the art of crisis

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...).

California Über Alles

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'.

The Eternal Return of Crisis

Peter Osborne's article 'A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis', in the new Radical Philosophy 160 is a provocative and fascinating read. Not least because it makes a connection I was interested in by using Benjamin's reading of the eternal recurrence as the temporality of capital (someone should also read this against the temporalities proposed in 'On the Concept of History'). Summarising violently Osborne, suggests the functionality of crisis, its detachment from politicisation, and what I've taken to calling the capitalist real subsumption of the new. In a way, and I'd tend to agree, crisis does not guarantee politicisation, and Osborne explores this through a deeper conceptualisation of the effect of crisis on the very concept of change - something I'm also interested in and I'll need to read over more carefully.

This and his related work on negation, which has yet to my knowledge appear in print, makes Osborne's work a rather uncanny shadow to what I've been trying to develop (or vice versa).

The problem is that there is no politics

'even in the daily cash receipts of the trade unions there is more resistance than any targeted aggression.'

Here Mario Tronti makes his comments on the G20 protests, comparing the protests in London and Rome. While Tronti accepts the politics of the symbolic gesture, he is also concerned about the imprecision of targeting the banks, and not collective capital. While I tend to think this sort of claim is often overstated, and after all it is part of materialising the 'immaterial'/real abstractions of capital, what is more interesting are Tronti's thoughts on labour. He argues: 'it is important to bring the force of labour back into the game, in order to make it visible and to show that it is not demobilised.' Again, not unsurprisingly for Tronti, the emphasis falls on the necessity for leadership and political direction, and the need to shift labour into 'a more offensive expression' and to identify the 'real opponent'. In line with his previous comments Tronti insists on the necessity for a re-analysis of labour as a political subject and as a social presence. The emphasis needs to fall on the crisis as a crisis of labour, and the need to find a new organisational form for the diffusion of contemporary labour: 'Labour is a decisive point.'

I'd tend to agree with that, but I wonder about the switch away from the G20 protests in Rome vectored through the CGIL and the lack of comment on the London protests in terms of an organisational vector? While I'm not necessarily inclined to see the latter as a sign of strength it seems to me something (again) goes missing in terms of how the organisational and the political are to be provided. As I note above I think the supposed naivete of the protests tends to be over-stated, which is self-serving in relation to the lack of any organisational or political articulation elsewhere.

An Intellectual Clown

My title comes, of course, from Philip Roth's description of Philippe Sollers, which was meant as a compliment. One could add that no doubt Franco 'Bifo' Berardi would also take it as a compliment. After writing two texts arguing that revolutionary subjectivation has failed, that we are due a 'wave of suicides' (at least an empirically testable assertion), re-evaluating Baudrillard contra Deleuze and Guattari, and hyming the 'the intellectual potency of depression' (Berardi 2008a; 2008b), Berardi now turns to the current financial crisis. Anyone expecting further hyper-pessimism will be surprised, that has now flipped over into a strange hyper-optimism. Contrary to the caveats and warnings of David Harvey, who warns that the current crisis is leading to a 'far greater consolidation of the capitalist class', Berardi concludes that 'the history of modern capitalism is over'.

In a remarkable gesture Berardi sets-up a schematic opposition between the 'net-economy', valorised as the site of the general intellect that 'is challenging the proprietary principle that has ruled Modern capitalist society', and 'criminal capitalism', associated with militarism and the abandonment of legal rule. In light of the fact that this 'split' exactly replicates the relative funding sources of the US Republicans and Democrats (cf. Davis 2009) it's unsurprising that Berardi embraces Obama as prophet of the general intellect:

Obama's victory in the US may be the opening of a new period in the evolution of mankind. This event has injected new hope in the peaceful army of the general intellect all over the world. The new President was voted in by cognitive labor, and his victory is the defeat of the criminal class represented by Cheney-Bush. But this victory marks only the beginning of the fight, that will be the fight of intellectual force against the brutal force of ignorance, violence and profit.

It may be the defeat of Cheney-Bush but as Mike Davis has repeatedly pointed out the 'new economy' base of the democrats is hardly congenial to any functioning left politics, and in fact might well be a purer neo-liberalism than the 'military Keynesianism' of Bush's neo-liberalism (although Keynesianism for the rich continues in the bank bail outs). In an utterly bizarre analysis Berardi argues that the media system (identified with criminal capitalism) has 'finally overwhelmed the productive cognitive class', when wasn't it this 'cognitive class' that backed Obama, and which is firmly based in the 'media system' - hence the Democrats wooing of Hollywood.

