tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70387069239466987102024-03-13T22:40:30.693-07:00No Useless LeniencyFor it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comBlogger352125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-27275318444589807032014-05-22T03:38:00.000-07:002014-05-22T03:38:04.635-07:00Supermale Accelerationism<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Alfred Jarry's <em><a href="http://exactchange.com/shop/jarry-the-supermale/" target="_blank">Supermale</a></em> (1902) is another of those fantasies of the fusion of the human with the machine, but also of the competition between the 'human forces' ('Ha, ha, <em>human forces</em>!') and the emergent forces of the machine. Andre Marcueil, the (anti-)hero is a veritable sex machine, or love machine. He is the supermale in all senses, including the most obvious one. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">He is out to prove his statement 'The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely'. He can also outrun, on a bike with no chain, both a racing locomotive and its competitor - a 5 man racing bike, with the men fed on 'perpetual motion food.'</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4tpAknIqNnw/U33QLsiGCQI/AAAAAAAABs8/j7p4qlzO1oE/s1600/Jarry+one.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4tpAknIqNnw/U33QLsiGCQI/AAAAAAAABs8/j7p4qlzO1oE/s1600/Jarry+one.jpg" height="160" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">This could be another of those 'modernist' male fantasies of mastery (sexual and technological) we have, supposedly, abandoned. It seems the most extreme, if comic, statement of 'technological vitalism', literalised as a sex scene. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Yet the scene of fantasy is one dominated by Ellen Elson, the railway heiress, who desires an 'Indian', an ever virile male.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: large;">She exhaust the supermale on her own, without the use of the 'reserve' prostitutes, and faints rather than dying - unlike one of the unfortunate bike riders, who dies in (literal) harness, but keep pedalling, or even the supermale, who dies fused to an electromagnetic 'love machine' at the climax (pun intended) of the book. The supermale overpowers the machine with his virility, but the result is that it melts into his head (it is something like the 'cap' from an electric chair) and drives him mad and kills him. Jarry's visions of male fusion are both competative and deadly.</span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J9TuqonIm5A/U33SqelkhSI/AAAAAAAABtE/1m0Y4uBe5_s/s1600/jarry+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J9TuqonIm5A/U33SqelkhSI/AAAAAAAABtE/1m0Y4uBe5_s/s1600/jarry+2.jpg" height="250" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: large;">Elson herself is another male fantasy, but perhaps not exhausted by that status. Jarry's comic vision explodes a mastery of technology, explodes the 'accelerationist' fantasy, without simply disregarding technology (as Deleuze makes clear).</span></div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-85150178674342560252014-03-10T04:35:00.000-07:002014-03-10T08:20:59.441-07:00The Party of Life versus The Devil's Party<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d0XZ6rSU1fQ/Ux2W-7vAWNI/AAAAAAAABsQ/sCzdfiFCEb0/s1600/JosephWright-Alchemist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d0XZ6rSU1fQ/Ux2W-7vAWNI/AAAAAAAABsQ/sCzdfiFCEb0/s1600/JosephWright-Alchemist.jpg" height="320" width="225" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In
this manner we enlisted irrevocably in the Devil’s party – the “historical evil”
that leads existing conditions to their destruction, the “bad side” that makes
history by undermining all established satisfaction.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm" target="_blank">Guy Debord</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Jean-Marc Mandosio's <em><a href="http://libcom.org/library/cauldron-negative-jean-marc-mandosio" target="_blank">In the Cauldron of the Negative</a></em> (2003) reflects on the tensions in the Situationist International between Raoul Vaneigem, as representative of the "party of life" (Nietzsche), and Guy Debord as representative of the "devil's party." Mandosio critiques Vangeim's "affirmative" vision, which runs from an over-heated embrace of the potentials of technology to a mystical-vitalist inverted Schopenhaurism. Read through the prism of alchemy Mandosio traces the "impossible" dream of qualitative transformation that founders on the rocks of actuality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The text usefullly signals again the SI's embrace of some of the most extreme forms of capitalist technology as sites that can be detourned to communist ends. These include the technologies of conditioning, even brain-washing, that have been turned to maintaining the spectacle. Asger Jorn writes of the "race between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of new techniques of conditioning." (which recalls Brecht and the Soviet avant-garde).</span></div>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hcB03V8lLfA/Ux2aZhRKhsI/AAAAAAAABsc/XJNF1Y9crOs/s1600/1439_the_destruction_of_rsg_6_ch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hcB03V8lLfA/Ux2aZhRKhsI/AAAAAAAABsc/XJNF1Y9crOs/s1600/1439_the_destruction_of_rsg_6_ch.jpg" height="320" width="292" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Mandosio quotes a <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/12.space.htm" target="_blank">text</a> by Eduardo Rothe, from issue 12 of the SI's journal, which claims that although space travel is the expression, par excellence, of capitalist alienation, in the future: </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as
“volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their
domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">This is the "accelerationist" tendency of the SI. It maintains the split of productive forces from relations of production and claims the capacity to reuse them, evincing a faith in the forms of automation leading to the possibility of a Fourierist utopia. Nature can be "pillaged" as long as it's by workers councils.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In Mandosio's account, which seems convincing, this tendency splits into two. In the case of Vaneigem it leads to a displacement of these technological powers onto mysticism and the "will to life." In the case of Debord, partly under the impact of ecological thinking, into a deepening consideration of the negative. The present taste for Vaneigem, as in Howard Caygill's <em><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/07/resistance-philosophy-defiance-howard-caygill-review" target="_blank">On Resistance</a></em> (2013), indicates the generalised desire for a power of will to break the forms of domination that characterise the present moment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The path of Debord is less taken, except perhaps by me, but is also not immune from a detachment from the present and an inscription of the will in the negative. Debord's desire to go by the bad side does not simply lead to pessimism, in the usual characterisation, but also <em>detachment</em>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">That Mandosio ends on a salutary Leopardian pessimism is a sign of the difficulty, although at least honest. What interests me is how the "adventure" of the SI maps a series of possibilities that remain the coordinates for the present moment, even if this is in a largely "occult" fashion. Rather than remain mired in debates about recuperation, academic or otherwise, it might be worth considering this "framing" as a means to inquire into our present moment.</span></div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-47654121286271301832013-11-10T04:34:00.000-08:002013-11-10T04:34:00.078-08:00Tracing the Invisible Time of the Present<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3R7npk65Ki4/UneUnbH45yI/AAAAAAAABno/gZLuXsoMZVc/s1600/X-Men_v1_141.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3R7npk65Ki4/UneUnbH45yI/AAAAAAAABno/gZLuXsoMZVc/s320/X-Men_v1_141.jpg" width="206" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reading Capital</i> (1968) Althusser argues
that we cannot rest content with the insight that there exist different forms
or rhythms of time to undermine the linear time of historicism and capital. He
argues that, in addition to different forms of visible time, there are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">invisible</i> times. In particular we cannot
read capitalist time ‘in the flow of any given process’, because this is an invisible
time that is ‘essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality
of the total capitalist production process itself.’ (RC 112) Such a time is
only accessible in its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">concept</i>, and
this is a concept which must be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">constructed</i>’
(RC 113).<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This would seem to leave the ‘lived
time’ of capital, its relation to the biological, as only ideological – a
receding moment that we cannot grasp outside of a discourse of science. If we
return to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Marx</i>, and in particular
the essay </span><a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/materialist-theatre.htm" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">‘The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> (FM 129-151), then we
can consider this a phenomenology, even in the Hegelian sense,</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">
of our access to ‘invisible time’ (so, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reading
Capital</i> would then be equivalent to Hegel’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Logic</i>). Althusser’s essay explores three modes of time that are
staged in the play. He begins from ‘the co-existence of a long, slowly-passing,
empty time and a lightning-short, full time’ (FM 134) in the play: between
scenes of mass characters going about everyday life – the time of the chronicle
– and the sudden intrusion at the end of each act of the three central
characters (Nina, her father, and her lover) – the time of tragedy. This would
seem to instantiate also a Benjaminian contrast between ‘empty, homogeneous
time’ and ‘now-time’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jetztzeit</i>),
especially as this second form of full time, according to Althusser, ‘is a
dialectical time <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence</i>.’ (FM
137)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e8zRhHtNrpk/UneUsHbP9wI/AAAAAAAABnw/voClv3C4VuE/s1600/ElNostMilan1955.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="236" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e8zRhHtNrpk/UneUsHbP9wI/AAAAAAAABnw/voClv3C4VuE/s320/ElNostMilan1955.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">The essay, however, disputes this
identification. The tragic time of encounter, dialectical time, is, in fact,
the melodramatic time</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of the father of the central character. We have not
passed from ideological time to non-ideological time, but to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">another form of ideology</i>. While
dialectical time is pushed to the margins, this dialectical time is a time
dictated by the father, who wishes to save his daughter’s honour from her
lover-cum-pimp. It is melodramatic. ‘Sheltered from the world, it unleashes all
the fantastic form of a breathless conflict which can only ever find peace in
the catastrophe of someone else’s fall: it takes this hullabaloo for destiny
and its breathlessness for the dialectic.’ (FM 140) This is still the dialectic
of consciousness and ‘And that is why its destruction is the precondition for
any real dialectic.’ (FM 138)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">The third form of time is only
indicated when Nina abandons her father – who has murdered her lover – to
embrace the life of (presumably) a prostitute. ‘Father, consciousness,
dialectic, she throws them all overboard and crosses the threshold of the other
world’ (FM 140) This rejection of the false dialectic of consciousness is
parallel to Marx’s gesture in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>
and to Brecht’s theatre. It is the emergence of a true knowledge. It requires
the rejection of consciousness to pass into an ‘experience’ of time, which is
to say capitalist time, as it is – in its naked dominance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ONaQpXgJs3g/UneVKsw4UsI/AAAAAAAABoM/o8oFlipUF5s/s1600/cash-register-1917_jpg%2521Blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ONaQpXgJs3g/UneVKsw4UsI/AAAAAAAABoM/o8oFlipUF5s/s320/cash-register-1917_jpg%2521Blog.jpg" width="259" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I now want
to turn to contemporary reflections or endorsements of accelerationism as a
site that replicates this tension of the attempt to trace a phenomenology of
capitalist time. What we could call ‘classical accelerationism’, associated
with the work of Nick Land, involved the endorsement of capitalist time as a
time of acceleration, in the form of expanding value and the absorption of all
elements of life under an ‘inhuman’ marketization (Land 2013). It is the
acceleration of this vector that will, it is claimed, pierce the wall of
capitalism itself an usher in a radically new future that has, in Land’s
reading, already occurred. We are infiltrated from the future, by guerrillas of
this technological and cybernetic mobilization of flows.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Dc56yK8Tvq8/UneVD1SxXGI/AAAAAAAABoE/f9F-Z5K5M48/s1600/1235454_540243559356003_1247201422_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Dc56yK8Tvq8/UneVD1SxXGI/AAAAAAAABoE/f9F-Z5K5M48/s320/1235454_540243559356003_1247201422_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Contemporary accelerationism
modulates this schema (I will be referring to the work of Alex Williams, Nick
Srnicek and Mark Fisher). It concludes that we have been robbed of our future
by an inertial and crisis-ridden neoliberalism that has rescinded the dynamism
of capitalism for the opaque mechanisms of speculative finance. The
phenomenology of this experience of capitalist time is provided by dance music.
Once, in this story, dance music provided an inventive form of musical
accelerationism. In </span><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/13004-mark-fisher-ghosts-of-my-life-extract" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Mark Fisher’s characterization</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">, ‘While 20<sup>th</sup>
Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which
made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21<sup>st</sup>
Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.’ Whereas once, in the 1990s, there was a ‘</span><a href="http://thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_introduction" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">hardcore continuum’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> that had guaranteed an experimental acceleration (from rave to jungle to
early grime), today, adopting Simon Reynolds diagnosis of ‘</span><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Retromania-Pop-Cultures-Addiction-Past/dp/0571232094" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Retromania’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">, that
future has stalled in bad pastiche (Williams 2013). Our moment is a nostalgia
for a future that was once promised (‘Today is the Tomorrow you were Promised
Yesterday’, in Victor Burgin’s phrase). Retromania is, in Alex Williams’s
formulation, the ‘pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The stasis of neo-liberalism, which
concludes the only way into the future is more of the same, is mimicked by a
plundering of the past to grab images and forms of acceleration that reappear
as merely static moments. We live, in Alex Williams’s Ballardian coinage, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chronosickness</i> (2013). Unable to accede
to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, we instead can only
live out the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blockage</i> of our present
moment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fUQ_OLwbDeo/Unea2AQpN5I/AAAAAAAABoY/LyCzKINeMjI/s1600/footwork.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fUQ_OLwbDeo/Unea2AQpN5I/AAAAAAAABoY/LyCzKINeMjI/s320/footwork.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">This is evident in </span></span><a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/essays/mark-fisher-on-dj-rashads-double-cup/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Mark Fisher’s recent discussion of juke / footwork</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> – a form of Chicago ‘ghetto house’ at
155-165 bpm, with repetitive and often aggressive sampling (‘</span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzEPQTlSztY" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Fuck Dat’</span></a><span style="font-size: large;">). It
would seem that footwork continues the hardcore continuum and instantiates
another acceleration, which would dispute the accelerationist characterization
of the present moment as a moment of stasis. To rescue this diagnosis, Fisher
argues that while jungle ‘was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping’,
footwork is ‘strangely desiccated’. This illiquid form traces its
resistance ‘in the bad infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering,
frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.’
If jungle was predictive of accelerative temporalities the
footwork, according to Fisher, only captures the impasses of the present
moment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YN__jWRYMGw/UnecG_jMgxI/AAAAAAAABoo/PPahUDEwOxQ/s1600/333.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YN__jWRYMGw/UnecG_jMgxI/AAAAAAAABoo/PPahUDEwOxQ/s320/333.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The answer of
‘classical accelerationism’ to this dilemma is more acceleration through
celebration of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">speed</i> of
capitalism. When jungle embodied the ‘Landian imaginary’ of ‘apocalyptic
paranoid euphoria’ this made possible a future (Williams 2013). The present
moment rescinds that promise and so contemporary accelerationism no longer
works on the ‘speed’ of capitalism, which is not present, but seeks another
form of time. Lacking this ‘alienating temporality’ (Williams 2013), speed only
replicates capitalist parameters. To push beyond them we need to play off
acceleration against speed, against ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’ (Williams
2013), we are called to a new ‘universal field’ of accelerative possibilities.
This future is predicated, for Alex Williams (2013), in the engagement with
‘the forward-propelling energies embodied in the best of UK race music, its
posthuman ingenuity, alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and
impersonal desire.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">I leave to one side the nationalism
of this agenda (seemingly an endemic feature of music writing in the UK,
usually in regard to an inferiority complex in relation to US-music). The
example of footwork I’ve just discussed points to a problem with this agenda:
the lack of any instantiation of ‘acceleration’ in the present moment. The
‘possibilities’ that contemporary accelerationism promises to trace in a
universal field slip, unpleasantly, into another form of retromania. This is
another form of nostalgia, but a retooled nostalgia that castigates the present
in the name of encrypted possibilities that remain largely invisible.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3yWLrw_QllQ/UnecDo7_sTI/AAAAAAAABog/gifGTvX_-yc/s1600/Record+Player+Richter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3yWLrw_QllQ/UnecDo7_sTI/AAAAAAAABog/gifGTvX_-yc/s320/Record+Player+Richter.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the Althusserian terms I sketched
I would argue that this figuration of capitalist temporality is melodramatic.
It implies that at the edge of the present – dominated by the empty time of the
chronicle – is the occasional flash of melodramatic dialectical time. These
flashes are, however, largely sent from the past. For all its proclamations of
a knowledge of the present and future, accelerationism does not accede to the
abandonment of this ‘full’ time of the clash. What are lacking, ironically, are
precisely the new aesthetic forms, the new modes of knowledge, which
accelerationism is premised upon.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> <span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Contemporary
accelerationism remains perched precariously in the present moment, between a
valorized past and a receding future. This is disjunction <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without</i> synthesis. Again, it registers our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">broken</i> relation to capitalist time, but only in the mystification
we can reconnect to a superior force. Althusser insisted that it was the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">absence</i> of relations that marked the
temporal experience of capitalism for consciousness. My objection to
accelerationism is not on the ground of absence, but on the promise of
reconnection.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Even discussing accelerationism might be considered a
waste of (your) time. This is especially true of a critical discussion. What
interests me, however, is accessing the question of the knowledge of capitalist
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Accelerationism promises the kind
of exposure of capitalist time that marks Althusser’s real dialectic. It premises
itself on the stripping away of consciousness, which is not now the result of
capitalism’s practical anti-humanism, but rather of epistemic expansion and
extended ‘rationality’. What I am suggesting is that it falls back from this
into mere melodrama, and that it positions such a real dialectic as a
melodramatic form.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yAHHZtPR1uk/Unef1SYIIqI/AAAAAAAABo0/INrmkgg9PfE/s1600/melodrama.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yAHHZtPR1uk/Unef1SYIIqI/AAAAAAAABo0/INrmkgg9PfE/s320/melodrama.png" width="296" /></a></div>
</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Of
course it could be said, in line with Althusser, that knowledge of capitalist
time is simply a matter for a critique of political economy and a
reconstruction of the logic of capitalism, beyond human consciousness. What
interests me is the registration and shaping of these experiences on and for
consciousness, which does not simply disappear – except in Althusserian science
or the accelerationist dream of inhuman knowledge. This implies, to me, a
necessity to think the disconnection and impasse of the present moment as a
figure, at least potentially, of consciousness. In this case our choice, or
decision, of aesthetic figuration becomes a crucial mode of knowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bibliography<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Althusser, Louis,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Marx</i>, trans. Ben Brewster
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). [FM]<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Althusser, Louis,
and Étienne Balibar, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reading Capital</i>
[1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2009). [RC]<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Fisher,
Mark. 2013a. <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/13004-mark-fisher-ghosts-of-my-life-extract" target="_blank">“An Extract from Mark Fisher’s Ghostsof My Life.”</a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Quietus</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Fisher, Mark, </span><a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/essays/mark-fisher-on-dj-rashads-double-cup/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">‘</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/essays/mark-fisher-on-dj-rashads-double-cup/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Break It Down: Mark Fisher on DJ Rashad’s DoubleCup’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Electronic Beats</i>, 22
October 2013b: </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Land, Nick,<i> <a href="http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_fangednoumena.php" target="_blank">Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007</a></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, intro.</span> Ray Brassier and Robin
Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2013).<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Reynolds,
Simon, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Retromania-Pop-Cultures-Addiction-Past/dp/0571232094" target="_blank">Retromania</a></i> (London: Faber
& Faber, 2011).<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Reynolds,
Simon (2013), </span><a href="http://thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_introduction" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">‘Introduction to the Hardcore Continuum’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wire</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rose,
Gillian, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Dialectic_of_Nihilsm.html?id=K-SsQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">Dialectic of Nihilism:Post-Structuralism and Law</a></i> (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Williams,
Alex, ‘Back to the Future? Technopolitics and the legacy of the CCRU’, Berlin,
1 February 2013.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-size: large;">[<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> In Gillian Rose’s
summary: ‘Hegel’s text invites us to witness the education of natural
consciousness, presented as a series of confrontations set in more or less
recognizable historical settings: between two opposed individual
consciousnesses, between opposed forces residing within a single consciousness,
and between opposed forces belonging to the same communal consciousness.’ (6)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1Bognor Regis, West Sussex, UK50.782998 -0.673060999999961550.702702 -0.83442249999996143 50.863293999999996 -0.51169949999996156tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-52696903872316919802013-11-09T05:26:00.000-08:002013-11-09T05:26:00.108-08:00Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy's Neo-Weird
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">‘</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres’, <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Institute of English Studies,
Senate House, University of London (8 November 2013)</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The ‘Old Weird’ could be seen to be
characterized by a notably dubious, not to say toxic, politics. H.P. Lovecraft’s
racism is an obvious case – ‘the polyglot abyss’ of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Horror at Red Hook</i> (1925) demonstrating the synthesis of racial
panic and cosmic horror. We could also mention that Arthur Machen, when asked
by the editors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Authors Take Sides</i>
for his views on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, was one of five authors who
supported Franco, writing: ‘Arthur Machen begs to inform you that he is, and
always has been, entirely for Franco.’ Algernon Blackwood, in his short story
‘Adventures of a Private Secretary’ (1906), has the character of an ‘old Jew’
with ‘an air of obsequious insolence’ (this is one of the milder slurs), called
Marx (!).</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
Penguin’s decision to reprint the story in a volume of Blackwood’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Tales</i> in 1943 defies reasoned
comment. Beyond personal politics I think we can also hazard a literary
politics of the Old Weird that often rests on a sense of racial or political
anxiety or threat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RvCFb9BJ3OM/Uneh-_FpeGI/AAAAAAAABq8/6x4_ul0bpw4/s1600/looney-okayhoward.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RvCFb9BJ3OM/Uneh-_FpeGI/AAAAAAAABq8/6x4_ul0bpw4/s320/looney-okayhoward.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
‘New Weird’, in obvious contrast, has a politics that is often much more to the
Left. Beyond the obvious example of China Miéville, I would like to note a more
general tendency to a cultural politics of loving the alien. The Weird is not
seen as simply some terrible threat, but only a threat when perceived as such
from within social constraints. The monstrous or Weird is to be celebrated for
its expansion of consciousness and erosion of the bourgeois ego – the latter exemplified,
often, by Lovecraft’s uptight ‘heroes’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Grant
Morrison’s short story ‘Lovecraft in Heaven’ exemplifies this turn by rewriting
the ‘Old Weird’ into the ‘New Weird’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
Lovecraft is dying of cancer and Morrison considers the self-replicating
monstrosity of cancer as the physical embodiment of both Lovecraft’s creatures
and his fear of the feminine (the ‘cuntworld’ as Morrison puts it</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">).
Lovecraft’s positivist rationalism makes him unable to embrace the chaotic and
fractal. In conversation with his fictional creation Professor George Angell
Lovecraft states: ‘I have come here to confirm my belief that the World of
Reason still holds dominion over the primeval depths of the human imagination.’
