No Useless Leniency

We will bury you!

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:40:00 +0000

Owen already draws notice to what was a pretty frantic and manic HM this year. I have previously written a conference report but, for a range of reasons, this is not possible this time round. I would just say that (for once) I really enjoyed my own session, with Evan chanting down Babylon and Mark on capitalism as the 'Terminator with a human face'. The Q&A was great as well - the Infinite one pushing me to confess my concept of human nature, China on 2012 as the bukake of the Earth, and Knox and Evan debating the finer points of Mad Max 2 and 3 with, as Alberto put in, the same amount of intensity and attention usually devoted at HM to debating volumes 2 and 3 of Capital. I also hear that Fredric Jameson (!) could not get in because the session was so full...

Thanks to any one else who asked a question and had the patience to listen to my answers.

Hurry Up Please It's Time

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:53:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT

Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19, 2010

‘Hamm: What’s happening?
Clov: Something is taking its course.’
Beckett, Endgame

Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political, this conference traces the appropriation of the political by apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment in politics.

To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply? How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the role of the moment in politics?

Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.

If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January 15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society, Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.

For more information see: www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org

wirklichkeit

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:42:00 +0000

The book launch for various zero books is on 2 December - details here. I should say I really enjoyed both Nina and Mark's books and really hope they get a wide readership. I especially thought my students would benefit from reading them as they are both acute and engaging political analyses of the present and because they make me feel old and out of touch (which is true). I can't go because we have a PG student evening that night, ironically.

Thanks to Owen I find I look like Ludwig Hilberseimer, but still he's a famously nihilist architect and urban planner...

Light the way

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:35:00 +0000

We are lamp-bearers ... we inspect the political place in order to discern therein the staking out of antagonism that will relay the promise and organize the future.

Badiou, Theory of the Subject (p.108)

Historical Materialism 09: be there, or be not Marxist

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:56:00 +0000

SIXTH HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ANNUAL CONFERENCEAnother World is Necessary: Crisis, Struggle and Political Alternatives27 - 29 November 2009Birkbeck College and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)Thornhaugh Street, London XC1H OXG

REGISTER NOW

REGISTRATION CLOSES 24 NOVEMBER

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME now available

Speakers include:

Gilbert Achcar * Robert Albritton * Kevin Anderson *Jairus Banaji * Wendy Brown * Alex Callinicos * Vivek Chibber * Hester Eisenstein * Ben Fine * Ferruccio Gambino * Lindsey German * Peter Hallward * John Holloway * Fredric Jameson * Bob Jessop * David McNally * China Mieville * Kim Moody * Leo Panitch * Moishe Postone *Sheila Rowbotham * Julian Stallabrass * Hillel Ticktin * Kees Van Der Pijl *Hilary Wainright

(and Benjamin Noys...)

Panels include: APOCALYPSE MARXISM * ART AGAINST CAPITALISM *CLASS AND POLITICS IN THE 'GLOBAL SOUTH' * COGNITIVE MAPPING, TOTALITY AND THE REALIST TURN * COMMODIFYING HEALTH CARE IN THE UK * CUBAN REVOLUTION AND CUBAN SOCIETY * DERIVATIVES *DIMENSIONS OF THE FOOD CRISIS * ECOLOGICAL CRISIS * EMPIRE AND IMPERIALISM * ENERGY, WASTE AND CAPITALISM * FINANCE, THE HOUSING QUESTION AND URBAN POLITICS * GLOBAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS * GRAMSCI RELOADED * INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CRISIS * LABOUR BEYOND THE FACTORY * LATIN AMERICAN WORKING CLASSES * LINEAGES OF NEOLIBERALISM * MARXISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE * MIGRATION * PHILOSOPHY AND COMMUNISM IN THE EARLY MARX * POSTNEOLIBERALISM * RACE, NATION AND ORIENTALISM *RED PLANETS: MARXISM AND SCIENCE FICTION * REMEMBERING PETER GOWAN AND CHRIS HARMAN * REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AUTONOMIST MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY *SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM IN THE US SOUTH * STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND YOUTH REVOLTS * THE CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND THE CRITIQUEOF CAPITALISM * UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND SOCIALIST BIOPOLITICS

Savoy Disturb

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:19:00 +0000

Savoy mircofiction competition at the Ballardian for the truly disturbed amongst you... (deadline 5 December)
Also, an interview with Michael Butterworth (of Savoy)

Better Living through Psychopathology

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:13:00 +0000

[This is my presentation at the Future event with, as Owen noted, references and quotes - I stand attached to my academic transitional objects, which should come as a relief to all as you wouldn't like me if I improvised...]

