Proletarian Shopping

Greek anarchists stormed a supermarket on Thursday and handed out food for free in the latest of a wave of raids provoked by soaring consumer prices. About 20 unarmed people, mostly wearing black hoods, carried out the midday robbery in the northern city of Thesaaloniki, police said. Local media have labelled the raiders "Robin Hoods" following previous raids. They take only packets of pasta, rice and cartons of milk which they drop in the middle of the street for people to collect, a police official said. "They have never stolen money or hurt anyone. They ask people to remain calm but use ambush tactics, jumping over cash desks," he said. "When they attack without hoods, people are surprised to see that they are mostly women. "The rising cost of living has replaced unemployment as Greeks' main concern. Inflation is officially running at a 10-year high of 4.9 percent although many items have risen in price more sharply.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Angus MacSwan)

Cattivo Maestro

"the weak philosophies of the margin, difference, and nakedness appear as the mystifying figures and the unhappy consciousness of imperial hegemony."
Hardt & Negri in Negri, Reflections on Empire, p.94

What might be quite a rare moment: Hardt and Negri appearing to channel Lukács circa The Destruction of Reason (1952). Brutal as their characterisation of "weak thought" might be, it appears to have increasing truth - although how that truth is taken is up-for-grabs (is Agamben's "bare life" uncannily predictive of imperial hegemony, or simply a counsel of despair in the face of it?). The difficulty is, as Steve Shaviro points out here is that this accusation can be returned to its sender - in what sense does "strong difference", or "nakedness" re-interpreted as poverty qua potenza, really not provide another "mystifying figure" of the supposed powers of resistance?

Perry Anderson has indicated the dangers of consolation, in which "[t]he need to have some message of hope induces a propensity to over-estimate the significance of contrary processes, to invest inappropriate agencies with disinterested potentials, to nourish illusions in imaginary forces." (14) While Anderson recognises this as a necessary illusion (could we say it is the Kantian transcendental illusion of the Left?), the difficulty with Negri's work is the sense of a magical transformation of weakness into agency that seems all too consonant with a mystification of the "obscene underside" of imperial hegemony.

We should, I think, recognise in Negri's work his good faith in trying to come to grips with new class composition(s), and the need to identify and retain a sense of revolutionary agency. After all, without this possibility of such agency Marxism would fall into the position indicated (and rejected) by Trotsky: "if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended in Utopia." The difficulty is that, at worst, Negri's work seems to imply the communism is not utopian because it is already realised - what Gregory Elliott acidly called "a mutant Browderism".

It seems to me that some of these difficulties are written in at a very early stage in Negri's work. I've been reading Books for Burning, the compilation of 70s texts (going cheap at Judd Books). These are definitely some of the densest of Negri's texts, and I start to have sympathy with those ex-Brigadists who accused Negri of the invocation of the "magic Grundrisse" and the recollection of Greppi (recorded in Steve Wright's excellent review "Children of a Lesser Marxism?):

I remember once meeting Luciano [Ferrari Bravo] coming out of a lesson, and he asked, "Why do I have to waste my time explaining Toni’s books?" He was a wreck after two hours of interpreting the thoughts of the great master. Basically this was ideology, rather than the critique of ideologies.

The particular difficulty I'm pointing to particularly concerns the quotation of passages of the Grundrisse and then their analysis by Negri, which at the very least often seem "inventive".

That said, the actual theses of the texts are relatively easy to follow, and identified quite clearly. These hold the key to the continuity that concerns me. In Domination and Sabotage (1977) Negri argues that ‘Sabotage is the negative power [potenza] of the positive’ (2005: 258; italics in original) and that there is ‘a positivity that commands the negative and imposes it.’ (2005: 259) Here already, for me, is the first alchemical transformation of negative into positive that dictates the later ontologisation of constitutive power.

This will later slide all too easily into an endorsement of 'things as they are' as really being communist. The line is perhaps easier to take at the high-point of a radicalised movement, although it offers little to explain the rapidity of defeat (of course we can note the extremity of the state repression - conveyed most movingly in Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen - but then what significant movement has not had to face and try to overcome such repression? Negri's own discourse of sharpened fundamental contradiction and rising proletarian power offers little explanatory grasp to the experience of defeat). In the current context it appears too much as wishful thinking, precisely resulting from an all-too-rapid positivisation of the negative.

Cover Competition (so far)

Some kind suggestions for the cover. The first two from espacioprovisional; I'm quite taken with the Christopher Wool image - the 'gridding' coupled to the 'splashed'/'smeared' paint (look I am not TJ Clark...) seems to resonate.

Steven Parrino, Untitled (1997)

Christopher Wool, Untitled (2005)

The second nicely classical suggestions from Dave. I did think about Goya, but all the usual 'horror' images; my partner would like this, and I find it disarmingly cute. The Caravaggio is typically great, but I've got the feeling already "taken" by some other book (frustratingly I can't remember which).

Goya, The Dog (1820-23)

Carvaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599)

If either of you want a "prize" from the stash of books let me know. More suggestions gratefully received. My first book had a very poor picture of Bataille (going cheap though) for the cover, when if I had the sense I should have suggested a still of him as a seminarian from Day in the Country. The second had a rather nice cover but was written under such horrible circumstances that I can't recover any real affection for it.

Perhaps there is also a case for suggesting better alternative book covers for existing works? Considering the state of my thinking at the moment this may well make up future posts in lieu of more intellectual labour...