Angell replies that Lovecraft is ‘quite naïve’ and that, in fact, ‘Reason is
the flimsy mask on the face of Chaos’. Lovecraft’s rejoinder is ‘Then our whole
world is a nightmare.’ ‘Only if you fear it’, is Angell’s reply. Angell starts
to breakdown verbally and physically, saying ‘we must embrace them … integrate
them’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
The story ends with Lovecraft being opened like a door, not into Hell, as Lovecraft
supposes, but into Heaven.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
This is the DeleuzoGuattarian Weird – in their preference for Lovecraft’s Dunsanian
trips to his cosmic horror,</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
or the Levinasian weird of alterity and its integration.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">World
of Horror<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UOdWBPzDthw/Uneh50Ix7zI/AAAAAAAABqs/A-kG6YTammc/s1600/imagesCAC1PQ7M.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UOdWBPzDthw/Uneh50Ix7zI/AAAAAAAABqs/A-kG6YTammc/s1600/imagesCAC1PQ7M.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">What I want to consider here is a form
of the ‘New Weird’ that embraces or integrates the toxic politics of certain
strains of the Old Weird; this is the work of Manchester-based publishers Savoy
and, most notably, their creation Lord Horror. Horror is a fictionalised
reworking of wartime broadcaster for the Nazi’s William Joyce, nicknamed Lord
Haw-Haw and executed for treason in 1946. The works deliberately, rather than
unconsciously, toy with anti-Semitism, racism, and, in the figure of La Squab,
paedophilic desire for the ‘fille fatale’. To be clear from the start I am not
celebrating or endorsing this turn or self-conscious return to the politically
toxic. These works disturb me profoundly, which is why I want to consider them
as an outlier of contemporary Weird fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VbBeAQ9AvAY/UnehdzK5SPI/AAAAAAAABpU/gXb3PEm4D1Q/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VbBeAQ9AvAY/UnehdzK5SPI/AAAAAAAABpU/gXb3PEm4D1Q/s320/3.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
world of Savoy and the world of Lord Horror is a multi-media platform. Lord
Horror has appeared in novels (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord
Horror</i> (1989), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Motherfuckers: The
Auschwitz of Oz</i> (1996), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baptised in
the Blood of Millions</i> (2001), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Invictus
Horror</i> (2013)), graphic novels or comics (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Horror</i> series (1-7) (1989-1990) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i> 8-14 (1994-2000) (2012)), music, film, and criticism (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horror Panegyric</i> (2008)). He also has
sidekicks, in the form of Meng & Ecker (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Adventures of Meng & Ecker</i> (1997)), and spin-off characters, such as La
Squab (daughter of Meng) (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Squab</i>
(2012)).</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
The result is a ‘universe’ or mythos, somewhere between Lovecraft and the
comic-book worlds of publishers like DC or Marvel. This dispersion gives a
paradoxical consistency to Lord Horror as – like one of his models, Michael Moorcock’s
Jerry Cornelius – he moves between times and formats. For reasons of brevity
and economy today I want to focus on his appearance within the graphic novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NIHsIsdj8x0/Unehb2enXyI/AAAAAAAABpM/6wVybMXxzGM/s1600/02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NIHsIsdj8x0/Unehb2enXyI/AAAAAAAABpM/6wVybMXxzGM/s320/02.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i> was a continuation of the
first 7 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Horror</i> comics and it
appeared in 8 issues from 1994-2000. In 2012 these issues were collected
together in one graphic novel, with an added final issue. David Britton is the
writer, with the main artist being John Coulthart and additional art provided
by Kris Guidio, while Michael Butterworth is the editor. The earlier <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Horror</i> comics, written by Michael
Butterworth and drawn by Kris Guidio had initially been more ‘postmodern’ in
their playing with comic conventions and comic characters the tone shifts
dramatically in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i>. Now
drawn primarily by John Coulthart the density of the art, the decline in the
words, and the movement to a thoroughgoing engagement with modernist
aesthetics, produces something slightly less immediately confrontational but
certainly more strange.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zzEWgdXGYbo/UnehfouOv9I/AAAAAAAABpc/HlXHy7900zU/s1600/04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zzEWgdXGYbo/UnehfouOv9I/AAAAAAAABpc/HlXHy7900zU/s320/04.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
shift began with John Coulthart’s work for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord
Horror</i> 5 – a series of full page images of an imaginary Auschwitz with
empty white text squares. Coulthart describes this as a ‘unique conjunction of
Holocaust architecture and Weird Fiction.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
In fact Coulthart drew on and reworked an earlier image from his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of Cthulhu</i> adaptation of R’lyeh
to figure this imaginary camp. Obviously this is a shocking violation of the
refusal of representation of the Holocaust and, even more provocatively, this
violation melds the camps with the pulp world of Weird Fiction. It also opens
to an architectural or spatial vision of the weird, which I now want to
explore.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t-QQBsEZBao/UnehwA36J3I/AAAAAAAABqM/JLo0xy7m-1k/s1600/cthulhu2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t-QQBsEZBao/UnehwA36J3I/AAAAAAAABqM/JLo0xy7m-1k/s320/cthulhu2.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Spatial
Dialectics<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Just as the distinction between the
latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any
division between the real and the super-real in the external world. Phantoms
slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial
and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at
Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OepbqVQs65M/UnehoYk9cwI/AAAAAAAABp0/5qy7IVz_n-U/s1600/24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OepbqVQs65M/UnehoYk9cwI/AAAAAAAABp0/5qy7IVz_n-U/s320/24.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The world of horror is now disconnected
directly from the world of William Joyce – that of the 1920s, 30s and the war –
displaced into a ‘future’ setting of Torenbürgen (the ‘unreal city’), or what
Coulthart calls ‘Lord Horror’s vicious dreamscape of fascist atrocity’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[11]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
Lord Horror is living with Jessie Matthews (modelled on the English dancer,
singer and actress of the 1920s and 30s). Matthews is a rock star, credited
with reintroducing reverb into popular music, while Lord Horror defends her
against anti-Semitic slurs and joins her on stage to sing. Horror is joined by
his ‘brother’ James Joyce.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kp0nFnDko8c/Uneh8SOn7HI/AAAAAAAABq0/pSQXP4emUgM/s1600/Jessie_Matthews.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kp0nFnDko8c/Uneh8SOn7HI/AAAAAAAABq0/pSQXP4emUgM/s1600/Jessie_Matthews.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Horror
still broadcasts a mixture of rock and roll with cut-ups of William Joyce on
his radio show ‘Amerikkka’s war in the ether’ on Radio Reich Rund Funk. As
Michael Paraskos notes in his review for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Spectator</i> (!), ‘it is difficult to outline a clear narrative thread’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[12]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
His suggestion that the images represent Benjamin’s wreckage of history, quoted
at the beginning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i>, is
astute. For Coulthart ‘Reverbstorm throws these numerous influences out like a
dark prism, flashing broken images of refracted black light’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[13]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
I want to suggest this image practice inhabits something like what Fredric
Jameson calls a ‘spatial dialectics’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[14]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i> temporality has
collapsed, or been collapsed, and instead we have the spatial play of fragments
which are, pace Eliot, not ‘shored against my ruins’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[15]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gQpe0Pu1WT8/UneiHYYT2aI/AAAAAAAABrU/8_UbsxCZoPQ/s1600/REVERBSTORM-70.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gQpe0Pu1WT8/UneiHYYT2aI/AAAAAAAABrU/8_UbsxCZoPQ/s320/REVERBSTORM-70.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These
fragments are the ruin; organised within the frame they are brought into
contact to generate the weird effect. For Lovecraft modernism was conceived of
under the sign of horror. When we encounter R’lyeh, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of Cthulhu</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Without knowing what
futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of
the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he
dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces
too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious
with horrible images and hieroglyphs.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[16]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Torenbürgen is horrific, but also a
space of modernism – a butchered modernism. This is Eliotic modernism with the
anti-Semitism amplified and embodied. To ‘read’ or ‘view’ this non-narrative
space is to engage with a difficult act of extracting meaning and reference
while also attending to the clash and emptying of meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ctsSmoanboY/Unehq9rH7yI/AAAAAAAABp8/vRKrtp7NFCs/s1600/27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ctsSmoanboY/Unehq9rH7yI/AAAAAAAABp8/vRKrtp7NFCs/s320/27.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Integrate
That<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I have drawn a contrast between the
dubious politics of the old weird and the politics of acceptance and
integration of the monstrous of the new weird. While I have suggested Savoy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Horror</i> is an outlier to the new
weird paradigm I’d also like to end by noting that it does produce a work of
integration. In this case, as I’ve previously argued, what we are called to
integrate is ‘fascinating (British) fascism’: the politics of William Joyce,
the pre- and post-war politics of Oswald Mosley, and the anti-Semitism and
racism that runs through certain strands of modernism.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[17]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
This is integration in the mode of disintegration, in which fascism, Nazism and
racism are coded through and as the Weird – also activating the dubious
politics of the Weird as well.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-06FOPqVhpzA/UnehtkdJBuI/AAAAAAAABqE/4bWnb6dKrq8/s1600/32.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-06FOPqVhpzA/UnehtkdJBuI/AAAAAAAABqE/4bWnb6dKrq8/s320/32.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Obviously
we can note at least two problems with this strategy. The first is the problem
Perry Anderson identified with post-structuralism: the randomization of
history. Rather than generating the tension or contradiction of a dialectic
this spatial arrangement of images and signifiers merely serves to mix-up and
even neutralise the ‘charge’ of the toxic materials it plays with. The result
is not so much a force-field, but rather a slackening of tension. The second,
inverse, problem is that this integration and neutralization servers a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i> – a pained ‘enjoyment’ – that
reactivates the toxic core as aesthetic option. Far from challenging the
fascination of fascism this ‘weird fascism’ integrates the toxic core as
‘attractive’ possibility.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lT_r-pNEYc0/UnehlnCk5DI/AAAAAAAABps/rLpAx0ecvLM/s1600/09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lT_r-pNEYc0/UnehlnCk5DI/AAAAAAAABps/rLpAx0ecvLM/s320/09.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
some ways the point is that we can’t simply immunise ourselves against these
problems or possibilities. The final issue of the graphic novel concerns, in
its text, the disintegration of Lord Horror as his insides push out through his
skin. This terminal collapse involves reprising the key image elements, under
the pressure that refuses to integrate. The tension of this (dis)integrative
moment remains and, I should say, never fails to disturb me. So, I’m not simply
recommending a return to the malignant politics of some of the Old Weird
writers. Instead, I’m interested in how this malignant politics feeds the
horror element of the Weird and how Savoy’s return to this malignant politics
puts the contemporary Weird under pressure. This, I think, is the tension of
our moment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GBfIOpUgeb8/UnehiCNgtRI/AAAAAAAABpk/GYhqTzh_uwo/s1600/08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GBfIOpUgeb8/UnehiCNgtRI/AAAAAAAABpk/GYhqTzh_uwo/s320/08.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Algernon Blackwood, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood</i>
(West Drayton: Penguin, 1943), pp.22-50.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> This model is, in
fact, figured in Lovecraft’s own fiction. In his story ‘The Whisperer in
Darkness’ (1931) one character, who has had his brain transferred into a metal
cylinder by the Fungi from Yuggoth (!), claims ‘‘What I had thought morbid and shameful
and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glorious</i> – my previous estimate being
merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">utterly different</i>.’ (193)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Grant Morrison,
‘Lovecraft in Heaven’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Starry
Wisdom</i>, ed. D.M. Mitchell (London: Creation Books, 1994), pp.13-18.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ibid., p.16.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ibid., p.18.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ibid., p.18.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaus</i>,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), p.240.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> For a complete listing
of Lord Horror’s appearances see the ‘Lord Horror Timeline’ in Keith Seward, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horror Panegyric</i> (Manchester: Savoy,
2008), pp.119-125.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> John Coulthart,
‘Drawing the Dark’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Haunter of the
Dark and other Grotesque Visions</i>, intro. Alan Moore (London: Oneiros Books,
2006).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> J.G. Ballard, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Drowned World</i> [1962] (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965), p.72.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[11]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
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</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[12]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Michael Paraskos,
Review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reverbstorm</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spectator</i> 9 March 2013: </span><a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8857521/murder-rape-and-racism/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8857521/murder-rape-and-racism/</span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span></div>
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</span><div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
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</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[13]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Coulthart, ‘Drawing
the Dark’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[14]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Fredric Jameson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Valences of the Dialectic</i> (London and
New York: Verso, 2009), pp.66-70.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[15]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> On the collapse of
time, and other coordinates of plot/structure in Lord Horror, see Keith Seward,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horror Panegyric</i> (Manchester: Savoy,
2008), pp.23-29.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[16]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The
Call of Cthulhu’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of Cthulhu
and Other Weird Stories</i>, ed. and intro. S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin,
1999), pp.165-6.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">[17]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Benjamin Noys,
‘Fascinating (British) Fascism: David Britton’s Lord Horror’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rethinking History</i> 6.3 (Winter 2002):
305–318, and <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">‘Fascinating (British)
Fascism: <i>Lord Horror</i> to <i>Meng & Ecker’</i> Afterword in David
Britton, <i>Fuck Off and Die</i>, illustrated by K. Guidio (Manchester: Savoy
Books, 2005).</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-74080203808550903412013-10-30T03:45:00.005-07:002013-10-30T03:45:52.645-07:00Are you Deleuzian, or have you ever been Deleuzian?<div style="text-align: justify;">
If someone hasn't already said it, which they have, Foucault got the wrong century - the 21st century, or at least so far, is the Deleuzian century. There's the obvious critical sense of this, which is that Deleuze expresses the ideology of contemporary capitalism / power. There's some truth to this and I've made the accusation myself, but, ironically, I'd said Deleuze is the language of our contemporary consciousness. His thought shapes our awareness of the present moment and resistance to it: struggles as much as surrenders, ruptures as much as recuperations.</div>
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From <a href="http://theclaudiusapp.com/5-mansoor.html" target="_blank">folds</a>, to <a href="http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/resonance-and-egyptian-revolution.html" target="_blank">resonance</a>, to time-images, even Roland Simon (of <a href="http://libcom.org/library/theorie-communiste" target="_blank">TC</a>) speaks Deleuzian (or Bergson/Deleuze) when it comes to characterizing the temporality of the <a href="http://riff-raff.se/texts/en/sic1-the-present-moment" target="_blank">present moment</a> (thanks Daniel Spaulding). What is insinuated is a productive contradiction, a differentiated moment that might unfold the abstractions of dominance; vectored in Deleuze through life, but even then this is not so much the full life of post-autonomia, but a fleeting, even damaged, life.</div>
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I speak another language. I speak Derridean. This is by training, by forgotten inclination, by habitus, without the name appearing. Untimely is usually cool. Out of step now, in step with the future. It's a grandiose 'failure', in its Nietzschean way. Out of time, out of ideology (a bit). This untimeliness I feel belongs to the past, as much Derrida and the internalized remnants of British social democracy, shaping the contradiction of inaction, a dull weariness, a bad investment. </div>
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Oh me, oh my, oh lyric I. You can't teach a dead dog new tricks.</div>
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To miss the present moment then. To grasp it might involve an internal phenomenology of this Deleuzian moment. Deleuze as <em>pharmakon.</em></div>
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For me it's a foreign language, and I'm terrible at those. Bye, bye, present moment.</div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-91366475625028627822013-07-30T07:26:00.000-07:002013-07-30T07:26:46.763-07:00Soleil Noir
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On
May 1 1937 the first and only issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Soleil
Noir</i>, a self-styled ‘post-Surrealist’ publication consisting only of one
double-sided mimeographed page, was seized and destroyed by Parisian police on
charges ‘obscenity’. The contents of the issue can only be reconstructed
largely from a truncated description later found in the files of André Masson
and brief (wholly negative) reports in other Surrealist publications.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What
is evident is the disturbing content of the texts printed in the issue and
especially of a hand-drawn illustration, which appears to have been drawn for
each copy. Masson notes the similarity to his style, and is concerned it will
be attributed to him, but unfortunately his description of the actual drawing
is vague at best – speaking only of a ‘the blackened solar anus’, ‘a technique
at once primitive and beyond anything of our time’, and that it ‘burns the eye’.
In terms of the texts he, and others note, the extreme violence of the
language, its agrammaticality, and a lengthy and scurrilous attack on Georges
Bataille. The writer intimates that during his time at Quarr abbey, on the Isle
of Wight, Bataille underwent a ‘failed’ initiation and, as a result, was
‘burned by the black sun’. In the most obscene terms Bataille is accused of
fatally re-writing his ‘wound’ or ‘burn’ into a political and economic theory
of prodigality and excess that has reversed the ‘anti-economy’ of the ‘black sun’
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qua</i> ‘extinction’. Again, the
descriptions are imprecise and, surprisingly, no mention of the attack has been
found in any of Bataille’s letters or papers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although
the issue was anonymous references have been found that suggest attribution to
a provincial ‘surrealist’ (never recognised by Breton), Gaston B.
[unfortunately no surname is given or can be reliably reconstructed],
supposedly incarcerated in a mental institution for several years in the
mid-1930s before he found his way to Paris where he tried, and failed, to meet
Artaud. Even more speculatively it is reputed that Gaston joined the Legion of
French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, and was later to serve as ‘occult
adviser’ to the SS Charlemagne Division, formed in 1944 out of the remnants of
the LVF. It is claimed either that ‘Gaston’ was executed out-of-hand by a
special Soviet partisan group in Pomerania in February 1945, that he committed
suicide in Berlin on May 1 1945 after helping prevent the seizure of the
Furher’s bunker on that day, or that he was shot when captured by Free French
forces under the command of General Leclerc.<o:p></o:p></div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-46724763911100748192013-07-19T04:41:00.002-07:002013-07-19T04:41:22.091-07:00'This red sun that comes from the West': Deadwood and the Spectral Proletariat<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/here-comes-the-new" target="_blank">David Cunningham</a>'s excellent discussion of <em>Deadwood</em> as capitalist epic, in which the central subjectivity, in the historical figure of Hearst, is 'capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself...' (<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S1" target="_blank">Marx</a>) What interests me in Cunningham's reconstruction of this capitalist epic, in which 'heroic' entrepeneurs pit themselves against abstract forces of monopoly and market, is what he notes as the spectral place of the proletariat. If capital is the negativity of pure accumulation then, classically, this would be answered by the negativity of those who have nothing to lose but their chains. </div>
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In <em>Deadwood</em> this dialectic is not present or is left hanging; with the Cornish miners and the replacement Chinese workers reduced to mere background. The nascent collective struggles of the Cornish brutally snubbed out as they are reduced to 'bare life' in almost literal forms (as Cunningham details). If Hearst is the figural representative of capital (although the role of his psychopathic assistant Wolcott might be interesting as companion double), then the closest (I think) to a figurative representative of the proletariat is the honest prospector Ellsworth - who is killed by Hearst's men.</div>
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This killing, paralleling the assassination of the leaders of the miner's struggles, suggests the elimination of proletarian negativity. Writing on American labour struggles of the 1930s <a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/TrontiWorkersCapital.html" target="_blank">Mario Tronti</a> suggested that 'this red sun that comes from the West' might incarnate a working class defined by the struggle against labour that 'the American class-struggles are more serious than European ones in that they
obtain more results with less ideology.'</div>
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In this narrative the lack of mediations produces a sharpened struggle, which was, as Tronti notes, defeated. He also remarks on the withdrawal of American workers from struggle: 'Labor struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of self-consciousness for
capital: without them it does not recognize its own adversary. Consequently, it
does not know itself. And when the contradiction explodes among the parts
altogether internal to the mechanism of capitalist development, again the
workers do not begin to actively struggle, neither to accelerate the crisis, nor
to somehow resolve it.'</div>
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What I want to suggest that the double resonance of <em>Deadwood</em> that Cunningham traces in terms of capitalism is also the resonance of the proletariat as absent/spectral in that moment and in the present moment. We could track the present moment of this reflection through the empirical fate of the US working class, traced in Jefferson Cowie's <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0042RUF7K" target="_blank">Stayin Alive</a></em>, or more theoretically through the communization thesis of <a href="http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/13" target="_blank">'the end of programmatism'</a> (ie, the collapse of the mediating identity of the worker). In either case, if we follow Tronti, we could see the fading of what already were relatively weak mediations. The spectral 'presence' of the proletariat in <em>Deadwood</em> would be this lack of mediation. This would be a dialectic of sharpened negativity, although one that <em>Deadwood</em> raises questions over.</div>
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In Tronti's analysis the 'bareness' of the history of the US working class makes possible a new reading of 'this modern sphinx, this obscure enigma, this social thing-in-itself which we
know exists but which cannot be known: the American working class.' Of course, as <em>Deadwood</em> indicates, this bareness, this absence, could also be taken as sign of repression, dispersion, and absence, rather than enigmatic sign of future struggle. This would also be true of the tensions of the communization position, in which the absence of programmes opens out new modes of struggle, but seemingly making it hard to conceive a new 'mass' struggle that would cohere or condense the necessary power to achieve victory - what Tronti calls 'organizational strength'.</div>
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In <em>Deadwood</em>, itself truncated by its own failure as a TV series (in capitalist terms), this violent cutting off of the proletariat - its death - suggests the difficulty of the present moment. A universe of entrepreneurs, corporate and otherwise, an absent proletariat, the dominance of the forms of service work (prostitution, retail, etc.) all trace our own universe, as confined and wretched as the town of <em>Deadwood</em> itself. Of course the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood,_South_Dakota" target="_blank">historical </a><em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood,_South_Dakota" target="_blank">Deadwood</a> </em>would burn, which is an apocalyptic 'solution'. The fact that this is deferred by the cancellation of the series leaves us within a world that may or may not burn, a universe of the spectre which is not (only) the commodity form but the proletariat, and a universe without solution.</div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-51690147151004079152013-07-01T02:31:00.002-07:002013-07-01T02:31:43.089-07:00Intoxication and Acceleration
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">P</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">resented at ‘</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Intoxication 2013’, the University of London Institute in
Paris </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Postgraduate conference (28
June 2013</span></i></span><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Academia.edu version for <a href="http://academia.edu/3824216/Intoxication_and_Acceleration" target="_blank">download</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of
rapture. Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Walter Benjamin, first experiment in taking
hashish, 18 December 1927</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his
interview ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’ (1989), Jacques Derrida</span> remarks on how the
drug user is condemned for their escapism from community: ‘he cuts himself off
from the world’ and ‘escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The drug user is similarly condemned on the grounds of a politics of
productivity, as they ‘produce […] nothing’ (236). In line with his tracing of
the instabilities and equivocations of this ‘rhetoric of drugs’, Derrida also
notes how drugs constantly cross the line of production. The supposedly
escapist and unproductive can turn productive. In the case of sports drugs can
become, Derrida suggests, the ‘artificially natural’ mode of augmentation that
could produce the superior ‘being’ (249). Drugs, as Derrida notes, are a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pharmakon</i> (234). In this case the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pharmakon</i> lies in the unstable
oscillation between escape into the transcendent and immersion in the immanent.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LEKAyxaWaM4/UdFEdTHEiyI/AAAAAAAABhU/LF6-2zndZTE/s470/morphinomane2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LEKAyxaWaM4/UdFEdTHEiyI/AAAAAAAABhU/LF6-2zndZTE/s320/morphinomane2.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here, I want to trace intoxication
(and more particularly drug intoxication) as a site of the desire for
immanence, production, and the possibility of a new ‘being’. This is
intoxication not as unproductive detachment from or dissolution of the social
bond, but intoxication as attachment, immersion, and (hyper) productivity.
Intoxication is taken not some transcendent experience, some escape from the
social or from the body, but a radicalized experience of immanence, of
insertion within the social bond to its maximum extent, and of radical
intensification. Of course this form of intoxication aims at breaking the
social bond, or ‘desocializing’ as Derrida puts it (250), but through a
traversal or line of flight into immanence. The ‘social disconnection’ (Derrida
251) that drugs cause works, in this case, by an absolute connection.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If drugs, and other experiences of
intoxication, are taken as paths to an experiential immanence then this
immanence can only be achieved through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">acceleration</i>.
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaus</i> Deleuze and
Guattari state: ‘All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of
speed.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
We accelerate from beyond the stasis of our existent social position into an
intensified experience of immanence that tracks lines of flight. These lines do
not lead into a transcendent world, but reconstruct and rearrange the actual
world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zPJJ_mLVcKA/UdFL3fFNByI/AAAAAAAABjU/FEmx4XcEr4k/s538/poussin-bacchanalian-revel-term-NG62-fm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zPJJ_mLVcKA/UdFL3fFNByI/AAAAAAAABjU/FEmx4XcEr4k/s320/poussin-bacchanalian-revel-term-NG62-fm.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
To be clear my aim is not to
validate this coupling of intoxication, acceleration, and immanence. Instead I
wish to critically explore what I regard as a particular fantasy of immersive
immanence and its correlation with acceleration and production. This is not
intended as yet another moralist discourse on drugs. In fact, as we will see,
actual drugs are not always at stake. Drugs take on the role of being a
simulacra or fiction. What is at stake is a desire. This is a desire for a real
production. Contrary to the simulacral discourse of drugs, the simulacrum is
put at the service of a collapsing of fantasy in intensification and immanence.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Giving them Drugs, taking their Lives Away<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his
review essay on the work of Gilles Deleuze ‘<a href="http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm" target="_blank">Theatrum Philosophicum’</a>, published
in 1970, Michel Foucault suggested LSD and opium might counter stupidity. He
concluded:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Drugs
– if we can speak of them generally – have nothing at all to do with truth and
falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world ‘more truthful than the
real.’ In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought
by eliminating the old necessity of a theatre of immobility. But perhaps, if it
is given to thought to confront stupidity, drugs, which mobilize it, which
color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences
and substitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorescence, are the source
of a partial thought – perhaps.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deleuze
remarked in a footnote ‘What will people think of us?’</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0CZZywJGxhY/UdFIptktwVI/AAAAAAAABiA/XQhilJKZWR4/s1600/merry-pranksters-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0CZZywJGxhY/UdFIptktwVI/AAAAAAAABiA/XQhilJKZWR4/s320/merry-pranksters-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Foucault’s remark suggests that in
part the effect of drugs is to eliminate a ‘theatre of immobility’. They
provide the intensification, mobilization, and acceleration, which offer an
experience of ‘continuous phosphorescence’. It is the work of Deleuze and
Guattari that takes-up this experience in a mode that links drugs and
acceleration. Deleuze and Guattari’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Oedipus</i>
(1972) is relatively silent on drugs, with only a few mentions, in regards to
R.D. Laing and American literature. The book is rather more explicit about
acceleration, with its suggestion that ‘We can never go too far in the
direction of deterritorialization.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The generally ‘trippy’ (to use an appropriately kitsch term) atmosphere of some
parts of the book, the selective manner of its adoption, and the milieu to
which it appealed, meant that despite its often marked tone of sobriety <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Oedipus</i> was taken by some as a
license for drug and other forms of ‘accelerative’ experimentation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S1rjalEmtMw/UdFLS92SSvI/AAAAAAAABjE/PGr9giBkTGw/s1000/tumblr_mgdl85WHjE1qlzc4lo1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S1rjalEmtMw/UdFLS92SSvI/AAAAAAAABjE/PGr9giBkTGw/s320/tumblr_mgdl85WHjE1qlzc4lo1_1280.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Thousand Plateaus</i> (1980) reconsiders and recalibrates the discourse on
drugs. Deleuze and Guattari still insist that ‘Drug assemblage’ is one of
molecular revolution, allowing us to perceive the imperceptible, have a
molecular perception, and invest that perception with desire:</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><sup>
</sup>‘Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis
has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a turning
point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the unconscious).’
(284) Drugs don’t turn to the fantasy production that marks the psychoanalytic
unconscious as ‘a dualism machine’ (284). Rather than the ‘gross molarities’ of
Oedipus, drugs can embark on imperceptible becomings that are constructive and
immanent.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fpFqazmbgY8/UdFK3GMV17I/AAAAAAAABik/4jXUGqcwsg8/s983/apo-33_1_front.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fpFqazmbgY8/UdFK3GMV17I/AAAAAAAABik/4jXUGqcwsg8/s320/apo-33_1_front.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While Deleuze and Guattari insist,
in Spinozist style, that drugs must be granted their own causality and can’t be
reduced to ‘generalities on pleasure and misfortune’ (283), they also sound a
more cautionary note. Drugs may be a matter of speed, but this speed is
variable: the time of drugs is at once one of ‘mad speed’ and ‘posthigh
slownesses’ (283). That is, what William Burroughs calls ‘junk time.’ Deleuze
and Guattari now suggest that acceleration, ‘mad speed’, is not to simply be
endorsed, as deterritorialization can run out-of-control. A delinking line,
which is only speed, means ‘the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in
black holes’ (285). In such cases the drug user does not connect with
immanence, but reterritorializes. They reterritorialize on the identity of the user
or addict: ‘The causal line, or the line of flight, of drugs is constantly
being segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit
and the dose, the dealer.’ (<i>ATP</i>: 284) We are no longer, as Deleuze and
Guattari say, ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">master of speeds</i>’
(285).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W_ebB1w1M3U/UdFLNzt59vI/AAAAAAAABi8/cpZg1vCGIPA/s403/time_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W_ebB1w1M3U/UdFLNzt59vI/AAAAAAAABi8/cpZg1vCGIPA/s320/time_cover.jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course we could and probably
should note that this discourse risks returning to the extrinsic moralism
Deleuze and Guattari has claimed to avoid. Accusing drug users or addicts of
being locked-in anti-social identities and chains of dependency is not so far
from the discourse of the police. Of course Deleuze and Guattari would insist
that their aim is to suggest the drug addict returns themselves to social
orders of control, rather than pursuing a true or real construction that might
rupture with the normative forms of territorialisation. This is part of their
rejection of fantasy, and their insistence that the collapse of the drug user
is one that results in falling into ‘hallucinations, delusions, false
perceptions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts’ (285). What is wrong with these
experiences is that they are not ‘rich or full’, they are not ‘passages of
intensities’, but result in ‘a vitrified or emptied body’ (285). The problem
with this use of drugs is that it is not immanent enough – ‘Drug addicts
continually fall back on what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the
more rigid for being marginal, a territorialisation all the more artificial for
being based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy
subjectifications.’ (285)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rather than disappearance or
immersion, the emphasis now falls on construction. This is an ‘art of dosages,
since overdose is a danger’ (160). It is not a matter of blazing a path.
