Birthday negated

Thank you to all those who sent best wishes on my birthday yesterday. The virtual card above is kindly from IT - uncannily like my actual life. I can say we had a very nice Indian meal, the Gerhard Richter show was disappointing, and the evening viewing consisted of Iron Man / and Zizek: the movie - how postmodern. 'Normal' service may be resumed in a couple of weeks, but I can be seen at the following:

‘The Future Lasts a Long Time: longue durée Marxism’, ‘Many Marxisms’, Historical Materialism annual conference 2008, School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London (Sunday 9 November 2008).

10am-11.45am

TIME, TEMPORALITY, HISTORY
Chair and discussant: Alberto Toscano
Benjamin Noys
The future lasts a long time: Longue durée Marxism
Andrew McGettigan
What is orientation in Marxist thinking? Communist practical reason and historical time

‘Outsourcing Authority: On Lars Von Treir’s The Boss of it All’, The Žižek Centre for Ideology Critique, Cardiff School of European Studies, Cardiff (18 November 2008). 5pm

Respondent to John Lechte’s ‘Agamben’s Politics of the Image’, Goldsmiths, the University of London (2 December 2008).

Contra Affirmationism

[This is the prospectus to my book, thanks to Gilles Grelet for its original publication.

In retrospect I realise it has more of an 'accelerationist' and quasi-anarchist feel that I'd now feel comfortable with - still a record of my continuing series of errors]

[1] Theory has become hegemonised by affirmationism – the doctrine of adaptation to the world in the name of the affirmation of the world. Create! Organise! Produce! – these are the master-signifiers of the affirmationist, the blackmail to either live in this world or make a “new” world.
This world we must leave.

[2] “All that exists is good”. This is the slogan of what we could call vulgar affirmationism. It appeals, simultaneously, to the density and fragility of the world. In its density the world cannot be subtracted from but only added to or affirmed. In its fragility we must cosset the world and protect it from any hint of violence. At once we are superfluous to the world and its heroic protectors. What we are left with is the patient labour of weaving of new links, new connections, and new material. Build your networks! Extend your own empires of thought and practice!

[3] “All that comes to be is good”. This is the slogan of “critical” affirmationism. Now it is not so much the world itself that is dense and fragile but all that can be actualised in this world. We are called not to affirm the world as we find it but to affirm the construction of a new and better world. The world as it is is doubled by the reservoir of potential, of the virtual from which everything can, and must, be drawn out. A dense realm of possibility, and so fragile it must be carefully brought out by us. Build your networks and extend your counter-Empire!

[4] In its more seductive “critical” form affirmationism maintains and appeals to the signifier of revolution. This takes place in two forms. The first is that of the affirmation of becomings and flows, where all that is good exists in reserve to be actualised in movement. We release or unchain the “spontaineity” of flows, we accelerate through and beyond capital. This is the fantasy of movement, or of the “movement of movements”. The buried moment of negation secreted deep within this orientation is only that of flight.
The second is that of the affirmation of the void or event. It has at least has the merit of beginning from the necessity of some minimal negation against the density of the world, or of allowing this possibility. Of course all it can then do is to supply that void, that unleashed negativity, with its “proper” form. This is the patient work of organisation and fidelity, where heresy is only a point of departure.

[5] Since Nietzsche we have learnt to be ashamed of negation. We see it only as the sign of ressentiment or, even worse, idealism. Of course the great gesture of Hegel was to make negation function as the motor of philosophy, the motor of the fundamental and repeated scission that generates the circle of the empirical and transcendental. Out of the ashes of Hegelianism emerged the signs of catastrophic negativity. No sooner that this possibility had composed itself then it was refused through the construction of “great ontological machines” (Bataille), re-tooled as the new war-machines of counter-philosophy.

[6] The fatal irony of affirmationism is that it releases a catastrophic negativity no longer attached to ontology or philosophy. We refuse the pseudo-liberation of the great ontological machines for the liberation of “unemployed negativity” (Bataille) against and outside those machines. This is no counter-philosophy, no new move in the theoretical game, but a rupture that proceeds indifferently, which no longer requires us.

[7] The axiom that unemployed negativity proceeds without “us” is the refusal of the blackmail of practice as it is currently staged; it is the refusal to produce a humanism of negativity. Non-dialectical negativity offers no work of purification or production, nothing new that would take the form of a semblant, and nothing that would form a new subject. The “subject” of non-dialectical negativity is the sorcerer’s apprentice, who finds that negativity rebounding on their constitution as “subject”. This rebounding does not depend on the triggering of the subject – unemployed negativity is as much the effect of the supernova as it is of revolutionary violence. At no point does the subject posses negativity, but exists as the remainder of its traversal; the subject is unemployed.

[8] On the other side, the “matter” of non-dialectical negativity is the negation of the prison house of the matrix immanent-transcendental-transcendent (as well as all existing materialisms). It is “active” but not as force, or even worse “life” – which would reinscribe it in some Nietzschean affirmationism, quasi-philosophical physics, or miserable neo-vitalism. If it is anywhere unemployed negativity “beneath” philosophy; we hate most of all that it should be mistaken for the grandness of the tout Autre – another new name for a deracinated God. This is matter that does not stay in place and refuses theoretical assignment.

[9] The true heretic does not make a new church.

