...massage. do this at the Plaza Hotel, large, old, expensive, famous hotel.

If I understood After Theory correctly, you were advancing a dual thesis of, firstly, a Marxist-influenced analysis of existing societal conditions, and, secondly, the possibility of liberation through a shared empathetic ethics rooted in a personal bodily experience. As I read I began to say to myself,

"Wait a second, that's me, my situation, doing massage at the Plaza Hotel.

Yes, that's me, I'm at the very center (the basement spa in fact) of the great capitalist mechanism trying to unhook the parts and liberate (relax) the players one body at a time."

The Plaza is a theatre for capital, a kind of sanctifying stage for accumulated wealth, providing an "appropriate" backdrop for international meetings and the doings of ambassadors and dealmakers. It also allows, through the activity of tourism, supposedly regular people to come and share in that grand performance for a moment. The Plaza is completely dependent on the continued activity of these people flying around the world and making more money. Interestingly, it depends on both the rich and not-rich ends of this type of international capitalism. A great many of the hotel employees are recent immigrants (many from Ghana and the Caribbean) and send significant parts of their paycheques back overseas. In this sense, the Plaza is a mechanism for and symbol of a new, now 21st-century, chapter of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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