Instead it is even a matter of absence of abstinence: getting drunk, but on
pure water’, or ‘getting high, but by abstention’. This is a critique of drug
use based upon a discourse of immanence: ‘Drugs do not guarantee immanence;
rather the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them.’ (286) While I think
this is not particularly satisfactory as a mode of critique, it indicates the
priority Deleuze and Guattari give to a ‘molecular’ becoming that folds-in to
immanence. Constantly warding off any trace of the negative results in its
occulted return, which tries to specify and delimit what molecules we can
connect with. This selection, unsurprisingly, in the name of a ‘vital
assemblage’ (286). To use the ironic sample of Emperion’s classic track
‘Narcotic Influence’: ‘Giving them drugs, taking their lives away’… Deleuze and
Guattari conclude, in seeming contradiction, that drugs don’t lead to the plane
of immanence, but ‘in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining
master of speeds and proximities.’ (286)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jrVR7MOIlg" target="_blank">Ya Buzzin</a></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In response,
the discourse of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU),
articulated at Warwick in the 1990s, insists on a return to full-blown
immanence. Rejecting any holding back, and working in the wake of the mass
pharmacological experiment of rave culture, they strip-out the cautionary
moralism of Deleuze and Guattari’s discourse. Their motto could have been
William Burroughs statement, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Naked Lunch</i> (1959): ‘The addict regards his body impersonally as an
instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with
the cold hands of a horse trader.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Here acceleration abandons
selection. In <a href="http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm" target="_blank">Land’s words</a> ‘Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.’ </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The only option is to immerse in the backwash of this runaway process, which in
Land’s metaphysics infiltrates the present from its realized future. What
Deleuze and Guattari tended to regard as fleeting and asymptotic converges on
absolute deterritorialization that has happened, but not now or here: ‘Neo-China
arrives from the future.’ Immanence, in this discourse, is perfectly aligned
with the trendlines of contemporary capitalism taken as site of absolute deterritorialization
momentarily deferred. What we had now, or then (in the ’90s), were traces of
that future which we should seize as paths to full future immanence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KsVXMVaVTA4/UdFLIN7pZtI/AAAAAAAABi0/oZopYWD6Gaw/s350/Moving_Shadow_logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KsVXMVaVTA4/UdFLIN7pZtI/AAAAAAAABi0/oZopYWD6Gaw/s320/Moving_Shadow_logo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The accelerative beats-per-minute of
rave into Jungle and drum n’ bass offered a new passage into lived affective
intensity and immanence – ‘text at sample velocity’. This was combined with the
drug culture of rave and post-rave, which ranged across the spectrum of
pharmaceutical options in the pursuit of catching-up with that speed of the
music. Walter Benjamin, writing of his experience on hashish in the 1920s,
noted: ‘The music, which meanwhile kept rising and falling, I called the “rush
switches of jazz.”’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
He continues, hilariously, ‘I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself
to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not
happen without inner disputation.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
Rave and post-rave dance music cultivated these ‘rush switches’ to an extreme
degree. Drug use + Jungle = CCRU, we could say. True abandonment requires the
breaking of all bonds, and drugs and Jungle would be two means.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lVTUON631FA/UdFLtKJB4-I/AAAAAAAABjM/nJgOsNi0XAY/s442/normal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lVTUON631FA/UdFLtKJB4-I/AAAAAAAABjM/nJgOsNi0XAY/s320/normal.jpg" width="231" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This also had a deliberately
anti-political element, derived as from Lyotard’s delirial accelerationist
rupture with ‘left moralism’ in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Libidinal
Economy</i> (1974). In Mark Fisher’s <a href="http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=markfisher" target="_blank">retrospective</a>: ‘</span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Ccru defined itself against the sclerotic stranglehold that a certain moralizing
Old Left had on the Humanities academy. There was a kind of exuberant
anti-politics, a ‘technihilo’ celebration of the irrelevance of human agency’.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The political and cultural fate of this discourse was not unpredictable.
Embrace of the trendlines welcomed self-dissolution, which gained an
appropriate accompanying mythology. The retooling of accelerationism in the
present moment owes much to repetition of this moment, which indicates the
strangely nostalgic form of such a Futurist discourse.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While more admirably
rigorous than Deleuze and Guattari, and less beholden to the minor or molecular
‘good hippy’ (as Lyotard sarcastically put it vis-à-vis Baudrillard), the
discourse of Land and the CCRU was deliberately terminal. Immanence achieved,
but deferred until its retroactive arrival, could easily generate the same
moralisms of adjustment and conformity to acceleration and immanence that we
found with Deleuze and Guattari. In this case adjustment and immersion come
from the future and the traces of this ‘future’ are prefigurative markers to
which we have to conform. This is an inverse moralism of conformity to
anti-moralism traced through a delireal sci-fi future that draws its elements
from the retro-kitsch of the present.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m the Platform<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For one
recent instance of this form of immersive, immanent and intoxicated
‘acceleration’ I want to consider Beatriz Preciado’s description of
<a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/testo-junkie-sex-drugs-and-biopolitics/" target="_blank">being-on-testosterone</a> as a ‘transgendered’ body.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
I’m not so much interested in the politics of this particular experience in
terms of gender, so much as the language and descriptive terms used to analyse
this state. Her description is one distinguished from other drugs – coke, speed
– to indicate ‘the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the
city’. This already suggests the resonant immersion in the forms and forces of
contemporary global capital, figured in the ‘rhythm’ of the city.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YCZRb2dSU68/UdFFwLw0PiI/AAAAAAAABhk/BWITi45vZQ0/s215/9781558618039.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YCZRb2dSU68/UdFFwLw0PiI/AAAAAAAABhk/BWITi45vZQ0/s215/9781558618039.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is an experience intimately and
explicitly connected with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, which Preciado
characterizes as ‘a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism.’ Here
capitalism converges and incites ‘molecular’ biopolitical transformation
through ‘micro-prosthetic mechanisms’ and new ‘multimedia technical protocols’.
What interests me is that, in common with the CCRU, the strategy Preciado
pursues is one of identification and immersion with these new forms of power.
The ‘drug’ experience, this molecular intoxication, is not a device of
transcendence or escape per se, but rather insertion with and within the
‘chains’ of signifiers and ‘materialities’ of the present.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TEcsATuzHno/UdFJLoJGp-I/AAAAAAAABiI/CfMCbtB9pE4/s800/testosterone.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TEcsATuzHno/UdFJLoJGp-I/AAAAAAAABiI/CfMCbtB9pE4/s320/testosterone.png" width="320" /></a></div>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The result is the common gesture of
the immanent and networked litany:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I
inject a crystalline, oil-soluble steroid carbon chain of molecules, and with
it a fragment of the history of modernity. I administer to myself a series of
economic transactions, a collection of pharmaceutical decisions, clinical
tests, focus groups, and business management techniques. I connect to a baroque
network of exchange and to economic and political flow-chains for the patenting
of the living. I am linked by T to electricity, to genetic research projects,
to mega-urbanization, to the destruction of forests and the biosphere, to
pharmaceutical exploitation of living species, to Dolly the cloned sheep, to
the advance of the Ebola virus, to HIV mutation, to antipersonnel mines and the
broadband transmission of information. In this way, I become one of the somatic
connectives that make possible the circulation of power, desire, release,
submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
conclusion: ‘I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of
political imagination.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is an intoxicated and willed
extinction of the self, especially the gendered self, into the mere ‘platform’
for affects, materialities, and signifiers. Insertion is the aim. Yet, this is
figured not simply as immanent extinction and immersion at the expense of
agency. Instead a strange new form of ‘agency’ is born: ‘I’m both the terminal
of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point
through which escapes the will to control of the system.’ What might be thought
to imply the surrender of the self to neoliberal capital is, it is claimed, a
‘vanishing point’ to immanent exit. This is registered in the usual discourse
of neoliberal availability: ‘I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers
sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the
State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XoKir6m14kI/UdFK_aBVL4I/AAAAAAAABis/JCQoC0W4w8E/s200/ball20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XoKir6m14kI/UdFK_aBVL4I/AAAAAAAABis/JCQoC0W4w8E/s200/ball20.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The aim is to ‘produce a new sexual
and affective platform’ in which ‘T is only a threshold, a molecular door, a
becoming between multiplicities.’ The reference to the ‘threshold’ and
‘molecular door’ echo the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, or Lovecraft
channelled via Deleuze and Guattari in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Thousand Plateaus</i>. The choice is, however, of what I’d call the hippy
Lovecraft. This is the Dunsanian Lovecraft of transformation and metamorphosis,
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through the Gates of the Silver Key</i>,
happily consonant with Deleuze’s Jungian roots. What is displaced is the
Lovecraft of horror. The molecular door is affirmed and positivised as exit and
escape, traversing the platform-being of contemporary capitalism, rather than
the negative horror of loss and dispersion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is the strange logic of
holding-on at work, in which immersion is disappearance but one that pushes or
nudges immanence beyond the supposed limits of the capitalist form. True to
Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal formulations it traces agency and
possibility as modes of ‘hypertrophy’.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_edn15" name="_ednref15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
The primary target is the State, as symbol of control of fluxes and flows,
which makes the usual correlation of power with planning, capture, and
transcendent control. Immanence flees beneath, in terms of riding, supposedly,
the lines of capitalist flight. The conformity of this strategy with neoliberal
capitalism’s own imaginary is not commented upon.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q3QAwXABFNw/UdFJRkAcn4I/AAAAAAAABiQ/tCPvGG9638w/s1600/cyberpunk2077-wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q3QAwXABFNw/UdFJRkAcn4I/AAAAAAAABiQ/tCPvGG9638w/s320/cyberpunk2077-wall.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Closing the molecular door<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
problematic core around which these discourses turn is one of absorption into
actuality as the site of transformation. The stakes here turn on the right
choice of molecule to enter into molecular becomings. This is a metaphysics of
self as platform to insert the self into ‘real’ production. ‘Real’ here is not
the usual sense of ‘real production’ as manufacturing, etc., versus ‘financial
or fictional capital’. Obviously this distinction doesn’t hold up. Instead
‘real’ here has the Lacanian sense, vectored through Deleuze and Guattari, of
immersion into a machinic production that encompasses all the flows and fluxes,
simulacral and ‘real’, in one metaphysics of differentiated production. Of
course, I’d suggest, lurking within this metaphysics is a suspicion of the
fictional or simulacral, which is rapidly displaced by the productive virtual.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gc6tnLakPko/UdFJh5uprtI/AAAAAAAABiY/XsXsFYRCMeg/s810/BlackJack3D_-_glossy_molecular_structure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gc6tnLakPko/UdFJh5uprtI/AAAAAAAABiY/XsXsFYRCMeg/s320/BlackJack3D_-_glossy_molecular_structure.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the moment of capitalist crisis
this immersive acceleration refigures the triggering of production, of creative
destruction directed against the ‘bourgeois ego’, as we immanently inhabit our
own potential or actual obsolescence. Drugs or intoxication are not matters of
insulating or cushioning against this loss, but active choices to intensity and
inhabit this process. The ‘platform being’ of the present moment is the being
of creative destruction. What is welcomed here is not the accelerative force of
capital, which has dispersed into intractable crisis, but the future
possibility of restarting that acceleration through stripping out the
‘residues’ of humanism and the remnants of the welfare State. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is the peculiar intoxicated
acceleration of our moment: a capitalist ostalgie that retools the search for
transcendence through drugs into immanence that selects only overload. The
inadequacy of this discourse should be self-evident. The fading of dreams of
jouissance in counter-culture is turned into a nihilistic inhabiting of the
superior force of the only actuality we have: capitalism in crisis. What is
lost is any negativity, any displacement or resistance, as that negativity is
hyperbolically reinscribed as the negation of the self. It’s enough to make you
want to take drugs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Walter Benjamin, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Hashish</i>, intro. Marcus Boon, ed.
Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2006), p.20.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Jacques Derrida, ‘The
Rhetoric of Drugs’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Points:
interviews, 1974-1994</i>, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995), pp.228-254, pp.235-6.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The exception to this
structure, in fact an exception at the origin, is Thomas De Quincey. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions of an English Opium-Eater</i>
(1821) not only insists that opium is not intoxicating, but that is also serves
a transcendental function. Opium increases the capacity of the intellect to
subsume content under form; in the language of Kant it augments the
transcendental schematism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaus</i>,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.282.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, <i>Anti-Oedipus </i>[1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p.417.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Deleuze and Guattari, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaus</i>, p.282. Further page
references in text.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> William Burroughs, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Naked Lunch</i> [1959] (London: Paladin,
1986), p.63.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Benjamin, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Hashish</i>, p.55.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Alexander R. Galloway
and Eugene Thacker, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Exploit: A Theory
of Networks</i> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.98.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-38030071896161000972013-05-28T04:14:00.001-07:002013-05-28T04:14:43.193-07:00Ursine Accelerationism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HIRXUBhMYE0/UaH8wYaH0WI/AAAAAAAABdk/mqtw5-k_RA4/s1600/1970bearinspace032.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HIRXUBhMYE0/UaH8wYaH0WI/AAAAAAAABdk/mqtw5-k_RA4/s320/1970bearinspace032.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In Andre's Platonov's <em>The Foundation Pit</em> the 'unknown last proletarian' (107) and last instance of 'residual exploited labour' (107) on the collective farm is a bear who hammers at the forge. In fact the forge is a 'shock' workshop and the bear is not only the last proletarian but also the first <a href="http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1929udarnik&Year=1929" target="_blank">shock worker</a> (<em>udarniki</em>). After been taken around the collective farm to denounce kulaks - in actuality, those who have mistreated him - the bear sees a banner 'For the Party, for Party loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!' (128).</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_BNNg0wHPO0/UaSQz8e6DYI/AAAAAAAABeE/OoeKW5OG9Eo/s1600/SovietBearFixed_small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_BNNg0wHPO0/UaSQz8e6DYI/AAAAAAAABeE/OoeKW5OG9Eo/s320/SovietBearFixed_small.jpg" width="224" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Taking this injunction absolutely the bear begins to hammer out iron at a frantic rate, distressing the villagers as his labour threatens to ruin the iron (and therefore figuring the excess of 'shock work' that stormed to destructive attempts at production). The bear wants to force the door for a proletarian future 'expending all this furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor' (128).</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_n2rPNe3diw/UaH_HB-mJhI/AAAAAAAABd0/Psg7O9UI2yU/s1600/olympic-mascots-misha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="221" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_n2rPNe3diw/UaH_HB-mJhI/AAAAAAAABd0/Psg7O9UI2yU/s320/olympic-mascots-misha.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">This is the interchange of animality and the status of the proletariat - the proletariat as animal and animal as proletariat (see <a href="http://www.mottodistribution.com/shop/history-of-animals-an-essay-on-negativity-immanence-and-freedom.html" target="_blank">Timofeeva</a>). In Annie Epelboin's analysis, this is acceleration as destructive return to chaos:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">'The bear symbolizes a prehistoric future .... He casts doubt on the validity of the creation myth itself. As an "unknown proletarian," representing the people as whole, and as a blacksmith, the bear is remiscent of the "hammerer-bear" of Siberian myth who, by inventing the forge, inaugurates cosmic and social order, presiding over the creation of the world. Platonov's bear, however, does not so much create the world as annihilate it. He is, at least potentially, the agent of ultimate destruction. Wanting to force open the doors of the future, he threatens to return the world to primordial chaos. Wanting to force the pace, to accelerate time, he shows us that time is reversible.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Annie Epelboin, "Metaphorical Animals and the Proletariat" in <em>Essays in Poetics</em> 27 (Autumn 2002), p.181, qtd. in Andrei Platonov, <em><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-foundation-pit/" target="_blank">The Foundation Pit</a></em>, p.222</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The shock acceleration of labour in 'speechless joy' (<em>jouissance</em>?), reverses itself into a chaos that ruins any linearity. In the moment of the revolution, in the revolutionary negativity of the proletariat doubled with the animal, the revolution revolves and reverses.</span><br />
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<br />Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-14122480548117149152013-05-15T06:58:00.000-07:002013-05-15T06:58:14.327-07:00There is no "aesthetics of communization": A Reply by Daniel Spaulding (guest post)<br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Many thanks to Daniel Spaulding for his rapid response to my paper <a href="http://leniency.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-aesthetics-of-communization-xero.html" target="_blank">'Aesthetics of Communization</a>'. I hope to reply on Monday, but there is probably more common ground that might at first appear.</span></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">There is no “aesthetics of communization.”
Indeed to claim as much suggests that the inquiry has been posed at the wrong
level, as if communization were a thing to which aesthetics might be attached –
a predicate added to a subject. Communization is not a subject; it is, rather,
a process that abolishes existing relations. The question then is whether a
process (moreover, a process that has never yet truly occurred) can in fact possess
an aesthetics. If we take “aesthetics” broadly to mean sensuous appearance,
then yes, communization will necessarily have its modes of appearance; there
will be movements of matter, form, affect, and so forth that will neither look
nor sound nor smell nor taste nor feel like the world mediated by capital. However,
if we take seriously communization theory’s basic contention that revolution in
the current phase of capitalism cannot proceed as the affirmation of an
existing position within class society, but only as a break with the
reproduction of the totality of capitalist relations, then there is today no
standpoint from which to elaborate a positive aesthetics adequate to communism.
From the perspective of communization we cannot possibly speak of an ascendant proletarian
art in the same way as we can speak of the historical ascendance of bourgeois
art, because communization takes the form of the immediate abolition of class
society rather than the affirmation and universalization of a class that might
possess its own particular representational structures.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Hence the “aesthetics of communization” can
only be designated as a placeholder for the forms that are, or will be, immanent
to the practice of negating existing forms of appearance (the real abstractions
of capitalist society). From our current standpoint there can be no
counter-aesthetics opposed to the commodity-form, for instance, but only an
aesthetics of the commodity-form’s contradictions and, perhaps, of the material
practice by which that form may eventually be abolished. The same goes for any
hypothetical counter-aesthetics of, say, free giving as opposed to exchange, or
of immediately social individuality as opposed to the reifications of gender.
To the extent that this is a positive aesthetics, however, it is not an “aesthetics
of communization” but rather something else, perhaps worth analyzing in its own
right (art in this guise may be the object of the disciplines of art history,
aesthetics properly speaking, and so forth, but not communization theory). On
the other hand, to the extent this aesthetics is only negative it is perhaps
not an aesthetics at all but a practice. Hence Benjamin Noys is quite right to point
to a double-bind: for communization, there is no aesthetics but in practice, but
if there is “aesthetics” there is no practice. To describe the “aesthetics of
communization” is to describe something that cannot exist except potentially
and in contradictory form, and that would also cease to exist if it were to be
realized, given that “art” as we know it is also a category of capitalist
society.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Unless I am mistaken, however, Noys is not
responding to an existing positive aesthetics of communization per se but is
rather attempting to describe, first of all, the aesthetics of communization <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">theory</i>, and second, the implications of
this body of theory for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">artistic practice</i>.
Thus his critique is posed at the level of representation, as a meta-critique.
I believe this equivocation between practice and text explains many of the
paradoxes of his essay. Noys observes a contradiction between the “figures, tropes,
and forms” of the communization literature – namely, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immediacy, immanence, acceleration,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dispersion</i>” – on the one hand, and the persistence of artistic
practice, on the other. He also superimposes this contradiction onto the
polarization within communization theory between groups that affirm the
possibility of elaborating “forms of life” in the present as opposed to those
who deny any prefigurative politics. The question he asks is: How is
communization theory able to reconcile its allegiance to purely negative
practice 1) with the continued existence of particularized artistic practice as
opposed to generic social practice, and 2) with its own existence during non-revolutionary
periods? I take his implication to be that communization theory does<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> not</i> reconcile these problems: it is a
contradictory formation. It therefore seems reasonable to interpret Noys as
offering preliminaries for a symptomatic reading of the structural contradictions
of communization discourse – of its political unconscious, perhaps. In the
process, however, “communization” comes to name a text rather than a practice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">It seems to me that Noys’s reading of
communization in terms of essentially literary categories misapprehends the
relation between theory, practice, and representation, at least at this historical
conjuncture and as elaborated in the communization texts under consideration. The
problem is that Noys can seem to collapse the temporality of theory with that
of the historical limit or horizon itself. (I should be clear that I am now
speaking primarily of communization theory in its non-voluntarist articulation;
Noys’s criticisms may indeed apply to certain ideas grouped under the label,
but the tactic of identifying a tension within “communization theory” already
presumes the field’s coherence – its difference, for example, from
insurrectionary anarchism – when this in fact remains to be argued.) Communization
theory may then be reduced to a fetishization of the utmost break, rather than a
reflection on the structure of the social totality that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">produces</i> the break. Consequently the persistence of other things
besides revolution itself is taken as a problem for the theory rather than as an
element of what it in fact predicts. What yet remains to be done (communization)
is then identified as what is supposed to be happening now; what is supposed to
be happening then calls for an aesthetics (since aesthetics above all refers to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">present</i> appearances); what is now
happening in reality is then found inadequate to the (distorted) image of the
theory; and finally the “aesthetic” element is found to be contradictory due to
the collapse of one temporality into the other. Such a perspective ultimately attributes
communization theory to a normative or utopian standpoint as opposed to recognizing
the theory as conditioned by possibilities immanent to processes that are
already occurring but which do not yet constitute a revolutionary situation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">To ward off this line of reasoning it is
necessary to insist on the uneven temporality of present struggles. While it is
possible to say that accumulation of surplus capital alongside surplus labor,
the weakening of the wage as the dominant form of social mediation, the
destruction of unions and the left, and so on, increasingly point to
communization as the logic of proletarian struggle in the present moment, it
would clearly be absurd to claim that none of the elements of the
“programmatist” era survive into the post-1960s period. Nor are these forms
present merely as archaisms, to be swept away <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> the millenarian revolution: they are exactly what remain to
be overcome in struggle. The reading of communization theory as
“accelerationist” in a pejorative sense may then result from eliding structural
analysis of a revolutionary sequence possible (but by no means certain to
transpire) under current or imminent conditions with the literal time of the
present. The fact that many texts in this corpus argue that communization must
be rapid and contagious is strictly speaking another issue; these texts do not
necessarily argue that the “prairie fire” will break out tomorrow, nor that it
will escape being extinguished, but rather suggest what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> be necessary for the reproduction of non-capitalist life. A
critique of this particular aspect of communization theory would have to be offered
in terms of the feasibility of other strategies in a given (if hypothetical)
revolutionary conjuncture, rather than lodged against an undifferentiated
“accelerationism.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">What remains, now, is to draw conclusions for
current practice – both political and artistic, though it is the latter that
concerns us at the moment. Let me repeat that there is no aesthetics of
communization. This is not, however, to say that we cannot “make it with
communization.” Even for an analysis that accepts the thesis of real
subsumption, the totality of capitalism remains contradictory: indeed this
analysis, as opposed to the pessimistic conclusions of Debord and the later
Frankfurt School, has no greater purpose than to indicate that the dialectic of
capital’s expansion leads to the destruction of its own conditions of
reproduction. Hence the ruptures from which a practice may be elaborated are
not positive/normative positions external to capitalism but are rather immanent
to capitalism’s structure as the “moving contradiction.” In turn, the appeal to
a “beneath” of the state of things that Noys questions as a form of “lurking
vitalism” does not necessarily call forth an ontology of capture and escape, but
rather indicates that the forms of appearance presented as true in capitalism
are in fact only one side of a contradiction. The point here is not that real
abstraction is mere illusion – to be dispelled, perhaps, with the aid of art –
but rather that each instance of abstraction (value, abstract labor) has as its
reverse an instance of the concrete or particular (use-value, concrete labor).
These instances of the particular are subsumed to the totality but are nonetheless
in contradiction with it. Indeed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">both</i>
the general and the particular as they exist for us are within capitalism;
communization is not the affirmation of one pole (use-value, concrete labor) at
the expense of the other but the abolition of both, and hence also of the
totality. The persistence of contradictory forms is then simply the material
with which art has to do today. If art has a function in anticapitalist
practice it may now be to hold open the non-identity or gap at the heart of the
capitalist value-form, not so much as a defensive maneuver against the
universality of bad life, but rather as a material practice conditioned by the
real movement of negation.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span> </div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-44480546216107576062013-05-12T04:59:00.001-07:002013-05-12T04:59:37.571-07:00The Aesthetics of Communization, Xero, Kline & Coma Gallery (May 11 2013)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.academia.edu/3515652/The_Aesthetics_of_Communization" target="_blank">Link</a> to downloadable version</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Communization
is a theory of revolution primarily developed out of the French ultra-left
during the mid-1970s. It poses the necessity for revolution as the immediate
process of communist measures – communization – without transition. Here I want
to talk about the aesthetics of communization in two senses. The first is to
probe the kinds of aesthetic figures, tropes, and forms that communization
theory uses to construct its own particular ‘problematic’. This is not, to be
clear, to dismiss communization as ‘merely’ an aesthetic politics. Instead it
is a way to grasp the form of communization, including the diversity of those
forms. There are, as we will see, different communizations and different ways
of posing the problem of communization. One way to grasp this plurality is to
trace different aesthetic emphases and choices in the deployment and use of the
key figures and tropes of communization. The second sense of the aesthetics of
communization I will explore concerns the implications of communization theory
for aesthetics and the contemporary practice of art. What would art after
communization look (or sound, or read) like? Again, consideration of this sense
will bring out tensions and differences in the forms of communization. Can we
practice a communizing art? Is art impossible in the horizon of capital? If
that’s the case can we practice the impossibility of art?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Figures of
Communisation<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
refiguration of communism as communization suggests the centrality of the
figure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">activity</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">process</i>. ‘Communism’ is, precisely, an
‘ism’, a suffix forming the name of a system or school of thought, while
‘ization’ is a suffix denoting the act, process, or result of doing something.
This activity or process is one that is apparently tautological: communization
is the production of communism by communization: ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[T]he communist production of communism</i>’ (Anon 2011: 6); or ‘Communisation
is not the struggle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for</i> communism; it
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> communism that constitutes itself
against capital.’ (B.L. 2011: 148). There are no non-communist ways to
communism; hence communization is communism is communization. We make communism
by making communism. If this is the conditioning trope, I want to explore the
tautological process of communization in the linked figures of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immediacy</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immanence</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">acceleration</i>,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dispersion</i>. In terms of their
destination in a common fluidity it will be no surprise that we find these
figures merging and flowing into each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wd6D4BXxw38/UY9_7AnyPII/AAAAAAAABaU/zgW9vc6-ZWQ/s1600/la-commune-tardi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wd6D4BXxw38/UY9_7AnyPII/AAAAAAAABaU/zgW9vc6-ZWQ/s320/la-commune-tardi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">T</span>he activity or process of
communization is also immediate. While a process or activity suggests something
which takes time, the time that communization takes can only be the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immediate</i> production of communist
relations: ‘The revolution is communisation; communism is not its project or
result.’ (Anon 2011: 6) There is no figure or problem of transition from
capitalism to communism via socialism or, if we are more sceptical, we could
say that transition is displaced or refused. So, there is no transition to a
new communist state, but rather ‘the simultaneous disappearance of the social
classes’ (de Mattis 2011: 24). If there is no need to build or make communism,
then why is communization an activity? It is an immediate activity in the
process of revolution itself, which refuses any non-communist measures (such as
the seizure of the state, the retention of money, maintaining armies or other
capitalist institutions, etc.). The qualitative leap to revolution (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hic Rhodus, hic Salta</i>!) is the leap into
communization.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">This immediacy is linked with the
trope of acceleration (which I will discuss separately later): ‘The revolution
will be both geographic and without fronts: the starting points of
communisation will always be local and undergo <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immediate</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very rapid</i>
expansion, like the start of a fire.’ (B.L. 2011: 154; my italics) It used to
be a ‘single spark’ that would start a ‘prairie fire’ and we don’t seem so far
from this Maoist figure, except we now have the refusal of any slowing down in
this incendiary process. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aLuWK_UuoDU/UY99DAXrajI/AAAAAAAABY0/Ajy5QmZVyrs/s1600/pfcoverbig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aLuWK_UuoDU/UY99DAXrajI/AAAAAAAABY0/Ajy5QmZVyrs/s320/pfcoverbig.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Of course the deferred question is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when</i> does this immediate process begin,
or has it already begun? Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, who make
occasional use of the term (there are some brief mentions of communization in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This is Not a Program</i> (2011: 68), and at
greater length in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call</i>), imply
that communization has begun now with forms-of-life and communes that escape the
net(work) of imperial capital. On the other hand, Theorié Communiste (TC)
insist that it can only begin in the revolution and hence all that we can have
is a negative prefiguration of the limits of capitalism and glimpses of this
future moment. This also suggests how activity and immediacy interact: our
activity is making communism immediately, but this can’t be done simply
immediately. It will take time: either the time of struggles from now into
communism, or the time of the revolution itself as we hit the limits of
capitalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bSieH6y-njY/UY-A1z5Ok8I/AAAAAAAABa0/RvBg0RJIRjc/s1600/Days+of+Rage+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bSieH6y-njY/UY-A1z5Ok8I/AAAAAAAABa0/RvBg0RJIRjc/s320/Days+of+Rage+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">If the temporal figure is immediate we
might say the ‘spatial’ figuration is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immanence</i>.
