the wire

读这篇剧评，才发现，老齐读资本论的深度，不亚于哈维教授，摘几段这章的文字和引用
David Simon
“The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason.”
老齐这句，跟哈维教授讲资本论第二卷第一讲关于资本主义经济“供需平衡”的论述异曲同工
does not the same hold for capitalism as such? Its ultimate impetus is likewise not to satisfy existing demands, but to create ever new demands so as to facilitate its continuous expanded reproduction.
cashless society，这是2012年的文字，太阳底下没有新鲜事啊
The stages in the predominant mode of money seem to obey the Lacanian triad of RSI: gold functions as the Real of money (what it is “really worth”); with paper money we enter the Symbolic register (paper is the symbol of its worth, worthless in itself); and, finally, the emerging mode is a purely “Imaginary” one—money will increasingly exist as a purely virtual point of reference, of accounting, without any actual form, real or symbolic (the “cashless society”).
这其实是给David Simon那段引文的解释回答，希望David Simon看过。
It is the self-propelling movement of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence. This violence is no longer attributable to individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: the former is the social reality of actual people involved in interaction and in the productive process, while the Real is the inexorable, “abstract,” spectral logic of Capital that determines what goes on in social reality.
前几天给别人讲过，只有制度性的变革才有意义
Brecht, whose motto is “change the system, not individuals”: “Mr. Muddle thought highly of man and did not believe that newspapers could be made better, whereas Mr. Keuner did not think very highly of man but did think that newspapers could be made better. ‘Everything can be made better,’ said Mr. Keuner, ‘except man.’
司法体系为自身的存在制造案件，毒品战争其实就是最好的范例。我想起的另外一个典型人物：去年去世的美国最高法院大法官，安东宁.斯卡利亚。此人反对堕胎，支持死刑，深受律师业的拥戴：堕胎的往往是穷人或不想养育孩子的人，让这些人生孩子，就是逼他们养育罪犯，有罪犯，律师们就有活儿干；死刑在美国费用极高，在于各种上诉法律手段，拖延时间，给法院和律师们创造大量工作机会。
In the world of The Wire, the crucial question with regard to this relationship between the legal order and its transgression does not concern the status of drug dealing, etcetera, since it is clear that the legal system itself generates much of the crime it fights. The central question is more insidious and unsettling: what is the status of the (utopian) acts of resistance portrayed? Are they also merely a moment in the totality of the system? Are the individual acts of resistance on the part of Snot and Omar, Freamon and McNulty, also just the obverse of the system that ultimately sustains them? If so, then the answer is obvious, if counterintuitive: the only way to stop the system from working is to stop resisting it.