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me ... (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers is some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian.

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

Appearance

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Workshop Announcement

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University

Subject and Appearance:

On Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject & Logics of Worlds

Friday 20 November, 10am to 5pm (followed by a drinks reception).

Confirmed speakers include: Ali Alizadeh (CRMEP, Middlesex) Bruno Bosteels (Cornell) Peter Hallward (CRMEP, Middlesex). Nina Power (Roehampton) Kristin Ross (NYU) Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths)

The workshop will take place in Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way, London W1T 5DL

Further details and the schedule are posted here

Brief extracts from Badiou's books, intended for particular attention during the workshop, will be posted shortly via this link, also you can register via the link, which is 'essential'.

The Future

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:21:00 +0000

[I am speaking at this, on an image from JG Ballard (to be revealed, and the talk will be posted here after). No one, as far as I know, is speaking on the above image. I just chose it in contemplation of Ballard's remarks about the space race lacking the ability to excite the imagination / or any 'manifest insanity'.]

Accompanying the exhibitions The Sculpture of the Space Age and The Object of the Attack (2/10/09-19/12/09) at the David Roberts Art Foundation

The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster, in association with the David Roberts Art Foundation, presents:

THE FUTURE
Thursday 5 November 6:30
Location: The David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY

Presenting images of the future with:

Tom Corby is an artist and writer whose research is concerned with relocating digital imaging processes within wider aesthetic and social frameworks. He is the deputy Director of CREAM at Westminster and coordinates the digital art research cluster in the school of arts and media. His experimental digital artworks (produced in collaboration with Gavin Baily) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards.

Benjamin Noys is Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester. He is author of, among other works, The Culture of Death (2005) and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Film-Philosophy. He has a forthcoming book entitled The Persistence of the Negative due in 2010.

Kester Rattenbury is an architectural journalist, critic and writer, whose many publications include the edited collection This is Not Architecture. She is a consulting editor for the Architects Journal, series editor for the SuperCrit series with Routledge, and leads the ExP research group at the University of Westminster.

John Timberlake is a photographer and writer, who also leads the BA in Fine Art at Middlesex University. He has exhibited widely in Europe and North America and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme. A former editor of Everything Magazine, his most recent publication is the book Bussard Ramjet (Artwords 2008) and he is currently exhibiting work at the Pittoresk: Neue Perspektiven auf das Landschaftsbild group show at MARTa in Germany.

David Cunningham is Principal Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. He is an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy, co-editor of the book Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005), and has published widely on modernism, aesthetics, architectural theory and urbanism.

Badiou, critique of SR avant la lettre

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:04:00 +0000

'The fact remains that they are turned off by the partisan taking of sides. The asymptotic perspective of flight makes of the empiricist a wandering materialist, a vagabond philosopher of natural substances. Ignorance of the mirror turns the empiricist into the mirror - of the world.' (209)
Badiou Theory of the Subject

Postone online

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:12:00 +0000

With thanks to Principia Dialectica for this link to a collection of work by Postone - easier than reading Time, Labour and Social Domination...

plumpes Denken

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:11:00 +0000

In the handbooks of philosophy, you will see that like the epithet of a two-bit Homer, the adjective "vulgar" almost invariably attaches itself to the noun "materialism". Well yes! There is something trivial about reading the abject secret of a speculative permanence in the densest of social hierarchies. But that is how it is.

Badiou, Theory of the Subject (p.185)

An excellent post by Infinite on the risks of a dialectics of nature and the rush to ontology (btw I don't have an ontology...). A rapid reply by Nick as well.

To add my meagre thoughts I'm not so concerned with deriving politics from philosophy / ontology / metaphysics, but rather with making a theoretically-informed political critique of philosophy etc. This is primarily because I regard it as perfectly possible to read a bad politics off SR / ANT whether they deny being political or not (allowing for the variants of SR). To be more particular, and this is elaborated at somewhat tedious length in my book, ANT is bad politics and bad metaphysics, precisely because the bad politics is derived from the bad metaphysics. Despite all the claims to make networks malleable and to regard capital as merely fragile network, these conceptions constitute a reformist voluntarism because of the fundamental desire to protect such networks from change and because they obscure, for me, the actual nature of the value-form.