We are drowning is the waters of capitalism and the advice, as in Conrad’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Jim</i> (1900), is not to struggle out
of the water, which is to drown for sure, but to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immerse</i> in the destructive element. There is no outside, no
cobblestones beneath the beach; we are subsumed by capitalist social relations
horizontally, across the planet, and vertically, down into the very
building-blocks of life. In Gilles Dauvé’s amusing characterization TC are
accused of producing a ‘proletarian structuralism’ (Dauvé 2008: 93), in which
capitalism dominates all. This characterization of immanence carries different
inflections: from the extreme position of TC – in which capitalism is totality,
but contradictory totality – to Tiqqun’s emphasis on forms-of-life that can
traverse capitalism on its own ground, or to Dauvé and Nesic’s assertion of
invariant communist struggle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KGu2EXzLE80/UY-ADlVRBgI/AAAAAAAABas/ehGSBy2Fl9U/s1600/XEY1_266.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KGu2EXzLE80/UY-ADlVRBgI/AAAAAAAABas/ehGSBy2Fl9U/s320/XEY1_266.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">It is at these points of the
inscription of struggle that we encounter the figure of acceleration. We have
already seen how immediacy is linked to acceleration: ‘communisation will
always be local and undergo <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">immediate</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very rapid</i> expansion, like the
start of a fire.’ The dominance of capitalism at all points implies the acceleration
of struggle at all points: ‘[E]verything depends on the struggle against
capital, which either deepens and extends itself or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loses pace</i> and perishes quickly.’ (B.L. 2011: 148; my italics) If
‘the movement [of communisation] decelerates’ (B.L. 2011: 150), then we fall
back from communisation and into socialisation (a more ‘traditional’ process of
the socialisation of the means of production). To force the immediate
production of communization requires the speed to outpace the forces of
reaction, which are seen as implanted largely within the process of revolution
(another contention that could be debated<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PYVusQVsyFc/UY-AA7Fe9jI/AAAAAAAABak/GUI4N4qj2NQ/s1600/disderi_4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PYVusQVsyFc/UY-AA7Fe9jI/AAAAAAAABak/GUI4N4qj2NQ/s320/disderi_4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">This acceleration also relies on a
dispersion of points of struggle, thanks to the loss of compactness of the
proletarian condition. The end of what TC call ‘programmatism’ – the
traditional forms of workers’ identity, affirmed in unions, parties, and states
– produces a dispersion of the proletarian condition. Rather than dispersion
indicating a weakening of energies, instead it is taken by communization as
suggesting a pluralisation that requires no condenser (to borrow from Trotsky’s
image of the party as piston and the proletariat as steam). These dispersed
energies recompose, for TC, a new figure of the proletariat without party and
formal organization. For Tiqqun they indicate a pluralisation of the struggles
of forms-of-life which don’t simply cohere into the ‘proletarian’ as
classically conceived.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lhm3mniVr70/UY9_-Ld_XHI/AAAAAAAABac/9wrfuUbag1s/s1600/Paris%252520Commune.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="258" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lhm3mniVr70/UY9_-Ld_XHI/AAAAAAAABac/9wrfuUbag1s/s320/Paris%252520Commune.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">These are all figures of fluidity: ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human activity as a flux is the only
presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit</i>.’
(B.L. 2011: 152) This fluidity predicates on constant expansion: ‘communisation
can only exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement.’ (de Mattis 2011: 25) This
figural context, in which prefiguration lies unstably on either side, both
here-and-now and in the process of revolution, seems to me the tension
communization bequeaths to contemporary practice, and contemporary artistic
practice. Do we have simply a negative prefiguration, which I’ll discuss
shortly, or can something emerge that indicates a possible future?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The End of
Programmatism<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">In
terms of our second sense of the aesthetics of communization – what are the
implications of communisation for the practice of art today? – I want to
suggest we can draw on the notion of the end of programmatism proposed by TC,
and the general agreement by communizers of all stripes that ‘traditional’
forms of workers’ organization are finished or empty. If we take the parallel
Alain Badiou (2007) draws between the political avant-garde of the Leninist
Party and the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Century</i>, we could suggest that both forms have been
hollowed-out. The end of programmatism is also, we could say, the end of the
programme of the avant-garde – attached to small groups, privileged artists,
the manifesto, etc. Badiou, elsewhere, concludes on the need for a post-party
politics, and so we could also suggest a ‘post-avant-garde art’. Of course,
declaration of the death of the avant-garde and calls for reinvention of the
avant-garde are commonplace to the point of banality; even the proposals of ‘relational’
or ‘post-production’ art by Nicholas Bourriaud, borrow this trope. What kind of
precision, if any, can communization bring to this situation?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MzUCWeZhTco/UY-BdkoH0jI/AAAAAAAABa8/R3yMzvrsxWQ/s1600/F4_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MzUCWeZhTco/UY-BdkoH0jI/AAAAAAAABa8/R3yMzvrsxWQ/s320/F4_large.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">One way to answer this question is to
consider the reflections of TC on the ‘avant-garde’ practice of the
Situationists. Guy Debord, de facto ‘leader’ of the SI, was acutely conscious
of the finitude of the avant-garde. In his last film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni</i> (1978) Debord stated that:
‘Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is
to have enlivened their time without <i>outliving</i> it.’ (2003: 182) Although
they display this awareness TC argue that the SI remains in an equivocal
position on the cusp of the end of programmatism, both artistically and
politically. On the one hand, they are able to trace out the end of art and the
end of work, the impossibility of proceeding in terms set even by an ultra-left
programme. On the other hand, they have nothing to replace this programme with
and so fall back on nostalgia or practices which invoke the old models they
have ruled out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--I8vuo8li-o/UY-BoLsZVrI/AAAAAAAABbE/jEr1yFjjySs/s1600/F3_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--I8vuo8li-o/UY-BoLsZVrI/AAAAAAAABbE/jEr1yFjjySs/s320/F3_large.jpg" width="242" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">While the SI aimed at a dialectical
supersession of art through its suppression and realization in revolutionary
practice they tended to remain split between the aesthetic, with most artists
expelled in 1962, on the one hand, and the political termination of art, on the
other, with art returning in nostalgia for past adventures and possibilities. In
the first aesthetic moment the ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage
revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">within</i> the reign of the spectacle. They are affirmative
counter-possibilities, and this belief in a counter-art remains close to the
belief in an affirmative proletarian identity found in council communism by the
SI. The aesthetic SI continues to make art as they continue to make revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">For Roland Simon it is the penetration
of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production
process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along
with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or
artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast,
following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon (2009) argues
that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a
recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process –
within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe
the process of revolution – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qua</i> communization
– than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’
revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zwm8h9iCsWk/UY-DLmR0jSI/AAAAAAAABbk/wxCmsl6Z-x0/s1600/Guy-Debord.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zwm8h9iCsWk/UY-DLmR0jSI/AAAAAAAABbk/wxCmsl6Z-x0/s320/Guy-Debord.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The rigorously negative formulation
keeps dropping back into ambiguous gestures in the case of the SI. The
so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord can be seen as a sign of the
difficulty in holding to this rigorous negative gesture and overcoming the
desire for a ‘positive’ form of art now. This can be seen in his tendency to
project back a nostalgic perception of the possibilities of the past that have
become ‘lost’ in the present; whether a lost Paris, lost comrades, or the
decline of the quality of alcohol, moments of the aesthetic recede into the
past. Debord remains within, to use Marx’s words, ‘world-historical necromancy’
rather than the ‘poetry of the future’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Burning Down the
Gallery<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
communizing position implies that with the evacuation of ‘proletarian identity’
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> the ‘avant-garde’, and the
evacuation of the potential fusion of both in some ‘passion for the real’, we must
abandon any aestheticizing model of revolution and any aesthetic prefiguration
of revolution. In these terms the ‘positive’ vision of the SI as regards
aesthetics is not merely outdated but, strictly speaking, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">impossible</i>. This bears some resemblance to the thesis of the ‘death
of the avant-gardes’, but it does not imply a welcoming of this death as the
opportunity for some new modes of practice or reinvention – from the relational
to the reconfigurative, we might say. Instead, the TC critique implies, I
think, the futility and necessary nullity of any affirmative revolutionary art.
All that we can have is the rift that exists at the limit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">In the case of workers’ struggles this
rift is indicated in suicidal struggles which register the limit that class
identity forms. The result is the burning down of factories, attempts to claim
as high a redundancy payment as possible, and other ‘exits’ from work (R.S.
2011: 119). Crashing against the limit that capitalism itself can no longer
sustain the worker’s identity, the tragedy and possibility of struggle today
lies in a rift from this identity and the confrontation with class as an
exteriority. In this moment there can be a fleeting ‘de-essentialization’ of
labour, and it is this negative moment that is prefigurative of a communizing
process (R.S. 2011: 120). If I risk transferring these terms into art, we could
say the identity of the avant-garde is the limit. Today, to continue to be an
artist is the problem, an unsustainable identity. The rift would lie here with
the ‘de-essentialization’ of art, posed as a limit we can no longer practice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qZCqdquflpQ/UY99VcSrHnI/AAAAAAAABZ8/U0VtQmZb2fk/s1600/warhol6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qZCqdquflpQ/UY99VcSrHnI/AAAAAAAABZ8/U0VtQmZb2fk/s320/warhol6.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">To take one, controversial, example we
could say that this situation is already implicit in the practice of Andy
Warhol. On the one hand, his work belongs to the moment of programmatism, with
the discourse of the ‘Factory’ and the proliferating model of industrial and
media proliferation and production. This renewed and estranged discourse of
alienated labour is doubled by the nihilism that inhabits the practice of art
as impossible. In his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, from 1970, Foucault
registers this equivocally subversive function:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This
is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his
series of advertising smiles: the oral and nutritional equivalence of those
half-open lips, teeth, tomato sauce, that hygiene based on detergents; the
equivalence of death in the cavity of an eviscerated car, at the top of a
telephone pole and at the end of a wire, and between the glistening, steel blue
arms of the electric chair. ‘It’s the same either way,’ stupidity says, while
sinking into itself and infinitely extending its nature with the things it says
of itself; ‘Here or there, it’s always the same thing; what difference if the
colors vary, if they’re darker or lighter. It’s all so senseless-life, women,
death! How stupid this stupidity!’ But, in concentrating on this boundless
monotony, we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself – with nothing
at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it – a flickering of light that
travels even faster than the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels
and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever
saying anything: suddenly, arising from the background of the old inertia of
equivalences, the zebra stripe of the event tears through the darkness, and the
eternal phantasm informs that soup can, that singular and depthless face.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Warhol’s
stupidity registers the moment of exhaustion of the programme in advance and
from within – a hollowing-out that would emerge in the 1970s and 1980s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IK_iVx09F80/UY99SR9QRsI/AAAAAAAABZk/FJiNrg1-trI/s1600/red-lenin-by-andy-warhol-on-artnet-auctions-1365497165_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IK_iVx09F80/UY99SR9QRsI/AAAAAAAABZk/FJiNrg1-trI/s320/red-lenin-by-andy-warhol-on-artnet-auctions-1365497165_b.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This ‘prefigurative’ negativity of the
earlier ‘avant-garde’, or artists of the period of programmatism, seems to
imply an odd temporality. Why should such negative gestures come in advance of
the moment of the end of programmatism? Why should the most resonant artistic
experiments in regard to communization (The Artists Placement Group, Duchamp,
Warhol, etc.) come at the ‘wrong time’? We could hazard an
interpretation from within the communzing problematic. While these ruptures
with the regime of art and the artistic are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chosen</i>
gestures, the end of programmatism might be said to make them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">necessary</i>. If the end of art was an act,
such as Duchamp’s giving-up of art for chess (equivocal as that was), now the
artist faces the necessity of such gestures as they cannot self-reproduce as an
artist. This does not, however, explain why all or most art of the present
moment doesn’t seem to take this ‘negative’ form. In fact, as we will see, the
present moment seems more dominated by the desire to turn the negative into new
forms of ‘positivity’ – most notably new ‘objects’ and new ‘materialities’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YKmHYHYu6ng/UY-CaBSeF2I/AAAAAAAABbU/cXwNgyadEnM/s1600/Duchamp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YKmHYHYu6ng/UY-CaBSeF2I/AAAAAAAABbU/cXwNgyadEnM/s320/Duchamp.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The emptying out of art, in its truly
negative form, is, however, also registered by another strand of contemporary </span><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">communization, which is pursued by
the post-Tiqqun milieu. In ‘A Fine Hell’ (2013), ‘build the party’ argue that:
‘Aesthetics, therefore, is imperial neutralization, whenever <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">direct</i> recourse to the police is not
possible.’ They unequivocally condemn aesthetics as originating as a
counter-revolutionary strategy in Schiller, and they have no time for any
‘artistic communism’ out of the early Marx or the ‘Oldest Programme of German
Idealism’. Instead aesthetics is synonymous with the aesthetic regime of
Empire, with the aesthetic performing an ‘infernal synthesis’ on any
antagonism. In common with their Agambenian roots, they regard aesthetics as a
house to be burned down (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Man without
Content</i> 115); or, in the case of Claire Fontaine, an art gallery to be
burned down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1Uz4iQP_pOs/UY9-jqGoHWI/AAAAAAAABaI/d-YTem2WmV4/s1600/Fontaine-Queens-Nails.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1Uz4iQP_pOs/UY9-jqGoHWI/AAAAAAAABaI/d-YTem2WmV4/s320/Fontaine-Queens-Nails.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The alternative to the aesthetic is
‘the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">materialist obviousness</i> of
forms-of-life.’ The only art is the art of inhabiting our determinations rather
than trying to escape them. In this traversal we must practice ‘an
apprenticeship in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">art</i> of tying
and unbinding.’ Art is impossible. Installation art can only make ‘little
portable hell[s]’. Instead we have an (anti-) political practice that considers
art as technique to form and find the dispersion or chaos of forms-of-life.
This is a collective elaboration, a sharing or force they call ‘communism’.
Here art seems to coincide with political practice as an unworking of the
various imperial identities, including the identity of the artist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WVQ3jcn_tkY/UY99PilALeI/AAAAAAAABZU/t-BFdVk1xhU/s1600/claire-fontaine-the-true-artist-2004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WVQ3jcn_tkY/UY99PilALeI/AAAAAAAABZU/t-BFdVk1xhU/s320/claire-fontaine-the-true-artist-2004.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Of course these are, more or less,
rigorously negative programmes. The difficulty, which seems to me to afflict
communization generally, is the uncomfortable tracing of limits and rifts.
These rifts are at once prefigurative, but also not. In the case of TC the only
prefiguration is negative. The crashing into the limit of class identity is all
there is, and so the artist could only crash into the identity of ‘artist’ as
well. For Tiqqun and others there is something of a traversal within these
determinations that promises a reformulation of forms-of-life. This vitalist
interpretation suggests an excess encrypted within and against (this is the
modelling of communization recently proposed by Stephen Zepke).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XGvzGuX32X4/UY99NiMiSWI/AAAAAAAABZE/77pAoFtuWY4/s1600/Claire_fontaine_RUBIK_CF_SEA-web_medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XGvzGuX32X4/UY99NiMiSWI/AAAAAAAABZE/77pAoFtuWY4/s320/Claire_fontaine_RUBIK_CF_SEA-web_medium.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Expressive Negations<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">What
does this clarify about our situation? To return to the story of the SI one of
the ironies is that this story is often told today as an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aesthetic</i> story. Communization suggests the necessary termination
of this story, so why should it persist? Why, to use a phrase of Johanna
Isaacson (2011), do we think the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of
‘lineages of expressive negation’? That is to say, the SI has tended to be
mined for aesthetic gestures of negation that would somehow express, here and
now, precisely a sense of revolutionary possibility. An exhaustive account
would be beyond the limits of time and patience. What I would suggest is that
these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the
receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lipstick
Traces</i> (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to
McKenzie Wark’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Beach Beneath the
Street</i> (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has
gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by communization.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X06Z2ZpvZuc/UY-C2lh9ECI/AAAAAAAABbc/N64wjI_BJHY/s1600/Punk11_525.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X06Z2ZpvZuc/UY-C2lh9ECI/AAAAAAAABbc/N64wjI_BJHY/s320/Punk11_525.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The difficulty then remains: how do we
account for the ‘error’ of these readings? If Debord and the SI couldn’t hold
on to a negative reading and persisted in nostalgia, we might say the limit of
reading today turns the SI itself into an object of nostalgia. Marx’s ‘poetry
of the future’ seems as distant as ever. We could argue that this is one sign
of the current limit of class identity and the blockage which forces us back
into nostalgia for ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least,
unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are
often justified and retained precisely because of their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">positive</i> forms. It is the fact that they seem existent
possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends
them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. I would
suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive
negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In
this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk
is of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">consolatory</i> function of the
aesthetic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L1CiLTH0Sjg/UY99Ov9eh6I/AAAAAAAABZM/DJYcJZlU9zc/s1600/claire_fontaine-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L1CiLTH0Sjg/UY99Ov9eh6I/AAAAAAAABZM/DJYcJZlU9zc/s1600/claire_fontaine-1.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Making it with
Communization<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Can
we then make anything out of communization? In a response to a questionnaire on
Occupy sent by the journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">October</i>,
Jaleh Mansoor, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding argue that: ‘Art’s
usefulness in these times is a matter less of its prefiguring a coming order,
or even negating the present one, than of its openness to the materiality of
our social existence and the means of proving for it.’ (2012: 48) This is a
useful attempt to flesh out what art might do within the context of communization
that suggests the absence of affirmative practice. Here it is a matter of the
‘materials’ we have to work with (and against), rather than some kind of
guaranteed practice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KVI2yk9HLwc/UY99UBz7PYI/AAAAAAAABZ0/xL4USXRkA_k/s1600/vendome+column.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KVI2yk9HLwc/UY99UBz7PYI/AAAAAAAABZ0/xL4USXRkA_k/s320/vendome+column.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">They go on to unpack this statement to
argue that art registers the falsity of the capitalist universe and insist that
bodies and things cannot be captured. The difficulty for me here is the
modelling of capitalism as capture and the evasion of capital as totality. This
‘beneath’ the state of things, their metaphor, seems in danger of returning to
the problematic metaphor of ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’. There is a
tension of lurking vitalism, I find, which seems to fall away from the probing
of art and labour, including the failure of labour.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a>
Perhaps this vitalism emerges from the very rigour of the negative, as its
flipside and ‘affirmative’ moment. This returns us to the tensions and problems
of the SI and suggests that the ‘end of programmatism’ or the cusp of that
‘end’, remains less clear cut than we might imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_i6rJN2z7SA/UY99RjQ5UvI/AAAAAAAABZg/yGvGBmn3CPQ/s1600/Colonne_vendome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_i6rJN2z7SA/UY99RjQ5UvI/AAAAAAAABZg/yGvGBmn3CPQ/s320/Colonne_vendome.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">I say this not to assert superiority,
but rather to assess the difficult problematic communization poses to us. The
rigour of its negative formulations leave us in what may seem the
unsatisfactory position of merely exploring negative prefigurations: limits,
ruptures, suicidal activities, identifications with capital, and aesthetic
regressions. Of course working with negativity is one of the definitional
traits of the avant-garde, so this is not so unfamiliar. That said, and in
perhaps ironically Wittgensteinian fashion, I’d say the problematic of
communization might be useful as a kind of therapy for our prefigurative and
ruptural desires. Therapy is, or should be, painful; in Freud’s famous
formulation we hope to pass from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness. In
the context of communization we could rework this to suggest moving from an
oscillation of hysterical misery and elation to everyday misery. That’s to say,
to begin from where we are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="page-break-before: always;" />
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Bibliography<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Angioma,
Cherry (2012), ‘<a href="http://libcom.org/library/communisation-theory-question-fascism-cherry-angioma" target="_blank">Communisation theory and the question of fascism</a>’, libcom.org, </span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Anon., ‘Editorial’ (2011), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SIC: International Journal for Communization</i> 1 (2011): 5-10.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Badiou, Alain [2005] (2007), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Century</i>, trans., with commentary and notes, A. Toscano,
Cambridge: Polity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">B.L. (2011), ‘The Suspended Step of Communisation’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SIC: International Journal for Communization</i>
1 (2011): 147-169.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Build the Party (2013), ‘<a href="http://umfnyc.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/a-fine-hell/" target="_blank">A Fine Hell’</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">build the party blog</i>,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Dauvé, Gilles (2008), ‘<a href="http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/11" target="_blank">Human, All too Human?</a>’ [2000],
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Endnotes</i> 1: 90-102. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Debord, Guy (2003), <i>Complete Cinematic Works</i>,
trans. and ed. Ken Knabb, Oakland, CA: AK Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Foucault, Michel (1970), ‘<a href="http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm" target="_blank">Theatrum Philosophicum’</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">generation-online</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Invisible Committee (2004), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bloom0101.org/call.pdf" target="_blank">Call</a></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Isaacson, Johanna (2011), ‘<a href="http://liminalities.net/7-4/expressivenegation.pdf" target="_blank">From Riot Grrrl toCrimethInc: A Lineage of Expressive Negation in Feminist Punk and Queercore’</a>, <i>Liminalities:
A Journal of Performance Studies </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">7.4:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Mansoor, Jaleh, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding
(2012), ‘<a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/OCTO_a_00122" target="_blank">Response to Occupy’</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">October</i>
142: 48-50.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">de Mattis, Leon (2011), ‘What is Communisation?’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SIC: International Journal for Communization</i>
1 (2011): 11-28.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">R.S. (2011), ‘<a href="http://riff-raff.se/en/sic1/sic-1-07-the-present-moment.pdf" target="_blank">The Present Moment’</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SIC: International Journal for Communization</i>
1 (2011): 95-144. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Simon, R. et collectif (2009), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Histoire critique de l’ultragauche: Trajectoire d’une balle dans le
pied</i>. Avignon: Editions Senonevero.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Tiqqun
(2011), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This is Not a Program</i>, trans.
Joshua David Jordan, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">For
example, see </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Cherry Angioma (2012) for a discussion of the problem of
fascism as one undertheorized possibility. </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: X-NONE; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span lang="X-NONE" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This
is the on-going project of Jaleh Mansoor.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-10595784341703858662013-04-16T01:46:00.000-07:002013-04-16T01:46:30.950-07:00My Own Public Germany: Notes on Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009)<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The White
Ribbon<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Screening, University of Brighton,
15 April 2013<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The subtitle</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">of the German release of Michael Haneke’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
White Ribbon</i> (2009) is ‘a German Children’s Story’, and the film</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> is set in
a German village between 1913 and 1914. Clear enough. </span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In an interview with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time Out</i> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Michael
Haneke insisted</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><a href="http://www.timeout.com/london/film/michael-haneke-discusses-the-white-ribbon-1" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But it’s not necessarily about that point in time.It could have been set at a different time about a different situation. Itcould have been set in an Arabic country even. It’s about the origin of evil,the origin of radicalism and terrorism. But since it’s a German film, this isthe best example of this situation in German society. I don’t want it to be understoodsolely as a film about German fascism.</span></a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">This kind of displacement – from a specific cultural context to a more general
context, or argument – is a signature of Haneke’s filmmaking. It is also, I’d
suggest, a problematic gesture. In the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i> it is hard to escape the fact that this probing of
childhood or teenage ‘fanaticism’ or ‘terrorism’ is highly-specific to the
generation that will bring forth Nazism. This, I think, is one of the central
equivocations of the film.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fr8FeG8GK5g/UWvt6Cd90_I/AAAAAAAABWw/YxabWgySy5E/s1600/978-0-8166-1451-6-frontcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fr8FeG8GK5g/UWvt6Cd90_I/AAAAAAAABWw/YxabWgySy5E/s320/978-0-8166-1451-6-frontcover.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If we take a contextual
reading we can locate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i>
in the wider genre that probes the psychopathology of Nazism. In his
controversial two-volume work on the pathological fantasies of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freikorps</i> – the post-World War One
veterans groups – Klaus Theweleit also probed the structures of childhood that,
for him, conditioned the emergence of Nazism. This speaks to the context of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i>. Theweleit notes that: </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">‘The fascist
state needed, and this reinforced, the family in its capacity as ordering force
and ego boundary; but the family remained more or less an obstacle to the
fascist will to world domination.’ (1989: 252) The result was what he called
the ‘fascist double-bind’ (1989: 252) – the family as essential to the new
order and also, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i>,
a structure to be contested or exceeded. What we might call the inchoate
campaign of the children (if, in fact, the children are responsible, which is only heavily implied) in the film will later be canalized, we could assume, by the Nazi state, as ‘the child was
encouraged to take action against its parents as an informer in the service of
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Führer</i>.’ (1989: 252)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Thewelheit’s analysis is remarkably
suggestive of the psychopathology probed by the film: ‘Their aim is to
annihilate what they perceive as absolute falsity and evil, in order to
regenerate their ego in a better world.’ </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">(</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">weleit</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">1989</span>: 253) These are fanatics of the ‘good’, so</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">to
speak, fanatics of the immanent and unfulfilled morality by which they are
abused and constrained. They ‘punish the sins of the father(s)’: the doctor, the Baron, the steward, and the pastor. Although we should add that in the case of the pastor this authority is not merely authoritatian, but a creepy combination of reasoned discourse and violence. It is this discourse the children turn against the fathers.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Eric Santner considers the
psychopathology of Nazism through the lens of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber,
the German jurist who fell into a paranoid psychosis after being elected to a
senior judicial role in 1884. For Santner this disorder is a result of a crisis
of investiture and Schreber’s psychosis provides an x-ray of the disorders of
Germany itself – Santner’s book is entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/My_Own_Private_Germany.html?id=Kn5wTC8ifoUC" target="_blank">My Own Private Germany</a></i>. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Santner suggests
that what is revealed is the perverse enjoyment (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jouissance</i>) at the heart of symbolic authority: ‘Schreber discovers
that symbolic authority in a state of emergency is transgressive, that it
exhibits an obscene overproximity to the subject: that it, as Schreber puts it,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">demands enjoyment</i>.’ (1997: 32)
Schreber’s ‘pathology’ reveals the raw matter of ideology before it is processed
or gentrified into official ideology. This raw state of ideology is the
galvanizing effect of enjoyment that ‘powers’ the ideological field.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">We could link this to Haneke’s film,
as it probes a certain ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ in generational transmission
which generates what Santner calls a ‘sense of surreal corruption’ (1997: 43).
