Strike!

It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist.
Alain Badiou

I will be a worker: it's this idea that keeps me alive, when my mad fury would have me leap into the midst of Paris's battles—where how many other workers die as I write these words? To work now? Never, never. I'm on strike.
Rimbaud

Please no more

Simply to second what has already been said; The Impostume has an excellent post of the new Mike Leigh film, which has the added advantage of meaning I won't have to watch it. I'm actually one of the seemingly few people who didn't like Naked so I can't even see the need to redeem Mike Leigh to active nihilism. I've never got over the representation of Aubrey's restaurant in Life is Sweet. More and more I start to consider the time I've wasted watching certain films or reading certain books and then I start to feel sick.

Make a Difference

the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.207

One makes a difference only in a world made of differences. To try to imitate the revolutionary today is as ridiculous as when the French revolutionaries imitated the Roman or the Spartan. As for changing the very fabric of the humans, we should leave this to the only total revolutionaries left : the Raelians ; let them clone the new human race

Bruno Latour

Freudful mistake

You leave the room for five minutes and miss another symposium on Alain Badiou... the papers from the Cardozo Law Review are here (scroll down to issue five). Obviously I haven't had time to read the papers, and I'm starting to have sympathy with Serres's point that he can't read anymore books because he has to have time to write his own. One thing I would note is that Badiou's paper 'The Three Negations' has been listed on the contents as 'The Three Negotiations' ha! look at the neutralisation of Badiou's message...

I'd also add that the introduction has some nice samples of Badiou's handwriting and Emily Apter's paper has some nice diagrams and pictures including the very amusing of a young Badiou (with flute! God this really is getting Freudian) from the back cover of his novel Almagestes.

Nothing

I came across Edgar Morin's 'Approaches to Nothingness' (1989) fortuitously. It pursues the relation to non-dialectical negativity, and echoes in some respects the recent work of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani (although in a less technical and metaphysical vein). In particular Morin explores the implications of our binding to a non-correlational negativity, or, in his usefully straightforward terms, the relation of anthropological nothingness (death) to the "incursion of Nothingness" into the cosmological. At the level of the cosmos we have the nothingness of the big-bang, the nothingness of the universe ending in annihilation, and a resulting ontological nothingness (which to me echoes Reza's concept of the "littered universe"). This is Morin, in Thomas Ligotti mode:

Such a universe is based on no foundation, has no center, knows no genetic God, does not exist in all eternity. It is an acentric and polycentric universe, a world without aprioristic laws since our known laws of the universe develop with the world contemporally and coextensively. Clearly, it is a world without a program, without divine Providence, without becoming. This world, which knows no foundation and no creator, which creates itself, engenders itself, generates itself, unfolds in the context of myriad autocreative and self-producing processes: the stars and atoms, of which there are billions.
(85)

As you might guess from the language Morin is interested in complexity theory and negentropy. What is interesting, however, is that he insists on how these processes of self-organisation always take place "at the phenomenal fringe of things that theoretically defies formulation, that bears no name, and whose presence we surmise." (88)

Morin insists on an effect of "emptiness", a fundamental binding to the necessity of destruction: "Nothingness is everywhere in the interior of the universe." (92) What's also interesting is that he links this back to our experience of this Nothingness. Of course you could regard this as a reactive (re-)turn to correlationism, but surely some of the fascination of non-correlational theories (whether "negative" (Ray Brassier), of "twisted affirmation" (Reza), or more "positive" (Graham Harman)) is their relation to us? In a way part of the point of these theories is to shock us out of a Kantian narcissim that "we are giving the orders". [1] What do we do with this shock?

