No Useless Leniency

Refusal of Work

2012-01-29T06:41:00.000-08:00

Leopoldo Lugones's short story 'Yzur' (from his 1906 collection Strange Forces) is a tale premised on the idea that monkey's have refused language so they will not be forced to work. The narrator of the story evolves a theory that this initial refusal has led to a degeneration in monkeys, and he aims to demonstrate this by returning one to speech. He buys the animal Yzur from the circus and proceeds to his experiment.

Using methods to treat deaf-mutes the narrator laboriously tries to encourage the development of speech through physical manipulation and a system of association of vowels with food treats. This initial process takes three years and no word is uttered. What does happen is the monkey develops a contemplative sensibility, and the tendency to cry.

The narrator becomes more and more frustrated, deciding that Yzur can speak but is choosing not to. This is reinforced when the cook tells him the monkey has spoken a few words (although the cook can't remember all the words, only bed and pipe). The next day the narrator, convinced the monkey is ironically taunting him, beats the creature violently and the monkey only sheds tears in silence.

Yzur then falls terribly ill, and the narrator desperately tries to save him. This ilness seems to humanise Yzur, but still he does not speak. The lessons continue, beginning with 'I am your master' or 'you are my monkey', but the monkey is now in decline to death.

The narrator speculates that the refusal to speak is the result of an 'intellectual suicide' that is 'petrified in the animal', from that long distant refusal of labour. He thinks man had persecuted these creatures, enslaving them in the ancient past, until they decided 'to break all advanced connections with the enemy.' 'Thus, their act of mortal dignity: to take sanctuary, as an ultimate measure of salvation, in the darkness of their animality.'

Yzur finally enters his death throes, remaining faithful to the ancient vow that refused speech, but at the final moment of death he draws the narrator close and murmurs 'Water, master. Master, my master ...'

In Spanish the play is 'Amo', which means master or as a conjugated verb I love. Lugones, who passed from socialism to fascism in his politics, inhabits the usual tropes of racism (we might also recall the teaching scene from Robinson Crusoe). The monkey is a failure to develop, a degeneration through the refusal of work, but one who still has the same capacities as humans (or, for the narrator, degenerate humans). Also, the monkey seems to taunt or refuse the strange scientific drive of the narrator that, typically, results in violence. Gwen Kirkpatrick notes Lugones own time as an Inspector of Schools... The positivism and modernism of Lugones are typically cast in equivocal light in this story, with its final enigmatic concession.

What we also have is the trace of the refusal of labour and slavery, and the implied 'hominisation' that takes place at the intersection of speech, labour, servitude. Unsuprisingly one of Borges's favourite stories, Yzur is an enigmatic fable that deserves to belong an anthology of stories about labour...

Adventures in the Land of the (Imaginary) Empirical Working-Class

2012-01-17T05:41:00.000-08:00

Alberto Toscano has pointed out the danger of possibilities of condescension built into the splitting of the ‘Idea of the Proletariat’ (Kantian in Lyotard) from the empirical working-class for the ultra-left. The failure of the latter to ‘measure up’ to the former can license snobbery and dismissal, a problem that can be dated to Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (following Stathis Kouvelakis). I wanted to write of a classical instance of this risk I found in HG Wells The War of the Worlds. Of course, Wells’s socialism was ‘scientific’ and had its own ‘peculiarities’, which could account for the element of ‘condescension’, nevertheless the example is worth analysing.

The scene takes place in Chapter Seven, after the Martian occupation of colonisation of the area around London. The narrator, despairingly trying to return to his wife, encounters a ‘man on Putney hill’ – a soldier he had met earlier who had managed to survive a Martian attack.

At first the narrator is impressed with the soldier’s lucid analysis of the state of the situation, as it seems the Martians have developed flying machines - “Aren’t you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.” The soldier goes on to sketch the likely future:

‘So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the best and storing us in cages and things. That’s what they will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven’t begun on us yet.’

Of course, the implicit allegory is not just with the Martians as colonisers, but also as a form of class rule – after all they vampirically drain the blood of humans for food (‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Marx).

The soldier sketches a situation in which the upper- and middle-classes will form happy collaboration in this situation of subservience: ‘Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad after a bit.’

Instead, in the future resistance, ‘If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck ‘em away. They ain’t no further use.’ Hence, the working-class will lead the resistance to the Martians and to these 'happy collaborators' (ie the complacent middle class).

This is cast in eugenic terms as well, as the resistance will have to go literally underground: ‘We’re not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.’ The ‘tame’, meanwhile, ‘in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid – rubbish!’ (hence The Time-Machine). Eventually, one these ‘able-bodied, clean-minded men’ will gain control of one of the Martian machines and then ‘Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that? … And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."

Impressed as he is the narrator is soon disillusioned by the man’s actual behaviour. He is digging a pointless tunnel from the cellar of the house he is hiding in to the sewers, when he could just enter the sewers. Also, he has proceeded very slowly, and so the narrator ‘had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers.’ In fact, the man is lazy – ‘Oh, one can’t always work’ – and taken-up with drinking champagne and Thames-side burgundy. The narrator ‘resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London.’

Addendum on Affirmationism: 'The Pure Tone Drips with Positivity'

2012-01-17T04:48:00.001-08:00

Re-reading Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity and came across this quote, which captures rather better than I did the dual sense of 'affirmation' that runs together existence with the good:

'Simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing. It is guaranteed in the protection of the double sense of the positive: as something existent, given, and as something worthy of being affirmed. Positive and negative are reified prior to living experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation.' (21)

There is much I could, and probably should, unpack from this. One thread is that although I vectored affirmationism through Nietzsche, we could also do so through Heidegger and Heideggereanism. Adorno's (and Benjamin's) scepticism concerning the fundamentally abstract nature of the phenomenological 'concrete' resonates with its affirmation of the existent and its refusal or demarcation of negativity (obviously complicated in the case of Heidegger through his reference to 'Nichts', but still capable of critique as a reification of the negative). This would also have implications for reference to the 'concrete' that derive from phenomenology, especially in the delimitation of negation.

Our Friends in the North: Alex Niven's Folk Opposition

2011-11-19T03:29:00.001-08:00

Alex Niven's Folk Opposition is a provocative, timely, and moving work. Provocative due to its unabashed endorsement and affirmation of 'folk' or regional identity against callous neoliberalism, timely due to the recent 'resonance' of populism in the US and elsewhere, and moving because if its recourse to sentiment and collectivity in an attempt to articulate a new politics. As he puts it in his preface:

Even without taking into account the vast inequalities that exist on a global scale, it is clear that we are living in an age of profound anti-egalitarianism and loneliness. In our own country [the UK], there is an underworld of suffering lurking beneath a surface-world of consumerist fantasy and lifestyle myths. The essential assertion of the following essay is that the best way to counteract this climate of negativity and radical privacy is through a socialism that is founded in the extraordinary potential of the ordinary, the populist, the community level, the everyday, a socialism that derives its identity from the belief that we are better off in teams than we are as isolated individuals.

It also resonates oddly for me because while Alex Niven valorises the oppositional potentialities in North-East England, notably in the pairing of T. Dan Smith's problematic civic modernism and Basil Bunting's regional poetic modernism, I come from the 'negative' region - Essex. From Thatcherite shock-troopers to TOWIE, Essex is often tracked as the 'dark heart' of neoliberalism, coupled to the useful ability to condescend and project this onto a 'working class'/Eastend community (and creating a remarkable imaginary geography of 'Essex' in the process). Certainly Niven does not invoke this stereotype and it is one that could easily be disputed, but it offers a strange displaced place (now I live here), to reflect on critical regionalism.

The problem that this book responds to, I think, is the one described by Theorie Communiste as the 'end of programmatism', that is the collapse, under the twin pressures of capitalist attack and workers' refusal, on the 'mediating' functions that affirmed workers' identity: unions, state-socialism, social democracy and the 'Fordist compact'. While TC regard this 'cycle' of the affirmation of the proletariat as passed and now replaced by new forms of struggle that 'jump' to the immediacy of abolishing proletarian identity, Niven argues that we can re-affirm and reconstruct this 'affirmative' resistance through new populist articulations that draw on the remains and remnants of programmatism.

The appeal of this argument, including to myself, is that it seems to avoid the potential risk of merely ratifying defeat as the ground of new forms of struggle, and of the linked danger of simply dismissing the 'limits' of past forms of struggle. It also has the benefit of trying to work through the relation of the empirical working class to the idea of the proletariat (or other political form of left agency), while avoiding condescension and hostility to that actually-existing working class (a danger in certain forms of ultra-leftism pointed out by Alberto Toscano). Hence its relation to Owen Jones' Chavs, as both struggle against the toxic and vile discourse of hostility to working class people that permeates British society.

Its obvious difficulty is that these 'remnants' seem insufficient to galvanise a new politics, and might fall into the problematic forms of populism that Niven is careful to recognise and try to distinguish his work from. Also, TC-style arguments imply, correctly I think, that the narrowed past forms of class identity cannot respond or reply to the dispersion and mutation of 'proletarian' identity (or anti-identity). This could also be linked to the difficulties in characterising an 'elite', and the often-discussed problems of populism leading to political simplification.

At a more local level I would also note that although the book analyses how Folk music, in the form on 'nu-folk', could be used to legitimate neo-liberalism there is less on the 'uses' of Folk music as oppositional resource. Although I myself only recently encountered this, and I'm no expert at all in Folk, we could consider the career of Hamish Henderson (described by Patrick Wright in the LRB - unfortunately in a subscribers only article). Communist militant, folk musician, and articulator of an explicitly Gramscian politics of the national-popular, this suggests precedents (and the problems they encountered) that could have been considered by Niven (or, as this is an essay, might be considered in a longer work).

In fact, this opens a more problematic history for this kind of articulation, vectored from Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn to Billy Bragg's The Progressive Patriot, via the Left's attempt to wrest nationalism from Thatcherism in the work of Tom Nairn and others. This envy of the 'motivational power' of patriotism/nationalism (similar arguments exist around religious radicalism) is obviously risky, as the reclamation can lead easily to the 'affirmation' of national belonging and exclusivity, even if cast in terms of 'better' values. Niven's critical regionalism is, I think, very alive to this risk (largely through valorising a 'working-class modernism' that is both internationalist and regional), and as the case of Hamish Henderson demonstrates it is not impossible to combine defence of certian regional values and identities with communism (or left politics), without falling into nostalgia or exclusion.

We could also raise the question of the 'monumental positivity' of the English working-class pointed out by Perry Anderson in 1964, countering Hoggart and others. Again, the reflection on the relation of positivity to negativity in the formation and destruction of class identity might involve more consideration of the complex relation between these terms. In fact, the rush to negation might need to be reconsidered within and against and the dissolutive effects of capital, as much as the rush to affirmation.

Niven is careful in his attempt to avoid these traps, even if the discussion of alternative bases of 'affirmation' is (necessarily) fragmentary and tentative. That said, I think this book is essential to a debate and to thinking about the forms of socialism that are too-often immediately considered 'out-of-date' and, as Carl semi-mischieveously noted, form a counter-proposition to 'accelerationist' forms of thinking (left or right) which declare farewell to an idea that they often never had much time for.

Strategic Melancholia: an Ultra-Left Disorder?

2011-11-14T08:03:00.001-08:00

Presented at ‘Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle’, Historical Materialism Eighth Annual Conference (10-13 November 2011)

There is an existent literature on communist melancholia that takes as its focus the ‘working through’, or grieving, of the loss of ‘actually-existing socialism’ (as it used to be called) post-1989 – often summarised as ‘Ostalgie’. What concerns me here are not the pathologies, or promises, of this process, but rather the fate of the ultra-left, for whom there is little or nothing to mourn at all in the ending of what they usually prefer to see as a ‘state-capitalist’ detour. By ultra-left, an admittedly unsatisfactory designation, I am broadly referring to those traditions that Lenin notoriously condemned as ‘infantile disorders’, but in particular to the critical articulations of these currents in the 1960s and 1970s that tried to develop a non-Statist and often non-party form of communism that could remedy the failings of the existing worker-identified forms of socialism or communism. While these traditions might find little to mourn in the demise of the ‘communist bloc’, European social democracy, and various other instantiations of so-called socialism, they too have their own forms of mourning and melancholia. These metaphorical ‘disorders’ afflict the ultra-left in terms of its own nostalgia for non-capitalist forms of life – notably for the forms of the artistic and political avant-garde, certain ways of life (what we might call, borrowing from Badiou, ‘proletarian aristocratism’), and past forms of radical struggle.

Crucial to this sense of melancholia is an analysis of the tendency of capitalism to a ‘totalitarian’ dominance. In fact, this is implicit in the analysis of actually-existing socialism as an instance of ‘detour’, or capitalist cunning of reason, that operates as a form of ‘primitive’ or original capitalist accumulation. The interpretation of capitalism as the dominant horizon implies the collapse of competing power blocs for a less differentiated conception of a strongly singular process of capitalist dominance. This tendency is often vectored through Marx’s analysis of real subsumption, often taken as a periodising hypothesis, which implies the subsumption of labour and life to the internal benefit of capitalism itself. It can also be linked to the analysis of real abstraction, which implies the attenuation and hollowing-out of all forms of life under the impact of the commodity form.

To take a canonical instance of this kind of analysis, one indebted to Debord and Lukács, we could consider Fredric Jameson’s statement from his ‘Postmodernism’ essay (this from the version auspiciously published in 1984):

Examples could be multiplied and are familiar I should imagine: on the explicitly ultra-left we have Debord’s concept of the ‘integrated spectacle’ (on which more below), and Jacques Camatte’s notion of Capital as ‘Community’; beyond that, we could include Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘totally-administered world’, Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional society’ and, at the extreme, Baudrillard’s deliberately hyperbolic ‘extermination of the real’.

This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way: one is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious.

The tension faced by ultra-left theorisations lies between this analysis of the horizontal and vertical dominance of capital and their hopes for the recomposition of revolutionary forces ‘within and against’ the forms of capital and its ‘licensed’ opposition. It is easily possible to see how this tension might collapse into ‘full-blown’ melancholia, in which the receding possibilities of escape from capitalism leave us with the melancholic contemplation of what we have lost. In fact, it is exactly this position that Jacques Rancière identifies as ‘left-wing melancholy’, which implies that we are ‘absorbed into the belly of the beast’ through recuperation of our every act of resistance. What I want to dispute is Rancière’s sweeping dismissal of such critiques as inevitably condemned to this paralysing form of melancholia.

