin's execution of Servetus, the gestapo of Geneva--violence, no? Might not the overt and covert forms of violence, the subtle and not so subtle methods of shaping our desires to be those that feed the beast, carry on the torch of "Reformed Businessmen"? RSA contributes in this way to a type of "total institution" (in Agamben's not Goffman's sense) that keeps the hope of heaven alive in the bank acct and tv screen. We are beaten, cajoled, massaged and molded into the "ideal type" that supports the status quo. But it is so overt and physicalist that it seems more the RSA rather than the ISA, though both to be sure are operative. (This leaves unaddressed the very real issue that, at present, the protestant ethos no longer appears necessary or central to the current arrangement of the system. No longer is the ascetism of working and saving exalted, but rather the profligacy of the consumer, flying in the face of the traditional Reformed notions that Weber observed.)

But Althusser's state-centered analysis and Foucault's efforts to cut off the king's head mean that this whole synthesis is flawed. The center cannot hold. But that's ok (since there is no center). Further inspired by the nature of the JPE-Jim exchange, I think I want to muse next on why PoMo is great and so nice for Xianity--though that will hardly be original.