I also doubt SR returns politics to its autonomy because, contra Nick, the tendency seems still to be to derive political consequences from metaphysics (see Graham's remarks about ethics and politics in the debate with Peter Hallward at 21st Century Materialism - vacuum-packed proletariat and all). Even if it does somehow make politics autonomous, we still have the problem of what SR adds then qua philosophy, which seems to be to return to certain 'traditional' questions (which is not bad in itself) but in ways that deny any connections with politics (which is bad). Finally, again, we have the possible political reading of SR precisely in this mode of detachment and refusal of politics. Perhaps a salutary dose of Lukacs is required.

The University as Event-Site

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Excellent post from Evan on the university as Kampfplatz (I really like the German better...). I think it's exactly true that we don't have to wreck the university, that's being done for us.

Black Metal

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:57:00 +0000

HIDEOUS GNOSIS
Black Metal Theory Symposium
December 12, 2009
The Public Assembly
70 North 6th St
Brooklyn, NY
1:00-7:00 p.m.

I: 1:00-2:15
The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground
Steven Shakespeare

The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances
Erik Butler

BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum
Scott Wilson
(moderator: Niall Scott)

II: 2:20-3:30
Transcendental Black Metal
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix

Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya
Nicola Masciandaro

Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration
Joseph Russo
(moderator: Steven Shakespeare)

Interlude: 3:30-4:30
Nader Sadek, Baptism in Black (Phase II)
Sym-posium (together-drinking)

III: 4:30-5:45
‘Remain true to the earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal
Benjamin Noys (in absentia)

The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Evan Calder Williams

Black Confessions and Absu-lution
Niall Scott

Meaningful Leaning Mess
Brandon Stosuy
(moderator: Scott Wilson)

IV: 5:50-7:00
Black Metal and Evil
Aspasia Stephanou

Red in a World of Black: A Discussion of Blood in Black Metal
Murray Resinski

‘Goatsteps behind my steps’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal
Anthony Sciscione
(moderator: Erik Butler)

Communisation

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:18:00 +0000

An excellent article from Mute by John Cunningham on 'Communisation', putting together the Tiqqun / Invisible Committe with Theorie Communiste / Dauve. Altough I personally tend more to the TC line, and would be less 'Deleuzian', this is a remarkably clear and even-handed summary.

Militant Dysphoria - some thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:02:00 +0000

I've only been slightly following / intervening in the debates that have followed the Goldsmiths event for Dominic's Cold World. To be a Habermasian hippy (a surprise to many, no doubt), I think the debate is part of the intellectual point, and certainly one way to get out of or minimise the elements of 'hype' and 'promotion' that are bound to surround any commercial venture (except perhaps academic publishing...). I also hope many of the contributors to the debate get to publish their works via Zero, to go all Maoist: 'let a thousand disputes bloom'.

I was thinking of Cold World in terms of Perry Anderson's remark that for revolutionary agency we need a coordination of knowledge and will. The dysphoric relation, whether aesthetic, political, or actual, seems to me a relation of knowledge: the preceptual awareness of the stark and delibidinised mechanisms and structures of the 'practico-inert'. In this it's quite unusual, because I think often the focus of contemporary work has fallen, understandably, on the necessity of will (See Peter Hallward's essay - pdf). I think that Cold World traces the absence of agency, or its antinomy - drawn out between stylised despair (as in BM) or frantic (manic?) activism (the RAF).

The problems noted, which I have some sympathy with, is how such a relation of knowledge might produce a new form of will? The old, and for that reason essential and difficult, question of what used to get called the 'negation of negation'. Dysphoria essentially often seems to lead to a paralysis of will, or at least its collapse / attenuation.

(I think here the other crucial problem raised by many is between the singularity of particular forms of suffering / depression / dysphoria as lived experience, the diagnostic / psychiatric categories (of which I am highly suspicious), and then the question of dysphoria as figure / cultural diagnosis. Certainly some may remember the heyday for such cultural diagnostics in the 1960s / 1970s - Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia, Jameson's 80s addenda, Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, Norman Mailer's hipster as psychopath, and I'm sure there are many more. Similar problems were raised in respect of all these, not least related to Freud's comment about the difficulty of supposing a cultural or societal 'standard of health' against which we could measure social pathology).