Strategic Melancholia

What I want to suggest here is that there is a possibility for inhabiting strategic melancholia as an imperative, rather than as a state to which we are condemned. To articulate this admittedly unlikely seeming possibility I first want to turn to Walter Benjamin’s remarks on melancholia in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1926). Obviously Benjamin attracted and attracts charges of melancholia and pessimism, but rather than add to that litany I am more interested in his rehabilitation of a baroque thinking of mourning and melancholia, vectored through the figures of the intriguer, courtier and tyrant. This vectoring already suggests a strategic dimension to this supposed pathology, and the possibility of a political reading of these states.

Benjamin’s remarks on mourning and melancholia are enigmatic certainly, but also suggestive. He writes that: ‘Mourning is the state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in the form of a mask, and derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it.’ In a typically baroque and Benjaminian paradox we see that the ‘revival’ of the world takes the form of the mask. This contemplative relation suggests the haut distance associated with high power-politics of the court, and the usual tropes of politics as game or theatrical spectacle. Here ‘engagement’ takes the form of analytic distance. Benjamin goes on to suggest that: ‘For all the wisdom of the melancholic is subject to the nether world; it is secured by immersion in the life of creaturely things, and it hears nothing of the voice of revelation.’ Again, we can see a dialectical doubling of immersion and withdrawal – immersion in the ‘creaturely’ (and here one could embark on an Agambenian reading) secularised in the withdrawal from any revelation.

There is, in this dialectics of mourning and melancholy (which are not distinguished along the lines Freud had made famous ), a politics that works on and with the feelings of detachment and disgust with the ‘empty world’. Benjamin notes that: ‘Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in contemplation, in order to redeem them.’ Now, knowledge is prioritised over the worldly and action (what we could call the ‘Hamlet-complex’), but this self-absorbed and disabused stance transforms contemplation into the act of ‘embrace’ and the promised of redemption. We could recall here Benjamin and Adorno’s later reflections on the transit through the ‘dead’ or hostile bourgeois ‘object-world’, as the site of intervention and resistance. The melancholic moves away, detaches themselves from the world, in the usual clichés of distancing and abandonment, but is also in the world, immersed in the destructive element of dead objects and creaturely life.

In both instances, and we could say dialectically, these extremes take the measure of pathology: too far from the world or too immersed in it, which might echo the fate of the ultra-left between the micrological sect and sudden world-historical instantiation. And yet, against prophets of the happy medium, dialectical thought proceeds by extremes. Hence the strategy of melancholia at once takes the distance that treats the world as a series of masks, as subject to knowledge, and immerses itself in the embrace of dead objects and creaturely things for the possibility of redemption. Benjamin recasts the usual antinomies of theory and practice, probed at length by Lukács, into a new sharpened contradiction.

The Case of Debord

I want to briefly explicate this possibility through the work of Guy Debord, who has regularly been charged with pessimism and poetic melancholia, not least for his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988). His articulation of the ‘integrated spectacle’ in that work combines the worst features of the ‘diffuse’ spectacle of market societies (archetypally the USA) and the ‘concentrated spectacle’ (state socialism, in particular the USSR), in the Italian misery of market plus manipulation (one not ended today). It seems to leave no way out. Debord concluded: ‘When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part.’ Debord would add, in his Panegyric, ‘One cannot go into exile in a unified world.’

This exemplary instance of the description of capitalist totalitarianism is also paired with Debord’s aristocratic nostalgia and melancholic recall of what has passed away due to the horizontal and vertical penetration of capitalism into the totality of the life-world. In Panegryic Debord, who would commit suicide due to the effects of an alcohol-related illness, states:

The majority of wines, almost all spirits, and every one of the beers whose memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes – first on the world market and then locally – with the progress of industry as well as the disappearance or economic re-education of the social classes that had long remained independent of large industrial production, and so too of the various regulations that now prohibit virtually anything that is not industrially produced. The bottles, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail provides the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be, not drink them.

He concludes: ‘Never in a drunkard’s memory would one have fathomed that drinks could disappear before the drinker.’

We could multiply instances of this melancholy nostalgia, from laments on the destruction of the Paris of his youth, to the sardonic reflections from his film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978) on the misery of the food and the lifestyles of the servants of the spectacle, who are even reduced to the state of filling their own cars with petrol. More seriously, Debord’s representation of the actions of the Situationist International through images of the charge of the light brigade or Custer’s last stand, suggest an ethics of heroic failure, in which doomed avant-gardes pass away in the waters of time. Debord’s final conclusion, in Comments, seems to echo Jameson’s:

Beyond a legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continual reduction and, moreover, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle’s requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.

And yet, Debord puts an audacious spin on this embrace of defeat. Taking up Marx’s riposte to Proudhon that history advances by the ‘bad side’ Debord argues, in In Girum, that the negativity of the project of the Lettrists and Situationists, his two groups, went so far as provoking spectacular society to produce itself as the negative image of their utopias. This ‘immersion’ in negativity consumes the consumers, sapping and eroding their own forms of domination and satisfaction from within. We might add, in baroque style, turning the empty world into the very masks that it offered as sources of pseudo-satisfaction.

Debord himself was notably obsessed with the baroque, and especially with the arts of conspiracy and the strategic conception of politics. The difficulty, which is obvious, is that although he might have conceived of his project as a negativity sapping forms from within without the revival of non-Leninist revolutionary politics the result could simply be a worsening ‘bad new’. Debord, at least, refused the possibility of revelling in this capitalist nihilism, but the alternative – melancholic contemplation – seems to result in auto-dissolution and self-satisfaction.

The Experience of Defeat

What we can see in Debord’s work is the replication of the tension of the ultra-left position: between the risk of a slide into ‘full-blown’ melancholia, in which the only hope lies in the utter misery of capitalist ‘life’ that would lead to desperate revolt, and a strategic melancholia that might offer critical reflection on the experiences of defeat and the possibilities of recomposition. The tension lies between the analysis of capital as totalitarian dominance and the possibility of a strategic analysis of the actualities or rationalities that might be reworked from it. The difficulty here lies in the concept of strategy itself, which can easily be remain at the level of manipulation and even voluntarism if not actually connected to the terrain of capitalism. Hence, we could contemplate the fate of certain ultra-left formulations, like that of Jacques Camatte’s, which tend towards a stand-off between a totalitarian capitalism and the last remaining traces of ‘human community’. Such an analysis converges with primitivist and anti-civilisation positions, as the better we trace the mechanisms of dominance the more they extend themselves, even into the past, leaving a desperate melancholia which traces the ‘fall’ further and further back into the past (the Neolithic agricultural revolution, the origin of language itself, etc.)

Strategic melancholia, then, is not precisely a ‘position’ one can stably inhabit. It can fall into this melancholic contemplation of capitalist despotism and recall of the few remaining traces of non-capitalist life. The other risk is the overestimation of strategic possibility that celebrates each new instance of revolt as the sign of coming revolution. The difficulty lies in maintaining a strategic distance and engagement that can take the measure of capitalist domination, can recognise the misery of the ‘bad new’, and articulate strategic points of disruption or attack. This, we might say, is a problem we all face. The merit, I want to suggest, of ‘strategic melancholia’ lies in its ability to grasp the effects of capital without false consolation. The difficulty lies in not falling into cynicism, despair, or false elation.

Bye, Bye, Mr Critique?

2011-10-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Critique is, today, not in good favour. On the one side, we have the neo-Nietzschean and neo-Spinozan currents of ‘high’ theory, which regard critique as fatally limited by being bound to what it negates and hence unable to accede to a true creation that would exceed and disrupt the mechanisms of capital and the State. Despite differences and conflict – the so-called ‘theory wars’ – there is surprising common agreement that critique is fundamentally passé, to be replaced by an emphasis on the excessive, the evental, and the ecstatic (parsed in very different forms). In the place of critique stands the affirmation of uncontrollable and unlimited powers. On the other side, we have the historicist and culturalist tendencies of the humanities and social sciences, which stress complexity and density against the supposed ‘reductions’ of critique. Now, cultural depth and fragmentation limit any ‘global’ or ‘totalising’ impulse, with the alternative of the local, the micro, the fragment, the detail, and all the mappings and connections of the shards of the social. In the place of critique stands the affirmation of the micrological and the density of the world. Too specific or too baggy, critique, it is claimed, can neither encompass the powers of creation nor the density of the life-world.

The squeezing out of critique between these forms of affirmation leaves it reified into the reductive, the negative, the old-fashioned, the miserable, the shabby and down at heel, and all that doesn’t belong to the glossy new times, despite the fact that the new itself is well and truly tarnished. Critique is characterised as mordant and miserable, and the reasons for this are conveniently forgotten. Those who cling to critique now seem like Le Carré’s Smiley’s People (that ironic name): relics from another time, fighting old battles, remembering too much, not able to forget, to move on, trapped in a theoretical ‘cold war’, unable to say ‘bye, bye, Mr Critique’. Instead, the slogan of the present moment might be that ascribed to Foucault – a ‘happy positivism’.

Happy are the victors, that’s to be expected: the sanctioning of things as they are in the faux wonderment of the reticular tracing of the ‘richness’ of the present; revisionary ‘complexifications’ that dissolve revolutions and popular movements into elite manipulations, the world of statecraft, and the refined manners of our betters; awed contemplation of the infinite depth to be found in objects and the ‘real world’; the inexhaustible creativity manifest in endless subversions and the mimicry of power; the micro-games, the formations of cultural capital, the inverted snobberies that praise the people as long as they don’t intrude too far onto the stage of history; the techno-fetishist analyses of the baroque instruments of military and financialised control, as well as that of the desperate counter-gestures of the weak; everywhere depth, density, complexity, richness, novelty, creativity, in a litany that becomes shriller as its contents become thinner.

Less explicable are the claims to happiness by the defeated. The re-articulations of radical theory, however, take on a stridently joyous tone of monumental construction, metaphysical daring, and political commencement. Joy, definitely taking on Nietzschean and Spinozan notes, is the mood we are supposed to adopt. Of course, the infinite flexibility of such ‘joy’ – given its form in the jouissance that absorbs and alchemises pain and pleasure, that takes negativity into superior processes of dissipation and excess – strikes again for an unlimited power that encompasses and affirms nearly all affects. Of course, melancholy notes are also struck, but again these tend to a new excessive affect that refuses the quotidian processes of mourning. Grand pleasure or micro-pleasures, joy unconfined, even the return of the revelling in catastrophe, only pleasure seems worthwhile.

Perhaps the irony of the moment is that, while Nietzsche is not as often invoked figure these days, this disappearance is the sign of his absorption into our very common sense. The Nietzschean suspicion of critique as mere disguised Christian moralising, the Nietzschean invocation of the will-to-power and the eternal recurrence, the Nietzschean attention to genealogy, rank, and the historical stratifications of the world and, not least, Nietzschean pathos, shorn of the more distressing elements of hierarchy, heroism and the martial, pervade the theoretical articulations of the present. A decaffeinated Nietzsche, to borrow Žižek’s phrase, although there are still some around touting variants of a fully-caffeinated Nietzsche as well.

Critique, then, seems at once too grand a concept, capturing too much, reducing too much, for the prophets of piecemeal social science and, at the same time, too limited a concept, unable to break the shackles of the present, for the taste of the theorists of excess. It is aligned with the misery of the present, with the resigned acceptance of the ‘bad new’ (although I would add that this is better than simple despair or, even less tolerable, a vile exaltation in just how bad the new can be). What has broken the possibility of critique is the waning faith in the uncomfortable space of embedded rationalities and actualities that cut across narratives of defeat and recommencement. The possibility of the rehabilitation of critique would seem to lie in the capacity to break its reifications and to attend to this strategic space.

Capitalist crisis, as Lukács remarked, reveals the unity of the capitalist system, but it appears as disintegration. This effect would seem to reopen the possibility of critique. Where once ‘capitalism’ was a dirty word – flagged at most in the nominalism of capitalisms, or the euphemism of ‘market societies’ – the effect of capitalist crisis has made its ideologues all-too happy to admit its globalising and totalising existence as an object to be saved. The global and total is readmitted as the true site and space of capital, as the untranscendable horizon of our moment. And yet the disintegrative effects of capitalism seem, now, to make ungraspable any ‘rational’ possibilities, any actualities in the midst of disintegration. The big banks, which for Lenin promised to be the basis for socialism once the capitalist integument was removed, do not seem redeemable at all, except in the cause of restarting capitalism and inaugurating a new round of creative destruction.

Irrationality was once a word once negatively associated with capitalism by the left and then, certainly in the moment of the 60s, more often reclaimed or reworked into a positive valence, now it seems to return as the hallmark of a disintegrating capitalism. What is missing is the possibility of a counter-rationality, the possibility of critique taking the measure of capital, rather than invocations of counter-sublimes or new radicalised ‘immeasurabilities’.

The rehabilitation of critique, it seems to me, lies in the capacity to break its own reifications through the attention to the strategic dimension of critique that operates in that uncomfortable space of the ‘bad new’. The key difficulty here is that of the agency of critique, as the fading of critique seems to be correlated with the forms and agencies that seemed to incarnate its historical function. The thesis of the ‘end of programmatism’ articulated by Theorié Communiste, and implicitly widespread, is that the end of identification with ‘workers’ identity’ and the political forms associated with this, should usher in a new disidentification, and new forms of radicalism not bound to those ‘old’ forms. In fact, however, the politically-engineered collapse of those forms has not produced much evidence of a ‘rebound’, and much of the affirmationism of the present either revels in this fact, promises a new radicalised alternative detached entirely from the conditions of the present, or both. A more nuanced and dialectical understanding of the ‘end of programmatism’, attuned to the fact of the political offensive of neoliberalism and of what persists in the ‘remnants’ of programmatism, is more effective than simply resigning ourselves to its defeat as the hidden sign of true progress. It also attunes us to the complexity and strategic possibilities embedded in those previous forms, as well as tracing out the necessary elements of engagement with the ‘bad new’ of workers’ identity, including the persistent identification with the working class.

The question of agency and institutional forms remains problematic of course, not least as the remnants of those forms come under continuing and sustained assault. Critique, at least as a ‘theoretical practice’, cannot be expected to simply solve this problem; if it were that simple then matters would be considerably easier and more hopeful. Instead, I would argue, the necessity of critique still lies in its probing of the conditions of the present and, to use Gramscian terms, in the continuing and unwavering critique of the ideological ‘common sense’ of domination. What I have elsewhere called the ‘grammar of neoliberalism’ – its penetration into the thinking of opposition, of counter spaces, its reuse of tropes of care, community, and implicit privatisation of personal and state functions that resist the disembedding effects of the market – must be critiqued, as an immediate task.