While I can certainly agree with Berardi's comments on the privatisation of experience, the shattering of social solidarity, and the pernicious effects of privatised car culture, the fact that computers has a great deal to do with these dynamics (and permitted the possibility of the complex financial products which helped produce the current crisis) is bypassed for a political fable of libertarian cyerculture tamed by 'the man' (it's as if The Baffler never happened...).

Berardi's solution is to conduct a kind of therapy on the desire for private property. His argument is that 'semiotic goods' are not annihilated through use (just like tables?) and so permit common use and collectivisation. Now we no longer have to look forward to a wave of suicides, but communism is back, surfing on the wave of commanlity of knowledge, the ideological crisis of private ownership, and the mandatory communilisation of need.

Of course this can't be the old communism of 'Will and voluntarism' (the entirely predictable targets), but 'A totally new brand of communism'.

Predictably the 'evil' background of this communism of Totality (capitalised of course...) was Hegelianism, forgetting the fact that Hegelian communism was largely the opposition to Stalinist state-capitalism. Nothing can get in the way of cliche, however. Now, via the general intellect, we have a communism of singularities and non-temporary autonomous zones: 'a sort of Revolution without a Subject' (i. e. no revolution at all).

Lacking necessity this process will be achieved by droppong out and creating new networks of service. i. e. further privatisation. Thankfully we can take heart from Berardi's announcement that we don't need industrial labour anymore, instead we'll find ourselves in a state of 'furgality and freedom' (which actually sounds quite good...) What will happen to computers and the net in the absence of industry is not vouchedsafe to us. In case you are feeling scared by this new singularised and chaotic post-growth economy, don't worry 'politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time.' Kindly Berardi and co. will be there to take care of my or your anxieties to allow 'a happy adaptation'.

At once banal, weird, and deeply creepy, perhaps I'm the fool for taking any of this seriously.

Bibliography

Berardi, Franco 'Bifo', '(T)error and Poetry', trans. Arianna Bove, Radical Philosophy 149 (May / June 2008a): 39-44.
___, 'Alterity and Desire', in Simon O’ Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (eds.), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008b), pp. 22-32.

___, 'Communism is back but we should call it the therapy of singularisation', Generation Online, 2009.

Davis, Mike, 'Obama at Manassas', New Left Review 56 (March - April 2009): 5-40.

Harvey, David, 'Their Crisis, Our Challenge', Red Pepper 2009.

Kettle Logic and Circuits of Protest

Reading the Institute's comments on the G20 protests (in reply to Owen and Mark) and the question of the right to the city versus the struggle at the immediate point of production I was thinking perhaps this need not be cast as an antinomy. In particular Beverly Silver-type arguments point out how the new spatial dispersion of capital creates new points of struggle in terms of circuits of circulation - transport, docks, etc. - and of course the right of circulation through the city-space itself. It is these circuits that provide the admittedly attenuated linkages between labour and finance capital - not least containerisation (cf. season 2 of The Wire) - in the 'circuit' between China and the US. This would allow us to make the connection between labour and finance capital that Harvey regards as detached. This is partly Blackburn's point that this is a crisis of poverty (both among the US working class, i.e. the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the Chinese working class, in terms of low wages), and Badiou's point that this is a crisis of housing. Focus on the circuits as points of struggle would also allow us to avoid the displacement of struggle onto the Chinese working class (although it may be the obviously mixed memories of struggle do allow for resurgence in the face of proletarianisation - the breaking of the iron rice bowl).

The issue here would be one of making figurative / imaginative connections between the subsumption of labour qua commodity and the futural (detached) commodities of financialisation. Here I think Harvey and Blackburn offer models that might appear reformist but actually offer the means to 'appropriate the appropriators'. The appropriators being now not so much literal subjects of capital (the firm, the individual capitalist), but the bearers of capital as real abstractions (the financialisation of the life-course, the futural nature of the form of value). To appropriate them requires not only the right to the city but the right to financialised capital. Instead of being 'monetary subjects without money', in light of the strategies of autonomia with regard to the reappropriation of the wage, we might speak of becoming monetary subjects with socialised money.

‘- work and + money’ to quote the slogan of a leaflet distributed at Fiat in 1969.

