When to eat salmon mayonnaise (a brief note on the strategy of exodus)

"The skeletal structure of the exodus [abrupt deviation in the axis of discourse] is faithfully reproduced, though in the Lilliputian dimensions, by the countless jokes I have examined before. Let us recall at least one of them. A gentlemen in financial distress obtains a small loan from an acquaintance. The following day, his benefactor chances upon him in a restaurant eating salmon and mayonnaise. The gentlemen reprimands him resentfully: "Is that what you've used my money for?" "I don't understand you", replied the object of the attack; "if I haven't any money I can't eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I musn't eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?"
(from Freud)"*

This is Paolo Virno on the strategy of exodus from his latest work to be translated Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (discussed at length in an excellent post by Steve Shaviro). I really just don't get the strategy of exodus. Of course I understand the idea of (line of) flight, displacement from existing structures, the evasion of factory labour, and (god help me) the flight of the Israelites from slavery (if only I'd paid more attention in Sunday school now I would be more likely to be an internationally-famous theorist). I'd simply like to hear about more concrete examples, especially in the current context - in particular what we might call self-consciously political strategies rather than 'objective' instances of exodus (ie form of economic migration).**

Even in terms of the joke it's hard to see it as a simple instance of successful displacement, but rather a recognition of the imposition of the impossibility of displacement. Within the framework set-up by the self-styled donor what the recipient registers is that they can never eat salmon mayonnaise (although of course they are - perhaps that's the displacement). It reminds me of "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, never jam today".

* in case this has made you hungry here's a recipe for salmon mayonnaise

** I find particularly unconvincing the reading of such instances as really being examples of political activity:

"I do not believe that these migrants are only trying to escape poverty; I believe they are also seeking freedom, knowledge and wealth. Desire is a constructive potenza and is particularly powerful when it is implanted in poverty: poverty, in fact, is not simply misery, but is also the possibility of very many things, which desire indicates and labour produces. The migrant has the dignity of the person who seeks after truth, production, and happiness. And this is the strength that breaks the enemy's capacity to isolate and exploit, and which removes, together with the supposed Prometheanism, every heroic and/or theological tendency from the behaviour of the poor and subversive." (Negri, Reflections on Empire, p.30) While not denying any agency to migrants, and seeing them as passive subjects of capitalist processes, one has to inquire into how exactly this agency will form itself into resistance. On these problems in the context of internal migration in China, see this.

Marx & ANTs

This could be interesting. I'm a paid-up Latour sceptic, and I've just drafted my critical chapter on Latour for The Persistence of the Negative. Due to that, and previous interventions, I've read a hell of a lot of ANT material (once, a long time ago, I did my UG thesis using ANT and could have, in an alternative life, ended up as an ANT sociologist). It's all piled in my office and although 'no academic work goes unwasted' (claimed sage ex-friend of my partner), I really feel like I should have done more with it, but can't really face writing a book on networks / complexity etc.; mainly because it would be a hatchet job, frankly (where is our Lukacs circa The Destruction of Reason?),

For reasons PN will explain at length I sceptical about this whole kind of 'object' related direction ('affirmationism' as I call it), while at the same time having a kind of residual empirical pull towards it (I actually did Psychology instead of Philosophy as a UG because I wanted to do something more 'practical' - what a naive young man I once was). Of course if we sceptics / critics put in papers then we'd decide the direction of the conference. Perhaps the Badiou-style 'brigade of intervention' needs to be re-discovered. (I think Vincennes in the 1970s would have driven me to despair - I'd have wanted some proper teaching, it's all right for all those normaliens).

Still the place is also organising this, which makes me feel sick just to think about. And, looking at the list of topics, we could all be back in the cyberpunk hell of the 80s / 90s, particularly traumatic for technologically incompetent male theorists of a certain age...

:: Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions ::
The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts
April 29th to May 1st, 2009
Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester
Keynote speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale
Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University
Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario
In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced the various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally elementary components of the capitalist mode of production.
So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders.

Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.
Developments in Actor Network Theory and autonomist technoscience studies have made a turn towards the economic. What does this bode for the field of organization studies? Will these two movements join in an encompassing view of posthuman economic institutions? Will ANT provide the definitive answer to the interrelation of economics, politics and objects? These two yet separated strands of economy and politics might provide a good opportunity to revisit the problematics of objects and their commodification, combining them with more traditional approaches.
This conference therefore proposes a return to the study of objects and artifacts and the various logics and dispositifs that underlie the formation of their fields of power, while combining them with modern and more classical forms of political economy. Themes could include, but are not limited to:
- Protocols and networked governance
- Diagrams and control
- The return of resistentialism and insubordinate objects
- Army ANTs and the bones left behind
- ANT and the networks of economies
- Imaginary futures and technological dis/utopian visions
- The affective states of machinic interaction
- Anachronous inquiries and steampunk dreams
- P2P commons, conflict, and governance
- Interpretative labor and semantic webs
- Extended minds and their cognitive scaffolding
- Posthuman artificing
- Artefacts, black boxes and governance
- The art of commodifying the artificed Network
- Immaterial politics of networking
- The estrangement of networks
- Marx’s Laboratory Life vs. Engel’s Scallops
Please send proposals to Jenni Hern (j.hern@le.ac.uk) of 500 words or less by November 28th, 2008. Notification of acceptance will be provided by February 4th.
For more information go to http://www.le.ac.uk/ulsm/research/cppe or e-mail Simon Lilley (s.lilley@le.ac.uk)