The invocations of radical imagination, of the valence of utopia, of transcendental ‘ideas of communism’, and so on, seem to me to forgo or forget this labour. Motivational as they may be the effect of such receding moments, whose empirical instantiations are often questionable or vague, is to offer false consolation. What they promise is the affirmation of a radical negativity or excess that never deigns to consider the forms and structures of instantiation and persistence. The momentary or the exceptional is valorised at the expense of a strategic thinking of maintaining and implementing. They perform a holding function, certainly, but one that threatens to recede into the merely utopian and hortatory. The alternative to imposed ‘happiness’, to demands for the requisite positivity, and to the outbidding power of joy, is not enforced misery or cultivated unhappiness. Breaking the reifications of critique, as nihilist or elitist destruction, or as the mordant refusal to ‘get on side’, requires that we do not accept ‘things as they are’, including the ‘good news’ of evangelical political promises. A certain stubbornness, a certain courage, a certain realism (which would not fall in its disabused cynicism), seem to me necessary virtues, to use another unfashionable word, of any future critique.

monocausal explanations

2011-10-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

In a piece on festschrifts for the LRB (subscriber only) - in this case for once left-leaning historians (or two of these) - Susan Pedersen notes they exemplify 'how through some opaque process of affiliation and acculturation, historians defending empiricist methods and resisting monocausal explanations float to the top of elite institutions' (32).*

Now, the process might not be completely opaque (irony is probably well-intended) as they initially seem to have gone to these institutions ('All did Dphils at Oxford') and, we could add, the obvious explanation of class politics. Complexity is for those who can afford and enjoy it, it speaks to a certain experience of that fraction, hence the plumpes denken ('crude thought') of 'monocausal explanation' (read 'Marxism'), seems so unutterably vulgar, yet so obvious to those who don't share that 'richness'.

Of course, the targeting of particular strategic moments (revolutions, popular dissent, etc.) by these 'complexifiers' indicates a precise awareness of the stakes involved, as does a 'practical materialism' about careers / academic power structures / institutions etc. Hence 'monocausalism' is both accepted as a truth and distantiated or diavowed precisely on the 'material' basis of class/social position.

* the sentence continues with this slightly snide, and typical, remark 'while those on less elevated perches stud their prose with the latest theoretical terms and pose and prophets of dissent.' There is something more to be written on the theorist as parvenu (to use Gilberto Perez's negative characterisation). Here the implication of posturing ('pose') seems to cut against academic ability and sincerity, staging theory, in Bourdieu style, as a power-game to seize academic reward. No doubt some do this, although I can't recommend 'high' theory as a tactic, but the pseudo-sociological explanation rests on that snobbery identified by Ranciere - don't get above your station, don't try any fancy (foreign) ides, you're on the make for coming from the 'wrong' class fraction... etc.

Module Handbooks

2011-09-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Coincidental reading after induction, Peter Linebaugh scornfully noting 'the good old days':

At Columbia University on the Upper West Side of New York, the entering history student was faced with the Historiography course (History g6000x) taught by Peter Gay, the brilliant historian of the bourgeoisie. He compared us as captives. Our problems, as students, he wrote in a brochure for each of us, were Laziness and Stupidity. ‘You are joining a profession in which competition is tough, and life is hard’. ‘In the months to come’, he warned, ‘you will hear, and perhaps tell, stories of injustice and neglect, but it might just be that not all of these stories are true.’

The Bonnot Gang avec The Ant Hill Mob

2011-09-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

After noting the image I used for the spaghetti communism post, this avec sprang to mind, perhaps suggesting a restart for Evan's blog.

Avec

Coda to Spaghetti Communism

2011-09-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

This is a coda to my piece on the Spaghetti Western at Mute, and was largely very kindly provided by Steve Wright (author of Storming Heaven) and Alberto Toscano. I should also mention this piece on violence, politics, and the spaghetti western which Steve drew to my attention.

We can trace the influence of the Spaghetti Western, and its close cousin the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, directly amongst the militants of the Italian ultra-left in the 1970s. This was, appropriately, a rather fraught and difficult negotiation. Stefano Lepri, a militant from the Roman section of Potere Operaio, recalls that ‘In 1968 we didn't have a lot of time for cinema … Some liked Once Upon a Time in the West, others considered it “escapist,” as the saying then went, and banal’. He goes on to mention various films across successive years, from The Bonnot Gang to Easy Rider and Queimada, and concludes:

But some, led by Rosati and Pace, had the courage to proclaim their preference for adventure films and to exalt Butch Cassidy ... Our favourite, more than anything else, was Vamos a matar, compañeros, the political spaghetti western by Sergio Corbucci, with Tomas Milian made up to look like Che Guevara, and Franco Nero, who many, starting with Morucci, began to imitate.

This ambiguity in taste is shown in a more comic light by an article from Rosso, published in 1975:

The perfect militant FIRMLY HATES western films in general, because they are American, individualistic, involving too many weapons (used outside a correct political line). The films of Sergio Leone are to be avoided in particular, because they are violent, with lots of explosions, and above all because the director does not sign progressive petitions. Peckinpah's films are rejected for similar reasons, because they are gory, they depict petty bourgeois characters and so are ambiguous, and in the last analysis right wing ... (trans. Steve Wright)

So, the irony is that the militants too found a certain discomfort in the populist political violence of the Spaghetti Western…

This is also true of the use of Mucchio Salvaggio (The Wild Bunch), as the name given to the group Primea Linea. In another instance resonant for the question of violence, Toni Negri replied to an article criticising him as a prophet of terrorism published in the New York Review of Books in 2002 by Alexander Stille. In his reply Negri noted:

When Stille cites phrases from my old books they are all butchered and taken out of context. For example, he cites the ominous sentence “No pity for our enemies!” but fails to say that it was clearly in my text an ironic citation from a Sergio Leone spaghetti western film.

Now the Spaghetti Western is used as a defence against the charge of advocating violence.

For Badiou completists

2011-08-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

Two quotes, taken from personal letters, and included in Emmanuel Terray's Marxism and "Primitive Societies", trans. Mary Klopper (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Le Marxisme devant les societies "primitives" (Maspero, 1969). From the essay 'Morgan and Contemporary Anthropology' (5-92).

'In fact, Morgan's "structuralism," like that of his successors, was based on a positivist conception of science in which, to quote Alain Badiou:

The theory is the model, experimentation consists of isolating the empirical correlate which materializes the model; the experimental apparatus [must allow] for a separating effect exhibiting an approximate realization of the form.

(p.38)'

and

'Alain Badiou believes that Marx, on the contrary, believed that:

It is impossible to set a theoretical conception of history against real history defined by its very complexity - its empirical impurity. In Marxist epistemology the complexity is constructed according to the concepts of a theory. . . . It is the proper task of a theory of history to give an account of the nature of real society.

(p.39)

Obviously, Badiou in his more Althusserian moment, but I'll leave parsing/explanation to the real experts...

The Proletarian and the Poet (or dig your own grave)

2011-08-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

'Work is not and never will be glorious. The hole into which the worker sinks is not and never will be but the vain work of taking earth from here to place it there, even if it then means taking it back again: a worthless task whose only price is the universal equivalent, the everyday gold that is exchanged for bread. This is the ordinary cycle of daily descent into a tomb, from which, for simple survival, one is reborn each day. It is the cycle of production and reproduction, of births lapsing into anonymity, into a repetition aping a simple eternity, without fold [repli]; in short, everything that is encapsulated in the very name proletarian, and that strikes with derision any rituals designed for the consecration of work.' (32)

Ranciere, Mallarme: The Politics of the Siren

Le Bateau Ivre

2011-08-24T03:29:00.000-07:00

Take a trip

Anti-Marxist Vitalism

2011-06-24T04:32:00.000-07:00

Only, when the Socialist Government had begun giving the peasants bits of land, dividing up the big haciendas, Ezequial had been allotted a little piece outside the village. He would go and gather the stones there, and prepare to build a little hut. And he would break the earth with a hoe, his only implement, as far as possible, But he had no blood connection with this square allotment of unnatural earth, and he could not set himself into relations with it. He was fitful and diffident about it. There was no incentive, no urge.
DH Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent

Somewhat ironically I only read this novel due to its footnote mention in Badiou's The Century, but if you want anti-socialist vitalism it's the place to go. Also, don't forget the hilarious dismissal of female orgasm, and the 'man is a column of blood, woman a valley of blood' either...

The Passion for the Real - All the Way Down

2011-06-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

Regeneration of man through the red-hot iron. Plow up the old earth, tear down the old structure. Re-create life anew. And in all likelihood perish yourself.

Victor Serge, Conquered City

the art of crisis

2011-06-07T11:32:00.001-07:00

trailing through the October questionnaire on 'recessional art' (i.e. art in the wake of the financial crisis) I came across this by Andrew Witt and Nathan Crompton in their reply (Badiousian largely) to October:

'Debt to the situation translates into a sense of "responsibility," like the artist who today finds him/herself in the midst of capitalism in crisis - nothing new there! - and is compelled to make art out of a sense of pathos and guilt rather than affirmation.'

Of course this is, for them, a bad thing. It's not just deliberate perversity, although that may play a part, but what's so wrong about a sense of 'responsibility' (and why the scare quotes?) and making art out of a sense of pathos and guilt? Less in favour of pathos, but guilt would be fine. Also, capitalism in midst of crisis is nothing new, well not in the technical sense but isn't this a slightly larger crisis? (perhaps leave this to Paul Mattick).

Of course I've written at length critically about affirmation, but even if one is affirmative I think the unspoken obviousness that is implied here might need a little more justification. Simply to mention 'responsibility', 'pathos' or, even worse, 'guilt', is supposed to raise post-Nietzschean hackles like an inbuilt-reflex (never made the maudlin pathos of much of Nietzsche and Nietzschean - all heroic strength while complaining about being 'dragged down' by those evil Christian / socialist / anarchist masses...).

Irrational Exuberance: Capitalism and Rationality

2011-05-31T02:19:00.000-07:00

One of the 'asides' of the paper 'Measure against Power' that I'll be giving at 'Whose University?' (Goldsmiths 10 June) concerns a tendency to ascribe to capital and the State the powers of 'rationality' and so, by imputation, to ascribe 'irrationality' to resistance (by those promoting resistance).

In a qausi-Weberian or Foucauldian fashion 'measure' / counting etc. is taken as the function of repression, while the 'immeasurable' is the function of resistance. Certainly, this is a broad presentation of the problem, and I wouldn't want to deny a certain function of 'governmental rationality' at work, not least in creating or constituting the conditions of the 'market' - usually considered by the ideologues of the market as an emergent 'blind' rationality operating out of 'irrationality' (from Mandeville on). That said, I think this antinomy, and its posing, needs more interrogation.

This analysis I came across by Marcuse, from A Study on Authority, seems (despite Marcuse's image as prophet of irrationality) to capture rather better the forms of the problem:

As opposed to the rational, 'calculating' character of the Protestant-capitalist 'spirit' which is often all too strongly emphasized, its irrational features must be particularly pointed out. There lies an ultimate lack of order at the very root of this whole way of life, rationalized and calculated down to the last detail as an 'ideal type', this whole 'business' of private life, family and firm: the accounts do not, after all, add up - neither in the particular, nor in the general 'business'. (10)

Marcuse goes on to argue that this irrationality at the base is figured in the theological and philosophical, such as in the function of the terrible 'hidden God' for Calvinism. Our de-theologized version seems to incarnate this kind of function in terms of luck or fate, or in a kind of pseudo-Machieavellian capacity for fortuna. Obviously, today, bourgeois society embraces a 'logic' of chaos, flux and perpetual revolution, rather than a logic of rationalization, but the return to the antinomy of the Protestant ethic as ideology demonstrates, I think, our living in its pseudo-reversal.

In terms of the dialectic of rationality it is, perhaps, time to rehabilitate Marcuse's insight that 'society's material process of production has in many instances been rationalized down to the last detail - but as a whole it remains 'irrational'' (11), precisely because it blocks the realization of reason. In fact, as Alberto pointed out to me, we could also take this point through the path of Badiou - in his insistence that representation is not the reduction of some eternally rich prior state but an excess that requires our 'measurement' to bring it under critique.

Therefore, what I am suggesting, is a more critical analysis of the alignments of 'rationality', an unpicking of the 'irrationality' at the basis of the capitalist order, because that's the case, and that to impute 'rationality', emergent or otherwise, to capitalism risks blocking the true realization of rationality - not least in the forms of rationality embedded already through struggle.

Anal/yse: Godard's Weekend

2011-02-20T04:52:00.000-08:00

Anal/yse:
Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967)

‘A FILM FOUND ON A SCRAP-HEAP’
This is not only a film found on a scrap-heap, but we might say a film found on a dung-heap, considering its relentlessly ‘excremental vision’, a veritable scatological apocalypse. This is a ‘shit film’, quite literally as we will see.

The obvious reference is to Georges Bataille, the image ‘anal/yse’ appears before Corinne’s monologue – fantasy or nightmare or reality – of scenes which deliberately mimic the anal eroticism of Bataille’s 1928 novel Story of the Eye (which makes it to wikipedia’s cultural references for the novel), and we could also add the more esoteric reference that ‘Emily Brönte’ appears as a character in the film and in one of the ‘case studies’ in Bataille’s Literature and Evil is dedicated to her work. But, at the most general level, Godard adopts Bataille’s ‘heterological’ vision he articulated in the 1920s and 1930s of ‘an irruption of excremental forces’ (1985: 92) that void value. The revolution, for Bataille erupts from the ‘materialist bowels of proletarians’ (1985: 35), while class struggle, for Bataille and Godard, is an excremental apocalypse in which everything turns to shit.[1] Here the excremental is revolutionary, the apocalyptic crisis of the bourgeois order, although Godard casts this in the satirical form of cannibal revolutionaries, producing one last ingestion of the bourgeois order and voiding we don’t know what.

In fact, as Godard’s film registers, this ‘excremental vision’ is, however, split: we have the revolutionary anality of Bataille, in which the heterological forces open a re-enchantment and re-sacralisation of reality, but also the anality of capitalist production, with its cycles of digestion and voiding in ‘creative destruction’.