Plus see the photos of the protests by IT. On IT's comment on the necessity for a sublation of the opposition between a totalising anti-spectacular concept of revolution coupled to a totalising concept of the spectacle I'd certainly agree (and on the query about the 'elsewhere' it might come from). I think here a re-reading (and critique) of the situs is necessary, especially the examination of such concepts as detournement and the construction of situations. Of course Debord's pessimism circa Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) seems to break this dialectic into a Baudrillardian-style pessimism (although Baudrillard is more interesting to me than the cliche).

All protest (I think) has a theatrical element, including successful protests / revolutions. Rather than risk blanket dismissal on these grounds - "the burning-with-the-pure-flame-of-negativity thesis" (Clark & Nicholson-Smith) - it might be more a matter of thinking types and forms of theatricality.

Accelerationism II.2

Two excellent posts by Owen and Mark, which demonstrate the 'general intellect' at work.

1. Owen makes the important point that 'accelerationism' doesn't have to be an ultra-leftist catastrophism but can involve the rational re-use of capitalist developments in constant capital to reduce variable capital, if we destroy the capitalist relation of accumulation (which is of course the proverbial big 'if'). This would, of course, be different from the capitalist reduction of variable capital through 'social exposure' (ie dumping workers into the reserve army of labour or out of the monetary relation altogether). Interestingly, I was reading this exact point being made by Richard Brenner in his essay on "Karl Marx's Theory of Crisis".

If we were to hypothetically leave out of the account real social relations of production today (capitalism), then improved technology and increased labour productivity would tend naturally towards the reduction of working time. Mechanisation would help convert the worker from semi-slave of constrained by a rigid division of labour into a supervisor of production, someone able through the progressive and sustained reduction of the lenght of the compulsory working day to participate in supervision and planning of ever wider spheres of production, distribution and consumption (socialism).
(p.53)

2. On Mark's post, just to say almost complete agreement... It was Landianism I had in mind with 'Deleuzian Thatcherism'; as for my choice of Lyotard as the text of accelerationism this was due to his outbidding of Deleuze & Guattari and his almost complete embrace of the consequences (I particularly like his sarcasm directed at Baudrillard concerning the lack of the 'good hippies' of symbolic exchange...).

It's slightly uncanny but Mark's three points were floating around in the cesspool that is my 'mind' and on the fantasmatic of capital permit me to refer to Mark's article in Film-Philosophy (a pdf).
In light of Mark's work I was thinking of the hyperstitional as a means of probing the 'real abstractions' of capital; especially as sketched by Roberto Finelli and Alberto Toscano.

3. One issue here (raised implicitly by Mark) is that of reterritorialisation as essential co-dynamic of capitalist deterritorialisation; [correction follows] Eric Alliez argues that the problem of Badiou's reading of Deleuze is that inscribes a constant and necessary relation between reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. In doing so Alliez argues that he produces 'Capitalism and Paranoia', not 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' - in which every deterritorialisation is immediately recuperated by reterritorialisation. For Alliez, we have to always fold capitalist deterritorialisation onto absolute deterritorialisation - hence, to quote Deleuze on Bergson - 'Dualism is therefore only a moment, which must lead to the re-formation of a monism.' This then is the sticking-point between Mark's formulation that 'it is was Deleuze and Guattari who proved to have the better handle on capitalism, precisely because they insisted on reterritorialization as the necessary counterpart of capitalist deterritorialization.' (which correspond to Badiou's position - and my own inclination) and SBA's position, which is more classically Deleuzian.

4. This is where the problem of agency comes in (again). I chose Lyotard as the exemplar because he seems pretty explicit that capital is the subject (of revolution): "[Capital] is the unbinding of the most insane pulsions" (138). If we want an alternative then we have to find some 'good hippies', or otherwise get into that various sub-Baudrillardian gestures of embracing the market that seemed to have a mercifully brief flowering in the 1980s/90s. Mark has made further comments on Lyotard here. In a sense this re-makes my point - Lyotard is the examplar because of this disappearance of the critical. This is exactly the point on which he departs from Deleuze and Guattari. Of course Lyotard's later political evolution - traced by Perry Anderson (see my comments here) - doesn't exactly make one convinced by this position of capital as absolute subject (subject as substance and subject?).

5. SBA has commented further on agency here, and re-iterating a strong accelerationist position rather than the previously canvassed Badiouian alternative. The action particularly takes place at the end of the post:

Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though we might wish to create a system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis (and here we return to the “sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires the illegitimate use of the very devices the praxis seeks to erase.