As I've said I'm very suspcious of any politics of the worst in the current conjuncture, which is not to say it couldn't have a role to play at other points. But what I think 'militant dysphoria' probes is our concept of the will - and also the point made by Badiou concerning the translation or integration of affects within the consistency of the truth-process. I think Dominic on this is far more interesting than, say, Franco Berardi's similar remarks on the 'intellectual potency' of depression - which definitely lead straight to Baudrillard (in a bad way). Perhaps I'm imposing my own modest reading on Cold World, but I see it as a manual of the antinomy.

Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:28:00 +0000

Scare in the Community
------ONE NIGHT ART EVENT------
Saturday, 24th October 2009, 6-9pm

A one night art event at Core Arts in Homerton showcasing video, performance, 2D and 3D works by artists addressing issues relating to community care and institutional critique both inside and outside the context of art.

Core Arts
109 Homerton High Street
London E9 6DL

train: Homerton

(London Overground)

buses: 236 / 242 / 276 / 394 / W15

Frank Bangay, George Barber, David Blandy, Ian Bourn, Boyle and Shaw, El Vonne Brown, Enda Burke, Leona Christie, CoolTan, Tessa Garland, Julika Gittner, Alex Ingram, IRE-MIND, Stephen Jackson, Terry Jones, Jean-Paul Martinon, Octavia Arts, Jo Panter, Laure Prouvost, Jon Purnell, Natasha Rees, Erica Scourti, Temple of Mithras, Josephine Wood

‘Society is an insane asylum run by the inmates’, Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums
The theme of the show resonates with current tendencies to prioritise principles of care in the community over extended hospitalisation. The idea of the mentally ill being free to roam the streets and mingle with the general public has caused much fear amongst communities and frequently leads to sensationalist news headlines in the tabloids such as "Armed and dangerous: public at risk as mental patients escape the care net." (Sunday Express, 2006).

On the other hand, the art world has shown a revived interest in the ‘outsider’ artist. The fantasy of the ‘outsider ‘ who, ignored by society, obsessively practices his ‘authentic’ and untrained creativity has lead to exhibitions such as Inner Worlds Outside at the Whitechapel Gallery (2006). While giving artistic credibility to the work of self-taught artists by exhibiting it next to the work of established artists, such exhibitions do not challenge the authority of the art institution to select who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’.

Scare in the Community aims to confront both sides of the coin by showing art, which relates to ideas of institutional ennui and social norms alongside work that responds directly to the implications of the closure of asylums over the past decades.

Scare in the Community is curated by Julika Gittner and Jon Purnell.

Strategy and Tactics

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:46:00 +0000

I find it difficult to comment on the UCSC occupation due to reliance on the statements, but I would say I probably find myself on the side of sympathetic disagreement, ie not agreeing with the tactics, but recognising the genuine nature of the protest (see the SW interview).

First, I personally doubt the 'terminal crisis of capitalism' thesis (I'd like it to be true...), or at least that the crisis will (a) lead to collapse anytime soon, or (b) lead to an accumulation of new radicalised forces (or automatically lead to such an accumulation). Maybe it's pessimism, which I certainly have, but I don't see the capitalist 'practico-inert' simply falling away or disintegrating except on a very much longer time scale (to be honest, at a minimum fifty years, and probably longer), unless there is a far more global and substantial development of alternative social forms (ie socialist / communist / non-commodified). These forms would also be required to prevent the 'common ruin of the contending classes' or simply authoritarian solutions. This is not a spectre of fascism argument, but a recognition of the risk of re-tooled authoritarian forms and national-popular mobilisations.

Second, I'm doubtful about maximalist 'demandless' occupation as a tactic. I have no real knowledge of the US university experience, but I do think actually particular administrations here are responsible for their responses to the crisis, and how they work within the crisis - and they should be held accountable. In fact, precise demands are what are required I think, and I know this is not my own original argument, far from it. This is especially the case in the context of the 'solutions' being offered of more business to solve the problems business caused.

Commandeering the Commons

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:52:00 +0000

Evan's final statement on the occupation, and here on tv. My comments to follow.

The Trash Heap of Political Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:04:00 +0000

It's pretty weird but Baudrillard's Forget Foucault is a rather precise critique of accelerationism avant la lettre, of course only if you ignore Baudrillard's own alternative to Deleuze&Guattari / Lyotard / Foucault, with seduction / reversibility, et al (a kind of negative accelerationism). As Baudrillard says 'Beware of the molecular!'; here are some further quotes:

This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any foxed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. This is the form itself which the current reailzation of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies.

to rediscover a phantasmal and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital.

it is the kind of generative inscription of the code that one expects - an immanent, ineluctable, and always positive inscription that yields only to infinitesimal mutations.