What Haneke implies is that the transgression of the children lies in their
extreme obedience, which, to continue with Santner, implies ‘getting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too close</i> to this [drive] dimension of
social reality.’ (Santner 1997: 43) Taking seriously Old Testament morality resutls from and produces a crisis in authority. This</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> getting ‘too close’ produces the scenes
of ‘surreal corruption’ – sexual abuse, violence, disturbance – that emerge in
the film. This is realism turned studied and phantasmagoric.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JhMzQsmgK_Q/UW0LloyFnXI/AAAAAAAABXI/cHcQD9nCypw/s1600/The-White-Ribbon-Das-weis-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JhMzQsmgK_Q/UW0LloyFnXI/AAAAAAAABXI/cHcQD9nCypw/s320/The-White-Ribbon-Das-weis-001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Taking another contextual approach,
one not licensed by Haneke, we can also connect <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i>, strangely perhaps, to the genre of the horror
film. More specifically we can connect this work, and other Haneke films
(especially <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Benny’s Video</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Funny Games</i>) to the horror genre of ‘the
terrible child’, or teenager. The literary terrible child emerges in works like
Tom Tyron’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Other</i> (1971) and Ira
Levin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rosemary’s Baby</i> (1967), both
rapidly made into films.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ltboc8H6hko/UW0L-6WMFXI/AAAAAAAABXQ/KCnUegCvX9k/s1600/Theother1972poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ltboc8H6hko/UW0L-6WMFXI/AAAAAAAABXQ/KCnUegCvX9k/s320/Theother1972poster.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Robin Wood argued that these films of
‘the terrible child’ are ambivalent: on the one hand, they are reactionary,
affirming the patriarchal family as bulwark against the ‘horror’ of the younger
generation. On the other hand, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Omen</i> (1978), they stage the extinction of this family (Wood 1986: 88). Wood
remarks, channelling Walter Benjamin, that ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Omen</i> would make no sense in a society that was not prepared to enjoy and
surreptitiously condone the working out of its own destruction.’ (1986: 88) It’s
striking that Robin Wood planned to write a book on Michael Haneke, but died in
1989, the same year as the release of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
White Ribbon</i>. While Wood respected Haneke’s achievement the bathos of my
comparison of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i> with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Omen</i> is intended to suggest the
problematic status of the ‘horror’ of the ‘terrible child’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q2sUMiFAeec/UWvs2J6Li9I/AAAAAAAABWY/zv5_X6tTzec/s1600/omen_2_kirous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q2sUMiFAeec/UWvs2J6Li9I/AAAAAAAABWY/zv5_X6tTzec/s320/omen_2_kirous.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">We could recall <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Omen II</i>’s use of the military school as ambiguous structure of
authority – even trying the patience of the child of Satan. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The White Ribbon</i> we can ponder this fear
of the child, especially if we follow Haneke’s generalising argument that it
might apply to all children, or all 'fanatical children'. This use of the idea of fanaticism (to follow
Alberto Toscano (2009)), risks the usual reactionary tropes of the fear of
abstraction and equality, as the children refuse to respect the ‘moral texture’
of the community. On the other hand, their attacks might seem well deserved,
bringing down this immoral ‘moral community’ by revealing and disrupting its
‘obscene underside’. The fathers burn with enjoyment, such as the doctors sexual abuse, but also the Baron's anger, pastor's hypocrisy, and steward negligence. </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The baronness notes this is a community of envy, apathy, and brutality. This is the equivocation that links to the equivocation of the terrible child film, which suggests it is not so original and equally problematic.</span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_aR9Hyz91nY/UW0O1-3GEII/AAAAAAAABXc/Ooju1fNNH00/s1600/imagesCADRIJXJ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_aR9Hyz91nY/UW0O1-3GEII/AAAAAAAABXc/Ooju1fNNH00/s1600/imagesCADRIJXJ.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The generalization of the structure
of the fanatical child seems, to me, to end up in metaphysical problems. In a
laudatory discussion of the film John Orr remarks that ‘[Haneke’s] pessimism
about the human condition goes beyond its very specific Adornian incarnation –
the aphoristic savaging of commodity capitalism.’ (2011: 263) In this way we
fully detach from any context, and this is also evident in Orr’s claim, which I
don’t find convincing, that ‘Haneke has systematically uncoupled all the links
in the causal chain’ (Orr 2011: 261). The detachment of Haneke allows him to
generate a metaphysical thesis of evil, which both plays to the horrors of
Nazism and occludes them. At the same time it collapses together all
‘fanatical’ instances into a metaphysical refusal and evil that runs very close
to the ideological uses of the idea of fanaticism against any politics of
abstraction or equality. In doing so, of course, it becomes abstract in turn.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">This, I think, is one of the puzzles
of the film. In many ways detailed and textured it is also abstract and
schematic, deliberately and at the same time. Haneke’s use of schematic
‘Brechtian’ character names and his use of back-and-white are, he points out,
deliberate ‘distancing’ and abstracting strategies. So, we have a
decontextualization that is supported aesthetically and by a practice of
metaphysical claim or abstraction. </span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A7oJQG-v080/UW0PX-heRZI/AAAAAAAABXw/qCRkdw7J7z8/s1600/whiteribbon-tiff-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="162" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A7oJQG-v080/UW0PX-heRZI/AAAAAAAABXw/qCRkdw7J7z8/s320/whiteribbon-tiff-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What concerns me is not equivocation per se, but the tendecy and structure of how these equivocations fall in the film. The film is, at once, not abstract enough (in its particular but insufficient evocation of context) and too abstract (as it spirals into 'higher' levels of abstraction, all the way up to evil itself). It is not adequate as a thesis about Nazism, nor about generalised fanaticism. What it is perhaps best at is the resonance of its probing of abusive forms of power and control, the petty forms of authority, and Haneke's usual refusal to align 'correct' responses to events. But the floating forms here threaten to become attached to prenicious ideaological tropes and to push us not into autonomy, but into well worn anxieties concerning fanaticism and power. A</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">fter all isn’t this just another horror
film? But not even that, as this is a dishonest horror film.</span></span></div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-84577205826755406292013-03-03T07:02:00.000-08:002013-03-03T07:02:06.362-08:00Emergency Brake
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zJRseB-VWXs/UTNh4q21RJI/AAAAAAAABTg/OuBMKPZ9dy4/s1600/800px-Rain_Steam_and_Speed_the_Great_Western_Railway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zJRseB-VWXs/UTNh4q21RJI/AAAAAAAABTg/OuBMKPZ9dy4/s320/800px-Rain_Steam_and_Speed_the_Great_Western_Railway.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I want to
begin with a remark recently made by Fredric Jameson:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">we
may pause to observe the way in which so much of left politics today – unlike
Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future – seems
to have adopted as its slogan Benjamin’s odd idea that revolution means
pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of History, as though an
admittedly runaway capitalism itself had the monopoly on change and futurity.
(2011: 150)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This is, of
course, a reference to a remark by Benjamin in the ‘Paralipomena to “On the
Concept of History”’ (1940):<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Marx
says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is
quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this
train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake. (Benjamin 2003:
402)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">For
Jameson, obviously, this conception is an ‘odd idea’ because it is a failure to
measure up to Marx’s own embrace of capitalism, and capitalist production, as
the condition of revolutionary change; as Marx puts it: ‘if we did not find
concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the
corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then
all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grundrisse</i>) Jameson’s implication is that by giving capitalism a
monopoly on the future we lose, in advance, any alternative ‘utopian’ vision of
free production. The result is that we then embrace the past as shelter – if
not feudal socialism, then perhaps feudal Keynesianism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ejy6Am6p6Lg/UTNhRAR7r1I/AAAAAAAABTE/7N4lGFgFAPo/s1600/EMERGE~1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ejy6Am6p6Lg/UTNhRAR7r1I/AAAAAAAABTE/7N4lGFgFAPo/s320/EMERGE~1.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Obviously, one immediate rejoinder
to Jameson is the explicit context of Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’. This is the
critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept
of History’, where it is remarked that ‘[n]othing has so corrupted the German
working class as the notion that it was moving with the current’ (2003: 393).
The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress, and not least
technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of
fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. The detachment of Social
Democracy from recognising the destructive side of technology, was, as Benjamin
argued in the essay ‘Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937) (2003: 349<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">−</span>386), due to an alienation from the
destructive side of the dialectic (2003: 358). The ‘movement with the current’
is a movement that replicates the faith in the productive forces, while denying
that these are also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">destructive forces</i>.
The reply to Jameson might be, to borrow another familiar image from the
theses, that stopping the clock is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
turning back the clock.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here I want to place Benjamin’s
thought-image in a deeper context of the thinking of temporality and
interruption that can be traced across his work. My account is by no means
exhaustive, but rather selects and traces certain moments of interruption
across his corpus. I want to suggest that Jameson’s style of critique misfires,
as Benjamin’s thinking of interruption engages with ‘material conditions’ to
explode them, in a way which does not replicate capitalist dynamics of
production. These forms of interruption certainly modulate across Benjamin’s
thinking, but they suggest an engagement with the present, rather than the
‘nostalgic’ image that Jameson portrays – Benjamin as historian of destruction,
or the ‘Sebald option’. In this conception only one side of Benjamin’s
conception of history remains, that of it as the ‘negative totality’ of
catastrophe, as the ‘pile of wreckage’ (McGettigan 2009: 26). I want to probe
another side – a critical politics of temporality (McGettigan 2009).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jSJgtqH1aBY/UTNiGItjIeI/AAAAAAAABTw/fj6ZQFzDedc/s1600/train+accident.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jSJgtqH1aBY/UTNiGItjIeI/AAAAAAAABTw/fj6ZQFzDedc/s320/train+accident.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Interruption<o:p></o:p></span></span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Benjamin’s
modelling and critique of the temporal forms of progress was present, as
Michael Löwy notes, in Benjamin’s early essay ‘The Life of Students’ (1914).
There Benjamin wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">There
is a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and
this concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and
epochs advance along the path [or, we could add rails] of progress. (in Löwy,
2005: 6)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">From
the very beginning Benjamin ‘tracks’ [forgive the pun] a critical politics of
temporality that stands against the unfolding or advancement of progress that
is premised on infinite extension.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XfPuawVxnhQ/UTNiCFEIKzI/AAAAAAAABTo/dlzwJV6r808/s1600/T08766_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XfPuawVxnhQ/UTNiCFEIKzI/AAAAAAAABTo/dlzwJV6r808/s320/T08766_10.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This ‘infinite extension’ has to be,
in the early work, interrupted or disrupted by a thinking of the ‘absolute’. In
these early texts, as Howard Caygill has indicated (Caygill 1998), Benjamin
takes-up a thinking of the ‘absolute’ within and against the neo-Kantian
moment. Tracking Kant’s strictures on the conditions of experience, Benjamin
also pushes at the limits of Kant to consider an absolutisation of experience. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is not a ‘pure’ absolute, so
preformed ‘interruption’, but a critical method that entails a task and
intervention. To return to ‘The Life of Students’, Benjamin writes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The
elements of the final state are not evidently present as formless progressive
tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present moment as the most
vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts. To shape the immanent
state of perfection clearly as absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the
present, is the historical task. (Benjamin in Caygill 1998: 8)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">We could
consider this, anachronistically and problematically, as a rewriting of Marx’s
contention that we have to find concealed in society the material conditions to
explode it. In this case, the ‘explosion’ is one that operates by reading the ‘absolute’
in terms of ‘the warps, distortions and exclusions of bereft experience’
(Caygill 1998: 25). We find our ‘conditions’ not in the acceleration of
productive forces, fettered by the relations of production, but in the ‘most
vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts’. This is a
‘metaphysical structure’, at once messianic and revolutionary.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Andrew McGettigan points out, in
regards to this programme of instantiating the absolute, that: ‘Its abandoning
coincides with Benjamin’s first reading of Marx around 1924. If we turn to the work
of the 1930s, we can see that several consistent themes – interruption,
suspension, caesura – continue into the later work’ (2009: 27). This is true of
the key example of Benjamin’s ‘Brechtiania’ (Gough 2002: 58): ‘The Author as
Producer’ [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der Autour als Produzent</i>]
(1934) (Benjamin 1999: 768−782). It is this essay that Gershom Scholem refers
to, probably snidely, as ‘an apex of [Benjamin’s] materialistic efforts’ (2003:
253). For Benjamin the ‘refunctioning’ of literature is a result of new
technologies producing a ‘molten mass from which the new forms are cast.’
(1999: 776) Again, the process of destruction of old forms is the condition for
the new, which has to traverse this ‘melting-down process’ (1999: 776).
Benjamin stresses the necessity of ‘an organizing function’ of this
destruction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SPwH2VMn3M0/UTNlwtLwMhI/AAAAAAAABUo/M525gJKPY18/s1600/r4222-hornby-gwr-clerestory-3rd-479-p%5Bekm%5D500x200%5Bekm%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="128" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SPwH2VMn3M0/UTNlwtLwMhI/AAAAAAAABUo/M525gJKPY18/s320/r4222-hornby-gwr-clerestory-3rd-479-p%5Bekm%5D500x200%5Bekm%5D.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">He takes Brecht’s Epic Theatre as a
model for this organization, but one which operates through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interruption</i>: ‘[y]et interruption here
has the character not of a stimulant, but of an organizing function.’ (1999:
778) Samuel Weber has drawn attention to how this function of interruption,
which Benjamin works-through with Brecht, releases the possibility of
citability (2002: 31). It makes available new material to be organized in a new
fashion. Interruption is ‘the mother of dialectics’, in Benjamin’s formulation
(Weber 2002: 31). Andrew McGettigan remarks that: ‘Benjamin’s approach to
historiography should not be understood separated from the outline of the <i>operative
</i>writer’s activity in ‘The Author as Producer’. (2009: 32) What I would like
to suggest is that this ‘activity’ is one of organized interruption, which
reflects a disruption of capitalist temporality. What Benjamin will call, in
the ‘Surrealism’ essay, after Pierre Naville, ‘the organization of pessimism’
(1979: 237).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">‘Angelic Locomotives’<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NKgC0LAC_Ro/UTNiX6eXVHI/AAAAAAAABT4/PkeGiM-yPTM/s1600/tayrail3-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NKgC0LAC_Ro/UTNiX6eXVHI/AAAAAAAABT4/PkeGiM-yPTM/s320/tayrail3-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In his essay
on Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children Jeffrey Mehlman draws attention to
Benjamin’s 1932 talk: ‘The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay’ (‘Die
Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay’) (Melhman 1993: 11−14; Benjamin 1999:
563−568). As the title suggests the central subject of the essay is the railway
disaster of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train of six carriages and two
hundred people was lost after plunging into the Tay, when the iron bridge it
was passing over collapsed during a fierce storm. Benjamin does not begin with
the disaster, but rather with the early technologies of iron working and train
construction and with what he calls, in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, the ‘defective
reception of technology’ (Benjamin 1979: 358). This ‘defective reception’
turns, in part, on acceleration, with the medical faculty at Erlangen
suggesting that the speed of rail travel would lead to cerebral lesions, while
an English expert suggested that moving by train is not travel but simply being
dispatched to a destination like a package (Benjamin 1999: 565). Perhaps
neither could foresee the current British train system…<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-l3L0U721Rrk/UTNheT5yHRI/AAAAAAAABTQ/jf52pk1b83o/s1600/Tay_bridge_down.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-l3L0U721Rrk/UTNheT5yHRI/AAAAAAAABTQ/jf52pk1b83o/s320/Tay_bridge_down.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In terms of describing the disaster
itself Benjamin quotes from a poem by Theodor Fontane, not the renowned poem by
William Topaz McGonagall – renowned for being terrible.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
Benjamin reports how when the accident occurred the storm was raging so
severely that it was not evident what had happened. The only sign were flames
seen by fishermen, who did not realise this was the result of the locomotive
plunging into the water (Benjamin 1999: 567). They did alert the stationmaster
at Tay, who sent another locomotive along the line. The train was inched onto
the bridge and had to be stopped a kilometre out, before reaching the first
central pier, with a violent application of the brakes that nearly led to the
train jumping from the tracks: ‘The moonlight had enabled him to see a gaping
hole in the line. The central section of the bridge was gone.’ (Benjamin 1993:
567)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jeffrey Mehlman parses this talk on
catastrophe as part of Benjamin’s reflection on a gap or rift in communication
(1993: 14). What interests me is the use of the brake as interruption. While
one catastrophe has already occurred, in which 200 people have lost their
lives, the act of braking prevents, although only barely, a second catastrophe.
It is not a great stretch to consider this as prefigurative of Benjamin’s ‘emergency
brake’ (2003: 402).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kU4JqJ59lSc/UTNhpWba9AI/AAAAAAAABTY/edUU4A2VnD0/s1600/future_jet_train.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kU4JqJ59lSc/UTNhpWba9AI/AAAAAAAABTY/edUU4A2VnD0/s320/future_jet_train.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Also, we can place this
consideration of the locomotive, speed, and the malignancy of technology, alongside
Benjamin’s remark in the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs’ that:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The
disciples of Saint-Simon started the ball rolling with their industrial poetry;
then came the realism of a Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the
future; and a Ludwig Pfau brought up the rear: ‘It is quite unnecessary to
become an angel’, he wrote, ‘since the locomotive is worth more than the finest
pair of wings.’ (1979: 358)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">We have here
a counterpart (and opposite) to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angelus
Novus</i> of ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), which is turned to the past,
with the ‘angelic locomotive’ that races forward into the future.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The ‘Angelic Locomotive’ is the sign
of acceleration to the point that indicates that the ‘energies that technology
develops beyond their threshold are destructive.’ (Benjamin 1979: 358)
Destruction here is the technology of capitalism that is pushed beyond the
threshold. I am suggesting that Benjamin’s dialectical thought-image of the
locomotive interweaves destruction and production, and the necessity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interruption</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4wLKZbyAcco/UTNjxovySgI/AAAAAAAABUY/t2iSP1obWEQ/s1600/Future+Trains+-+A+View+From+The+Past+(5).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4wLKZbyAcco/UTNjxovySgI/AAAAAAAABUY/t2iSP1obWEQ/s320/Future+Trains+-+A+View+From+The+Past+(5).jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) Benjamin criticises the
surrealists ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’,
which can be found wanting in comparison to ‘the well-ventilated utopias of a
Scheerbart.’ (1979: 232) I would suggest that we see this, again, as a reminder
that we not simply embrace the accelerative and ‘overheated’ function of
technology. In fact, earlier in that ‘Surrealism’ essay Benjamin remarks of the
surrealists that: ‘No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how
destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors,
enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary
nihilism.’ (1979: 229) This suggests another instantiation of the earlier
project in which the absolute is found in ‘the most vulnerable, deformed,
ridiculed creations and thoughts’. The surrealists proffer a ‘method of
nihilism’ that can traverse the destitution of the present to a dis-placement (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ent-setzt</i>) that is not subordinate to
the ends of accumulation (Gess 2010; 688), a ‘constructive destruction’ (Gess
2010: 706) that, in Gess’s words, ‘presum[es] great intimacy with the things it
takes apart.’ (2010: 706)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span></b> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Revolutions per minute<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">To conclude
I now want to return to the remark by Benjamin that ‘Perhaps revolutions are an
attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate
the emergency brake.’ (Benjamin 2003: 402) I have suggested that this remark be
not only read as a critique of German Social Democracy, or as a critique of
Benjamin’s own ‘productivist’ moment,</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
but also as a politics of temporality. Rather than read teleologically towards
the emergency brake as the ‘final moment’ or ‘fulfilment’ of Benjamin’s work,
his (literal) ‘last word’, I want to suggest that reading across these moments
complicates our understanding. In rejection of Jameson’s claim that Benjamin’s
remark is an ‘odd idea’, even an example of the ‘left-wing melancholia’
Benjamin himself derided in a 1931 essay (Benjamin 1999: 423<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">−</span>427), I think we can find a politics
of temporality that is, precisely, engaged in reworking or retooling. Benjamin
has not given up all hope in any political change, pace Scholem, but continues
to think the conditions and possibilities of that change.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If we read this remark in the
context I have elaborated we could also argue that the revolutionary locomotive
of Marx is paired by Benjamin with the ‘angelic locomotive’ of capitalist
productivity that has gone off the rails. In this case we have the pairing of a
critique of capitalist and Stalinist politics of production and
accelerationism. The implication is that without attention to destruction we
can only have a malignant politics of acceleration, rather than grasping the
necessity of the brake as the means to refunction production. In Michael Löwy’s
words:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The
image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow
its course – already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails – and if
nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster,
for a crash or a plunge into the abyss. (2005: 67)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Or, we could
add, into the Tay.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ofk1u3GyH_g/UTNixBdXG0I/AAAAAAAABUI/pLkiarqWmfw/s1600/Dee_bridge_disaster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ofk1u3GyH_g/UTNixBdXG0I/AAAAAAAABUI/pLkiarqWmfw/s320/Dee_bridge_disaster.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Benjamin’s registering of
destruction, and its equivocation, suggests exactly that heterogeneity of time
that will find its formulation in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940).
Homogenous empty time is the time of the train on the tracks, which can speed
up and slow down. The emergency brake of Benjamin’s metaphor for revolution is
not simply the stopping of a train on the smooth tracks of progress. Rather, as
with the metaphor of the angel of history, it suggests that the train tracks
into the future are being laid immediately in front of the train. In fact, the
anecdote of the Tay Bridge disaster suggests that the emergency brake is applied
precisely due to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">derailing</i> of the
train, and threatens another catastrophic derailing. The ‘rails’ of history
accelerate us to disaster if we are not aware of the destructive side of the
dialectic of production.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The irony, as Benjamin’s notes make
clear, is that the desire for acceleration on the tracks of history breeds
passivity before the productive forces:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Once
the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and
homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one
could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less
equanimity. (Benjamin 2003: 402)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Linking this
with the neo-Kantian deviation from Marxism, the idea of the tracks stretching
into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment – the station we never
quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is
the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. In
this way ‘accelerationism’, as I’ve called it (Noys 2010: 4−9), either tries to
actively increase the speed of capital, or simply becomes the passenger on the
train, allowing the constant destruction of living labour at the hands of dead
labour to do the work.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UcrMcrjg0nk/UTNijFVjsZI/AAAAAAAABUA/A6x7JT0lO2w/s1600/071022_r16700_p465.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UcrMcrjg0nk/UTNijFVjsZI/AAAAAAAABUA/A6x7JT0lO2w/s320/071022_r16700_p465.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The conclusion is that the emergency
brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping
at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy –
which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of
‘socialism’). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist
moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal
socialism’. Rather, Benjamin argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final
goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">endlich</i>] achieved interruption.’