This seems to imply a kind of reverse Munchausen effect - instead of the subject pulling itself up by its hair it destroys itself by a 'self'-erasure. This may be formulated along the lines Reza suggests as an exposure to being 'butchered open' (see Reza on hauntology in relation to SBA's posts here). The difficulty is the passivity implied in this sense of agency - to be butchered by the processes of capital do we have to do anything more than just live and await our demise? How could we acclerate this process (and if so why)? Then, also, which particular humans would perform this self-destruction of the human?

6. Finally to try and clear up the Achcar matter (on which I was perhaps rather unclear), I'm in agreement with this point by Owen:

"Mind you, for that I don't subscribe either to the Gilbert Achcar view - it's always relative privation which causes revolt. The starving might not start revolutions, but the only insurrection during a boom I can think of is the abortive May."

A couple of things to add, first this can involve psychic immiseration, which I'm sure Owen includes in relative privation. This was the situ point about the misery of everday life qua accumulation.

Second, I posted the Achcar comment more for a reflection on the 'accumulation of struggles' as precondition for agency, hence I was going back to the 60s/70s. Mark and Owen, and everyone else who said, is perfectly right that (a) booms don't necessarily need to revolution (I have no 'one size fits all model of revolution', anything would be nice), and (b) the recent 'boom' hasn't. Of course that's because that 'boom' involved the massive decomposition of working-class power in a waning cycle of struggle. What concerned me was the mechanisms to translate disenchantment and privation into struggle, and whether (as Mark points out) the crisis is more likely to lead to barbarism than socialism in the absence of such accumulated struggles.

It seems appropriate that I should have to write a couple of lectures on Dickens, as he is a writer of catastrophism, and has his own version of accelerationism in 'free circulation' (he hated blockages of all kinds). Mercifully for the students this won't be much discussed by me.

Accelerationism

This is a term I've coined (unless someone out there proposed it w/o my knowledge) to describe the kind of strategy beautifully conveyed here. In a sense it has a fairly impeccable pedigree as one of the "spirits" of Marx, especially the oft-quoted passage from the Manifesto on "all that's solid melts into air". To quote myself, this is "an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist."

Unsurprisingly I'm made more than a little nervous by these attempts to argue "the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism" (Brecht, see below). A "red thread" can be traced from Marx, via Brecht, down to the libertarian current of the early 1970s. Rather than seeking the subject of revolt as the marginal to capital, the subject of revolt is the subject in capital (although the dangerous elision is that the subject of revolt simply is capital). As Lyotard, whose Libidinal Economy is the book of accelerationism, puts it: "in the immense and vicious circuit of capitalist exchanges, whether of commodities or ‘services’, it appears that all the modalities of jouissance are possible and that none is ostracized."

Interestingly, in a previous post titled 'Against Hauntology' Splintering Bone Ashes (SBA) sketches two options:

Firstly (if we believe the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we might think a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern audio-necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation [option a]. Alternatively, we might consider Badiou's analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable. [option b]

Obviously I'd choose option b, and in a sense, although departing from Badiou precisely on the grounds of his "affirmationism", this is the argument of The Persistence of the Negative. The later post firmly chooses option a. While this is one way to cash out the politics of speculative realism, and hence admirable, I'm not sure it exhausts those possibilities or is the only such politics extractable.

In terms of artworks I find a lot to agree with in the critical remarks concerned with hauntology, and can certainly see the jouissance of the nihilistic embrace of capital qua accelerator. Much of the shock of Detroit Techno in its initial phase (to show my age) was its choice to embody the robots of the production lines of Ford (which had obviously been a factor in the devastation of Detroit), rather than the "humanism" of Motown. In a way this it is impeccably Brechtian.

That said I feel there are definite problems with this as political strategy (as well as artistic - cf. the late Warhol - Jeff Koons - Damien Hirst line). Instead, unsurprisingly, I prefer the position of Benjamin: "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake."

____

Some examples of accelerationism:

Brecht

Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology, progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social). Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good path.

Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Pleasure of the Text (1973)


Galloway & Thacker
One must push through to the other side rather than drag one’s heels.
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007)

Krisis

IT / ICR with Badiou on the crisis, ICR with Tronti, and via What in the Hell... this site, which has some excellent analysis.

This point by Mike Davis is interesting in terms of questions of agency:

"On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.

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

(my italics)