I'm not simply trying to restore correlationism, in fact such a restoration is, in a way, premised on my missing of the metaphysical level of these arguments. [2] I want to consider, however, Morin's arguments which also sketch a political effect of the "embrace" of nothingness. Here is a (unfortunately) long quotation:

Apart from a self-defensive reaction by which human beings ignore negative feedback or deliberately forget and simply persist, there is an attitude of acknowledging that for the first time we are facing Nothingness in all its desolation, in all its necessity, in all its mystery. [3] The increasing enervation of the myths, which are by no means ineffectual or dead yet, bring us for the first time to the insight that there is no messiah or also that every possible messiah is ill, not just the Messiah of the religious but also that of politics. Every Messiah - including that of science, including that of progress - must be told: no! (94)

In political terms this function of the anti-messiah means the refusal of "brotherhood" as consolation and myth in the face of the negative. Rather, we can elaborate fraternity, or I would even say communism, "on our shared condition of being condemned to Nothingness." (95)

Although Morin argues this in terms of an "ethics of agony" and ethics is a word I am suspicious of (despite my own failure of using it in a piece that perhaps should be pruned from my CV), his point concerning the anti-messiah may still hold as one possible starting-point for thinking the politics of the non-correlational.

Notes

[1] I am by no means knowledgeable enough to grasp the accuracy of this as a reading of Kant, my suspicion is not but I await the next issue of Collapse eagerly.

[2] I seem to lack the "metaphysics gene", and in my rare conversations with philosophers I can easily be chided for my tendency to completely miss this level of argument. Hence I am without-philosophy in perhaps the most boring sense.

[3] Reza's work indicates this awareness is not as "new" as Morin suggests.

References

Morin, Edgar (1989) ‘Approaches to Nothingness’, in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, trans. David Antal. New York: Semiotext(e), pp.81-95.

Negarestani, Reza (2008) "The Corpse Bride:Thinking with Nigredo", Collapse IV.

The Principle of "Creativity"

But there is another side to the situation, and it promotes the overtaxing of the creative person in the name of a principle, the principle of "creativity". This overtaxing is all the more dangerous because it flatters the self-esteem of the productive person, it effectively guards the interests of a social order that is hostile to him. The life-style of the bohemian has contributed to creating a superstition about creativeness which Marx had countered with an observation that applies equally to intellectual and to manual labour. To the opening sentence of the draft of the Gotha programme, "Labour is the source of all wealth and culture", he appends this critical note; "The bourgeois have very good reasons for imputing supernatural creative power to labour, since it follows precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature, that a man who has no other property than his labour must be in all societies and civilizations the slave of other people who have become proprietors of the material working conditions."

Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, p.71

Another eerily prescient Benjamin comment, perhaps because of his own conjuncture at the intersection between the fading model of the Bohemian, Brechtian productivism, and the haute model of the Institute. One can't help reading his reflections on Baudelaire as quasi- self-reflections, although Benjamin's lack of the material conditions for intellectual labour does not seem as penurious as Baudelaire's ("I must admit I have reached the point where I don't make any sudden movements or walk a lot because I fear I might tear my clothes even more.") The reference to Marx's most "refusal of work" text is crucial as is Benjamin's pinioning of the operation of creativity as a "principle" that at once flatters the creative person and overtaxes him (one thinks of Dickens's exhausting reading tours, Mary Braddon's relentless production of books simply to keep her family, or the debate concerning the three-volume novel, as later 19th century examples.)

Benjamin also prefigures the current debate concerning "immaterial labour", but does so precisely by not reinforcing the "superstition about creativeness" that underpins much post-autonomist work. In this way he tries to break the magic circle of the ideology of "creativity" - the ideology which seemingly detaches it from production, but only to register it all the more within production. At the same time, again, this marks the rupture with the image of Benjamin as "safe" Marxist; either because he is a "great writer" (cf. J. G. Merquior), mystic (Scholem), or cultural flâneur. These images tend to re-insert Benjamin within the principle of "creativity" (a creativity in "excess" of the "constraints" of Marxism), playing-off of the fact of the vastness of the arcades project coupled to its unpublished status (blame here falling, partly rightly, on Adorno & Horkheimer*). Instead, we have Benjamin as "producer"; neither simply negating creativity as such, nor celebrating it as "resistance" to capitalism. Rather it is a matter of production as negation (of labour), intervention, and ideological rupture.

* Adorno's letter to Benjamin concerning the text from which my epigraph is drawn has to be one of the most crushing "reader's reports" of all time. Kudos to Benjamin for his robust response; when I get bad reader's reports I usually cry, or throw things across the room, before supinely trying to make good my "errors".

Please Mediate Me

The slightly uncanny experience of becoming mediated, if only I could be followed by my own personal photographer / essayist to give my whole life some much needed narrative sense....