(Benjamin 2003: 402) We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks
to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In this sense the emergency brake is
the operator of Benjamin’s non-teleological politics of temporality predicated
on the wresting away of the classless society from the continuing dialectic of
production/destruction that is the constant ‘state of emergency’ (Benjamin
2003: 392).</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Rather than acceleration into
destruction, we find the detachment of destruction into an integral ‘intimacy’
with things that it destroys. This is supposed by the surrealism essay’s
argument that the ‘organization of pessimism’ requires the removal of moral
metaphor and the grasping of the image within, 100% within, the image sphere
(Benjamin 1979: 238). In this case action ‘puts forth its own image’ (Benjamin
1979: 239), without external reference. If then we read Benjamin’s ‘method
called nihilism’ in terms of what I am calling the ‘organization of
destruction’ we can argue that interruption and detachment from the temporality
of acceleration is required to find a real ‘variable and non-positing’
construction. This would be an ‘intimate’ production, a production that ‘puts
forth its own image’, and insubordinate production not coordinate to ends.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CxHC-9fZp1I/UTNi61tx2fI/AAAAAAAABUQ/A8N6JbiO9qI/s1600/brake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CxHC-9fZp1I/UTNi61tx2fI/AAAAAAAABUQ/A8N6JbiO9qI/s320/brake.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Although ‘On the Concept of
History’, as Andrew McGettigan points out (2009: 26-7), involves a correction
of Marx’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eighteenth Brumaire</i>, we
could say it could be brought into agreement with a later central contrast of
the essay. Marx remarks that:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Bourgeois
revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from
success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things
seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are
short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Katzenjammer</i> takes hold of society
before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period
soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the
nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">constantly interrupt themselves </i>in their own course, return to the
apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel
thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts,
seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength
from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil
constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a
situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the
conditions themselves call out: </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.1"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Hic
Rhodus, hic salta!<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[Here
is the rose, here dance!] <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 32.55pt 0pt 1cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">(my
italics)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">While not
hoping to add to the potential for ‘misinterpretation’ Benjamin noted, hence
leaving the essay unpublished, I do want to suggest that something of the
‘interruption’ speaks to Marx’s notion, even in it would problematise the claim
to ‘growth’ in certain forms.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yc-akylu7kc/UTNlnc9RbHI/AAAAAAAABUg/1siyRrcwbDQ/s1600/IMG_20121007_130526.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yc-akylu7kc/UTNlnc9RbHI/AAAAAAAABUg/1siyRrcwbDQ/s320/IMG_20121007_130526.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Of course, whether this enough to
cope with the capacity of capital to ‘posit its presuppositions’, even, or
sometimes especially, on destruction, remains in question. The resistance of
‘variability’ has no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori</i>
guarantee to produce the truly new. Therefore, we can consider the emergence of
production as a series of experiments that have ‘frequently miscarried’, and
which require an ‘ultimately [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">endlich</i>]
achieved interruption’ as their real condition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="page-break-before: always;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span></span>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Bibliography<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Benjamin,
Walter (1979), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One-Way Street and Other
Writings</i>, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: New Left
Books.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Benjamin,
Walter (1999), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Writings, vol. 2,
part 2 1931-1934</i>, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Benjamin,
Walter (2003), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Writings, vol. 4
1938-1940</i>, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Caygill,
Howard (1998), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walter Benjamin: The
Colour of Experience</i>, London: Routledge.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Gess, Nicola
(2010), ‘Gaining Sovereignty: On the Figure of the Child in Walter Benjamin’s
Writing’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MLN</i> 125.3: 682−708.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Jameson, Fredric (2011), ‘Dresden’s Clocks’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Left Review</i> 71: 141−152.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Löwy,
Michael (2005), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fire Alarm: Reading
Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’</i>, trans. Chris Turner, London:
Verso.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">McGettigan,
Andrew (2009), ‘As Flower Turn Towards the Sun: Walter Benjamin’s Bergsonian
Image of the Past’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Philosophy</i>
158: 25<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">−35.</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Mehlman,
Jeffrey (1993), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walter Benjamin for
Children: An Essay on His Radio Years</i>, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Noys,
Benjamin (2010), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Persistence of the
Negative: A Critique of Contemporary <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Continental Theory</span></i></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Scholem,
Gershom (2003), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walter Benjamin: The
Story of a Friendship</i>, New York: New York Review Books.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Weber,
Samuel (2002), ‘</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Between a Human Life and a
Word. Walter Benjamin and the Citability of Gesture’, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Benjamin Studien / Studies</i> 1: 25</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">−</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">45.</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Alas! I am very sorry to say<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">That ninety lives have been taken
away<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">On the last Sabbath day of 1879,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Which will be remember’d for a very
long time.</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7038706923946698710#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> A point made to me by
Irving Wohlfarth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-22847811598929465452012-12-16T08:36:00.000-08:002012-12-17T03:04:56.573-08:00Ariadne's Thread<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-etSKoOZUVjo/UM338iMJvDI/AAAAAAAABR4/UutAqMVmusY/s1600/masson_ariadnes_thread1335998353613.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-etSKoOZUVjo/UM338iMJvDI/AAAAAAAABR4/UutAqMVmusY/s320/masson_ariadnes_thread1335998353613.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Reflecting on the comments on <a href="http://www.academia.edu/2300754/Emergency_Brake" target="_blank">my paper</a> from the Walter Benjamin paper, particularly Paula Schwebel's point that I tended to talk about spatial images when referring to a politics of time and Andrew McGettigan's suggestion about intoxication, I fortuitously came across this 'thread'. </div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Reading Benjamin's <em><a href="http://www.wbenjamin.org/translations.html">On Hashish</a></em> on an appropriately slow and apocalyptic Saturday night journey home from the badlands for South London I found this:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance [<em>Rauschgluck</em>], one ought to meditate once again on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave into which we're venturing, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread, The certainty of unrolling an rtfully wound skein - isn't that the joy of all produtivity, at least in prose? And under the influence of hashish, we are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power. (53)</div>
</blockquote>
I then came across this passage, today, from the 'Paralipomena':<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Only when the course of historical events runs through the historians hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress, If, however, it is a frayed bundle unraveling into a thousand strands that hang down like unplaited hair, none of them has a definite place until they are all gathered up and braided into a coiffure.</div>
</blockquote>
Here, I think, we can see the imposition of a spatial line of progress by the historian, which I think corresponds to the image of the rail tracks extending into the future, and to the infinite idea of progress. This spatialised conception captures the spatial features of capitalist time as 'empty, homogenous time'. <br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The intoxicated image of unwinding Ariadne's thread, which recurrs in the Hashish writings, suggests a 'productive' act that takes as its power not to unwind one thread as the line of progress, but to multiply and trace different 'threads' that need to be gathered together, or made citable, to resist being 'spatialised' as the line of progress. I think this may be another image of the variable production Benjamin invokes and which suggests another image of time as gathered threads.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It may also be linked to Kant's invocation of 'guiding threads'. Its probably an equally enigmatic image as the train, once we'd got through nearly all the permutations on that metaphor, but I think it suggests the kind of intoxicated self-extinguishing practice Andrew was invoking (against some more pious conceptions) and suggests another way of figuring 'spatialised time' on the grounds of that spatialisation (as with the Arcades project), but also against it.</div>
</div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-80031557919346476952012-11-12T04:55:00.003-08:002012-11-12T05:08:33.213-08:00Western Nihilism<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>Presented at </em>
</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><em><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">‘Weighs Like a Nightmare’, Historical Materialism
Ninth Annual Conference <o:p></o:p></span></em></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><em>(8−11 November 2012)</em></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br /></div>
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</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Next
evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates,
feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Existentialist Sheriff</i>, which Pig Bodine
had recommended.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Thomas
Pynchon, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V." target="_blank">V</a></i> (1963)</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I want to
consider the politics of the Western under the sign of ‘epic nihilism’, which I
derive from Alain Badiou’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Century</i>
(2007: 85). Previously I have used this concept to analyse the ‘</span><a href="http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/spaghetti-communism" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Spaghetti Western</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">’, as a form which explicitly engages in a left politics of nihilism. We might say that these Westerns operate in that mode suggested
by Walter Benjamin, via Naville: the ‘organization of pessimism’. What I want
to do today is to attend to some of the equivocations of this ‘epic nihilism’,
vectored particularly through what we might call ‘late’ US-westerns. I have in
mind here the emergent revisionist Western on the late 1960s and early 1970s,
in which the political crises of that period (especially the Vietnam War) came
to inflect the form of the Western. This is, therefore, a parallel case to the
Italian Western. To do this I will focus on one particular case, Robert
Aldrich’s 1972 film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2pNg-Tns48" target="_blank">Ulzana’s Raid</a></i>.
Something of a political exception, Aldrich was a union activist in Hollywood.
He was also responsible for perhaps the most nihilist ending of a film
(alongside Monte Hellman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067893/" target="_blank">Two-LaneBlacktop</a></i> (1971), with the literally apocalyptic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me_Deadly" target="_blank">Kiss Me Deadly</a></i> (1955). In the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulzana’s Raid</i>, what I am concerned with are the tensions and
equivocations of political nihilism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l_wmCLpvrOM/UKDnhuZuJXI/AAAAAAAABPE/LG_QnGjgc2c/s1600/kiss-me-deadly-06212011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l_wmCLpvrOM/UKDnhuZuJXI/AAAAAAAABPE/LG_QnGjgc2c/s320/kiss-me-deadly-06212011.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">First, I want to set some of the
coordinates of the politics of nihilism, and especially the ‘epic nihilism’ of
the Western. My approach will be, admittedly, idiosyncratic and
impressionistic. I want to select a number of moments, literary and filmic,
which trace the coordinates of an equivocal politics of nihilism. My concern,
in particular, is how these moments trace a politics of nihilism through a
particular politics of labour.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">A Very Brief History of Western Nihilism </span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">We can
consider the dubious kind of politics of nihilism at work in the writings of
Joseph Conrad. Crucial to his work is the conception of a fundamental absence
of transcendent or transcendental value. This is most clear from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5658/5658-h/5658-h.htm" target="_blank">Lord Jim</a></i> (1900), when after the
eponymous central character is found guilty of cowardly misconduct for fleeing
his ship while it seemed to be sinking the judge of the inquiry commits
suicide. The implication appears to be this is a result of the collapse of
value, later given its most resonant formation by the character Stein:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
A
man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he
tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he
drowns — <i>nicht wahr? </i>. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive
element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the
water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me — how to be?</blockquote>
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">His answer
to the rhetorical question is, famously, ‘In the destructive element immerse.’</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yet this recognition of the collapse
of the transcendental signifier is answered with a politics of labour, of the
job well done, embodied in the cooperative work of the ship’s crew. The
unpleasant nature of this politics is everywhere, from Marlow’s remark on the
map of Africa in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/526" target="_blank">Heart of Darkness</a></i>
(1900):<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was a vast amount of red – <i>g</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ood to see at any time, because one knows
that some real work is done in there</i>, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little
green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where
the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t
going into any of these. I was going into the yellow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dead in the centre.</span> </blockquote>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ealh3nCjKdc/UKDpWhgbRBI/AAAAAAAABPM/yuB_NEv-gkY/s1600/hawthorn-banner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="165" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ealh3nCjKdc/UKDpWhgbRBI/AAAAAAAABPM/yuB_NEv-gkY/s320/hawthorn-banner.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Matters are
even more explicit in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17731" target="_blank">The Nigger of the‘Narcissus’</a></i> (1897), in which the smooth and efficient running of the ship,
the only bulwark against nihilism, is disrupted by the ‘nigger’ and by the
socialist agitator. The nihilism that results from the ‘death of God’ is
answered by a politics of labour that holds only one ‘value’ – efficiency –
which is at best neutral, although in fact definitely constructed as the domain
of the right. This is a colonial and capitalist politics of domination.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In terms of the Western, we can find
such a politics of efficiency everywhere. To choose a more recent example, the
neo-Westerns of Cormac McCarthy most explicitly evoke both nihilism and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">katechon</i> of efficiency. Usually
declaimed in burnt-out churches, just to make the point, McCarthy’s
declarations of cosmic nihilism are a persistent feature of his work. The Judge
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian" target="_blank">Blood Meridian</a></i> (1985) puts this in
typically portentous style:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
A
man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man
who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could
only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for
each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it
all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast
and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard,
it is barren. Its very nature is stone. (348)</blockquote>
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">This
‘universe of blood’ is not exactly redeemed but only resisted by moments of
quiet containment; such as John Grady, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All
the Pretty Horses</i> (1992), quietly tapping the ash from his cigarette into
the turn-up of his jeans.</span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p></o:p></span> </div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In the domain of film, we can
consider Sam Peckinpah’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wild Bunch</i>
(1969), in which the decision of the gang to suicidally attempt to save one of
its members is signalled only by the laconic instruction ‘let’s go’. Again, the
appeal is to a quiet activity of necessary labour, the one necessity in a world
that has no meaning and necessity other than a certain code of ‘honour’ and
friendship. The bulwark against nihilism deliberately aims at a minimalism,
which itself achieves an overblown quality in the very repetitions that
construct it as ‘code’ or habit. This is not (simply) the ‘will to power’, but
rather the ‘will to efficiency’ – ‘wil’ against ‘nill’, but also the ‘wil’ that
is ‘nill’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Infrastructure of Error<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Robert Aldrich’s <i>Ulzana’s
Raid </i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">(1972) concerns a raid led
from the San Carlos Indian Reservation by the Apache Ulzana, and the pursuit of
the raiders by the US Cavalry, led by a naïve new lieutenant Garnett DeBuin
(Davison) and the scout MacInstosh (played by Burt Lancaster), with the Apache
scout Ke-Ni-Tay (Luke). Central to the film is the debate and discussion
between MacIntosh and the lieutenant over the nature of the Apache and the
means to hunt down Ulzana’s raiding party. The film is known for its brutality
of presentation. In one of the opening scenes a US Cavalryman is escorting a
female homesteader and her son when they are caught by the Apache raiding
party. Begging the soldier to return and save her, the soldier turns and shots
the female homesteader through the head before turning his gun on himself. The
Apache, in pursuit of horses and ‘kills’, leave a trail of rape and torture of
which the aftermath is graphically shown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The lieutenant,
son of a pastor, constantly tries to understand the cruelty of the Apache.
Drawing the Apache scout into conversation, the scout explains that the
infliction of slow death by torture is a means to take a man’s power. The Apaches
on the reservation have become weakened and ‘old men’ in terms of status, while
their world is ruled by a metaphysics of power gained through the taking of a
man’s spirit. Although trying to maintain his Christian beliefs the lieutenant
is soon ‘hating’ the ‘Indians’, while MacIntosh comments he doesn’t have time
for hate, preferring to simply fear them.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Amzv8TTjG1I/UKDsvbfqYlI/AAAAAAAABP0/htGvEQuumLA/s1600/Ulzana's+Raid+(1972)_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Amzv8TTjG1I/UKDsvbfqYlI/AAAAAAAABP0/htGvEQuumLA/s320/Ulzana's+Raid+(1972)_5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Soon,
the pursuit of the raiding party becomes a kind of game in which, as MacIntosh
explains, the first to make a mistake will get killed. This conforms to </span><a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/aldrich/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Alain Silver’s</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> characterization: ‘Most of Aldrich’s films, in their own genre
contexts and particular plots, are explorations of the infrastructure of
error.’ (2002) Having to conserve their horses and match pursuit with the
faster Apache results in the constant attempt of each group to circumvent the
others strategies. Ulzana leaves a raped woman alive, for example, to slow down
the cavalry, or force them to split their forces to return her to the fort. This
will then allow Ulzana to capture the cavalryman’s horses and slaughter the
cavalrymen. The result is the final strategic bluff of the film, in which the
cavalry patrol do split their forces to entice Ulzana into attack, while then
planning to later rejoin and so surprise and defeat Ulzana. The planned
strategy fails, as although Ulzana attacks the other troops do not arrive
quickly enough and most of the original group are killed, with MacIntosh left
mortally wounded. The lieutenant’s decision to sound the bugle also succeeds in
warning off Ulzana, who escapes. MacIntosh remarks on the lieutenant’s error,
before noting ‘there ain’t none of us right’.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The
film ends with MacIntosh requesting to be left behind to die, rather than face
the agonizing and pointless attempt to get back to the fort for medical
attention. In the meantime the apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay has succeeded in running
down Ulzana and returns with Ulzana’s body. After the lieutenant has ordered
Ulzana buried, rather than taking his body or, as one trooper suggests, his
head, back to the fort they leave. The final image is of MacIntosh trying to
light a cigarette, before dying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
film presents a twist on Richard Slotkin’s virtually contemporaneous thesis of
<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Regeneration_Through_Violence.html?id=552NfCm3-WwC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">‘regeneration through violence’ (1973)</a>. Slotkin, critically reflecting on the
continuity of this myth from the Western frontier to the Vietnam War, suggests
the linking of the desire for independence with the capacity for violence as
mechanism of rebirth. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725crbo_books" target="_blank">James Wood (2005)</a>, writing on Cormac McCarthy, has noted
the equivocation in which Michael Herr hails McCarthy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blood Meridian</i> (1985) as </span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">‘a classic
American novel of regeneration through violence.’ In this case critique is
turned into valorization. Noting, instead, McCarthy’s attempt to articulate an
‘antimyth’, we could see the same task in Aldrich. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulzana’s Raid</i> regeneration fails, precisely through error and the
inability for violence to lead anywhere. The risk run, however, is the one Wood
identifies as ‘metaphysical cheapness’, which is never far away in figurations
of nihilism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reflecting on Aldrich’s
films, <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/aldrich/" target="_blank">Alain Silver</a> writes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
the one constant in Aldrich’s work is that
ultimately no one is untouched by the savagery of the surrounding world. For
those who expose the more visceral layers of their psyche to it, the risk is
intensified. It is not merely annihilation but also, what may be worse, a
descent into an unfulfilled, insensate existence. If, in the final analysis,
Aldrich’s sympathy resides most with individuals who are anti-authoritarian,
with anti-heroes like Reisman in <i>The Dirty Dozen</i> or Crewe in <i>The
Longest Yard</i>, it resides there because these are persons who survive. They
survive by resolving all the conflicting impulses of nature and society, of
real and ideal, of right and wrong, in and through action. (2002)</blockquote>
<br />
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulzana’s
Raid</i> this doesn’t seem quite right. Certainly the film exemplifies the
exposure of the psyche, particularly in the figure of lieutenant, whose ideals
are shattered, but also for MacIntosh and the other troopers. Also, the
sympathy of the film lies with MacIntosh, who has a Native American wife, and
who is largely responsible for the sensible decisions made during the pursuit.
He is marked as anti-authoritarian as the cavalrymen at the fort regard him as
morally and socially dubious. Yet, of course, he does not survive and certainly
does not ‘resolve all the conflicting impulses’.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SN1FdBrcExY/UKD0Dpbwm9I/AAAAAAAABQg/-rT8jLaM1eY/s1600/131957512592.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SN1FdBrcExY/UKD0Dpbwm9I/AAAAAAAABQg/-rT8jLaM1eY/s1600/131957512592.jpg" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It is
in this way that the nihilism of the film plays itself against dialectical, or
better, pseudo-dialectical solutions, of ‘resolving’ or ‘regenerating’. In
particular, I think, it questions the resolution ‘through action’ that, as we
have seen, often structures a dubious politics of nihilism. If action
necessarily fails then its valorization fails also. Here is where Aldrich does
not take the path of ‘metaphysical cheapness’ by invoking new nihilist myths
(as does McCarthy), instead embedding nihilism in the very ‘infrastructure of
error’. The nearest the film comes to metaphysical pathos is the scene in which
a homesteader is trapped by the apache in his shack. Nearly burned out the
apache kick in the door, but none enter. Then he hears the bugle of the
cavalry, and starts to praise God. We cut to the cavalry troop to see the bugle
is not being sounded, in fact it’s a trick played by the Apache. The result,
considering the terrible death inflicted on him, is more bathos than pathos.
This is a deflationary nihilism in which, as in the conversation between the
lieutenant and MacIntosh at the end of the film, one is forced to pick knowing
no choice is right.</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">War is God<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">Cormac McCarthy’s
nihilist antimyth is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIQynsWpBpQ" target="_blank">‘war is God’</a>; this was recently retooled in Karl
Malantes’s Vietnam novel <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/11/marlantes-matterhorn-book-review" target="_blank">Matterhorn(2010)</a>, with its proclamation, as <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/jackson-lears/mad-monkey" target="_blank">Jackson Lears’s</a> (2010) argues of ‘War as
authentic experience: this is the nihilist edge of modern militarism, unalloyed
by moral pretension.’ This form was perhaps best articulated in Ernst Jünger’s
valorization of war as ‘inner experience’, in 1922. Despite Alain Badiou’s
contention that we have passed beyond the ‘passion for the real’ figured in the
scission of combat this shadowy continuity suggests a more problematic
attachment to the forms of militarized nihilism. Here the modelling of
efficiency finds its form in a disregard for ideology, hence nihilism, and a
valorization of the act of killing as the ‘sacred act’ which permits contact
with the ‘Real’. Of course, as any Lacanian would say, this is an evasion of
the trauma of the Real through its displacement. Contact with the Real is
predicated on the death of the Other and the survival of the self, hence the
pronounced egotism of this ‘heroic nihilism’.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bg0xMt6vmE0/UKDvEDXyuqI/AAAAAAAABP8/4JxEp-Dm9LQ/s1600/071-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bg0xMt6vmE0/UKDvEDXyuqI/AAAAAAAABP8/4JxEp-Dm9LQ/s320/071-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In contrast, Aldrich suggests war is
a human-all-too-human ‘infrastructure of error’, evident also in his film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Attack!</i> (1956). What I am suggesting is,
beyond its evident critique of the Vietnam War, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulzana’s Raid</i> speaks to a critique of the valorization of nihilism
in combat and efficiency. While certainly not unproblematically poised the
film’s acceptance of a nihilism of error that does not attain the ‘metaphysical
cheapness’ of these myths, undermines a particular and singular form of ‘epic
nihilism’. The latter examples suggest, however, the fleeting nature of this
insight, which belongs to the particular configuration of the American
experience of defeat in Vietnam. Marlantes’s work, in fact, suggests the
‘reversal’ of defeat into epic nihilism, and it is notable that Jünger’s
elevation of war is also borne from the experience of defeat. This suggests the
difficulty which an ‘infrastructure of error’ might have in breaking with the
ideology of military nihilism.</span> </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Ethos of Nihilism<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">To conclude,
I want to borrow Alberto Toscano’s memorable citation from <i>The Big Lebowski</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (1998)</span>: ‘Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean,
say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s
an ethos’. My suggestion is that nihilism, or at least in the dominant form I
have traced here, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> an ethos. To be
precise, it is an ethos of labour, an ethos, to borrow from Fredric Jameson’s
characterization of Heidegger, which is a ‘handicraft ideology’. In this form
the ideology is of expertise and craft that is indifferent to the job itself,
hence its nihilism, but only concerned with the doing of that job. It is ‘handicraft’
because it retains that element of personal expertise that will be eroded by
the deskilling effects of capital – hence its relation to capital’s nihilism,
rooted in the indifference of abstract labour, is somewhat equivocal.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The persistence of this form of
ideology speaks to the constant reinvention of the epic, away from the form of
national foundation and towards the form of nation ‘saving’. Hence, the Western
plays a particularly equivocal role in the US in the 1960s and 1970s as this
‘will to efficiency’ incarnates a resistance to nihilism in the context of,
admittedly limited, national self-questioning. That this is politically dubious
can be seen in the ‘hard hats’ versus ‘the hippies’, and Jefferson Cowie’s
tracing of the declension of US labour during the 1970s in his <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stayin_Alive.html?id=xz-EINoBGNcC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stayin’ Alive</i> (2010)</a>. In this case the
disappearance of the West is tracked to the disappearance of labour (or certain
forms of manual and handicraft labour).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Therefore, we might risk locating
the twists and turns of this politics of nihilism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qua</i> politics of labour not only within the context of war, but only
in the context of this collapse of the usual role of labour within the
ideological and economic space of capitalism. In this way, Aldrich’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulzana’s Raid</i> becomes not only an ironic
commentary on the nihilism of war, but also on the nihilism of labour. Whereas
the Italian Western responded with explosive outbursts of violence, embedded within
longueurs, here we have violence, but within an ‘infrastructure of error’ that
finally leads to resignation. This is, of course, not enough to escape this
ideology, but rather, I think, it registers its internal faultlines and
incapacities – a certain impossibility in the ‘will to efficiency’, a failure
in labour as a bulwark. Perhaps a failure that points to the true impossibility of labour under capital.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-54768161839995570882012-10-08T06:20:00.001-07:002012-10-08T07:02:11.522-07:00Real Savages & Imaginary Philosophy<div style="text-align: justify;">
This will probably be my one and only post on speculative realism (SR) or, to be more precise, a post on someone else on SR. I wanted just to give a sense of the paper by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Viveiros_de_Castro" target="_blank">Eduardo Viveiros de Castro</a> (EVC) at the conference <a href="https://materialismos.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">The Ontological Turn</a>, which I recently attended. Eduardo spoke in Portuguese (which was streamed), and probably/did depart from the English text I had for his presentation (for which I was respondent).</div>
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He began with the fact that philosophy has been content to speak of imaginary savages to generate real philosophy and so, as an anthropologist, he wanted to speak of real savages to do imaginary philosophy. Welcoming the speculative turn, EVC valorised metaphysics as a Borgesian branch of fantastic literature. He also agreed with the need to get over correlationism but, and this is a big but, his means to do this pass through Amerindian thought, the metaphysics of others, to return to the dissident tradition of panpsychism (Tarde, Latour, Whitehead, et al), the 'other metaphysics'.</div>
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The crucial intervention is rather than turning to so-called 'hard science', which SR has usually done, we can turn to anthropology as science, as the science not of one reality, but of <em>multiple</em> realities ('savages want the multiplication of the multiple', Pierre Calstres). The ontology of Amerindian societies is not merely another view on 'Nature', but rather a reinscription of the very relation to 'nature' - a <a href="http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/masterclass/article/view/72" target="_blank">multinatural perspectivism</a>.</div>
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This cosmological theory stands with and against Western thought, implying 'a radical materialist panpsychism that manifests itself as an immanent perspectivism: an ontological and topological perspectivism.' Probably the key point is EVC's valorisation of relation, a hot topic in SR. His argument was that in Amerindian thought relation occupies the place of substance, and that the primary mode of relation is 'the alterity nexus'. This thought is one of metaphysical predation and consumption, metaphysically anthropophagic (a thesis outlined in <em>Metaphysiques Cannibales</em>).</div>
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In terms of SR, this means that EVC is anti-correlationism but pro-relationism. This is performed by distinguishing between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, which are often run together. Amerindian thought is anthropomorphic, but not anthropocentric. In this argument the problem with SR, particularly with Meillassoux, is that it is the <em>negative form of anthropocentrism</em>. The real way to break with correlation is via anthropomorphism, via panpsychism, and in a sense to 'drown' or specify 'correlation' as one limited form of relation within a sea of other forms of relation. </div>