CFPs and other business (never personal)

A call from Reza and Nicola for a special issue of Glossator on commentary and black metal. I guess I happen to know a few people who might / should contribute - eh, and eh. I know nothing about said topic so you will be spared my tender mercies.

Also this call from Speculative Heresy. Did I happen to mention I'm writing a book contra affirmationism?

Btw thanks to infinite my Habermas review is appearing in the next issue of the Philosophers' Magazine. I've always quite fancied living in a Habermasian world, as I hope you'll see from the review.

39 on Sunday and off to this.

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)

Phuture agency

There is an excellent review of the new Virno here. I think it's a very interesting work, especially in light of reflections on agency. I have to agree with said reviewer that the comments about the New Orleans superbowl are reprehensible, I'm hard pressed to understand why no one pointed out the possible problem at an earlier stage to Virno. It's certainly a case for postcolonial critique.

One thing I found particularly odd was Virno's rehabilitation of Schumpeter's Unternehmergeist (entrepreneur-spirit). This, however, started to make a little more sense after reading Robin Blackburn's 1991 piece on 'Socialism After the Crash'. The essay offers a fascinating discussion of the 'calculation debate' and the possibilities of market-socialism, including this comment:

So far as I am aware no-one pointed out that Hayek’s argument from the dispersed nature of knowledge could also be deployed against a narrow capitalist entrepreneurialism by advocates of social and worker self-management.

I'm not sure if this exactly coincides with what Virno means and, like the concept of "exodus", it remains highly under-developed. This seems all the more problematic in the current context of financial crisis, in which these forms of "agency" would have to connect the multitude to power over the macro-economic. This might be another reason to agree with IT that his pitching of innovation and negation at this level of abstraction is of more use to those turning a capitalist profit that to those wanting alternative egalitarian social forms.

At a slight tangent I've also recently encountered the work of Malcolm Bull, which has the merit of asking exactly the question that has been troubling me:

Within contemporary radical politics, there are a lot of questions to which there are many possible answers, and one question to which there is none. There are innumerable blueprints for utopian futures that are, in varying degrees, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, ecologically sustainable, and locally responsive, but no solution to the most intractable problem of all: who is going to make it happen?

(The Limits of Multitude)

The result, at least in Bull's summary is that:

Without these agents [communist states / parties of the left] there appear to be only two forces capable of shaping the contemporary world: market globalization propelled by governments and multinational corporations, and populist reactions that seek to assert national or communal sovereignty. (Limits)

We are left with the choice between the 'invisible hand' (under which, to use Karl Polanyi's words, 'human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation’) or forms of populist will. It may be we could argue Peter Hallward's attempts to argue for a generic or communist will are one way to try to escape this alternative. What's provocative about Bull's argument is that he assimilates the Negrian multitude precisely to the 'invisible hand' / Hayekian tradition. This throws a more sinister light on the lack of specificity of Virno's models of agency; is his work another ruse of the (capitalist) cunning of reason?

That said Bull's own solution seems to partake of a slightly odd version of the same logic:

To the contemporary crisis of political agency, Hegel’s theory of the state offers both an explanation (in terms of the inadequacy of any one form of agency) and two possible resolutions: it excludes the non-dialectical options of a global market society or global non-market state, and reduces the viable options to a global market state and a global, potentially non-market society. A global civil society might be willed into a global market state, or else a global state might, through the workings of the invisible hand, collapse into some form of global civil society. The former is the natural expression of the Hegelian dialectic transposed to a global context; the latter has the form of Gramsci’s appropriation of the anti-dialectic.

(States of Failure)

Here the dialectic, or anti-dialectic, implies a passing over through the invisible hand to a global civil society. He appears to argue that the 'anarchy' of capitalist barbarism offers a path through to socialism, via this barbarism registering the failure of the state: "the invisible hand invests the failure of utopia with the utopian promise of the failed state." Again, I'm not really sure how this specifies more forms of agency? Perry Anderson's question to Bull carries weight:

an impasse between the globalizing market and populist reactions to it implies that they are of equivalent weight, neither advancing at the expense of the other: is that what the last twenty years suggest? If the current version of the global state (sc: us hegemony) is dissolving, why should not it issue into Huntington’s patchwork of regional market powers, delimited by civilizational spaces, rather than a global civil society, market or not? ("Jottings")

I'd say this alternative is plausible because, as Anderson points out, this implication of symmetry (perhaps derived through the metaphorics of chaos theory) that doesn't seem to really register the 'balance of forces'. For me a similar problem afflicts Immanuel Wallerstein's claim that as we are entering in a crisis for the system, not a crisis of the system:

We have to remember finally that the outcome of the struggle during the present chaotic transition is not in any fashion inevitable. It will be fashioned by the totality of the actions of everyone on all sides. We have only a fifty-fifty chance of prevailing. One can define fifty-fifty as unfortunately low. I define it as a great opportunity, which we should not fail to try to seize.

I wonder if the metaphorics of chaos theory used also by Wallerstein ("equilibrium" / "bifurcation") leaves the strategic questions a little hanging in terms of balance? Anyway one thing I should say about Bull's use of Hegel is that Hegelians have a habit of being right.

For what it's worth my own position is more Andersonian on this; sceptical, but not without hope.