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) analyses this split vision. First, we have Jonathan Swift’s ‘excremental vision’ that reveals the anality of culture and the psyche, and Swift’s Menippean satire seems an obvious antecedent of Godard. In Brown’s words, ‘for Swift [scatological imagery] ... becomes the decisive weapon in his assault on the pretensions, the pride, even the self-respect of mankind.’ (1977: 179) And yet the revelation by Swift of the excremental core that wrecks human dignity is also the historical revelation of the anal economy of capitalism itself, as Eli Zaretsky notes: ‘Capitalism at root, Brown argued, was socially organized anality: beneath the pseudo-individuated genitality of early modern society, its driving force was literally the love of shit’ (2003), and the chapter on Weekend in the discussion between Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki on Godard is titled ‘Anal Capitalism’ (1998: 85-142).

If the excremental is under the sign of sacred then it displays the typical equivocation of the sacred: revolutionary or bourgeois? Terminal regression or re-birth? If the ‘driving force’ of capitalism is ‘the love of shit’ then this ‘driving force’ is appropriately figured in the equivocation of the status of the car, which in Weekend is both ‘treasured commodity’ and ‘worthless junk’ (Silverman, 1998: 89). The ‘weekend’ break from production leads to the heterological space of stasis, in which production is reversed into voiding, the traffic jam the blockage of this driving force, the indigestible moment of failed flow and the accumulation of the excremental. The famous long tracking shot of the traffic jam, as Brian Henderson points out, finds its future echo in the tracking shot of the car production-line in British Sounds (1970), and figures, again, this equivocal reversal of ‘value’. Anti-production and production change places, in the oscillation of excremental vitalism.

The equivocation of the ‘driving force’ of capitalism, the question whether this anal economy of incorporation, digestion, and excretion that Bataille traces can be derailed into an ecstatic and apocalyptic voiding, is redoubled in the moment of the scatological apocalypse. Again, we equivocate on the waste of a decomposing culture, and can ask is this ‘a nourishing decomposition’? (Badiou, 2007: 45) Is Godard’s vision of the termination of capitalism, and the re-birth of a new order, or merely mired in on the scrap-heap? In Swift’s words, will we find ‘Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung’? (‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, 1732). In what sense can this rotten core revealed by Godard surpass the capitalism it relentlessly anal-yses; are we left in the shit, or can this rot manure a new order? The turn of the screw Weekend applies is that we no longer have socialism or barbarism, but barbarism per se, but is this barbarism as the way to socialism? For Farocki, ‘there is the suggestion that under the thin veneer of this “civilization” beats the heart of a more affectively vital “barbarism.”’ (Farocki, 1998: 91) For Godard’s ‘revolutionaries’: ‘We can only overcome the horror of the bourgeoisie by even more horror.’ (Godard, 1972: 98) An excremental vitalism emerges, based on the ‘nourishing decomposition’ of capitalism, the revelation of ‘a disagreeable and terminal stagnation’ destroying ‘the prestige of industrial reality’ (Bataille, 1985: 92). This is the promise that ‘Weekend is not about the end of the world – it is simply about the end of our world.’[2] (Wood, 1972: 11) In this case one world ends in horror to give birth to a new world presumably without horror, although whether this horror will operate peacably as a vanishing mediator seems unlikely in the terms of the film. Ironically before the moment of May ’68 that would lead to its re-invigoration, in Godard’s film we have a kind of terminal vision of Badiou’s ‘passion for the real’ (Badiou, 2007) – the revelation of the real is the revelation of cannibal extinction. The dialectic in this ‘passion’ between voluntarist vitalism and historicist confirmation is ruptured in Godard’s film through a regression as ‘vitality’ detaches itself from history, and pulverises history into a mythic space of social degree-zero and auto-consumption.

If capitalism is all shit, if we have an ‘anal capitalism’ that levels all into general equivalence, then the end of everything is required in a final voiding. The apocalyptic tone is required prior to some ‘future’, a full decomposition to consume that rotting culture. Godard, as Silverman notes ‘launches an extended assault upon all forms of abstraction.’ (Silverman, 1998: 96) With abstraction, itself the organisation of levelling and equivalence through value, voided, we have what appears to be another abstraction of absolute barbarism. This voiding and levelling of abstraction takes its own revenge, as a kind of capitalist nihilism or exhaustion that turns the film once again into shit. The signs equivocate again, and the ‘liberation’ of the anal, of the ‘excremental forces’, is, to again quote Silverman, ‘not the utopian sexual liberation hailed by Hocquenghem thirty years ago, but the catastrophic end of all singularity. What we might call “anal capitalism” decrees the commensurability of “male” and “female,” but only by consigning both, along with Weekend itself, to the cosmic scrap heap.’ (1998: 111) The apocalypse reveals then not another revolutionary order, the film as gate to May ’68 which redeems its hippy-cannibal revolutionaries into the ‘good hippies’ of libidinal revolt, but watched again at the point of the voiding of the capitalist order in crisis, seems also to reveal a terminal levelling of capital itself.

Does the equivocation of satire have to be met with a full politicisation to escape the relentless dialectic of reversal between satire and object? Are we forced to depart from satire to depart from this intimate dependence of satire on what it satirises? For Godard Weekend was the last film before the collective experiment of political filmmaking the Dziga-Vertov Group. Writing in 1973 Thomas M. Kavanagh argues Godard’s turn to explicitly political and didactic cinema as the only possible response:

Few films declared their horror, their contempt for the Western bourgeoisie as explicitly and as unrelentingly as did Godard's Weekend, the work immediately preceding Le Gai Savoir. Yet the bourgeoisie adored it. In spite of some critics' outrage, this film remained eminently recuperable: it had the largest commercial success of all Godard's films. Denouncing a certain way of life, its viewing became one more obligatory ritual making up that way of life. Something more had to be done, some way had to be found to shortcircuit this embarrassing complicity with an audience he no longer sought to please. If a revolutionary film was to be made, if a film was actually to embody, rather than comfortably proclaim an absolute refusal of the status quo, it presupposed a radical reconsideration of what film is: a stepping outside of all conventions, even those of parody and satire. (Kavanagh, 1973: 52)

Recuperation, re-digestion, an anal biopolitical economy à la Salo beckons. The irrecuperable ‘foreign body’ becomes an object of jouissance, of self-disgust that returns to bourgeois narcissism. Revolution itself is circular: ‘There is even the familiar suggestion, rendered concretely in the film in terms of similarities and parallels in their rituals — eggs and fish between girls’ thighs – that the revolutionary society will be another formulation of the murderously bourgeois one we knew already.’ (Williams, 1971: 13) The exit is out of satire.

And yet the collapse of Godard’s political certainties, and those of his critics, re-locate the satire or parody of Weekend in our moment: the Weekend of crisis, the bursting of the bubble, abandonment of house and car as debt-loaded ‘hostile objects’ (Williams, 2011), and excremental or cannibal hostility that shapes the decomposing culture of capitalism. The impasse of Godard’s film was to be saved through political praxis, but the decomposition of capitalism and of that praxis makes the ‘levelling’ of Weekend if not ‘radically funny’, at least necessary again.

References
Badiou, A., 2007. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Oxford: Polity.

Bataille, G., 1985. Visions of Excess. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Brown, Norman O., 1977. Life Against Death. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Godard, J-L., 1972. Weekend / Wind from the East. London: Lorrimer Publishing.

Kavanagh, T. M., 1973. ‘Godard's Revolution: The Politics of Meta-Cinema’, Diacritics 3.2: 49-56.

Silverman, K. and H. Farocki, 1998. Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press.

Williams, C., 1971. ‘Politics and Production’, Screen 12.4: 6-24.

Williams, E. C. 2011. ‘Hostile Object Theory’, Mute.

Wood, R., 1972, ‘Godard and Weekend’, in Godard, 1972, pp.5-14.

Zaretsky, E., 2003. ‘Obituary: Norman O. Brown (1913-2002)’, Radical Philosophy 118.

Notes
[1] ‘In Weekend the class struggle is seen as a violent, anarchistic, apocalyptic clash rather than as a struggle between socialised forces.’ (Williams, 1971: 13).
[2] See also Wood’s rather touching remark: ‘The film postulates, rather convincingly, the irrelevance, uselessness, and ultimate disintegration of everything I have always believed in, worker for, and found worth living for, and I don’t think I can be unique or even unusual in this.’ (11-12)

Objective Spirit

2011-02-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

In his Notes on Literature Adorno offers his reflections on the re-issue of Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat ('Professor Garbage'), and notes that the re-issue has been retitled The Blue Angel after the Sternberg film that took the novel as a source (amusingly the only thing Adorno likes about the film are 'Marlene Dietrich's beautiful legs': 'The venerable film masterpiece is one of those revoltingly false and also - apart from the famous legs - fairly boring products that make the excursion into full human life only to trap customers[...]'. He speculates that this title change is the work of some committee of tycoons and filmmakers.

He then receives a reply from the publishers that no-one wanted this change of title. As Adorno comments: 'If one could lay one's hands on the committee I invented, it would presumably turn out that every individual had already indignantly rejected the title The Blue Angel and that it had been decided upon by a majority that consisted of no one.'

In a long passage Adorno anatomises this situation in which 'Although positivist science indignantly rejects the concept of objective spirit as metaphysics, this concept is becoming more and more palpable.' In the culture industry individuals experience a 'split consciousness' between what they consider correct and 'what they believe corresponds to the schema of the industry they disparage'. But they choose the schema, so there is no need for heavy-handed 'discipline', and when one attacks any concrete instance 'there is nothing one can get hold of'.

Adorno links this to a generalised dispersion of responsibility, and certainly I've been involved in more than a few meetings in which such 'decisions' have taken place. The worst decisions are made but no-one is responsible, because responsibility is displaced onto the imaginary Other. As a very minor example, virtually every book I've published has had its title changed by publishers, and not on their own behalf but that of 'prospective readers' (few enough...). Adorno goes on to note the effect of 'reified guilt' as we all become responsible for these 'decisions' that are never made by anyone and so made by all...

The Plebeianization of Theory

2011-01-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

'No doubt the molecular labour of theory is less visible than it was previously. It has no master-thinkers comparable in renown to the old ones. It is also wanting in dialogue with a political project capable of assembling and combining energies. But it is probably deeper, more collective, freer, and more secular. And hence richer in future promise.'

Daniel Bensaid, A Marx for Our Times (p.xvi)

Fredric Jameson often remarks that postmodernity, as cultural condition of 'late' capitalism, requires a 'decline' from high modernist masters and avant-gardes, but that this might open a 'plebeianization' of culture, a democratic opening of the 'postmodern' he associates with Brecht. Linking this to Bensaid's argument could we, or perhaps only I, imagine a plebeianization of theory? No masters, but rather collective working, not in a false collapse of community (where some seem to do the work for others), but a 'community' that might take seriously this possibility to develop such a means of working with theory.

Of course we live still with a constant fetishisation of prospective masters or movements, a seemingly relentless demand for authority coupled with an iconoclasm that 'dates' a thinker, or returns them, by whim, while providing plenty of material for 'epigone critiques' for anyone foolish enough to take a thinker seriously.

In this 'project' of plebeianization I think there are a place for scholarly virtues (as I still find them): citation of revelant research, including so-called 'secondary' research; argument rather than vatic pronouncement; engagement with sincerity rather than false and malign 'debate'; an ability to try and grasp history, including very recent history, w/o a 'historicism' that would block change; simple accuracy; submission to referees (when done properly); publication of good work rather than work by X 'famous' person; and so on.

In this 'theory', lower case 'T', submits to discipline, and not the discipline of the market, the discipline of wealth or cultural capital (which so often run together - a dearth of proletarian masters...), but the discipline of thought and expression in proper research and rigour. I'm certainly not claiming I live up to this, however I do try, and I think some real articulation here might be necessary.

Le Club Filth (notes on A Serbian Film)

2011-01-13T04:10:00.000-08:00

'it's like a cartoon for grown-ups'

this is no country for art,
one take -
live transmission of sex.

This is porn vitalism,
life is the life of a victim:
that's 'newborn porn'

pissing blood.
After death,
available object:
'start with the little one'

Zengakuren

2011-01-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

Barthes's Empire of Signs might well be read as another chapter in what Federico Luisetti calls 'political Orientalism' (pdf). 'Japan' is explicitly rendered as the possibility of displacing our own narcissism, of locating 'the very fissure of the symbolic' (4), and allowing Barthes to '"entertain" the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system' (3). One of the 'flashes' Japan affords Barthes is a reflection on 'The Writing of Violence'. For Barthes the riots of the Zengakuran permit 'a writing of actions which expurgates violence from its Occidental being: spontaneity.' (103) As he goes on:

In our mythology, violence is caught up in the same prejudice as literature or art: we can attribute to it no other function than that of expressing a content, an inwardness, a nature, of which it is the primary, savage, asystematic language ... [it is] an anterior, sovereignly original force.' (103)

In contrast the violence of the Zengakuren 'is immediately a sign': expressing nothing' (103). It is intransitive, concerned to create 'a great scenario of signs' (106), and exhausting itself in its immediate expression.

Of course, Barthes's caveats don't exhaust the dangers of 'Orientalism', but here we can, along with his work in Mythologies, a neo-Brechtian reaching for the 'pure sign'; in the case violence that is not primordial but signifying, but then not signifying a meaning or use, but only the 'nothing' of its own immanence.

Negativity as a Practice

2011-01-07T03:18:00.000-08:00

"The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood, their lot would do labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them."

CLR James, The Black Jacobins (thanks to Jessica)

Negativity as a political practice, and thanks also to Jason Read for his excellent comments/review on my book. I have to say on D&G's Anti-Oedipus I'm picking up on a tendency in the book, which certainly doesn't exhaust the text. That said I don't find it personally that engaging, perhaps due to the reason Jason has identified in its 'productivism' versus representation matrix, although more obviously stylistically (for me).

In a general way the critical identifications in the book are noting commonalities and can't be exhaustive, but the chapters are designed at least to ground my arguments in the textual evidence (I can't stand arguments that fail to even read the texts they analyse and simply identify a thinker/writer by their pre-existent image, or create a 'straw-man' (it used to be 'postmodernists')). Part of the point is that each of the thinkers I analyse operates in a point of tension with negativity and, of course, my overall reading doesn't have to accepted but I would say I don't think this tension can be contested.

In some recent presentations of the book I've been a little ruder about the 'negativity of finitude' tendencies, but whether they will or deserve to see print I don't yet know.