Cover Competition

In lieu of meeting the stringent meme criteria here's a delaying tactic: please suggest possible image(s) for the cover of my new book. I'm still writing (one chapter and a conclusion to go; plus a series of traumatic rewrites no doubt - due December 2009 / published 2010), and the publishers haven't said anything about what might be acceptable so I make no guarantees. Also the Spinal Tap gag about black letters on a black cover is unacceptable... Anything good / helpful will get some reward (did I tell you about the piles of books making my office uninhabitable?).

Here are my thoughts (so far):

Gerhard Richter's "Record Player" (1988) from the Baader-Meinhof series. The other images in the series seem too obvious (and my book doesn't of course mention the RAF). Nothing also about music in the book either, but there is something that seems to evoke non-dialectical negativity in this image (for me). As I've been told (via a reliable source) publishers believe that a UK audience doesn't need a cover that has anything to do with the contents of the book, so anything goes.

Jeff Wall "The Destroyed Room" (1978)
Is this too obvious?



Jeff Wall "View from an Apartment" (2005)
I also like this, for no very obvious reason except perhaps I'm currently using a postcard of it as a bookmark. There's also something about the density of everyday life that seems to echo what I'm trying to think about dissolving.

This (or other images), from Masataka Nakano's "Tokyo Nobody" (something nicely apocalyptic about his work, and the book is amazing.

On the "long list" there's Titian's "Flaying of Marsyas" (1570-76) (too pretentious?) and I really love Caravaggio, but then nothing seems suitable. I'm starting to wish I was clever / famous enough to have one of those annoying openings when an artwork allegorises the project as a whole (Cf Foucault's The Order of Things, and the descent into stylistic tic in new historicism); I'm not.

Lessons in Dialectics

Travelling by train to London I sat down at a table and noticed a wasp crawling across it. Using the paper I was planning to read I carefully brushed the wasp off the table. Later coming into London I reached into my bag and the wasp, which had obviously crawled in, stung me on the wrist. I carefully shook the wasp out of my bag.

dogmeme

Been tagged for this. Writing according to rules (also cf. Oulipo) has always seemed a relief to me, probably from some super-ego pressure I can't recognise without Lacanian analysis. In fact, one reason I have such a great affection for academic conventions is they provide exactly these rules - and also they incarnate some generic models that I find appealing (of course run through with all the micro- and macro- corruptions that disable these mechanisms). My suspicion is that often "experimental" is just plain sloppy, and even valorised experimental modes (like Derrida's "novel" The Postcard) demonstrate to me that (a) I'd prefer a "proper" book, and (b) It is really difficult to do, and can easily lead to a banal stabilisation of the "experimental".

The first problem is that I don't have five people do send it on to (this is starting to bring back memories of school..). To get round this, in the spirit of Wyndham Lewis (everyone laughs or no one laughs), I'm making a hystericising Lacanian call that anyone who wants in can identify their own two most common stylistic or rhetorical ploys and then write a post without them.

On the two demands on me:

1. Dialectic

Hmmm, tricky - perhaps to write a completely affirmative post might be the solution (which fills me with horror).

2. Footnotes

Easy, except I really like footnotes - to use the trite commonplace they function as the unconscious of the text. I'm also one of those people who enjoys reading footnotes before reading the main text. In the case of my current reading this mode of reading is suitable due to the fact that the footnotes make up an almost parallel book... (still, it's a very interesting book, and very good value as well for an academic book - £8.50)

Transcendental Revolution

Of all the thinkers I have analysed so far for The Persistence of the Negative it is Deleuze that has gone up in my estimation, from an admittedly low starting point (and I'm sure you're all happy to know my fickle changes in intellectual appreciation...). Although I discuss and critique his work as the subject of chapter four this point in Difference and Repetition (1968) struck me as uncanny and prescient.

Analysing Marx's Social Idea - which Deleuze takes to be the economic as the virtual field posing problems - Deleuze notes that the economic problem is actualised as a false problem – ‘the solution is generally perverted by an inseparable falsity.’ (1994: 207-8) In the case of the economic the false problem is the fetishism of the commodity conceived as ‘an objective or transcendental illusion born out of the conditions of social consciousness in the course of its actualisation.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208) Already here we can see the similarity to Slavoj Žižek’s argument that fetishism is incarnated into social reality in the form of materialised beliefs (1989: 31-37). This fetishism produces effects which both enable some to live and others to suffer – the false problem makes history ‘the locus of non-sense and stupidity’ (Deleuze 1994: 208). We have a situation in which the nonsense of alienation and exploitation is rendered as ideological commonsense, precisely through the inscription of this nonsense in social consciousness. Commodity fetishism is both real and false. For this reason we cannot appeal to consciousness as the site of a solution – it appears that Deleuze implicitly rejects the Lukàcasian solution of ‘class consciousness’. Instead, his analysis prefigures Althusser’s argument that the imaginary conditions of ideology create an effect by which consciousness is by necessity ‘false’ (see Althusser 1971: 121-173). How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)

Although sketched with startling rapidity the conclusion appears to be that to prevent the stabilisation of affirmative differences in happy co-existence – ‘the counterfeit forms of affirmation’ (Deleuze 1994: 208) – it is necessary to return to the virtual to re-actualise the true problem that will break with this necessary illusion of individual consciousness and sociability (although what is left unclear is the agency that will perform this ‘transcendent exercise’).

Here endeth the extract...