Sunday 19 October 2008

Krisis

IT / ICR with Badiou on the crisis, ICR with Tronti, and via What in the Hell... this site, which has some excellent analysis.
This point by Mike Davis is interesting in terms of questions of agency:
"On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.

Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods."
(my italics)

7 comments:

owen hatherley said...

As coiner of the term 'Deleuzo-Thatcherite', I presume you've read this? Unsurprisingly I disagree with the whole thing in toto - neoliberal nihilism in the absence of the state's ameliorative efforts isn't something that necessarily needs encouraging, as Planet of Slums makes clear enough, while the plea for a 'continuation and merging of Marxist-Leninist Communism and neo-liberal capitalism' as an extremist proposal implies that the writer is unfamiliar with contemporary China - but at least one has to admire the force of the rhetoric...

Benjamin said...

yes I did, and I was / may write something on it. If you look at the previous post 'Against Hauntology', which I have some sympathy for, there we are offered an alternative between nihilist acceleration and a Badiouian tracking of strategic points of eruption - obviously I'd choose option (b) while the xenoeconomics post goes firmly down (a). In terms of artworks I'm not so bothered by the embrace of capital qua accelerationism, but as a political strategy it seems (to me) pretty suicidal.

Dominic said...

Basic misreading of Deleuze, I think: deterritorialize everything! Yeah, man!

I'm sympathetic of course to the premise that capitalism qua axiomatic system can be meaningfully regarded as a kind of alien parasite (so would not agree with the marxist-humanist insistance on mapping it back into the domain of the human, denouncing the fetishism of treating it as a thing separate from us, etc. - it obviously is a kind of planetary xenomorph, and needs to be understood as generative of interests - class interests, say - just as much as it is generated by them).

I'm also sympathetic to the dismissal of nostalgic humanist politics ("defend the human"...) that goes with this perspective (and tired of explaining to losers like warszawa that this does not mean that I think it's OK for actual human beings to be crowded into slums, used as slave labour, immiserated etc). But the choice between nostalgia and accelerationist nihilism is a bogus one - the pair are symbiotic anyway. Where's the virulence of the idea in that?

owen hatherley said...

In terms of artworks I'm not so bothered by the embrace of capital qua accelerationism, but as a political strategy it seems (to me) pretty suicidal.

This is pretty much my view, and I also largely agree with the arguments in 'Against Hauntology', esp on how it essentially tries to use pomo devices against pomo, a defeatist position from the off: but as a non-cultural strategy, well, capitalism can always do nihilism better than us, regardless of the humanist gloss it gives itself.

(another good Brechtian example: The Measures Taken, so much more forgivable than, say, the lunatic accelerationist 'after Hitler, us' KPD policy that this and Brecht's most thrillingly anti-humanist works were basically propaganda for, and which merely helped usher in Hitler and then 'us' were massacred - a topical question today, what with the evident accelerated regression to the early 1930s. Mind you, for that I don't subscribe either to the Gilbert Achcar view - it's always relative privation which causes revolt. The starving might not start revolutions, but the only insurrection during a boom I can think of is the abortive May).

Benjamin said...

Dominic, I'm not so sure it's a 'complete' misreading of Deleuze, after all D&G do talk about 'absolute deterritorialisation'. Although it is noticable in Mille Plateaux that are a lot more cautious about the possibly suicidal and destructive aspects of this process (ie syaing use a nail file not a hammer to make a BwO).
Thanks Owen for all the material on Brecht; I knew I should have asked you first...

Dominic said...

The provident and self-healing gods

destroy only to save.


- Geoffrey Hill, Of Commerce And Society

My understanding of D&G was that capitalism as an axiomatic machine deterritorialises in order to reterritorialise (or recode) - that it can't be an engine of "absolute deterritorialisation" even if it is the negation of all other social codings. But I don't know how useful this is as a perspective anyway, or how much it adds to "...in the icy water of egotistical calculation"

Benjamin said...

dominic, thanks for the link - I always should and must read more. Yr right on capital as machine of de/re terr (I've tried to cover this in the new post accelerationism II). It's only how to split this from a (good) 'absolute deterritorialisation' I haven't ever grasped. So, we have to pursue the existing lines of flight and open them to absolute deterritorialisation, but how can this really split open the capitalist machine / derail its axiomatic? and, again, who or what (to be anti-humanist) will do it? I realise I'm boring myself on this now...
Lesson to self; 1. never make any political predictions
2. never write anything on popular culture (as I always get it wrong)