Next year

2010-12-22T05:32:00.001-08:00

This what I am currently scheduled to do next year, of course thanks to the cuts I could end up with a lot more time and far less money... I'm also trying to write a review of Blanchot's Political Writings, planning to write an essay on Debord's cinema, specifically In Girum, and working on the spaghetti western paper.

Conjunctural Dilemmas

2010-12-17T02:44:00.000-08:00

If one believes that Agamben's notion of the reversibility of 'bare life', abandoned by the state, into stateless potentiality is magical (as I do)...

But one also believes the capitalist tendencies of the present are to produce an abandoned/surplus humanity that at once figures something like the classical (negative) definition of the proletariat but incapacitates politics (Balakrishnan, Endnotes)

Then isn't one back to Agamben, but vectored via the tendency and w/o political hope (doh!)

Concrete Problems

2010-12-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

I must say that this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind we were reproached with, because it is idealizing and, in the end, ethical in nature. (To say: "One must stop being abstract, one must be concrete" without worrying whether such a slogan has the least meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.)

Blanchot

Mute Launch event - 9 December

2010-12-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

Further details here

9 December 2010

Godard on Foucault

2010-11-29T04:11:00.001-08:00

I'm not so fond of Foucault, it's because he's always saying, "During this period, people thought 'A,B,C,'; but, after such and such a precise date, it was thought, rather, that '1,2,3'." Fine but can you really be so sure? That's precisely why we're trying to make movies so that future Foucaults won't be able to make such assertions with quite such assurance. Sartre can't escape this reproach, either.

Godard, 1967

French Jacobins Influence UK Student Protests

2010-11-25T04:52:00.000-08:00

In an update to the influence of 'French Communists' on the UK student protests it has now been revealed by the office in charge of monitoring 'domestic extremism' that French Jacobins, using a revolutionary Tachyon-burst carrier wave designed by a M. Lavoisier, counterfactually reprieved after it was decided the republic did have a need for scientists, have transmitted their pernicious doctrine of abstract equality to UK protesters.

A reported image of the 'Lavoisier' Tachyon transmitter

Messages intercepted by the security services include those from a M. Saint-Just, reportedly a 'violent young radical', who stated 'those who make half a revolution dig their own grave', and asked UK student protestors to look to the 5,000 workers of Sheffield who celebrated the victory of the French army at Valmy in 1792. A M. Robespierre, known as the 'incorruptible', also sent messages of encouragment, stating 'To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity.' It is thought other 'revolutionary' propoganda was transmitted, including a cryptic message from a M. Danton, ''The world is chaos. It will give birth to a god called “Nothingness”', that has left police 'baffled'.

A dangerous German Radical in a Library

Despite the widespread agreement of historians that there were no English Jacobins police were taking seriously the threat of 'unactuated revolutionary possibilities' as a new tactic by radicals, and were especially interested in interviewing 'Walter Benjamin', a German radical who may have had a role in transmitting the carrier wave from his desk in the Bibliotheque Nationale in the 1930s.

In a counter-move David Cameron held a late night seance in which he contacted Edmund Burke, who denounced yesterday's protests as demanding an equality which is a 'monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.'

Mr Burke also took time to target Goldsmiths lecturers' support for the protests, arguing that: 'These philosophers are fanaticks; independent of any interest, which if it operated alone would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such an headlong rage towards every desperate trial, that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments.'

Political Vitalism

2010-11-19T04:32:00.000-08:00

For some reason much of my current reading seems to be converging around problems of vitalism, so thanks to Federico for this link, which has much material (and much I can't read thanks to unforgiveable linguistic incompetence), including texts by Federico himself. I'm also hoping to make it to the Zagreb conference on vitalism next year ('To Have Done with Life'), which is looking more and more like a crucial event.

My paper for HM is currently being re-drafted, 'worsened' (a la Beckett), for the JCGS, if it doesn't get turned down. Caught in the 'grief' of completing the book (thanks to Michael Holroyd's excellent talk at our University for this formulation), but if I can only combine current interests (Kierkegaard, Lefebvre (on dialectics), Rousseau on political economy) then perhaps something will emerge from that, after writing a piece on 'Debord's Time-Image' and editing the communization collection.

Other, better, people on grading protest, on nothing changes but everything gets worse, on the British misery, hostile objects, Greece as crucible of protest, the Italian misery (pdf), and, courtesy of the Institute, Marcuse on student protest.

You must choose...

2010-11-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

‘There are two ways of rescuing the Idea of communism in philosophy today: either by abandoning Hegel, not without regret, incidentally, and only after repeated considerations of his writings (which is what I do), or by putting forward a different Hegel, an unknown Hegel, and that is what Zizek does, based on Lacan (who was a magnificent Hegelian - or so Zizek would claim at first explicitly and later secretly, all along the way).
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
Note 6 pp.237-8

I've been listening to Alexander Galloway's lectures on contemporary French thought, although still waiting for the one on Laruelle, and he offers an interesting mapping of the current 'moment'. He distinguishes between those in search of the absolute versus a re-articulation of historical materialism. Broadly, I'd say, he follows Peter Hallward's articulation of contemporary French philosophy as dominated by 'singular' orientations, although Galloway splits this into quasi-Hegelian/Idealists of the absolute (roughly Malabou/Zizek) and realists of the absolute (Meillassoux and the speculative realists). Badiou's probably falls slightly uncomfortably here, and it would be interesting to hear Alexander's reflections on the 'broker' of many of these currents.

Also, I'd say that these figurations of the 'absolute', although often opposed to the Derridean/post-structuralist disenchantment with metaphysics, are definitely post-Derridean in quite a strong sense. Explicitly so in the case of Malabou, but also implicitly in Zizek (Zizek's Hegel is post-Derridean, whether Zizek likes that or not), and we could also say in terms of Badiou's ontology of sets, or Meillassoux as well. These 'absolutes' are not the usual forms/substances of so-called 'trad metaphysics'.

Galloway's own alternative 'historical materialism' is articulated through a Deleuzian/Marxian mix, with a little Stiegler, to reformulate the confluence of thought and control as the condition of thinking liberation. In terms of 'camps' I find myself in his, in that I'm more concerned with the immanent political forms of resistance, rather than some metaphysical or post-metaphysical absolute. It was interesting to hear the quote from Heidegger (presumably the 'Letter on Humanism'), in which Heidegger opposes his own engagement with the truth of Being to Sartre's engagement on behalf of beings. I'm for the ontic in this case...and so, I guess is Alexander (also interesting to think Badiou's project, especially in Being and Event (his most Heideggerean book) as the squaring of this circle).

Burn Baby Burn

2010-11-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

A process of deterioration in the human race cannot go on indefinitely, for mankind would wear itself out after a certain point had been reached. Consequently, when enormities go on piling up and the evils they produce continue to increase, we say: "It can't get much worse now." It seems that the day of judgment is at hand, and the pious zealot already dreams of the rebirth of everything and of a world created anew after the present world has been destroyed by fire.
Kant, Conflict of the Faculties

(Thanks to Jessica)

Dying on our feet

2010-10-25T03:41:00.000-07:00

Evan on disease as class struggle. Not so much 'They want to kill us, but we're already dead', as 'We're already dead, and we want to kill them'; the cold embrace of class hatred, Samson Agonistes - revolution as nihilism; bring it all down...

'transferring cadres to lower levels'

2010-10-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

[Poster from May 7 Cadre school movement - 'the university takes care of our mountain village'

The Browne report sees a nice return to 'Thatcherism in its Maoist phase', but this time the re-education of the intellectuals will take place without any manual labour to do either. Of course no exceptions made for cadre from 'lower levels' either, let them go first as they know the way.

Two New Collective Blogs

2010-10-12T02:55:00.001-07:00

Carl's on the 1970s, to which I hope to be contributing sometime in the next couple of weeks, and Evan's on British horror, obviously 'Carl' and 'Evan' are mere signifiers for assemblages of social negativity...

Dependants Hired by the State

2010-10-09T03:55:00.000-07:00

This is Rakesh Bhandari on the pioneering work of Jairus Banaji on waged labour, and seems to speak to the Browne review and the incipient privatisation of my own job: from hired dependant to confronting the despotism of capital (although the 'social factory' provides its own series of contexts for that despotism in forms of consumption). Perhaps this social position accounts for some of the modelling of capitalism as exteriority by such hired dependants? It might also account for the accelerationist faith in capital as the desire for subsumption ('in the destructive element immerse', to quote Conrad (fuller quote below). I've highlighted the last line as the resistance to this move - privatisation is sharpening contradictions on their terms.

Capital, for its part, fights to eliminate labour paid out of revenue to the extent that such activities interfere with capital using such opportunities for the valorisation of capital. It does this, for example, by closing down a public hospital or school paid for out of tax revenue or a public utility so that a capitalist can take its business. Of course, some of the workers paid out of expended revenue may also carry out operations that speed up (and may in fact be necessary for) the rotation of capital (for instance, building and repairing a public roads system out of tax money), but these activities are not themselves aimed at profit and thus the workers do not come under the terroristic discipline of profit as do workers in the banking and commerce sectors. Whenever they can, capitalists strive to replace dependents hired by the state with wage-labourers exploited by capital. Hence the mania for privatisation which has been a hallmark of capitalist development for the last twenty-five years, and has been more important for the growth of the capitalist system, through the vent provided for surplus-capital, than the reduction of the putative deductions from surplus-value by the commercial and banking capitalists in the bourgeois fraternity. Writing in 2006, Andrew Glyn underlined that privatisation has ‘reduced the contribution of government owned companies from 12% of UK GDP in 1979 to less than 2% today’. It goes without saying that the working class, composed of wage-labourers and hired dependents alike, should resist privatisation. The analytical distinction, in other words, is in the first place not a political distinction.

(From Historical Materialism 16 (2008): 71-99).

"'Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. 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 - nicht wahr?... 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?' "His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. 'I will tell you! For that, too, there is only one way.'

'And yet it is true it is true. In the destructive element immerse.'... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. 'That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream- and so - ewig - usque ad finem....'

Elliott on Hobsbawm

2010-10-08T04:29:00.000-07:00

New Gregory Elliott book from Pluto, at a good price as well, always worth reading GE.

Speculative Aesthetics / Drifting Seminar

2010-10-05T03:28:00.000-07:00

This seminar is running at Duke on 'speculative aesthetics', and usefully has some of the text available should you wish to engage from afar. I'd quite like to have been included in the reading for accelerationism... oh well

Also, bearing in mind the weather, I'm tempted to attend this 'drifting seminar' in Brighton, organised by the publishers of our communization collection, Minor Compositions. Again reading available. Hopefully more politically attuned than my last 'psychogeographic' outing in Brighton, to see Iain Sinclair and Aidan Dun (who was publicising Vale Royal, so that must make it 1992?) years ago, when the 'discussion' descended into recriminations of a King Cross squat and off-key remarks about the 'spiritual desolation' of the estates (like Moulsecomb) that surround Brighton - psychogeographic snobbery.

cloacal critique

2010-10-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

That which is communist is not “violence” in itself, nor “distribution” of the shit that we inherit from class society, nor “collectivisation” of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects these actions, underlies them, renders them the moments of a process which can only communise ever further, or be crushed.

Theorie Communiste

In lieu of anything useful, another quote from TC on the nature of communisation and a minor reflection, that I'd somehow like to work into my HM paper, on the usual adoption of the negative value of excrement. Thinking of Brecht's 'bad new', Freud's equation of money and excrement, and Bataille's reversal with his (non-)concept of heterology, perhaps we might re-think a 'cloacal critique', although with an awareness that metaphoric reversals of valence seem pretty cheap when, as Mike Davis points out, so much of humanity does live in excrement (and has done). Perhaps there would be someway to connect to Owen's Socialist Lavatory League, and the inadvertently apocalyptic visions in the CiF posters' revelations of apocalyptic waste burning in suburban Britain? Or, of course, and as mentioned by Owen, Evan's salvage punk re-tooling of debris. After all, to return to Marx's point that history advances by the bad side and Olson's Kingfishers, 'on some rejectamenta' is where change takes place.

completed his doctorate in 1841

2010-10-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

For some reason I find the Verso author's description for Marx inexplicably amusing, and where's the author's photo? Shabby promotion Marx.

Karl Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. Expelled from Prussia in 1844, he took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867, he published his magnum opus Capital. A co- founder of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.

Undead class struggle (for Evan)

2010-09-30T07:44:00.001-07:00

'They want to kill us, but we're already dead'.

According to TC the 'spirit' of the struggles of the 1980s, in which the violence of struggle never led to a formalisation or demand for autonomy; strikes without demands in the extinction of the affirmation of the liberation of labour, and in which class definition only results from capital as antagonist and not 'in itself'.

From the failed zombie re-training of Day of the Dead (casting an ironic light on The Full Monty) to the post-Fordist breakout of the remake of Dawn of the Dead, the reserve army of (un)dead labour figures real subsumption the age of coming devalorisation. Not alive, not dead, not-value; the 'fructifying vitality' (Marx) of living labour recoded as death drive.

Verso debates

2010-09-24T03:59:00.000-07:00

As already noted by IT, Verso have a new website. I'd be interested to follow the reponses to this debate:

Against his friend and comrade Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek has been arguing strongly for the need for a return to Marx's critique of political economy—as borne out by his engagement with value theory and Moishe Postone's work in Living in the End Times. But what are we to make of Zizek's own understanding of value theory, when he claims that, strictly speaking from a Marxist perpective, Chavez's Venezuela is “exploiting” the US through oil rents?

Sad Economy Pig

2010-09-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

This image is part of the cover of this free ebook from L&W on Britain's Broken Economy. I feel sorry for the poor pig - is this supposed to be the broken economy (metaphorically , of course), or a representation of greed? Leave the pig alone I say, why always blame the animals?

Of course the book might be great, I don't know...

Arrived!

2010-09-21T02:22:00.000-07:00

The book is here, thank god (or whatever). Very pleased. Obviously in expensive hardback, but anyone who is interested in reviewing let me know, or who doesn't receive a review copy soon who has already agreed.

Available to review for HM

Fall out from accelerationism

2010-09-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

The shards of a debate that just didn't happen fortunately continue, although it would have been so good if it had taken place at the time (see below), with another interesting post on accelerationism, I particularly like this amusing characterisation of yours truly:

Noys at the conference presented a curious figure, a man who had come to speak but primarily to savage any favourable reading or support of Accelerationism. Land was wrong, quite frankly, and Noys argued repeatedly that all Accelerationism was a capitalist fallacy, with a dangerous nostalgia for the very recent past (1990s cyberpunk, Nick Land, Jungle music etc), for a kind of Sino-Capitalism with full biopower and “no Judeo-Christian hang-ups”.