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This radicalised alterity posits proliferating difference, so the irony is the Amerindian affirmation of humanity as the original condition from which animality derives does not entail 'super-correlationism', but rather a panpsychism of existence = thought that places all in relation and otherness. There is a universal relationality, of which even this thinking of relation is only one part.</div>
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I'd add my own coda that although I think the material is fascinating, and agree with the need to really change thought with its 'outside' on a truly equal basis, I do have some problems. These are the invocations of 'insurrection' and 'alteration' to replace revolution, and the usual affirmative casting of critique as 'merely' negative (in the bad sense). I also think we need to think through the politics of the 'other metaphysics' (Latour & Tarde especially), which is not exactly 'innocent'. EDV himself remarked how Amazonia is becoming a crucial geopolitical nexus, and so I still think we need to think the ontological politics of the 'metaphysical predation' of capital. This is tricky because capital is not conjoint with the substantialist metaphysics of the 'West', which is why it is so hard to think. The promiscuity of capital's absorption, the minimal status of its own effects of real abstraction need, I think, to be thought alongside and inside 'Western metaphysics' (a category a little baggy for me).</div>
Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-52384027671626714282012-08-09T05:07:00.000-07:002012-08-09T05:07:23.880-07:00Black Metal Neuralgia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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With the publication of <a href="http://blackdogonline.com/music/black-metal.html" target="_blank"><em>Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness</em></a> and the new issue of <em>Glossator</em> on <a href="http://glossator.org/2012/06/15/volume-6-2012-black-metal/" target="_blank">Black Metal</a>, both of which I've bought, I wanted to consider Black Metal Theory again. I wrote a piece for the earlier <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Hideous_Gnosis.html?id=GCM2MFeJwfMC" target="_blank">Hideous Gnosis</a></em> on the politics of BM and was due to write something for <em>Glossator</em>. One of the obvious things that struck me was the hostility BM Theory attracted ('bedwetters' being one of my favourite comments, before I decided to stop reading people slagging me off). Of course, as the <a href="http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/47/79" target="_blank">Hardcore Continuum 'debate'</a> proves, writing on music theoretically seems to reactivate antitheory positions automatically: the abstract, cold, and intellectual ('theory wank') versus lived experience, truth, authenticity and the fan(atic). The use of masturbatory metaphors to condemn theorists as sterile, self-obsessed and narcissistic, implies the virile, (hetero)sexual coupling associated with the true experience of BM as creative practitioner/fan.</div>
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Of course obvious points can be made, not least that BM is often a heavily self-theorised from (this is partly what interested me). While that's true I think that the antagonism is due to the fact that this self-theorisation is explicitly opposed to the usual forms of theory, stressing the authentic, true, grounded, cthonic etc. More than that, BM's own theory (to collapse too much together) has something of the traditional in method: philological, autodidact, deliberately and provocatively amateur, if not gentlemanly. In a sense it is 'pre-theoretical' in quite a true sense, returning to forms of analysis even before modernist 'new critics' and the so-called humanism that theory was supposed to be reacting against (I have respect for these forms, just to be clear).</div>
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It was this hostility, in part, that lead me to abandon my piece for <em>Glossator</em> (you can read the abstract in the collection) and to be wary about writing anymore on BM (ironically, I've been listening to it a lot). I was also, however, dissatisfied with my piece for <em>HG</em>. I want to make a brief autocritique, which will be seen as another sign of theory narcissism, of course. The reason for this is that I do think legitimate problems were raised within the 'debate'.</div>
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1. I think the tone of my piece was wrong. It was too arch and too 'theoretical' in an overwritten bad sense (some truth to the 'pseudy' accusation). I also think it missed the humour in BM and was too po-faced. It was an inability to find a correct tone that also nixed my trying to write anymore on BM.</div>
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2. In terms of the analysis I tried to account for the difficulty of writing about 'BM in general' and its politics, but this could have been noted more. I took <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peste_Noire" target="_blank">Peste Noire</a></em> as a metonymic case study (and now appear on their wikipedia page, much to their annoyance I'm sure), but the difficulty is that part of the self-theorisation of BM is the resistance to commonality. This is a communal form in which practitioners insist on singularity, hence the proliferation and typologies of forms of BM.</div>
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3. In terms of the theoretical analysis of a certain politics of BM I do hold by what I said. I don't think aesthetics and politics can be split, and I do think the 'grounding' of BM in the matrix of the friend/enemy actually also speaks to much of the hostility the debate generated. I want to add a quote from Fredric Jameson's <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/338-fables-of-aggression" target="_blank">study</a> of Wyndham Lewis <em>Fables of Aggression</em> (a great title for a collection on BM, in fact):</div>
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his artistic integrity is to be conceived, not as something distinct from his regrettable ideological lapses (as when we admire his art, <em>in spite of</em> his opinions), but rather in the very intransigence with which he makes himself the impersonal registering apparatus for forces which he means to record, beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all their primal ugliness. (21)</blockquote>
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I think there is still much to be written or, yes, theorised, about BM as an 'impersonal registering apparatus'.</div>
</div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-11961239702613812832012-07-20T02:51:00.000-07:002012-07-20T02:54:09.409-07:00Life's What You Make It: Vitalism and Critique<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Presented at<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">‘The Politics of Critique’, University of Brighton (July 18<sup>th</sup> – 19<sup>th</sup> 2012)</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In a </span><a href="http://libcom.org/library/preoccupied-logic-occupation" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2009 pamphlet</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> issued out of the student occupations in New York we find what we might call the standard rejection of critique: ‘This activity of producing novel recommendations for the submission of the population is called critique.’ (2009, III) The activity of critique is treated as one that is indissolubly bound to what it rejects, and hence always constrained and always available for recuperation: ‘Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that its managers have overlooked.’ (2009, III) What we find is the rejection of critique founded on a rather unstable amalgam of an immanent thought of affirmation – which would charge critique with always being secondary, dependent, and a symptom of <em>ressentiment</em> – coupled to a post-Situationist model of perpetual recuperation – in which critical activity is a mere corrective or, as the pamphlet puts it, ‘[a] release valve for intellectual dissonance.’ (2009, III) The ‘solution’ to this impasse is one of radical separation, which aims to sever the relation to power: ‘Critique must be abandoned in favour of something that has no relation whatsoever to its enemy, something whose development and trajectory is completely indifferent to the nonlife of governance and capital.’ (2009, III)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The reference to ‘nonlife’ gives a clue perhaps to the nature of what has no relation to the enemy, what has a different development and trajectory: Life. It is the power of Life that will substitute for the impotence of critique. This is made explicit in the appeal to ‘a form of life which no reason can govern’ (2009, IX), and the closing assertion: ‘Our task, impossible, is to seize time itself and liquefy its contents, emptying its emptiness and refilling it with the life that is banned from appearing.’ (2009, XI) Of course, what justifies and supports this discourse is the work of Giorgio Agamben. It’s initially somewhat surprising that the supremely po-faced and hyper-refined thought of Agamben, in which the paradigm of modernity is the concentration camp, should be so prevalent in licensing radical discourse. No doubt, the work of </span><a href="http://tiqqun.jottit.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Tiqqun</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> and </span><a href="http://libcom.org/library/coming-insurrection-invisible-committee" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The Invisible Committee</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> has been influential in encouraging this take-up through the redemptive reversal of the transformation of ‘bare life’ – life everywhere subject to sovereign power – into a transfigured life of glory. I will say more about this ‘transfiguration’ later, for the moment I want to pause for a while on the vitalism subtending this take-up.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Comedy and Critique</span></strong></div>
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I<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> want to turn to what might perhaps appear an unlikely topic – the comic (don’t worry this won’t be funny). It is the comic that will allow us to explore the continuing vitality of vitalism and, in particular, how vitalism attempts to replace critique. Henri Bergson’s work <em><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4352" target="_blank">Laughter</a></em> (1900) contains a famous definition of the comic as ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. One key example of this repetitious mechanism deployed by Bergson is the jack-in-the-box:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">As children we have all played with the little man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher. Crush him down beneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying. It is hard to tell whether or no the toy itself is very ancient, but the kind of amusement it affords belongs to all time. It is a struggle between two stubborn elements, one of which, being simply mechanical, generally ends by giving in to the other, which treats it as a plaything. A cat playing with a mouse, which from time to time she releases like a spring, only to pull it up short with a stroke of her paw, indulges in the same kind of amusement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This example indicates the two tendencies that Bergson traces: the elasticity of life, represented by the act of playing, and the inelasticity of the comic, represented by the jack-in-the-box’s mechanical and thing-like repetition. The function of laughter is to free us from this inelastic ‘machine-like’ existence and return us to the social normality of elastic life – to prevent us from merely being jack-in-the-boxes, we might say. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This is, of course, equivocal because the return to social normality can itself seem like a return to something ‘machine-like’ and repetitive – the routines of social life being hardly more elastic than the comic. Therefore, Bergson himself notes how laughter can free us from the machine-like, but also risks returning us to the limited forms of social life:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The bitter taste of laughter is this limited ‘critical’ function and the difficulty of finding a true elasticity of Life. In finding the elasticity of Life we aim to replace the merely ‘negative’ function of critique by affirming that elasticity. Yet, the result is still equivocal, seemingly as bound to the social as critique is supposed to be. On the one hand, laughter threatens to return us to the rote routines of social life, to what Federico Luisetti calls the ‘founding mechanisms … of late capitalism’s violent entertainment compulsion’ (2012). On the other hand, laughter also incarnates a possible detachment or interruption of these mechanisms, and the possibility of a new construction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">We can find this latter kind of political (or anti-political) vitalism figured in the comic turns of activism that aims to mock the inertial repetitions of the 1% or capitalist capture. Laughter at those in power is the affirmative replacement for critique, indicating both how we can collapse into the social repetitions and machine-like roles of our capitalist personas and how we can break with these routines. The difficulty is that the very act of the comic, the very attempt to break social norms, can itself become another mechanical norm. The valorisation of the elasticity of Life – incarnated in lines of flight, exodus, and ‘movement’ – threatens to become another rote routine of affirmation, if not to fall back into replicating the ethical and social forms of a ‘mutational’ capitalism. The result is a perpetual conflict, a divine comedy, which serves to enforce the perpetual power of Life. Life as affirmative operator must also be returned to again and again to free it from any becoming inelastic, including in the inelasticity of opposition. The dread fear of recuperation, displaced onto critique, returns to haunt Life that always falls short of the excess it is supposed to figure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">What I am tracing is a strange mimicry and replication of the operation of critique, and its fate, by this political vitalism. The very stridency by which critique is condemned in the name of Life is suggestive of the parallel by which vitalism comes to replace, or try to replace, critique. The ‘empowering’ effect of vitalism, and also its comedy, makes it the signature gesture of the moment. It traces a biopolitical populism that poses Life against a vampiric Capital. This is an ethical discourse in which are actions are assessed by their ability to live up to the elasticity of Life and condemned by laughter at their failure to do so. We are perpetually comic subjects, laughing at our own enchainment to the mechanical, while repeatedly trying to conform to the vibrancy of Life. I want to unpack now a little more just why the interchangeability of vitalism and critique should take place and suggest a little more why this should be problematic.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A Renegade Discourse</span></strong></div>
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<a href="http://english.berkeley.edu/faculty_books/7" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Donna V. Jones</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> has noted the popularity of vitalism in the contemporary moment as a replacement for the usual discourse of critique:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">As a radical or renegade discourse, vitalism represents protest, disillusion, and hope. Life often grounds opposition today, after the political disappearance of a subject/object of history and scepticism about the philosophy of the subject in general. … A third way, Life disallows bourgeois stasis as certainly as it makes impossible the achievement of rational controls. In fine, Life conjures up experience, irrationality, and revolt. (2012: 17)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Obviously the slightly coy reference to the ‘subject/object of history’ indexes the absent proletariat, and so we might say Life indexes a new populist subject that, true to its object, overflows any class canalisation. Also, the reference to exceeding rationality is the trope of anti-planning and anti-rationality that is driven also by the claimed immeasurability and excess of Life over all control</span>.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">What Jones crucially indicates is that despite vitalism claiming the status of an affirmative and primary force it in fact always functions as a ‘reactive banner’, and should be ‘defined less affirmatively than as the negation of its own negation – the mechanical, machinic, and the mechanistic.’ (2012: 28) Life does not come first, but (as we saw with the comic and laughter) can only be recovered through and against the mechanical. It is for this reason, I want to suggest, that the hostility of vitalism to critique is a sign of what Freud would call the ‘narcissism of small differences’. Vitalism constantly makes a claim on Life as primary and castigates critique as reactive because it remains within the same matrix.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Now, of course, one response to this could be to suggest the complexity of vitalism as a ‘critical’ discourse – noting that it does not involve a simple opposition between Life and mechanism, but rather a complex and dynamic topology (as does </span><a href="http://roml.unc.edu/people/italian/faculty/federico-luisetti/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Federico Luisetti</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">). The path I wish to explore is rather the strange interchangeability this analysis sets up between vitalism and critique. Where we saw how vitalism starts to look like critique, I now want to briefly explore where critique starts to look like vitalism. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This is interchangeability is posed by Jones. She turns to Bergson’s essay on laughter to track how Bergson’s suggestion that ‘laughter is social therapy for action that has become mechanical’ (Jones 2012: 52) can be used to understand the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu as forms of Bergsonian comedy. In the case of Butler’s theory of drag as parody the act of parody frees us from the laughable mechanical repetitions of gender roles, while Bourdieu’s analysis of the<em> habitus</em> becomes ‘a comedy of class society, a risible provocation.’ (Jones 2012: 55) These works of critique can be seen as vitalist in the ways they encourage us to mock routine and encourage invention and elasticity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">What we see here is how theories we might consider to be anti-vitalist and critical turn back around to vitalism once we recognise the critical function of vitalism. In this ‘comedy’ we find positions exchanged as critics become vitalists and vitalists critics (admittedly this may be a ‘comedy’ only found funny by a few sad souls). In Jones’s reading the addition of Marx’s analysis of reification is that there we laugh at how inanimate things act as living beings – in the ‘dancing’ commodity form. Marx inverts Bergson to demonstrate ‘living activity in inert things’ (Jones 2012: 55).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The effect of the deconstruction of the distinction between the living and the machinic seems to problematise vitalism, but still leaves it as a useful ‘critical’ discourse. In fact, this speaks to the difficulty of discarding vitalism, should we wish too. There is, if we like, a kind of persistence of the ‘living’ as norm secreted within the critical apparatus (as well as a critical apparatus secreted within the ‘living’). This is the ‘vitality of vitalism’ referred to by Georges Canguilhem, in which he stressed its ethical and imperative function (Greco 2005: 17-18).</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Critical Life</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Despite, or perhaps because, of these parallels and fusions the critique of vitalism seems all the more urgent. The very volatility, promiscuity and dispersion of vitalism (which mimics its own account of Life) threatens to leave no space at all for critique that could not be re-absorbed into Life. Max Horkheimer, in a 1934 essay, accepted the element of protest against reification at work in vitalism, but was critical of its elimination of history, evasion of the material, and irrationalism (Horkheimer 2005). Now, while these criticisms still hold good, I think, we might note the re-tooled anti-critical vitalism of the present tends to embrace these exact points of criticism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If history is co-extensive with Capital and Empire, the ‘single catastrophe’ to use Benjamin’s oft-quoted phrase, then the elimination of history is the only way to found the novelty of the new. The crisis of capitalism and the exhaustion of left or social democratic forms is taken as a given and as the sign of the release of the repressed force of Life. In similar fashion the material only incarnates the practico-inert slumped into the frozen stasis of the commodity form. The alternative ‘materialities’ of Life – objects, networks, complexity, et al. – are the only hope against the dead matter of the present. This is what Badiou, in <em>Logics of Worlds</em> (2006), calls ‘</span><a href="http://www.lacan.com/badbodies.htm" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">democratic materialism’</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">. Finally, irrationalism is to be welcomed against the sterile rationalisms of planning and order that are taken to encompass everything from state socialism to neo-liberalism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This is something of clichéd presentation of the various forms of political vitalism, but I would argue that there is some truth to it, and some truth to it as an account for the attraction of biopolitical populism. In fact, this kind of political vitalism precisely tracks outside of the constraints of the present and presents itself as a discourse without limits. This was Michel Foucault’s point concerning what he described as the ‘savage ontology of life’ in <em>The Order of Things</em> (1966) (1974: 303; trans. mod.). The galvanising force of this ontology lies precisely in its disregard for the discourse of political economy. The difficulty is, however, that the discourse of ‘Life’ remains within the forms of capitalist and state power as its essential support.</span></div>
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My contention, then, is that ‘Life’ with a capital ‘L’ opposed to Power with a capital ‘P’ is obviously a <span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">critical discourse, but an inadequate replacement for critique. While it constantly tars critique with the brush of being reactive and trapped by its proximity to what it negates this supposed model of separation and distance replicates the forms and functions of capitalist ideology – which separate off ‘Life’ as the sphere of reproduction from production. In that sense it operates as a replacement for critique and founds its superiority on the affirmation of a productive value on which capitalism depends, and which capitalism posits. It mistakes interiority for exteriority, and also dissolves the difficult questions of class structure into the simplicity of two opposing blocs.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Mediations</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I want to suggest that critique here finally turns on the question of mediation. Part of the appeal of this political vitalism is its deliberate dissolution of mediations. Mediations are bad. They stand at the expense of the immediate expression of Life – whether those mediations are the forms of power of state and capital, the mediations of organisation in the forms of party or union, or the mediations that would impose rationality and direction on the forms of Life. Now as I have noted one form of these mediations, those of the organised left, have largely collapsed, or have certainly been hollowed-out and significantly weakened. This, however, does not license the complete removal of the problem of mediation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Part of the difficulty here is that mediation tends to get understood as the search for the happy median, for mediation as synthesis, as stabilisation, in line with the usual clichés concerning Hegelian or Marxian mediation. In fact, mediation is a work of negativity and negation that does not propose to bring together, but which splits, divides, and exacerbates contradictions. We might say, and I would say, that the irony is that the seeming discourse of separation, of the radical division into Two, that is the discourse of the savage ontology of Life finds itself most subject to mediation in the bad sense it decries. Its very division forces it back into mediation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">My suggestion is then that mediation, in critical terms, traces an impossibility of conjoining and integration. In precise terms the mediation that concerns me is labour, as the very impossibility of labour. So, a thinking of labour does not entail the function of labour as mediator in terms of discipline and generation of either a capitalist or revolutionary identity – Marx’s ‘stern but steeling school of labour’. Rather, a thinking of the mediation of labour suggests that even labour can’t save us, that ‘wageless life’ is a future traced within the forms of labour as well as in abandonment from them. It’s precisely the collapsing of this mediation that feeds the fantasy of Life as norm of excess, but also this impossibility that reveals the form of Life with a Capital ‘L’ as capitalist fantasy of canalisable excess. Hence it is the political vitalisms that produce the antinomy of Life as excess and Capital as vampiric that results in a totalising (in the bad sense) discourse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If the compactness of the class did not deliver then the compactness of Life will not either. In fact, what is lauded is the dispersion and volatility of Life beyond any positive or negative point of identification – precisely its lack of compactness attests to its always revolutionary potential. I want to suggest that this folds back into bad comedy – in which Life is always about to succeed but some final pratfall, last minute social or political blunder, leaves us laughing at Life reduced to mere lives. Rather than this perpetual comedy, I am suggesting that we look a little more closely at how Life was already mediated by capitalist and state power. This is not to sow a countervailing despair of ‘everything is recuperated’. In fact, it is the discourse of Life as radically separate that oscillates between the poles of Life as everything and Life as completely mediated and recuperated. In contrast, mediation lies in the patient work of insinuation and negation that reveals no affirmative ‘Life lesson’, with its consoling comedy, but rather the divine comedy of the purgatory we are in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Marx remarked, in the <em><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/" target="_blank">Eighteenth Brumaire</a></em>, that ‘the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically.’ I doubt we still have quite the confidence of the teleology of the journey to paradise. That said, Marx also remarked about the complexity of any revolutionary process: while bourgeois revolutions ‘storm more swiftly from success to success’ they leave you with a terrible ‘Katzenjammer’ (hangover – literally cat’s wail); in contrast, proletarian revolutions ‘constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew’. This suggests that making life what we want it to be might be a winding process, more purgatorial, still a divine comedy, but not the storming to immediate transfiguration ‘Life’ would promise.</span></div>
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<br /></div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-56741967666111843892012-07-16T02:16:00.000-07:002012-07-16T02:16:16.087-07:00The Perils of the Research Novel (I)<div style="text-align: justify;">
Joshua Ferris's <em>The Unnamed</em> (2010) has as its central character Tim Farnsworth, a lawyer afflicted with compulsive walking. At several points in the novel is is noted that he is the only person who has ever had this disorder: 'I'm the only one ... No one else on record. That's crazy.' </div>
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It is crazy because a characters who has been to Switzerland for clinical treatment might have been thought to have come across Ian Hacking's book <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Mad_Travelers.html?id=mjdwhkQYTwgC" target="_blank">Mad Travellers</a> (2002) which is about cases of compulsive walking in late nineteenth century France... particularly Albert Dadas, who is mentioned in the wikipedia entry on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dromomania" target="_blank">dromomania</a>. A disorder also familiar to readers of Virilio's <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Speed_and_politics.html?id=EkDaAAAAIAAJ" target="_blank">Speed and Politics</a></em> (1977).</div>
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In case we might think this is unreliable narrator, the more reliable daughter Becky notes: 'but who had ever heard of what he had? Not even the Internet.' (94)<br />
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1. So we can conclude that despite being in ever other way similar to our world (excepting, perhaps, the extreme weather conditions) the world of the novel lacks 'dromomania'<br />
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2. Or, Ferris never encountered Hacking's book or the diagnosis, despite all the consulting of authorities listed in the acknowledgements<br />
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3. Or, he expects his readers not to know about it.<br />
<br />Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-70783771482398427942012-06-09T03:31:00.001-07:002012-06-09T03:31:43.499-07:00'Avant-gardes have only one time': The SI, Communisation and Aesthetics<div style="text-align: center;">
Presented at 'Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now'</div>
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University of Sussex</div>
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Friday 8th June 2012</div>
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The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.</div>
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Marx, <em><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/" target="_blank">The Eighteenth Brumaire</a></em></div>
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One of the <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm" target="_blank">slogans of May ’68</a> that has been rendered most ironic is: ‘Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse’; constantly reworked, the result is particularly ironic in regards to the ‘corpse’ of the Situationist International (SI). The desire to bury the corpse of the SI – ‘let the dead bury the dead’ – is accompanied by just as many resurrections or, for the more Hegelian amongst us, sublations. Here I want to engage in yet another act of ‘world-historical necromancy’ in relation to the SI. My aim is not to revive the corpse, or to pose the ‘poetry of the future’ that would arrive from some final ‘surpassing’. Rather I aim to consider the historicization and critique of the SI posed by one current of communisation – that of Roland Simon and the group <em><a href="http://www.theoriecommuniste.org/" target="_blank">Theorié Communiste</a></em> (TC).</div>
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The reason for this, as we will see, is that it is art and aesthetics that is particularly at stake in this critique. Despite appearances I will not be taking sides for communization and against the Situationists, or vice versa. Instead, I regard the communizing interpretation of the fate of the SI as a means to reflect on the current situation of the reception and resurrection of the SI. To carry this task out I will attempt at least three impossible things after breakfast: first, to sketch the nature of the communization problematic, especially as it is articulated by Roland Simon and TC; second, to explore Simon’s reflections on the SI and how the aesthetic plays a crucial role; third, to consider how these reflections might problematize the dominant ‘aesthetic’ reception of the SI.</div>
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<strong>Communization, and Its Discontents with the Situationists</strong></div>
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The theory of communization articulated by TC rests on what they regard as the crisis of the identity of the worker in contemporary capitalism. In particular, they argue that out of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s and the social struggles of workers in the same period the idea of affirming a proletarian identity against capitalism came to an end. This is what they call the end of ‘programmatism’. Emerging from the general ultra-left scepticism concerning the role of unions, parties, and other worker’s organizations in mediating capitalist social relations, TC take this further – they have little time for worker’s councils and other forms of ‘alternative’ worker’s organizations. Instead, they argue the restructuring of capital makes the identity of the proletariat a barrier or impossibility to be overcome. The penetration of capitalist real subsumption goes through the identity of the worker and the affirmation of work as the antagonistic pole of capitalism. The collapse of this possibility, as capitalism restructures and destroys these forms of mediation by the ‘worker’, and as workers’ themselves refuse them, means that the ‘proletariat’ can now only exist as the negation of work and worker’s identity. Therefore, communization refers to this process of self-abolishment and not to various forms of prefigurative or alternative identities or struggles. If we cease to affirm the proletariat, we cannot affirm some alternative ‘identity’.</div>
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The ‘place’ of the SI in this schema is one of being on the cusp of this change. On the one hand, the SI’s analysis of the dominance of the spectacle as form of abstraction and the bankruptcy of worker’s identity indicates the future lines of Communization theory. On the other hand, their faith in worker’s councils or alternative forms of ‘constructed situations’ mark them as remaining at the end of the period of programmatism. In Roland Simon’s formulation this contradiction meant that: ‘I think the SI led programmatism to its point of explosion.’ <a href="http://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/interview_roland.php" target="_blank">(2006)</a> What Debord could not tie together, for Simon, was his theorization of the spectacle as reality – as real abstraction – and the possibility of revolution. His failure to grasp the proletariat as an internal negation results in the positing of an outside, or alternative, that escapes representation. This speaks to the ‘vitalism’ of the SI, more marked in Vangeim than Debord, but present nonetheless. ‘Life’ marks this ‘exterior’ – ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’ – in Tom Bunyard’s critical analysis: ‘The “real” thus becomes “life”, considered as an abstract and romantic potential, against which stands a “capital” that has become equivalent to all present social existence.’ (<a href="http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6393/" target="_blank">2011</a>: 132, cf. 166) In contrast, Communization insists on the interiority of the proletariat to the formation of capitalism, as its antagonist and force of dissolution.</div>
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<strong>The Realization and Suppression of Art</strong></div>
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This, in a nutshell, summarizes the argument of TC and their critique of the SI. This critique can also be put, as Simon <a href="http://www.decitre.fr/livres/histoire-critique-de-l-ultragauche-9782951646094.html" target="_blank">(2009)</a> does, in terms of art and aesthetics. The tension here lies in the SI’s claims to the realization and suppression of art. Again, in parallel with the position of the proletariat, we have the thesis of a ‘positive’ possibility of alternative formulations and art practices in tension, or contradiction (‘realization’), with the ‘negative’ possibility of the ‘abolition’ of art pending the revolutionary process that would sublate and rework this category (‘suppression’). In common with many standard histories of the SI this contradiction is given a periodizing position in Simon’s account. We have the ‘early’, ‘artistic’ SI (up to the split of 1962), and then the ‘political SI’ (1963 to the dissolution in 1972); so canonical is such a division it appropriately structures the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International" target="_blank">wikipedia page for the SI</a>. </div>
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In terms of the critical reading of the SI in regards to the communization thesis the ‘realization’ model implies the belief in prefigurative possibilities of artistic practice that can be realized within and against capitalism. The ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments within the reign of the spectacle on this reading. For Simon, it is the penetration of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast, following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon argues that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process – within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe the process of revolution – qua Communization – than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’ revolution.</div>
