Resistance (is futile / or not)

This argument from Pasolini, quoted by Barthes in his inaugural lecture at the College de France, presents a neat solution to the problem of recuperation:

'I believe that before action we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventuality did not exist .... But I also believe that afterward we must realise how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity or our necessity has been controlled and manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure.'

This kind of Pascalian wager, or Vaihingerian deployment of the political 'as if', at once avoids the paranoia of the position of 'always-already co-optation' (Chris Connery), and the 'happy' naivete that presumes the eternal revolutionary truth of a position, rather than, to quote Debord, that theories exist, and die, in time.

The paranoia of the first position can be found most symptomatically in Baudrillard's later texts, but with a twist. He passes from death as resistant to power (or symbolic exchange), to the system itself as auto-deconstructive - hence the passivity of accelerationism. Rather than having to think through recuperation, to 'abjure' our works, we simply rely on the providence of the 'system' to produce its own collapse, in which its 'obscene underside' suddenly chaotically 'jumps' into complete collapse.

This kind of paranoia also characterises the position of the Telos group in the 1970s with their concept of 'artificial negativity', in which virtually every protest of the 1960s was somehow constituted or manipulated to the advantage of capital. In later incarnations Telos came to believe a new populism would somehow evade this dialectic, again leaving an exit door open. This 'cunning of (capitalist) reason' argument is particularly beloved of renegade leftists (Marcuse wisely remarked on the fact that the cunning of reason always seems to work for power, never against it).

The alternative often canvassed is to build-in an ontological grounding that 'resistance comes first', more metaphysical in Deleuze's reading of Foucault (who otherwise might well seem to fall into position one) and more political in the autonomists, where labour-power does the work.

What concerns me is how these two positions fold-into each other: paranoia over complete recuperation finds that resistance comes to infiltrate itself as, or within, the 'system'. On the other hand, the primacy of resistance licenses the reading of any recuperation as somehow always the effect of resistance, thereby functioning as an apologetics for the system.

I'm not sure there can be an absolute solution to this kind of aporia, but Pasolini's wager offers a deliberate wager in the symbolic, to act 'as if' recuperation does not exist in advance, then afterwards abjuring works that are recuperated, w/o bad conscience.

Social Negativity

I'm not sure I'm exactly glad to know that I'm not the only one subject to random snowball attacks the moment there is exactly one inch of snow. I obviously have an amazing ability to attract social negativity "into my life" (as New Age types like to say). When I used to have a regular appointment in Brighton which involved walking along the main road by Preston Park I was regularly subject to abuse screamed from passing cars (usually the "c" word). Many out there would no doubt feel I deserve such treatment, however I continue to find it harrowing, what have I done?

Collapse V out

Now the anti-Kantian fun can begin (again)

Mine arrived this morning (no.71, trump that), and it's a big one, thanks to meetings, teaching, supervision, and in last place bodily needs like to eat and sleep, I doubt I'll be reading it for a few weeks at least.

Gazumped (academically)

Check out this review (pdf here) by Negri of Agamben latest (although the translation seems a little unsteady, or it may be the maestro's style). Annoyingly it appears that:

1. Agamben has already taken-up providence as a model for subjectivity (although it appears to be a negative model)

and

2. Negri critiques Agamben's lack of agency / subjectivity for his thinking of inoperativity (which is the argument of an article of mine which may/may not be forthcoming - I haven't heard back from the journal).

Back to the drawing-board...

Rome-phobia: A Conceptual Art Proposal

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development would exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising their old height on the Palatine and the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. (Civilization and its Discontents, 257-8)

A conceptual art project for any digital architecture types who want to spend a long time in Rome: to recreate digitally Freud's fantasmatic simultaneous Rome qua unconscious (the Freud quote goes on in further detail for quite a long time). This is close, but not quite - although perhaps close enought to ruin your arts council funding bid.

Foucault Avec Polanyi

For Evan

"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function."

Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) Avec

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944)

'Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon plan with the help of which gaols could be designed so as to be cheaply and effectively supervised had been in existence for a couple of years, and now he decided to apply it to his convict-run factory; the place of the convicts was now to be taken by the poor.' (106)

'His [Bentham's] Industry-Houses were a nightmare of minute utilitarian administration enforced by all the chicanery of scientific management.' (117)

When recently reading The Great Transformation, shamefully late, I noticed the passages on the Panopticon as an essential utopia of the self-regulated market, in which policing becomes the enforcement and invention of the 'economic'. It surprised me that no readers of Foucault, in my memory, had ever mentioned this connection. Recently writing a presentation for a Taster Day on detective fiction I re-read Franco Moretti's 'Clues' (in Signs Taken for Wonders), and noted that he placed Polanyi before Foucault in a footnote to his comment that the detective story 'reiterates Bentham's Panopticon ideal: the model prison that signals the metamorphosis of liberalism into total scrutability.' (143)

If you wanted a full chain you could read back to Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged, in which he points out how the Panopticon was 'trialed' in Samuel Bentham's (Jeremy's brother) regulation of shipyards to avoid workers walking off with 'liberated' surpluses. Hence the Panopticon returns to the history of real subsumption, and out of the history of 'surveillance' as an autonomous dynamic.

A Brigadist Speaks!

This review of Negri's, Goodbye Mr Socialism, by by ex-(Angry) Brigadist John Barker, courtesy of the Institute.