Thanks also for the kind comments on my Bataille book. The description of the audience reaction was a little depressing, although chimed with my sense that a conversation that could have taken place didn't. I doubt people will or should have much sympathy, but it's not that enjoyable being 'on stage' so to speak in such a situation. Perhaps the 'decelerationist' cold I've now acquired is true testament to the whole experience...

Btw (a), (b) (40/41), and (d) (only now, not in origin) apply to myself.

Classless

2010-09-17T07:03:00.001-07:00

I've just ordered it, via amazon uk, but I'd suggest purchasing in any fashion you choose

Big Society Exhibition - Your Chance to Exhibit

2010-09-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

For all you artistic / creative types [I wish I could contribute something good, the moment I see these invitations I have the feeling 'I could do that', followed immediately by the draining of my already limited mental powers - perhaps some concrete poetry referring to vampire squid...or a photomontage somehow based on the image of Wilhelm Ropke:

Looks harmless doesn't he?]

Open invitation, please forward widely:

There is still time for you to send submissions for Big Society A window exhibition, viewed from the street4/08/10 – 28/10/10

Closing Event Friday 29th October 6.30-8.30

FINAL DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS Wednesday 27 October

The earlier you send us something the longer it will be displayed for. The window is being re-hung each week. Contributors selected so far include: Julian Stallabrass, Mark Pawson, Robin Smart, Cathie Pilkington, Rosalie Schweiker, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Ann Robinson, Andrew Cooper, Andy Bowman, Arnaud Desjardin, Brendan McIntyre, Cathy Wade, D Rosier, Daniel Manning, Danielle Drainey, Dominic Thackray, Eli-Rose Sanford, Emma MacKinnon, Martin Hand, Niall McCullough, Patrick Galway, Rosalie Woods, Sara Willett, Sophie Eade, Stephen Hodgkins.

Space Station Sixty-Five invites you to respond to the notion of Big Society.

What is the 'big society' if not arts for everyone? Tiny grants already stretch far into communities, making music, dancing and art, engaging with history and heritage, drawing people together in shared emotions and experiences. Civic pride, quality of life, pleasure and endeavour (and art for arts sake) is cheap for its rich returns, but it's not free.

Polly Toynbee, Arts for everyone is cheap considering its rich returns, The Guardian, Wednesday 28th July 2010

Your contributions may be selected to make an evolving window exhibition at Space Station Sixty-Five.

To take part please email us a Word, RTF or Pages document or a jpeg with an image at 300dpi.

You may also post contributions, no larger that A4, to Space Station Sixty-Five, 65 North Cross Road, London SE22 9ET

We are sorry, original artwork will not be returned, copies are preferred. If selected, your work will be attached to the inside of the Space Station Sixty-Five window and viewed from the street. We look forward to receiving your emails and postal contributions; the exhibition will develop as they arrive.Space Station Sixty-Five65 North Cross Road, London SE22 9ET020 8299 5036

Buses: 40, 176, 185, 37, 12, P13, 484.

Rail: East Dulwich (from London Bridge) (check for engineering works at weekends)

Tube: Elephant & Castle or Oval (then bus)

SPACE STATION SIXTY-FIVE MAP HERE.

'everything that moves is not red'

2010-09-15T07:52:00.000-07:00

'In the serenity of the concept, let us say that everything that changes is not an event, and that suprise, velocity, disorder, may only be simulacra of the event, not its promise of truth.

Badiou 'Of an Obscure Disaster'

In the concession from an 'absolute accelerationism', which seems incoherent by definition for the usual reasons (incarnation of absolute presence, equivalence of absolute speed with stasis), to a 'relative' or 'strategic' accelerationism we confront the simulacral, and the retention of the tendency to always still insist on the acceleration of capitalism as liberation rather than the liberation of socialism/communism. Accelerationism become abstract in the pseudo-concrete.

Postscript to accelerationism

For more polemic see here and also see Tom's excellent point in the comments

Notes on the first session here

This is where the talks will appear:

Accelerationism

Accelerationism paper

2010-09-15T02:45:00.000-07:00

The less polemical version of the paper I gave at the accelerationism event is now available here. On the day I cut the first part on Foucault and made some more direct remarks to the arguments of Mark and Ray, I guess that can be found on the recorded version when it goes up. Thanks to Mark for organising and everyone who made up the large audience in a small hot room, I felt I would have liked the opportunity to chat more, especially with the audience.

Accelerationism tomorrow

2010-09-13T04:12:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to it, although wish I wasn't quite so tired after Maastricht (my own Katzenjammer - see below)... One thing that I was thinking on (again) was the relation of Marxism and accelerationism (prompted by a train conversation with Ray Brassier). While I always argued accelerationism is a Marxist heresy, and conforms to the tendency of Marxism to embrace capitalism as the condition of communism, I still don't think that we have to correlate that with absolutisation of capitalism or absolute acceptance of the conditions capitalism 'offers'. After all, the replacement of accumulation as key value(form), might led to 'enrichment'/acceleration in different forms, but I do think it would have to lead to a certain slowing down as well, in terms, to take one key example, of preservation of planetary resources (although the last thing we want is a 'barracks socialism' introduced merely to save capitalism). Therefore, we might imagine a future temporality of socialism/communism along the lines of Marx's comment from the 18th Brumaire:

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 Katzenjammer [cat’s wail] 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, constantly interrupt themselves 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:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Negativity II

2010-09-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

My contribution to 'Cutting the 'Not'' now up here.

Catherine Malabou "Negativity and the Body in the Phenomenology of Spirit"

2010-09-13T02:43:00.000-07:00

[Below are my notes (w/o critical commentary) taken from Catherine Malabou's paper at the conference Cutting the 'Not', more details on the conference to follow. Catherine also indicated that after the 'detour' of neurobiology she will be returning to thinking the philosophy of time 'as such', in particular with Heidegger.]

Introduction

The paper concerns the body in the Phenomenology, and particularly in the 'Lordship and Bondage' section.

1. The traditional interpretation is that the body is absent from Hegel's philosophy and especially from the Phenomenology. 'Spirit' either has no body, or seeks to renounce the body, and so the body is negativity present or present as negativity.

2. Kojeve, Foucault, and Derrida argue that the body is sacrificed as a 'negative presence'. The body incarnates negativity and so the body must be sacrificed.

Hence the body is a 'crossing-point' or convergence for dialectics and anti-Hegelian thought, which agrees on the negativity of the body.

Attachment / Detachment

We can translate Lordship and Bondage into the conceptual names of detachment and attachment, respectively. The lord detaches himself from the body by risking its death, he is not knotted to life and the body. On the contrary, the slave or bondsman is attached to the body. The question then is:

What is negativity? It is to detach, cut, or dissolve, or is it to attach? Is it to live or die?

Hegel doesn't believe in detachment, fundamentally. Attachment to negativity is the truth incarnated in the slaves labour. The master's detachment is only a moment, and is sustained only in and through the attachment of the slave. In this 'economy', life always wins, at least according to Kojeve, Derrida and Foucault. Now we turn to their analyses.

1. Kojeve

It is animality that disappears, and not the body. The master disavows or risks his animality, his biological life, through acceptance on non-biological desire, and so accedes to the spiritual body, which is the speaking body. We move from an inauthentic animal body to an authentic spiritual or conceptual body. While the animal body is located and finite, the spiritual body, by acceding to language, is decontextualised and infinite.

2. Derrida

In Hegel there is no real risk, dialectical 'death' is actually the ruse of life. Death is always denied and amortised, and so absolute detachment is impossible. The master/slave dialectic should be a tragedy, but is (as Bataille argues), really a comedy, where nothing is really at stake.

In contrast to this we can figure an absolute detachment, a detachment from dialectics, a 'blind spot' in which we are 'attached to nothing' and so do not maintain ourselves. Life is expenditure, a body qua excess, and the sign of this negativity or absence is the trace as 'sign' of erasure.

3. Foucault (via Butler's reading in The Psychic Life of Power)

Absolute deatchment is impossible and instead we can see, via Foucault, a need for attachment as the means to achieve freedom. The repression of the body is the condition of the body of pleasure, and repressions generate proliferating pleasures.

In this model, according to Butler, we are faced with the dual impossibility of being Hegelian and being non-Hegelian, we are mired, in a way, in attachment/detachment.

Conclusion: Hegel on the body

Detachment comes first. There is no personal identity, no auto-affection, and death is only the confirmation of our initial detachment (our plasticity). The subject is plastic: both shaping itself and being given shape. There is this originary plasticity, missed by Kojeve, Foucault, and Derrida, which means the 'self' is empty detachment that then has to work to attach itself to itself, as a guard against this originary madness. Negativity is the milieu of this originary detachment.

out and about

2010-09-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

In Maastricht from tomorrow to Sunday at 'Cutting the 'Not'', should anyone be in the 'area'... I'll put up my paper on academia.edu and perhaps post a report when I return. I don't actually have a portable laptop so can't do any on-the-spot reporting.

After a day's recovery, off then to Accelerationism at Goldsmiths on Tuesday 14th, which Mark updates here with further news (currently downloading the mix). I have to say being anti-accelerationist doesn't make me anti-drum n' bass / (detroit) techno - two of my absolute favourite forms of music.

Chillaxing after that, ie working, although launching my book at Chichester on October 14th 4pm with an early evening soiree, before gearing up for HM in November.

Prims and Anti-Civs

2010-09-07T08:06:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of radicalarchives, via the anarchist academics mailing list, comes the 'Origins of Primitivism' documents from Fifth Estate (1977-1988). Of course 'primitivism' is not something I agree with, although I did kind of admire its gung-ho anti-everything elan, especially when it came to language (after all Barthes did say the language-system was structurally fascist). It's strangely reminiscent of Douglas Adams's Hitchiker's Guide:

'Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.'

You may wish to consult this, on Zerzan, as a rather devastating critique.

That said, easy point scoring is just that and some of the questions raised about 'civilisational' forms and experiences of alternative modes of organisation had resonances for my old hippie soul (Hugh Brody's Maps and Dreams has some remarkable passages on the 'non-organisation' 'organisation' of a hunting trip by Beaver indians in British Columbia that made me realise just how capitalist in time-habits I really am...)

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2010-09-06T03:13:00.000-07:00

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”

Reading G.M. Tamas's article 'The Truth About Class' (pdf here), for whom there are two kinds of communists: Roussean socialists, who believe in the intrinsic goodness of the people (including in these are the unlikely bedfellows of EP Thompson, Mauss, Bataille, and Polanyi), and actual communists, who believe in the self-abolition of the proletariat as only a class of capitalism. Tamas himself is a rare case of a dissident from neo-liberalism to communism, and brings a robust clarity to his rare apostasy.

Now I should be type 2, but find myself often falling into type 1... (perhaps especially in my (non)-participation in the debate over the right to work slogan.

A few points disputing the clean lines of Tamas's division. First, the idea that type 1 (Roussean) involves a return to 'simpler and transparent' relations wouldn't hold up, for anthropological reasons, in the case of Mauss and Bataille. Gift economies are at least as complex, if not more, than capitalist economies, and perhaps one of the attractions of capitalist economies is that they remove all the 'messy' temporal negotiations of gift economies, gratitude, charity etc. (which often take malignant 'caste' forms of condescension - Maria Edgeworth's remarks on the need for gratitude get caught up in this very unpleasant 'economy', when it comes to servants and slaves - and Edgeworth is by no means the worst example of such problems).

Second I think Tamas lines up too clear a division of piling class malignancy onto 'pre-capitalist' caste relations. While I wouldn't want to defend the intrinsic 'goodness' of the people, nor deny the imbrication of the working class as class of capitalism, I do think he underestimates how capitalism parasites on and generates a new discourse of 'canailles'. To defend equality, to defend the fact that the working class aren't stupid, etc., may not be 'Marxist' per se but it a necessary task.

This leads to the major problem of the assumption of the emergence of a 'pure capitalism' that throws workerism/Roussean socialism into crisis and paves the way for true Marxism. This of course makes sense in terms of the crisis of social democracy, the affirmation of the worker etc. (and chimes with Theorie Communiste's theorisation that such affirmations belong to the stage of formal subsumption / 'programmatism' in the stage of real subsumption, and are now obsolete in true real subsumption). I think the question here lies on the 'purity' of that 'pure capitalism', to repeat/iterate the point above. If social democracy is dead, for example, it doesn't seem to be dead for the banks, and the assumption that the ground is clear for true Marxism doesn't seem to be yielding the results one would suppose, as Tamas, being a clear-sighted and logical thinker, concedes.
Therefore, perhaps especially in the case of crisis, I think a necessary tense and contradictory inhabiting of these two tendencies might be possible: a defence of past gains, without seeing these as Marxist, rather 'true socialism', and a re-tooling of the self-abolition thesis that does not conform to capitalism's current round of devalorisation.

On the ground then, a defence of job security, and work as possibility against devalorisation / attacks / neo-liberal re-organisation, coupled with taking the opportunity, as Nina rightly suggests, to re-think work/value/accumulation.
A fudge then...

Really free working

2010-08-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense extertion.

Marx, Grundrisse

California here we come

2010-08-25T04:56:00.000-07:00

A new website for the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory (I wonder if there is an alternative program in firmly-established Critical Theory...). One of the great things, even if you aren't on/can't make the programme is that all the texts are available (and videos) if one should one to create or follow one's own 'program' (now I have a vision in my head of some poor lone person in a bedsit staging imaginary seminars with various transitional objects a la Stewie in Family Guy).

Paint it Grey

2010-08-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. Hegel

The grey of the concept over the grey of the world reveals, with the end of the coloured figures in which it was given, the restoration to existence of the task of thinking itself, by itself, beyond all consistency of the figure.

Jean-Luc Nancy

SR in Spanish

2010-08-24T05:38:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Jonatham F. Morich we have the first appearance of an SR text in Spanish here. It's a translation from Planomenology of this post.

Cutting the "Not"

2010-08-24T04:23:00.000-07:00

Cutting the “Not”: Workshop on Negativity and Reflexivity
September 10-12, 2010
Jan Van Eyck Academie
Maastricht, Netherlands

Organizers: Mladen Dolar, Avigail Moss, Eli Noé, Kerstin Stakemeier and Tzuchien Tho
Please see our website for schedule and updates.