For I Know Not What I Do

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:10:00 +0000

Negation results from affirmation: this means that negation arises in the wake of affirmation or beside it, but only as the shadow of the more profound genetic element – of that power or “will” which engenders the affirmation and the difference in the affirmation. Those who bear the negative know not what they do: they take the shadow for the reality, they encourage phantoms, they uncouple consequences from premises and they give epiphenomena the value of phenomena and essences.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (my emphasis)

Sounds a good programme to me...

Deconstruction

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:16:00 +0000

Having at one point been a true Derridean, and now coming to try and write critically on Derrida for the new book (it's virtually impossible btw, and probably pointless), I came across the new issue of Diacritics on Derrida and democracy. Even back in the day the 'democracy to come' stuff never really impressed me, and nothing much so far in the issue prompts me to change my mind. I did find this, however, me raised my post-Derridean ire - from a paper on Derrida's 'nonmaterialism':

'As the undoing of the power of the subject, the force of materiality cannot lead to a political program. Indeed, it is what resists and confounds any teleology such as that of Marxism and even any purposive or end-oriented action that is based on rational calculations or the projection of an ideal end.'

Great... say goodbye to rational calculation, end-oriented action, or an 'ideal end' (like, say, a fairer society, or avoiding a class-stratified environmental catastrophe). Or, welcome the irrational contingencies of the market, in which the only teleology is accumulation...

Of course we are supposed to respect this as about theory and not the dread empirical, and no doubt if I could be bothered to read my own work I might well find similar such acceptance of contemporary commonplaces. I can't help but find this stuff depressing. In the interest of fairness here is the next part of the passage:

'But as that which opens power up uncoditionally to the other this force also has a messianic dimension. It aporetically implies an absolute or incalculable hospitality to the other that demands a response in which we calculate the given conditions in order to act in a responsible manner.'

That, however, doesn't seem to me to provide the answer, especially considering the later comment that although the impossible other 'is not unfigurable as such, [it] is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse.' Well quite...

Of course Mark and Owen are the people to refer to here when discussing the knee-jerk ideological rejection of planning.

Enough of my spite, look at Nina's fine photos, especially this one, for Owenem Hatherleyem - currently gracing the cover of the NLR as his alter ego Owen Hatherley.

Black and Red papers

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:18:00 +0000

Some of the papers from the 'Is Black and Red dead?' conference are available here, for mine scroll down this blog to 'Space is the Place'.

The State of Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:28:00 +0000

The re-drafting of the Persistence of the Negative is currently taking up most of my time, and I'm very grateful to all the readers/commentators who have at least prevented some of the more major errors. Certainly I'm a lot happier now with the Derrida chapter (more streamlined), the Latour chapter (nastier), and the Negri chapter (fairer).

I just got some overall comments from John Roberts, author of this excellent book, and they form their own analysis of the state of theory, this is an extract:

"It [Persistence of the Negative] renders the theory and philosophy as moments within a collective 'research programme', despite all the professional and political animosities of the given writers (an approach that Badiou pursues himself in his recent essay on post-French philosophy in NLR). Your decision then to connect this body of writing through the concept of 'affirmationism' is vivid, insofar as it becomes clearer forty years after May 68 and 10 years after this 68 philosophical legacy begins to fall into decline, that in these authors’ shared desire to accelerate away from a certain crisis in the form and affective life of revolutionary politics, the celebration of the actual becomes a chronic liability. I myself see this as a result, firstly of a misreading and then abandonment of Hegel (and Marx's fundamental indebtedness to Hegel), in the widespread turn within this tradition to discontinuism, conjuncturalism, alinearity, and anti-causality, which finds its perfected form, of course, in Logics of Worlds, where causality is exchanged for a kind of telescopic historical abridgement. The relations between affirmation, negation and historical development, therefore, have been sundered in this tradition, which, in a sense is where your book enters the fray. But as I said, in our discussion, the absence of a discussion of Hegel renders the critique of a post-historical affirmationism (certainly in Badiou) without a philosophical anchor."