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It is the difficulty that the SI finds in accepting this formulation that lies at the root, for Simon, of the necessity to surpass the SI. We might add that the so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord is a sign of the difficulty of overcoming the desire for a ‘positive’ instantiation of artistic and revolutionary possibility. Also, the much-remarked nostalgia of the Debord and the SI could be indexed as one sign of the difficulty of giving-up on these hopes, or their displacement into the past. In this analysis the tracing of the dominance of capital displaces a sense of ‘internal’ opposition to an aestheticized outside (cf. Bunyard, <a href="http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6393/" target="_blank">2011</a>). The SI, in this argument, remains too attached to the aesthetic and hence can only offer an aesthetic image or representation of revolution. To move beyond this ‘world-historical necromancy’ and to find the ‘poetry of the future’ requires the abandonment of the aesthetic and the abandonment of ‘positive’ visions of revolution, such as the worker’s councils. </div>
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<strong>Expressive Negation</strong></div>
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What interests me is that this periodization and analysis implies the overcoming of the SI, and the overcoming of the artistic and aesthetic as the ‘positive’ prefiguration of the SI’s vision of revolution. The irony is that the analysis of the SI has tended to take another direction, one that is far more in line with the supposedly ‘surpassed’ moment of realization. To use a phrase of Johanna Isaacson (<a href="http://liminalities.net/7-4/expressivenegation.pdf" target="_blank">2011</a>), we might say that the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of ‘lineages of expressive negation’.</div>
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An exhaustive account would be beyond the limits of my time and your patience. What I would suggest is that these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s <em>Lipstick Traces</em> (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to McKenzie Wark’s <em>The Beach Beneath the Street</em> (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by TC / Roland Simon.</div>
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I think, personally, this indexes a broader problem with the communization thesis, which claims justification in the historical actuality of the exhaustion of worker’s identity and the collapse of prefigurative radical politics, but then has to constantly account for why these ‘errors’ still occur. One absence, at least in the material I have read, is a convincing account for why these ‘errors’ should take place, unless it is regarded as unwarranted nostalgia or the lack of a ‘correct analysis’ of the present situation. This seems inadequate as an account of how these ‘errors’, if they are errors, are generated from social forms of struggle and forms of capitalist power.</div>
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In aesthetic terms, it indicates the persistent attraction of ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least, unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are often justified and retained precisely because of their positive forms. It is the fact that they seem existent possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. Without claiming to offer a full account, I would suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk is of a consolatory function of the aesthetic.</div>
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<strong>Vaster Terrains</strong></div>
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We can also find elements of this critique by TC anticipated by Debord, particularly in <em>In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni</em> (1978). The <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm" target="_blank">script</a> and the use of the détourned images of <em>The Charge of the Light Brigade</em>, indicate that:</div>
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Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it. After them, operations move onto a vaster terrain. Too often have we seen such elite troops, after they have accomplished some valiant exploit, remain on hand to parade with their medals and then turn against the cause they previously supported. Nothing of this sort need be feared from those whose attack has carried them to the point of dissolution.</div>
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In this sense it is precisely the radicalized negativity of the ‘expressive negations’ of the avant-garde that indicate a recognition of their own finitude. This effect of dissolution, captured in the thematic of fire doused in the waters of time, relies on a dialectic of transformation in which we ‘move onto a vaster terrain’. Of course, the difficulty is that this dialectic appears broken.</div>
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In that sense the Communization critique tries to re-establish this dialectic through the argument that the collapse of workers’ identity is not simply the sign of defeat but precisely the sign of transformation and movement onto this new terrain. The cultural and aesthetic negations of the avant-garde are couched by the SI as the prefigurative ‘charge’ that is expended into a new proletarian movement and, if we like, Communization shifts the form and the timescale. I’d suggest, however, that the lingering sense of nostalgia and pessimism in the later Debord (despite worthwhile attempts to re-read this moment in more strategic direction (Cf. Tom Bunyard, <a href="http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6393/" target="_blank">2011</a>)) indicate an impasse or impatience that this transformation has not been delivered.</div>
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Again, then, we could say that the aesthetic reading of the SI is not simply false but registers this uneasy position – one I would say that is as uneasy for communization as it is for the SI. What if we don’t move onto a ‘vaster terrain’ but a terrain that is constricted? Or, if we move onto a vaster terrain how is that to translate to the precise contestations required to rupture the real abstractions of capital? It is here, to adapt a phrase I’m fond of, we could speak of a ‘persistence of the aesthetic’. The turn to the aesthetic reading is not merely consolatory, although it can be that, but also a desire to provide some kind of more precise sense of negation in the present. Unsatisfactorily, I suppose, I can only sketch this as a problem. We live then in the moment of what Debord called a ‘splendid dispersal’.</div>
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<br /></div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-84328555071207990842012-05-28T06:42:00.002-07:002012-05-28T06:43:21.742-07:00Neuro-Horror-Novel: Kathe Koja's Bad Brains<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Predating the emergence of the <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel" target="_blank">neuronovel</a> by about 5 years Kathe Koja's <em>Bad Brains</em> (1992) could be regarded as a prefigurative critique of that particular micro-genre. Replacing the spectacular and rare disorders so beloved of literary fiction Koja settles for a fall off a curb and resulting brain damage and repeating seizures for her central character - failed artist Austen Bandy. The banality of the initial incident coupled to the lengthy exploration of largely ineffective treatment, combined with rapidly dwindling health insurance, puts paid to some of the irritating troping of neurological 'insight' and 'difference' in the neuronovel.</div>
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Of course, we might say that the rise of the neuronovel is not so much a sign of the turn to the brain and bodies, although it is that, but a particularly literalised version of the postmodern condition as the fragmentation of the psyche (Jameson). Where once we were content with figurative mental illness now the only Real deal is the trauma in the Real, which (as Zizek has often noted) neglects the Real of appearance for an ideological version of the 'concrete' qua hardwired brain (<em>hard</em> being the operative signifier).</div>
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Koja's novel certainly does return to the troping of creation - what makes this a horror novel is Austen's deepening vision of 'a dustdevil of fluid, liquid, mucus; silver, almost scalelike, delicate as fish skin and stretching out, elongating'. If we can rely on this most unreliable of narrators then it's reported that this 'silver mucus' is spreading into Austen's own work, hence its appearance in the 'Real'. It is also coordinated with his previous divorce and his desire for his ex-wife Emily. </div>
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As the novel unfolds (slowly), we are in the territory of the activity of artistic creation. This is made explicit in the closing section of the novel with 'Dr Quiet', a Cronenbergian psychiatrist, who links this 'vision' to limbic excess and the act of creation, with the 'silver' as daemon of creation. The 'era of blood' is coded as absolute sacrifice, or the malign greediness and egocentrism of 'the heedless bodiless passion of creation itself where nothing matters, nothing exists but the work.'</div>
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Something, however, remains of the banality of this stepping over. Austen, headed out on an ill-advised road trip to visit his mother, encounters a punk band in the usual shock style. He wryly remarks: 'they were young and earnest and so unaware of edges, the real edges on which we teeter, every day'.</div>
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The real edges, or for a flip Lacanian reversal, the edges of the real are as much divorce, falling off curbs, running out of health insurance, and failed mothers as they are edged silver smears that may, or may not, be the sign of 'creativity' - or perhaps, both at once.</div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-7036303322588783682012-05-28T03:40:00.001-07:002012-05-28T03:40:34.976-07:00'The Hectoring of Limits': Kathe Koja's Skin<div style="text-align: justify;">
For <a href="http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/" target="_blank">Steven Shaviro</a></div>
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Kathe Koja's 1993 novel <em><a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kathe-koja/skin-3/" target="_blank">Skin</a></em> is a novel of transgression and its usual destination: death. It concerns two symmetrical artists: Tess Bajac (the narrative voice), who works with metal to make it live, and Bibi Bloss, a dancer who makes to transform the flesh through integration with metal. These symmetries, as Tess and Bibi, pass from comrades to friends to lovers to enemies to final collapse, trace a narrative of 'transgressive/alternative' culture. Tess's work in the novel is obviously modelled on <em><a href="http://srl.org/" target="_blank">Survival Research Laboratories</a></em> (referenced in the text), and in her later departure from public art her 'boxes' are obviously <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell" target="_blank">Joseph Cornell's</a> (a favourite model, it seems, for fictional artists). Bibi, on the other hand, is the 'modern primitive' of <em>Re/Search</em> fame, with her extreme body modification and, implied in the novel, quasi-Facist tendencies.</div>
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While the account of the art created is, typically in a novel, not every convincing in terms of the effects it is supposed to be producing, the account of the 'hectoring of limits' engaged in by the transgressive artist, especially Bibi is - as critique. What's also interesting is he emergent narrative in the book of the function of the manipulative character Michael Hispard who, in a sense, runs the whole show by playing off Tess and Bibi against each other to produce or force the 'spiral' of transgression.</div>
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In particular Tess's account of Bibi, and her scepticism, offer a questioning (quite literally) of this 'dynamic': <br />
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Do you modify to improve, or empower, or simply to feed the greedy black scorn of the human boundaries that succor flesh to blood to the pulse and contraction of the emperor mind within?</div>
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In a key formulation Tess remarks of Bibi 'her body was the vanguard'. This captures, I'd argue, a contention we can derive from Badiou that the collective 'passion for the real' of the avant-gardes has become saturated. This does not mean it is simply exhausted, but rather dispersed into the body itself - hence Badiou's scepticism concerning 'postmodern' art as the art of bodies/languages in their implosive and inert 'presence'.</div>
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The novel, however, seems to terminate all options - public performance, collectivity, individual involution - in a final pairing of death, inert madness, and inertial passivity. The novel explicitly formulates the problem of change as its core - transformation, transfiguration, becoming, all seemed to twist finally into forms of failure. While this can be seen as a 'local' pathology, either of this 'scene' or the characters in the narrative, the book also points to the winding down of the 'dynamic' of transgression. Of course, the novel itself is the 'creative' allegory of these 'failures', and it is fitting that it is not entirely successful - or perhaps successful in its own strangely drawn-out inertia. We might say it is the prefigurative novel of <a href="http://www.lacan.com/badbodies.htm" target="_blank">'democratic materialism</a>' and its pathologies, the indicator of the impasse of Bergsonian <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v038/38.4.luisetti.html" target="_blank">'mechanical' vitalism</a> as 'creative'; in this way, it is the dead-end of transgression.</div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-68402603483368407192012-05-20T04:35:00.001-07:002012-05-20T04:35:45.263-07:00The Melancholy of Resistance<div style="text-align: justify;">
The invocation of melancholia to characterise the mood of the present, to characterise something of our ‘condition’, is a veritable cliché. Certainly, the concomitant attempt to make a politics out of that melancholia can often seem like the attempt to pile one cliché on top of another. In his usual pugnacious style Slavoj Žižek (2000) has noted how melancholia is to the taste of our times – indicating the preference for an attentive narcissism that ‘preserves’ the dead object and a reluctance to embrace the step to mourning that would imply internalisation and action. Typically, however, of this style of opening I am going to avoid that good advice and indulge in the very vice that I have just anatomised – trying to grasp a politics of melancholia, or better the limits of a particular instance of a politics of melancholia. Even more typically, for an academic, I am going to indulge that vice at one remove by considering one contemporary invocation and endorsement of the politics of melancholia: Andrew Gibson’s <em>Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy</em> (2012). My aim is to suggest, in this case, how an appeal to affect can block politics.</div>
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Rebecca Comay (2011) remarks on ‘the ideological versatility of melancholia: an uncompromising rejection of the existent (nothing short of total transformation is tolerable) coupled with an easy accommodation to whatever happens to be the case (everything is equally terrible, so why bother…).’ It is useful, I think, to analyse Gibson’s work because he hyperbolises this versatility, and so also speaks to and reveals the disavowed ideological underpinnings of much contemporary theory. In his work, as we will see, the ‘uncompromising rejection of the existent’ finally becomes indistinguishable from ‘an easy accommodation’. At the root of the ‘uncompromising’ is a ‘compromise’ that is all the more problematic for being concealed. What also becomes evident in Gibson’s explicit anti-Marxism is a more general tone of contemporary theory that rejects negation and dialectics as inevitably ‘compromised’. This is a book of the enemy; hence deserving of critique.</div>
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The core concept of Gibson’s book, derived from Christian Jambet, is an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’. What this in fact means is that history is split into two: the history of law and the history of grace, with history divided between long stretches of ‘dead time’ (Gibson 2012: 223) and sudden irruptions of justice or the good through punctual and intermittent events. Therefore, ‘historical reason’ has a temporary and fragile existence and what we confront most of the time, and certainly for the last 30-odd years, are the ‘deserts stretches of dead time’, a ‘dead time [which] breeds melancholy.’ (Gibson 2012: 223) Gibson ratifies an experience of historical defeat, especially the ‘polar night’ of the 1980s, which is then translated into the metaphysical register of historical experience itself.</div>
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The ‘enemy’ for Gibson is any ‘progressive’ conception of historical reason as unfolding in and through history, and more specifically the usual melange of Hegel/Kojève. To characterise this ‘progressive’ conception Gibson indulges in the familiar commonplaces: ‘immanence; plenitude; the active principle; freedom; dialectical reason, negative and positive together; culmination; overcoming; the project; completion in the State; mediation; finitude; the schema.’ (2012: 6) The antonyms, vectored through the critique of Christian Jambet, are fairly, although not entirely, predictable: Metahistory interrupting immanence; intermittency; passivity; openness to being mastered; negative reason; sporadic truth; discrete singularities; irregular events; resistance to the State; immediacy; the infinite; and anti-schematics. This unabashed metaphysical dualism is the Gnostic principle of Gibson’s analysis.</div>
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Gibson’s alternative to the ‘progressive’, bewitched by the unfolding of historical reason, is a thinking that suggests that ‘historical reason’ only ever irrupts intermittently, and we live a ‘melancholic-ecstatic conception of history’ (Gibson 2012: 10) as we lurch from the melancholy of dead time to the ecstasy of the event. He characterises the philosophical element of the rare and intermittent event through readings of Alain Badiou, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Rancière, which are all ‘paired’ with literary examples that characterise the limits of melancholia the philosopher can never fully grasp. Gibson institutes a division of labour, with philosophy dealing with the moment of the event and literature dealing with the ‘remainder’ of melancholy. In fact, to add an example he does not mention, this anti-schematics seems allegorised most for me in Andrei Tarkovsky’s <em>Stalker</em> (1978). In that film we have the traversal of the ‘wasteland’ of the zone, and the witnessing of the sudden moment of the irruption of grace (quite literally).</div>
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It is in the lengthy conclusion of the book that Gibson articulates his ‘own’ anti-schematics constituted through this traversal of contemporary thought. Here he particularly engages with ‘speculative realism’ – that odd non-movement, in which realism and speculative metaphysics are coupled together (Bryant et al (eds.) 2011) – to insist on history as ruled by absolute contingency. Fully-embracing that ‘randomization of history’ that Perry Anderson regarded as one of the signal vices of post-structuralism (Anderson 1983: 48), Gibson insists on the rarity of events, the irruption of contingency, and the persistence of the negative situation of the absence of events and the petty compromises and disgust of everyday life. </div>
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Melancholia, for Gibson, has a polemical and political (or anti-political) purpose. Embracing the melancholia breed by the dead times (á la T. S. Eliot) immunises us against false hopes and the embrace of ‘progress’. As he puts it:</div>
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Melancholy functions both as a scrupulous refusal of the contemporary will to contentment, its disregard for the contemporary ‘state of emergency’, and a cautionary brake on a century and more of a fruitless and finally bankrupt ‘left positivity’. (2012: 242)</blockquote>
In a rather typical ideological manoeuvre Gibson runs together the ‘affirmative’ culture of late capitalism, and the teleological positivity of neo-liberalism, with the supposed teleologies of ‘traditional’ Marxism (a ‘point’ also made by Jacques Rancière and Bruno Latour ). Lumped into one camp, ‘progressives’ now encompass a promiscuous set running from Newt Gingrich to any remaining Marxists, taking in reformist prophets of a re-created ‘caring’ capitalism and the marketeers of the new.<br />
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Christopher Nealon has noted the ironic violence of the identification of Marx and Marxism with its ‘object’ of critique, a trope with a long Cold War history. We find, in Nealon’s words, ‘the punishing, all-too-familiar reversal by which critics of capital, not its agents, are imagined as the bringers of violence into the world.’ (2011: 8) This practice involves turning the features of capital – teleology, economic determinism, and totality – onto its critics, ‘as though it were the critic who tried to name the totalizing work of capital, rather than capital, who was failing to do justice to particulars, or to aesthetic experience.’ (Nealon 2011: 10)</div>
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For Gibson the aim is to extract an ethics from this melancholia to allow us to ‘cope’ with the long periods of reaction, as the horizon of the event seems to take care of itself (if such an event should come along, Gibson notes it may well not). This is ‘an ethics of perseverance – the perseverance of the traces of subjectivity and truth, of the subject itself – through dead times, times in which truths appear to have failed.’ (Gibson 2012: 273) To ensure this possibility Gibson is explicit about the necessity of religion or theology against what he calls ‘the simple registers of Marxism.’ (2012: 276) In another contemporary ideological common-place Gibson regards religion as the place-holder of a density and depth of experience and thought that cannot be understood or matched by an ‘optimistic’ thought. Marxism is Brechtian <em>plumpes-denken</em> writ large, which may not sound that bad compared to the inflationary Augustianianism of ‘original sin’ and the ‘fallen state’ which dominates Gibson’s thinking.</div>
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More generously, there certainly is something (or very little), even if it is ‘through a glass darkly’, in Gibson’s remark on the necessity for perseverance amidst and against the ‘affirmative’ positivity of contemporary culture that resists negation. Like so many others, however, Gibson reifies negation into the grand event of rupture that may, or may not, arrive, on the one hand, and reifies it into the melancholia of an ‘atonal’ or ‘eventless’ everyday, on the other. Developing the speculative realist critique of correlationism – the tendency to posit the world and reality as always in relation to a human subject – Gibson remarks that: ‘A correlationist culture is characterized by the ubiquity and pure meaninglessness of positivity.’ (2012: 278) And yet, the melancholia of negativity, in Gibson’s hands, seems to give use little reason to persevere at all, except perhaps to await an event that will only flash briefly on the horizon. Here ‘perseverance’ and negativity take on the cynical cast of damming all attempts at historical change, and justify an attentisme which has lost even the minimal faith in the event. </div>
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This is not the melancholy of thinking defeat, or registering the difficulty of radical change, but the melancholy of consolation that justifies our own exceptional place as the ‘less deceived’. The vanity of the theorist is flattered by placing themselves as the lucid non-dupe who can, at least in thought, evade the crushing weight of the practico-inert:</div>
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To think intermittency is to run counter to the contemporary culture of plenitude, of which positivity is a crucial feature, and to persist with a Sartrean principle of austerity. This constitutes an emphatic, properly philosophical refusal to buy into the contemporary will to be swiftly controlled. (Gibson 2012: 279)</div>
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Of course, swiftly or slowly controlled doesn’t seem to make that much difference, especially as no action seems to be able to take place between those two states. In this case ‘lucidity’ becomes cynicism, disguised as tough-minded thinking.</div>
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To analyse this problem further I want to consider the crucial ‘ideologeme’ that justifies Gibson’s de-politicising political melancholy: this is the distinction and valorisation of revolt at the expense of revolution. Gibson implicitly favours revolt over revolution, re-articulating what Badiou diagnosed as the ‘speculative leftism’ of Lardreau and Jambet (Badiou 2005: 210-211) – in which the ‘pleb’ or resistant is always opposed to a finally triumphant power – but without the ‘leftism’. In doing so, Gibson not only ignores Badiou’s general diagnosis of this ‘infantile disorder’, but also Badiou’s specific criticisms of Lardreau and Jambet, whom he had dismissed as <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H9td3zGH0bcC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&dq=linbiaoists&source=bl&ots=u22cXnUq7k&sig=RKDzIW5lgBLQbsEyhAWQkkVETi0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HNW4T_aZNKaw0QXZqrybCA&ved=0CFMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=linbiaoists&f=false" target="_blank">‘Linbiaoists’</a> – i.e. as incarnating an ultra-left purity predicated on an absolute break that reproduced the ‘excesses’ of Lin Biao’s thought (Bosteels 2011: 148). The metaphysical One is replaced by the Manichean Two. The purpose served by Gibson’s gesture is the not uncommon one today of avoiding any imputation of ‘dirty hands’, even if this is now displaced firmly into the ideological past. The ‘purity’ of revolt is recoded as an interruptive moment that never solidifies into the bad attempt to impose ‘purity’ in the process of revolution, as ‘purity’ is the bad signifier of our times (‘purity’, inevitably ‘fatal’, we might say, to write a new entry in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas). Of course, this involves ignoring the violent experience of revolt, which speaks to one’s doubts in the depth of Gibson’s endorsement. Lacking any sense of the reality of revolt, any meaningful political content is evacuated from what was already an attenuated politics – a ‘revolt without revolt’, or a decaffeinated revolt. </div>
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We can dispute this valorisation of revolt through a resort to the analysis Furio Jesi offers of the Spartacist Insurrection of 1919 (Jesi 2012). Jesi gives a classical statement of the distinction between revolt – which ‘suspends historical time’ – and revolution – which is ‘wholly and deliberately immersed in historical time’. Of course, this is why ‘revolt’, reworked at the ‘event’, has value for Gibson, while the revolution does not. Now, while Fusi displays sympathy to the function of ‘revolt’ what he also does is indicate its historical and political limits. In particular he notes how revolt can serve the very forms of power it attacks. In the case of the Spartacist uprising the suspension of historical time it engaged in allowed the restoration of ‘normal’ capitalist time after the disruption of the time of war. Also, the action of revolt – punctual and immanent – can function as a release of energies that would otherwise coalesce into the more sustained historical process of revolution. In this more nuanced analysis we can see, at least, the necessity for a more careful historical analysis rather than the transfer of the problem into the metaphysical or spiritual register. </div>
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Gibson’s ‘solution’ can then be regarded as a ‘political melancholia’, in the symptomal sense, which fails to properly register the melancholia that belongs to the structure of revolt, and occludes the risks and dangers of revolt by passing these over to the revolution. In this way we can turn, with ‘clean hands’, to reactionary or dubious literary forms as justifications for our experience of the ‘remainder’ of dead time detached from any political content. The result is a deliberate consolation that, in effect, blocks any politics through the deployment of affect.</div>
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<strong>Bibliography</strong><br />
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Anderson, Perry (1983) <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/In_the_tracks_of_historical_materialism.html?id=ai4KAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">In the Tracks of Historical Materialism</a></em>. London: Verso.<br />
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Badiou, Alain (2005) <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WE4rPwAACAAJ&dq=badiou+being+and+event&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kNS4T9_mD-W10QX4_NCiCA&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA" target="_blank">Being and Event</a></em>, trans. Oliver Fletham. London: Continuum.<br />
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Bosteels, Bruno (2011) <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Badiou_and_Politics.html?id=H9td3zGH0bcC" target="_blank">Badiou and Politics</a></em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<br />
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Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) (2011) <em><a href="http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf" target="_blank">The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism</a></em>. Melbourne: re.press.<br />
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Comay, Rebecca (2011) <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17143" target="_blank">Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution</a></em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.<br />
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Gibson, Andrew (2012) <em><a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-7486-3757-7/intermittency" target="_blank">Intermittency: the Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy</a></em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.<br />
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Jesi, Furio (2012) ‘The Suspension of Historical Time’, trans. Alberto Toscano. Chapter 1 of <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Spartakus.html?id=T6LaAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta</a></em> (2000), ed. Andrea Cavaletti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.<br />
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Latour, Bruno (2004) ‘Never Too Late to Read Tarde’. <em><a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/magazine/874/" target="_blank">Domus 874</a>.</em><br />
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Nealon, Christopher (2011) . <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Matter_of_Capital.html?id=rKNTCgZ4miwC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century</a></em>. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.<br />
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Rancière, Jacques (2010) <em><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Chronicles_of_Consensual_Times.html?id=DESVK0oOefkC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">Chronicles of Consensual Times</a></em>. London: Continuum.<br />
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Žižek, Slavoj (2000) ‘<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344326" target="_blank">Melancholy and the Act</a>,’ <em>Critical Inquiry</em> 26.4: 657-681.<br />
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</div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-41678581919902270462012-05-15T12:02:00.002-07:002012-05-15T12:02:21.163-07:00Found PoemChanging Collaboration<br />
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<br />Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-92206628259132625832012-03-24T08:19:00.002-07:002012-03-24T08:19:45.771-07:00Live Life to the Full<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Recently I've been thinking and writing a lot about the critique of the various political vitalisms that dominate the contemporary theoretical scene. Some of this work is available <a href="http://chi.academia.edu/BenjaminNoys/Papers/702944/The_Poverty_of_Vitalism_and_the_Vitalism_of_Poverty_" target="_blank">here</a> (turned down as an article by <em><a href="http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/" target="_blank">Radical Philosophy</a></em> for lack of nuance) and <a href="http://chi.academia.edu/BenjaminNoys/Papers/1108355/The_Savage_Ontology_of_Insurrection_Negativity_Life_and_Anarchy" target="_blank">here</a>, some will appear soon in various forms (including, eventually, as a chapter in my next book). </div>
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At the heart of my deliberately blunt criticism is the suspicion that political vitalisms are often homologous to capitalist operations of value extraction, as both depend on erecting a concept of 'Life' as perpetual resource over the various miseries and joys of 'life' as empirical existence. This replicates capitalism's treatement of labour as perpetual resource, always available for extraction (and abandonment). In particular I suspect a theological discourse at work in which the misery of life is transformed into the glory of Life, in a 'postmodern passion' (Negri) that repeats a Christological dialectic.</div>
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Recently my friend <a href="http://encls.net/?q=profile/jernej-habjan" target="_blank">Jernej</a> directed me to an article by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alenka_Zupan%C4%8Di%C4%8D" target="_blank">Alenka Zupančič</a> in this <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KXZiRO8f-V8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">book</a>, which analyses the relation of surplus value to surplus enjoyment, and which can help develop a critique of political vitalism. Her argument is that in capitalism our surplus enjoyment, which usually appears an entropic waste, becomes the means for value extraction and capitalisation. We might say that in capitalism no waste goes to waste, which doesn't mean it is not a uniquely wasteful system only that waste could potentially generate value out of this waste (being recycled... which gives an image of the circular drive of capital).</div>
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The result is an 'imitation surplus <em>jouissance</em>' that takes the form of the 'entropy-free enjoyment' of the kind we find in the <a href="http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm" target="_blank">decaffeinated</a> products Zizek identifies as the 'absolute commodity' of contemporary capitalism (my own favourite being <em>Coke Zero;</em> I'd suggest a reworking of the Lacanian <a href="http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm" target="_blank">formulas of sexuation</a> on the distinction between <em>Coke Zero</em> and <em>Diet Coke</em>).</div>
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This entropy-free enjoyment is split from the negativity it incarnates and is exploited. The result is that surplus <em>jouissance</em> is hijacked for generating value, and we find a convergence of power and resistance as the indirect despotism of capitalism encrypts its own mastery.</div>
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Returning to the political vitalisms I would argue that the 'negative vitalisms', like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben" target="_blank">Agamben</a>'s, try to reconnect this waste into the form of life, to resist detachment and hence ruin value; <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/toc/dia36.2.html" target="_blank">'affirmative biopolitics</a>' tries to exceed value 'on the other side' through overloading or massifying <em>jouissance</em>. In both cases, however, they erect 'Life' over (or under) 'life', and so remain in the convergence of power and resistance on the site of 'Life' as waste/excess. This, as I've suggested, leaves them within the theological matrix of capitalism, which functions (to use Adorno's phrase) as 'psychoanalysis in reverse' - enabling our 'waste' as value. </div>
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Our entropic subjection to perpetual value extraction is treated as the moment of saving: transforming waste into glorious excess, but leaving the recycling machine untouched. While the attraction of these discourses might seem obvious in the moment of capitalist bubble inflation, in which value seemed to spiral upwards without limit and giving 'substance' (or appearance) to the fantasy of Life <em>qua</em> excess, they persist in attraction at the moment of crisis. The denuding of capitalism into 'waste' merely triggers the fantasy of its exteriority and of our superior powers of 'Life' over capitalism. That this figures a gesture of 'creative destruction' is my suspicion.</div>Benjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.com2