Cutting the “Not”
The question of the negative has been one of the fundamental concerns, if not the central problem, of modern and postmodern philosophy. If, since Descartes (and more explicitly since Kant), philosophy is understood as an inherently self-reflexive practice - no longer an inquiry into the essence of things, but the reflection of thought onto its own conditions and limitations - the question of the negative has risen as the necessary counterpoint to this self-reflexivity: negativity as the non-identity between subject and object, the differential correlation between thought and what is external to (and yet conditioned by) thought.

Perhaps the strongest historical example of the coincidence between the problem of reflexivity and negation is the Hegelian concept of negativity, the dynamic process of self-differentiation as self-identity. No doubt, its tremendous impact on contemporary thought can be seen as itself a negative one. In various ways, much of contemporary philosophy ranging from the work of Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou has been posed in specific opposition, modification or reinvention of this negative/reflexive dynamic. By inventing forms of negativity that do not involve dialectic reversals and over-comings, by rejecting the fundamental structure of contradiction outright, or by de-globalizing the scope of any dialectic system, contemporary forms of thought have either rejected negativity outright or have re-inscribed or readjusted the power of negativity in local, that is, non-totalizing functions.

In this context of "thinking beyond the negative", the concept of negativity is often treated as a theoretical shibboleth, a conceptual "password" that serves to divide conflicting doctrinal tendencies, separating allies from foes. In so far as this logic involves the demarcation of a homogeneous theoretical field to be rejected (e.g. Deleuze's critique of "post-Kantian Hegelianism"), it not only involves a rude simplification, presupposing a unambiguous dividing line where there is in fact a complex knot, but also attests to the fact that in polemically opposing the negative, one inevitably takes part in it. Hence, a fresh, actualized take on negativity does not only involve new ways of affirming the negative, but also has to take note of the "persistence of the negative" (B. Noys) in any thought and practice that claims to have surpassed negativity.

The aim of this workshop is to cut the (k)not of the negative, not to offer any easy way out of the problem, but to reconsider, with the polemical strings cut, the question in its complexity. This means, above all, to appreciate the field of negativity as a "garden of forking paths", a tissue of folded and interwoven philosophical lineages, with branches extending to extra-philosophical domains. We propose to investigate the problem both forwards and backwards, both looking at the origins of the problem in modern (transcendental and dialectical) philosophy, as well as to the vicissitudes of the negative in contemporary thinking. Our focus will also extend "laterally", by directing the attention to figures of negativity in art, politics, psychoanalysis and science.

Participants include: (alphabetically)
Mark Van Atten
Jean-Yves Beziau
Ray Brassier
Mladen Dolar
Sven Lüttiken
Catherine Malabou
Gregor Moder
Avigail Moss
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Eli Noé
Benjamin Noys
Frank Ruda
Kerstin Stakemeier
Tzuchien Tho
Jan Völker
Susanne M Winterling

Determinate Negation

2010-08-23T05:07:00.001-07:00

But when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.

Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit

It Makes Sense

2010-08-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

The whole run of Common Sense is now available here. Somewhere I have some print copies buried in the piles of material I've collected. Issues 13/14 have work by Sergio Bologna on money and crisis which I plan to read first.

Funeral in Berlin

2010-08-19T04:29:00.000-07:00

To make the most obvious point a trip to Berlin certainly makes evident that the failure of the German revolution is the event of the 20th century for Europe and perhaps globally (documented here). If it had succeeded then one can't help feel many of the 'other' appalling events wouldn't have happened and we wouldn't need the following.

Communisation is Go!

2010-08-19T04:27:00.001-07:00

The collection Communisation and Its Discontents is happening, with a load of excellent people and an excellent publisher, further details to follow...

And more accelerationism reading...

2010-08-10T02:08:00.000-07:00

The relevant section of Anti-Oedipus is posted here (as a pdf), for another (very interesting) project (as well as lots of other goodies).

Courtesy of Alberto, links to The High-Speed Society, slightly dubious but perhaps interesting collection of readings on speed/acceleration.

Here is a slightly difficult to hear video with one of the editors:

And a review in French of his work by Anselm Jappe.

In terms of fiction China's Iron Council takes the revolution = train equation literally to explore the temporality of failed revolution (acceleration or brake (Benjamin). As Joshua Clover reminds us (pdf) Neuromancer is the book of the pre-crisis period (do people still read it?), of, of course, return to Gravity's Rainbow.

English Crisis

2010-08-09T06:05:00.001-07:00

Just to maintain my record for topical political comment, here's Lukacs on Wilson:

Wilson is doubtless one of the most astute and opportunist bourgeois politicians anywhere today—yet his government has been the most utter and disastrous fiasco. That too is a sign of the depth and intractability of the English crisis.

Grand Opportunism

2010-08-06T07:44:00.001-07:00

Despite being anti-accelerationist I do have a soft spot for Massimo Cacciari's 'negative accelerationism' - as I've previously posted (now, sign of age, repeating myself...). Unlike the pathos of the Landian tendency to 'love' one's own dismantling at the (metaphoric) hands of capitalism, an embrace of liquid flows and extinction, Cacciari's 'unpolitical' version of completed nihilism encompasses a breathtaking cynicism. Here's a position statement from his essay 'Nietzsche and the Unpolitical' (in the new collection from Fordham The Unpolitical):

'they see their own operations as alienation - not in the banal and servile sense, that this alienation is simply imposed on them, that they are subject to it in messianic expectation of the dialectical synthesis, but in the sense that, within the irrevocable dimension of alienation, they can build their own political interest, can determine their own separateness and division as grand politics... There is no synthesis for workers' alienation.'

As capital nullifies all values far from embracing capitalism own deterritorialised flows we embrace a political intelligence that can organise a counter-plan, manipulating evacuated 'values' for our own 'unpolitical' projects. Of course, that turned out to be the PCI and the historic compromise, so not so 'intelligent'... Fedrico Luisetti has some fascinating work updating Cacciari to the present misery (pdf).

Cacciari's collection Architecture and Nihilism is available here, with a kind plug for my earlier post.

Neo-liberalism and the 'society of litigation'

2010-08-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

Whereas economic regulation takes place spontaneously, through the formal properties of competition, the social regulation of conflicts, irregularities of behavior, nuisance caused by some to others, and so forth, calls for a judicial interventionism which has to operate as arbitration within the framework of the rules of the game. If you multiply enterprises, you multiply frictions, environmental effects, and consequently, to the extent that you free economic subjects and allow them to play their game, then at the same time the more you detach them from their status as virtual functionaries of a plan, and you inevitably multiply judges. The reduction of the number of functionaries, or rather, the de-functionarization of the economic action of plans, together with the increased dynamic of enterprises, produces the need for an ever-increasing number of judicial instances, or anyway of instances of arbitration.

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p.175

Events

2010-08-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

First, I will be presenting at the JVE (Maastricht) at the Versus Laboratory event 'Cutting the 'Not': Negativity and Reflexivity', with Ray Brassier, Catherine Malabou, and others (including people who actually understand paraconsistent logics and intuitionism) on 10-12 September.

Kindly arranged by Mark, we have the Accelerationism event, on 14th September at Goldsmiths where, no doubt, I'll be the odd one out, but it should be fascinating.

For the pithiest definition, here is Nick Land:

Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field, ‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet’.

I will post my papers for each post festum, probably here/ or on academia.edu.

Big Society - the origin?

2010-08-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Foucault's fascinating The Birth of Biopolitics, at the recommendation of Jess, which is an excellent genealogy of neo-liberalism. As I will be liberally ripping it off when I talk at the Accelerationism event I will save substantial comments until then, however as I was reading I came across this:

in 1950 Ropke wrote a text entitled The Orientation of German Economic Policy, which was published with a preface by Adenauer. What does Ropke identify in this text, this charter, as the object, the final aim, the ultimate objective of governmental action? I will list the objectives he fixes: first, to enable as far as possible everyone to have access to private property; second, the reduction of huge urban sprawls and the replacement oflarge suburbs with a policy of medium-sized towns, the replacement of the policy and economics of large housing blocks with a policy and economics of private houses, the encouragement of small farms in the countryside, and the development of what he calls non-proletarian industries, that is to say, craft industries and small businesses; third, decentralization of places of residence, production, and management, correction of the effects of specialization·and the: division of labor; and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of natural communities, families, and neighborhoods; finally, generally organizing, developing, and controlling possible effects of the environment arising either from people living together or through the development of enterprises and centers of production.

You will recognize this text; it has been repeated 25,000 times for the last 25 years.

As Foucault goes on to remark 'I think this multiplication of the "enterprise" form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.'

So perhaps not Chesterton/Belloc, but a re-tooled neo-liberalism German style? Frankly the whole 'big society' fills me with horror so I can't check how closely the proposals match the above, confirmation / refutation appreciated (let's move into a Popperian / Lakatos space).

Derrida as Vanishing Mediator

2010-08-02T07:15:00.001-07:00

This post is largely prompted by several conversation with Jernej, met in Rotterdam, and reflections on the conference Derrida Today (which I did not attend), but also dates back to something that has been floating around in my head for a while. Simply stated this is that many 'anti-Derrida' moves, especially around the return to Hegel, could equally be said to have internalised and required Derrida. In a sense the 'new Hegel', who may have always been there, is actuated through Derrida - a la Borges's remark that every writer creates his precursor. That's to say some of the best readings of Hegel are directly indebted to Derrida (Malabou / Nancy) or traversed by Derrida in the mode of antagonism (Zizek, Rose, or to a lesser extent Jameson). In a recent article in Critical Inquiry Zizek returns with more sympathy to Derrida, noting a 'belated gesture of solidarity' around the materialist potential of 'differance'.

Much the same argument could be made as regards Lacan, which is to say a certain reading of Lacan becomes possible via and through Derrida, even if it should result in a critique of Derrida. In fact in this case one could even unpick a subterranean dialogue at the time, with Lacan taking on and reworking terms like 'writing' (Derrida notes that Blanchot went back to all his earlier work and replaced 'presence' with 'writing...), while Derrida appears heavily indebted to Lacan if one reads the seminars (a problem like circumcision, for example, turning up much earlier in Lacan than Derrida). Lacan after Derrida after Lacan... and we could also add Badiou here, when he integrates Derrida to a 'tracking of the inexistent', i.e. a kind of subset of Badiou's more encompassing 'system'.

We could even add Paul de Man enacting this on Derrida, but arguing Rousseau was more deconstructive than Derrida, all the while ignoring the fact no one seemed to have noticed this until Derrida...

Of course a great deal turns on the 'vanishing'; is it simply necessary to traverse Derrida, so, as in Badiou, where difference simply becomes the everyday 'stuff' from which we have to extract the same, or Derrida offering some refinements of Lacan's analysis of the phallus. Here Derrida functions in a Wittgensteinian way as a 'ladder' that can be kicked away, or therapeutic corrective. Or, as I'd guess Derrideans might feel, is this 'vanishing' an act of repression or disavowal, leading to the hallucinatory return to Derridean positions shorn of Derrida? Having 'personally' traversed Derrida, although he hasn't vanished from my work, which could lead to the accusation this is all my projection, I don't think either of these responses are quite adequate. It's neither the case Derrida requires to be 'vanished', pending a better and more finally critique of his work than has yet appeared (and I include my critical remarks in this set) that might convince on this ground, nor that Derrida out-trumps all and every thinker.

Perhaps, instead we could start a more patient close reading, in the style of Derrida, that might analyse and be sensitive to this peculiar effects of reading that problematise priority / security and might help us re-think 'philosophy' as a practice.

As an addendum Jernej informs me Geoff Bennington (my DPhil supervisor) already said this in Interrupting Derrida, nice to know I repeat the master's words...

OOP v Deleuze, or psychopathologies of philosophy

2010-08-02T04:01:00.000-07:00

I came across this while reading Michael Balint's The Basic Fault:

In the ocnophilic world the primary cathexis, though mixed with a great deal of anxiety, seems to adhere to the emerging objects; these are felt to be safe and comforting while the spaces between them are threatening and horrid. In the philobatic world the objectless expanses retain the original primary cathexis and are experienced as safe and friendly, while the objects are felt as treacherous hazards. (68)

I won't go into the detail of Balint's theory, but bascially these two 'orientations' emerge out of the experience of primary love, and he argues that psychoanalysis itself, due to a focus on the analyst as object, as primarily been ocnophilic. Perhaps one could argue that philosophy, by contrast, tends to be philobatic, in its preference for objectless universals, way back to the presocratics, but also beyond?

Of course, I'm semi-joking but it would be interesting to fully turn psychoanalysis on philosophy, especially since aside from Freud's remark about philosophy's proximity to paranoia we haven't seem much of this. Usually philosophy spends its time regionally delimiting psychoanalysis.

The Anthropology of Capitalism

2010-07-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Perhaps we have been too quick to celebrate the “disenchantment of the world” ushered in by the retreat of religion and the growth of naturalism since the seventeenth century. Rather, what actually happened was the enchantment of Western society by the world, by the imagined cultural values of the material rather than the spiritual. We live in a world enchanted by symbolically constituted, culturally relative “utilities” such as gold, oil, diamonds, Pinot Noir grapes, Mercedes cars, heirloom tomatoes, silk clothing, hamburgers from McDonald’s, and purses from Gucci. Here is a large construction of nature by particular cultural values whose symbolic qualities, however, are understood as purely material qualities, whose social sources are attributed rather to individual desires, and whose arbitrary satisfactions are mystified as universally rational choices.
Marshall Sahlins

Big in Poland

2010-07-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Agata for noting this appearance of my work on Herzog's Grizzly Man in Polish, for the original English version see here (pdf). Would have been nice if they'd asked, but even so good to see the work getting out there.

Call of Joyce

2010-07-08T03:52:00.000-07:00

Textual variant of the opening line of Finnegans Wake, begun by Joyce in Bognor Regis and found in Bognor Regis museum (fragment of text since stolen from a display case in an unsolved break-in):

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to R'lyeh and Environs.

Conjunctural Cthulhu

2010-07-05T03:06:00.001-07:00

There is absolutely no need for Marxist cultural criticism when the working of the geist provides riches like this.

Dictionary of Received Ideas

2010-06-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

I'm no Flaubert, you'll be suprised to hear, but at various points I have toyed with the idea of writing a contemporary version of his 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'. I actually see there is a facebook group dedicated to this, but they don't seem to have got very far. I can't achieve Flaubert's devastating wit and ability to capture the true banality, but out of semi-annoyance I can't resist a couple of attempts.