Post-Lapsarian Anarchism

noreply@blogger.com (Benjamin) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:49:00 +0000

Two events for the libertarians out there. The first is this:

Imperceptible Strategies, Unidentified Autonomous Organizations
:: A Drifting Seminar :: London, October 23rd, 2009 ::

Anarchist and autonomous politics are often associated, in a kneejerk way, with a celebration of chaos and disorder: a rejection of all forms of organization. The reduction of radical politics to a cheap joke (‘anarchist organization, what’s that?’) comes to substitute for an actual understanding of autonomous organizational practices. Far from rejecting organization all together, the history of autonomous politics contains a wealth of different modes of organizing, from the formation of temporary autonomous zones to affinity group models, maroon communities to networks and collectives.

These are forms of organizing that not always acknowledged as being organizations because they do not conform to what it is assumed organizations necessarily are: durable, static, and hierarchical. This understanding of organization obscures and makes difficult an actual engagement with the merits and weaknesses of different forms of organizing. But what would be found if rather than working from a fixed and unchanging concept of organization, one that excludes temporary forms of organization from consideration, it was attempted to tease out the organizational dynamics from all the temporary alliances and alliances that appear and disappear?

Might it be possible that we are already enmeshed in a world of unidentified autonomous organizations, a milieu of potential liberation that has remained imperceptible because of a narrow understanding of what organizations are? And might it not be that this imperceptibly, rather than being a condition to be addressed as a problem, could rather be part of building of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls an infrapolitical sphere: a space for politics coming out of people’s everyday experiences that do not express themselves as radical political organization at all.

The aim of this encounter is to explore the connections between anarchism, autonomism, and the revolutions of everyday life, drawing out conceptual tools useful to developing and deepening the politics of these infrapolitical spaces and organization. How can we strategize and build from the connections and movements of the undercommons, working from everyday encounters to compose new forms of social movement? How can we connect and work between spontaneous forms of resistance without forcing them into some larger form that ossifies them?

This event will not be based around formal presentations, but rather will rather take the form of a drifting seminar. Participants will be asked to read several pieces of text that will form the basis of discussion and exploration.

Registration for the event will be approximately 10 quid. There will be some limited travel funding available. If you wish to be considered for this funding indicate this when you register.
For registration and information contact: stevphen [NO SPAM] autonomedia [DOT] org / Sponsored by the Anarchist Studies Network & Minor Compositions

The second is this series of seminars, for details contact Saul Newman:

The Libertarian Impulse

From October 2009 until March 2010 RUPE will hold a series of seminars on the theme of libertarian politics and theory. With the collapse of state socialism, the unseemly decline of social democracy, and with the devolving of liberalism into a narrow politics of security, we believe it is high time to turn to political heresies like anarchism, left-libertarianism and autonomist Marxism, which have existed until now on the margins of more recognized political traditions. With the unprecedented deployment and expansion of state power and surveillance post-9/11, and with the symptomatic crisis of legitimacy experienced by representative party politics, we think it is important and timely to investigate alternative sites of the political – the autonomous and anti-systemic social movements and activist networks which have proliferated across the global horizon in recent years. The series will focus on different ways of thinking about individual and collective liberty, difference and equality, as well as political identities, practices, modes of organization, action and democracy outside the state order.

This seminar series will explore related themes of: anarchist theory, utopian thought, cosmopolitanism, the politics of direct action, new social movements, social liberty, autonomous politics, piracy and biopolitics, and continental radical political philosophy. It will bring together a series of experts and thinkers from different disciplines – Politics, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Policy – who are all moved in some way by the libertarian impulse.

The seminars will be held on Tuesday evenings 6-8pm in the Senior Common Room (Level 2 RHB), Goldsmiths. Drinks will be provided, and everyone is invited. The program is as follows:

Autumn Term
6 October – Professor Kevin McDonald (Sociology, Goldsmiths): 'Between autonomy and vulnerability: grammars of action and experience in movements today'

13 October – Dr. David Graeber (Anthropology, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

10 November – Dr. Carl Levy (Politics, Goldsmiths): ‘Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism’

17 November – Dr. Simon Griffiths (Politics, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

1 December – Professor Gianni Vattimo (Philosophy, Turin): Title TBC, Venue TBC

Spring Term
19 January – Dr. Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths): ‘Freedom, Claustrophobia and Colonisation: Lessons from the Anarchist Geography of Elisee Reclus’

2 February – Dr. Ruth Kinna (Politics, Loughborough): ‘William Morris: Time & Utopia’

9 February – Dr. Nicola Montagna (Criminology, Middlesex): Title TBC

2 March – Amedeo Policante (Politics, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

16 March – Dr. Saul Newman (Politics, Goldsmiths): Booklaunch: ‘The Politics of Postanarchism’