Game Over Man

It has happened, at least according to Mike Davis (and the twenty-one members of the Geological Society of London commission). We have departed the Holocene - a 10,000 year inter-galcial warm period that happens to encompass the history of human 'civilisation' (cue Ghandi's joke) -for the Anthropocene - a new 'stratigraphic' interval dated from 1784 and the invention of the steam engine. The result, Davis forecasts is that:

the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

I won't dispute the science, because of a lack of ability, or Davis's diagnosis, which seems to indicate the existent tendencies - an abandonment of large swathes of humanity coupled to retreat into the 'Evil Paradises' of neoliberalism by the rich. Of course it gives an entirely new meaning to Rosa Luxemburg's alternative of socialism or barbarism. Not only does this 'choice' imply barbarism will operate in the absence of socialism, it now implies barbarism can bring an end to habitable existence for most of humanity and so the possibility of socialism. In Luxemburg's formulation the choice was uneasily tied to historical necessity. [1] If we doubt that necessity - immanently operating through the existent contradictions - then the prognosis is bleak. The Pasclian wager on revolution, whether activist or not, has its own expiry date.

Worse than that, if Davis is correct (and contra optimists like Negri) the existent tendencies are steadily eroding any possiblity of human solidarity that would be necessary to stop barbarism - whether that took the form of 'revolution' or any other sort of collective action for equality. The 'historical necessity' then appears (and I'd be happy to be wrong) to be moving in the opposite direction.

That said, and perhaps fiddling while Rome burns, I always find something disturbing about the tone of the work of Mike Davis. His work displays a taste for the apocalyptic and an evident interest in the technical details of destruction. He displays, to quote Guns n' Roses (never thought you'd see that) an 'appetite for destruction'. Thinly veiled by diagnosis it seems that a desire for destruction and apocalypse seeps through - car bombs on the streets of Los Angeles, 'burn, Malibu, burn', and the 'anarchist avengers'. One has to suspect that this is a result of the seeming disappearance of agency in the face of historical defeat. The recourse of Davis to biological metaphors here (and not only bio-history which is perfectly fine) disturbs because it threatens a good-old naturalisation of social relations. The 'typical', or at least typical of his worst books, Davis passage, involves summation of others research re-written in the style of William Gibson coupled to the techno-thriller via the new complexity theories. Everything is 'viral', 'coiled in DNA', or latched on to technical specifications (his Buda's Wagon (2007) makes him the Tom Clancy of the Left).

I can't say that I'm immune to the attraction of this discourse myself, through a toxic combination of childhood militarism (coupled to 80s nuclear anxiety), adolescent nihilism, and baseline pessimism.

Notes

[1] "We now realize the absolute truth of the statement formulated for the first time by Marx and Engels as the scientific basis of socialism in the great charter of our movement, the Communist Manifesto. Socialism, they said, will become a historical necessity. Socialism is inevitable not merely because proletarians are no longer willing to live under conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but further because, if the proletariat fails to fulfil its duties as a class, if it fails to realize socialism, we shall crash down to a common doom."

Fear of Flying

Ulm 1592.

Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.

Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.

The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.

Berthold Brecht, The New Reasoner 3 1957-58

Lucio Magri's article 'The Tailor of Ulm' in the latest New Left Review presents a depressing conspectus on the present fate of Marxism. While in Brecht's parable the Bishop was proved wrong and the tailor right the allegorical reading in relation to communism produces some disturbing questions:

"Can we be sure that if the tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall,he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends would not have tried to prevent him doing so? And secondly, what actual contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics? In relation to Communism, such questions are especially pointed and difficult—above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent it dissolving into myth." (48)

The New

Also, if you can you should order this for yourself, or for your local / university library. I didn't personally know Sam but I have read a little of his work on Badiou, which raises key questions especially around my own current thinking of the negative. Also, re-press fast seem to be turning into the 'good' semiotext(e), which is rather nice to see.

If Wilbur Whateley had Pay-Pal

He'd buy this:and he would have saved himself this:

"The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated."

Reza's work operates a radicalised "thought of the outside" (Foucault), in which the subject is subjected to the "torture" of "being opened by" the negative. Against "affordance" in all its forms (which I tend to parse as an ontological "recuperation"), this is metaphysics as politics - "twisted affirmation" that concedes nothing to the current affirmationist consensus, by inscribing nothing through subtraction at any and all points.

Let me tell you about my mother...

The excellent new issue (although some of the proofing / translating is very poor on the texts I've looked at) of The Symptom includes not only the essential "Extimity" by Jacques-Alain Miller, but also a very strange (to me) text by Alain Badiou on his own philosophical biography. Better if you read it that if I summarise. Perhaps it is simply that I find such "revelations" embarrassing and slightly distasteful (which is itself odd due to my own interests in psychoanalysis). Certainly Badiou, as one would expect, links these biographical elements to the formal elaboration of his own philosophy, but at some level I prefer the inhuman image of the philosopher (or writer, artist, musician etc.). That is why I was quite happy to write my first book on a thinker who was dead, and while working now on living thinkers I have little or no desire to meet any of them.