Academics, never live in the 'real world', don't understand business

Activist, never an academic, involved in the real world

Art, neither autonomous nor propoganda. Always problematising, questioning, making one think. Provocative, but never be so vulgar as to be actually shocked.

Blogs, destroying our culture or giving birth to a new public sphere. When meeting a blog writer always express suprise they find time to write it, never visit.

Deconstruction, passe, but express admiration for Derrida

Difference, see Same

Fundamentalism, condemn in all forms

Lenin, misunderstood, admire tentatively

Marxism, always teleological, stagist, and reductivist. Express appreciation for the thought of Marx, but with the proviso it won't quite do today.

The Novel, 'Dead', or 'In better health than ever (thanks to Coetzee)'

Novels, always be writing one.

Rhizome, better than trees, see Tree

Same, see Difference

Sex, now liberated

Temporary Autonomous Space, live in one

Tree, worse than rhizomes, see Rhizome

Zizek, too popular, really a Stalinist, but always provocative

Containers

2010-06-22T01:41:00.001-07:00

Images from Alberto of our tour of Rotterdam harbour on an icy Sunday in June... This is part of a new website for Alberto and Jeff Kinkle's forthcoming zero book Cartographies of the Absolute (thanks to Nina). Mine are on Facebook here.

Our Bloch

2010-06-12T05:12:00.000-07:00

The perfect description of Evan's project, detourned from Adorno on Bloch:

'Like all thought worthy of the name, Evan's thrives on the edge of failure, in close proximity to sympathy for the occult.'

We come from the land of ice and snow

2010-06-10T08:59:00.001-07:00

Evan, suggestive and perplexing on that neatly insane Nazi-adopted cosmogony of 'world ice theory'. This reminded me of Roger Callois's rather dubious 30s essay 'The Winter Wind', on which Benjamin commented:

His contribution, 'The Winter Wind', celebrates the "bitter wind," under whose frosty breath all the weak must die, and in which the fit will recognize each other by their red cheeks (not from shame) in order to unite in a caste of heroes ....

and this of course:

It's interesting to analyse, as this post does, the radicalised nihilism of such fascist/Nazi 'theories', or pseudo-theories, not least for the questions they raise about the attractions of nihilism more generally and question of active/passive/completed nihilism. In what forms do such nihilisms seem to allow/accept ther very hierarchisations and distinctions they (should) problematise? What questions does this raise for the contemporary valorisation of nihilism? Is a cosmogenic 'absolute nihilism', thinking here of Thomas Ligotti, an exit from such attractions or does it reproduce an elitism of the confrontation with meaninglessness?

smells like victory

2010-06-09T01:23:00.001-07:00

In the wake of the move of CRMEP to Kingston the ironies keep on coming:

"Around 4/5th of Middlesex University’s research in RAE2008 was rated as of international standing. An important aspect of our strategy to build on this success is to strengthen our research student base. Consequently, we are funding several fully funded research studentships for an October 2010 start. Applications from suitably qualified candidates are invited in the following areas."

My personal feeling, reinforced by someone more sensible than I, is that under the conditions of the rigged game this was a victory. The rigidity of the academic job market, which once was a trade off with job security, now works to undermine academics. The obvious point was that Middlesex regarded their staff as disposable and now they have 'disposed' themselves en masse. Of course I feel real concern for those left behind, more than most as I feel strongly the need for struggles to increase job security. I'm deeply critical and sceptical about those 'radical' demands to exit philosophy from the university - living outside the university is living in other forms of wage labour, and I see nothing wrong with demanding state support for education (pending abolition of the state / value form / etc...).

The fantasy of the private university or certain forms of knowledge common seems to me to rest on a further entrepreneurialisation of knowledge. Here is where a thinking of the state and capital is required, rather than recycling anti-social democracy tropes in the guise of exodus style radicalism. 'Abolish the university', well wait around it's already being done by neo-liberal capitalism (isn't there a story that Jacques-Alain and Judith Miller where moved out of one Paris university by the French state (to another, but in the provinces!) in their haut Maoist destroy the university phase).

Paint it Black

2010-05-30T06:54:00.001-07:00

"A swarming machine that blackly paints glass"; further work needed

Apocalypse Again

2010-05-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

Another chance to read my piece on Eurozine; unremixed I'm afraid. Currently working on my paper for Rotterdam, which will focus on political disorientation as self-serving motif, the concrete v. the abstract, and the relation of politics and philosophy, all via Kant, Heidegger and Schmitt, with perhaps some Badiou/Jameson thrown in (as the bifurcation of 'political' Marxism and 'economist' Marxism). Then on to the planning for HM 2010 and, volcano willing, a holiday...

Saturday chairing a panel at this internal event if you're on the south coast and the weather isn't good... Starts at 1pm, registration shortly before

service update

2010-05-13T02:46:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Rob

indexing

2010-05-08T07:08:00.001-07:00

TRG event next week (x-advertised)

2010-05-06T04:45:00.000-07:00

It's here, you are welcome, and if you don't know the place contact me via here.

My Letter to Middlesex

2010-04-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Professor Driscoll, Professor Ahmad, Professor House, and Professor Esche,

I am writing to protest at the decision to close the philosophy department at Middlesex University and to urge you to urgently reconsider. My reason for writing is my dismay at the threat to such a valuable and internationally recognised philosophy department, and to those who teach, research, and learn in the department. Working myself in the field of Continental philosophy I have regularly attended events organised by your philosophy department, I use and engage with work published by the staff, and have personally been in dialogue with Professor Peter Hallward. I also regularly read and cite material published by the journal Radical Philosophy, which is edited from Middlesex, and I know as friends and colleagues many who have attended and graduated from the philosophy programme at Middlesex. I can personally and professionally attest to the centrality and importance of the philosophy department at Middlesex to the field, and to Britain's cultural engagement with philosophy.

The philosophy department has made a sustained, innovative, and profound impact on the field, making Middlesex known as a university that encourages and develops teaching and research that has shaped contemporary culture. Middlesex is abandoning this reputation by closing the philosophy department and, once again, I would urge you to reconsider your decision.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Benjamin Noys
Reader in English, The University of Chichester

Commonism

2010-04-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

COMMONISM:
DEAN KENNING
01.05.10 > 16.05.10
GALLERY OPEN: SATURDAY > SUNDAY 1PM - 6PM
PREVIEW: FRIDAY 30.04.10 6PM - 9PM
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Be the revolution of you
- Nike Ad
The individual, in truth, is nothing ... the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject
- Alain Badiou

Metallurgy of the Subject is an attempt to present philosophical re-conceptions of community and communism allegorically as an alchemical process of sacrificial transmutation.

Animation. Accompanied by:
Kinetic rubber sculptures jerk and flap about. Spastic decor. A chorus of idiots.

Maussian-Messianic Salvage Punk

2010-04-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

In lieu of what I had planned to do, which was actually post on Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound (a reference gleaned from Alberto's book, and well worth tracking down, especially the 1970 Paladin edition with psychedelic cover I found in Hay-on-Wye), here is just a great quote and some scattered remarks:

For a long time, the Europeans were not regarded as all-powerful, but as rather pathetic, ignorant people who could be easily cheated or stolen from. Their ignorance of sorcery was lamentable. ‘These are not men, they are merely gods’ said the natives, judging the Whites to be beings whose lives were inferior to those of living men. Again, they spoke the indigenous tongues very badly; why should one bother trying to make out their uncouth speech? And if one did associate with them, was it not likely to provoke the wrath of the ancestral spirits? Surely the country of the White man must be a very bad place, or why would they leave it? Or were these, perhaps, refugees who had fled their country to escape some punishment? (218)

Worsley's book is concerned with cargo cults, and more particularly with seeing this messianic movements as actually pretty rational responses to the irrationality of capital, especially in colonial 'contact zones'. After all, if you work more and earn less, or if the colonialists seem to do no work and live pretty well, why not engage in some Maussian-messianic salvage punk by destroying all your goods and waiting for deliverance by the ships or planes of the whites? Kill all your pigs, the primary source of wealth in New Guinea, and await the great Pig. Worsley's point that 'rationality' in anthropology and sociology is often judged from the 'rationality' of the market is particularly astute, as are the colonised's remarks about how useless whites are because they keep having to send broken down vehicles back to the ancestors for repair. More disturbing, although perhaps accessible via Fanon, are the claims of the colonised to be the real ancestors, and really white. A great scene as well when one potential rebel leader is sent on a 'orientation'/ training course and finds out that the whites don't really believe in their God but instead claim descent from apes - well, as he notes, that was always our theory...

In fact bearing in mind the inexplicability of the financial crisis and its effects of 'creative destruction' / non-reproduction Worsley's book starts to look like a guide for strategy for the colonised of capitalism. Why not liquidate your property and await your rescue package? (Probably better to try this if you run a bank...)

The Politics of Postanarchism

2010-04-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Sure to provoke more debate on the surprisingly vituperative anarchist academics discussion list, Saul Newman's new work.

Apocalypse Choice

2010-04-07T08:12:00.001-07:00

Your choice is either some unspecified polar ice-cap meltdown:

Or line drawn nuclear mushroom cloud (so 1980s...):

After having suffered the misery of 2012 on DVD; the world has to be 'cleansed' of over 5 billion people so some miserable hack pretentious writer who sold less than 500 copies of his palpably awful book can get back with his wife and family, after neatly dispatching the rather kind and useful stepfather (but he was a plastic surgeon...), I could do without any more apocalypse for a while. Perhaps though, after Alberto's suggestion, we should have a panel on apocalypse delayed at HM this year.

Review Copies

2010-04-06T04:51:00.001-07:00

This is indeed by itself a sufficient reason for writing a book ; but add to this what has many a time wrung books from modest authors, the impetuous appeals from known and unknown friends. Moreover, he had bought a big work, and, what is worse, had read it, and this labour was not to be thrown away. Thence originated the present treatise, which, we flatter ourselves, will fully satisfy the reader ; for the main part he will not understand, another part he will not believe, and the rest he will laugh at.

Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (download here)

"So soon as Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia was printed, for whose publication he had been eagerly waiting, he bought the volumes at seven pounds sterling, and this at a time when Kant, the privat-docent, was anything but well off, and when that amount of money meant more than it does now."

Robert Hoar

Thanks to Alberto for noting Kant's recognition of the need for a review copy...

X-post: Fanaticism video podcast

2010-03-31T06:57:00.001-07:00

For all those who couldn't make it here is the video podcast of Alberto's excellent talk, thanks to Helen for this.

California Über Alles

2010-03-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to use that as a post title and Evan on California at Mute gives me the excuse, although reading the wikipedia entry on the song it's libertarian (from the right) 'message' is a bit of a disappointment... Still can't beat 'Life Sentence' however - I'd rather stay a child and keep my self-respect / if being an adult means being like you'.

Knights of the Round / Square table

2010-03-25T03:50:00.000-07:00

I can recommend a reading of the Deleuze 'Roundtable' mentioned below, for a certain kind of comedy as well as for intellectual reasons. It's amusingly stacked pro-Deleuze (Eric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Nicholas Thorburn, and Jeremy Gilbert versus Peter Hallward...), although Peter does, as usual hold his own. In terms of positioning Eric Alliez offers the most sophisticated, although patronisingly articulated, defence of Deleuze / Guattari located in terms of the analysis of real subsumption and the contemporary mutations of capitalism. Colebrook's 'normative' defence (w/o mentioning Canguilhem) of the Deleuze of life seems to embody the problems for me, rather than the solution. Thorburn, who has written a very interesting book on Deleuze and politics, which I don't entirely agree with, seems to end up rather side-lined.

In terms of interesting moments I quite agreed with Alliez on the anti-war demonstrations / marches in the UK - which the doxa now tends to regard as completely failed / an instance of clean hands / pseudo-protest. His suggestion that the potentialities of that series of protests may not be exhausted and 'not in my name' is not (necessarily) a sign of withdrawal, chime with my feelings. Peter notes we may just not know yet. As I noted in the post below I have most sympathy with what I perhaps unfairly called Peter's 'paleo-leftism', although vectored through communisation which would probe the limits of the affirmation of workers' identities. Despite Alliez makes the best attempt no-one really seems to much grapple with the question of the congruence of Deleuze and Guattari with the capitalism they analyse, more offering relentless and reiterated insistence that the Deleuzian analysis of affects, composition, minor/molar will provide key forms of analysis. There are also some amusing moments when it seems things got pretty nasty... at least on my reading.

Deleuze and Politics

2010-03-24T04:20:00.000-07:00

The current issue of New Formations is devoted to Deleuze and Politics, and the pdf of the roundtable discussion is available, as is the editorial and an article by Jeremy Gilbert. Looks pretty interesting, although you'll have to wait for the book for my true opinions (on Deleuze and politics). Thinking on the communisation project, however, I do note an interesting congruence in terms of the re-invention of strategy in the absence of a functioning left (I have some sympathy for Peter Hallward's more 'paleo-leftist' stance, although not in terms of will).

Fanaticism at Chichester

2010-03-22T04:26:00.000-07:00

Cross-advertising, but it's worth it!

The Theory Research Group is proud to welcome Alberto Toscano, presenting on 'Fanaticism', 1-3pm, The University of Chichester, March 30 2010. For further details please contact Benjamin Noys, all welcome.

Art / Revolution

2010-03-16T08:19:00.001-07:00

Emory Douglas

Os Cangaceiros

2010-03-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

Just when you think you know every autonomist groupuscle in existence you find another... Thanks to John Cunningham for providing me with a translation of their text on the millennial movement of Canudos I discovered Os Cangaceiros (nearly all their French texts are here, while an account of the group in English is here). Drawing from the second resource, which notes their involvement in both the Brixton uprising and the Miner's Strike, we also have this from their physical assault on the architects on the French prison-industrial complex:

"Subject: Ambush
Are your wounds well healed, architect ? Did you figure out why ? Shamelessly, with no discretion of any kind, centimetre by centimetre, you have conceived these cages in which even the handicapped will be locked up. Inside the walls which you have designed, individuals who are worth more than you will be beaten up on a regular basis. It is good that you have received an appetizer of what thousands of prisoners will endure to the nth degree. To be sure, architect, this is not your company's first infamy. Considering what you build to house normal citizens, one can guess your competence to shut away delinquents. One moves easily from the tower blocks of the 13th arrondisement to prison cells. Pig, looking at your snout up close, we were able to note from your tired face how deeply you involve yourself in your projects. Before you were building walls, now you're going to knock them down."
Os Cangaceiros, Lyon, 29/03/1990