Brigade of Intervention

While I have a large amount of sympathy with the points made here concerning the communism 'event' at Birkbeck I'm not so sure about the call for 'active' intervention (ie physical disruption), sharing IT's and these doubts. Not very situ I know. In fact, I'm not going partly because I'd actually prefer to read the papers, so I do hope they go online (as well as for the general intellect).

I would say it may be unwise to storm the stage, if you're planning to, when Negri or Badiou is speaking, they both have some experience of these things...
"You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself"

Two Westerns

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the United States to the thematic of the century is to have placed at the heart of its cinema the question of the genealogy of courage and of the intimate struggle against cowardice. This is what makes the western – in which this struggle is permanent – a solid, modern genre, and what has enabled it to yield an inordinate number of masterpieces.

Alain Badiou, The Century

Courage, in the sense in which I understand it, has its origin in a heroic conversion, and is oriented towards a point that was not there, a Real woven out of the impossible.

Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy

Valdez is Coming (1971) is an almost perfect example of the Western as a discourse on courage, a Lacano-Badouian exemplification of persistence as orientation toward the Real qua antagonism. Bob Valdez (Burt Lancaster) is a Mexican lawman, who unwittingly kills a man accused of murder by the racist local arms dealer Frank Tanner. The man, who was both innocent and black, had an apache wife. Valdez tries to get compensation for the wife, not the niggardly sums offered of a few dollars, but a decent $200. The real is racism, in which the black ex-soldier, his wife, and Bob (referred to as a 'greaser' by Tanner and his men) do not count. Valdez's courage is the simple insistence on the generic worth of all.

Abused by Tanner's men, treated as a parodic Christ, Valdez simply and constantly pursues getting $100 dollars from Frank Tanner (his part of the compensation). That is why 'Valdez is coming'; not for revenge, or to settle his own suffering, but from this simple insistence. The film ends ambiguously on the final showdown in which Frank Tanner is told he will have to do his own dirty work and kill Bob himself, which he is incapable of doing. It is Bob's courage that turns Tanner's wife (whom Bob has been forced to kidnap) to his side, and which eventually leads Tanner's gang, especially its Mexican leader, to refuse to do Tanner's bidding. Here courage is not only an individual but also a potentially collective subjectivation, a rupturing with the casual racism - whether violent and direct (as with Tanner), or dressed up in more polite terms (as with the other white town bigwigs, who initially offer a couple of dollars and set Valdez on his impossible mission). Courage here is also the courage that the impossible can be done.

Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) is, as usual with Miike, a hyper self-conscious play with genre: a kind of meta-meta-meta Western. If we consider the 1950s meta-Western in the US as already a reflexive and elegiac meditation of the impossibility of the Western, then (which Badiou does not discuss) we have the spaghetti Western as first 'postmodern' moment, most perfectly in the work of Sergio Leone, and then this post-postmodern Western. With his Japanese actors speaking every cliche of the Western, a hyper-stylised staging (think Lars Von Trier remaking Leone), and deliberate anachronism, the film is, for me, a slightly wearying terminal summary of the Western. Should you be teaching intertextuality this is the film for you.

Of course this is further complicated by the series of overlappings which would make an excellent film book in itself. First we have Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), a samurai film derived from the Western, but also inspired by the 1942 film noir The Glass Key, derived from Dashiell Hammett's 1931 novel of the same name. The film has a lone ronin playing off two warring clans against each other and was, of course, remade by Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), thereby returning to its 'natural' generic home (Leone also claims inspiration from Hammett's The Red Harvest). Leaving aside Miller's Crossing (1990), which I dislike, Miike's film of warring gangs and a lone samurai gunman is obviously another stage in this already deeply complex series of exchanges.

It would obviously be foolish to expect a discourse on courage from Miike's film, rather like the (to my mind excellent) The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), what appears crucial is the generic 'play'. Unlike that film, Sukiyaki Western Django does not seem as successful in this generic play, perhaps because the spaghetti Western was already the perfect 'play' that remained absolutely serious.

A New Political Subject?

Three new reports on the Greek revolts, an excellent account in the Guardian(!) and two reports in the latest RP (not yet up on the website). In all cases the writers agree that the struggle is as much against precarity as against state violence, that a new 'transversal' political subjectivity has emerged outside and against the usual coordinates of mediation, and the difficult struggle to articulate that subjectivity against the political channels which, it appears, are thoroughly corrupted. A key question is the way in which the revolt depends on contextual specificities - the history of repression and violence, the precarity of the €700 generation, the failures of the Greek state, the strength of political resistance - and how much it might be generalisable. This was obviously the fear in France, although it's depressing to say not in the UK (which certainly has seen a wave of occupations).

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Most unexpected of all was the occupation of a call centre operated by the Altec telecoms group by employees threatened with redundancy without compensation. Altec was part of the recent break-up into the private sector of Greece's formerly state-run telecommunications system.

"There was a complete lack of political culture in the place," says Giorgos Sotiropoulos, who worked as part of the technical support team. "A call centre is as alienated as you can get. It's insidious. You're pitched against your co-worker by the fact that the supervisor is counting how many sales you make in how many calls and minutes. So it really mattered that it was a call centre we occupied, because the kind of enemy this insurrection in Greece is fighting is typified by this work. The enemy is amorphous, it is virtual, and that makes fighting it far more challenging than fighting a junta of colonels. Our enemy is a society which offers procedural freedom, and perceived freedom, but no physical, substantive freedom. But this situation is not irreversible, and we demonstrate this by finding a way of being free through uprising.

(From the Ed Vuillamy and Helena Smith piece in the Guardian, my italics)

The Political Metaphysics of Time

"Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it."

In his commentary on the themes of his 1978 film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (a Latin planidrome meaning "We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire") Debord comments that the primary thematic is "water" as the evocation of evanescence and the flow of time, while its secondary theme is that of "fire" as "momentary brilliance", although the water of time will always extinguish this brilliance. It's perfectly possible to give this a mystical or even Jungian reading (although I doubt Debord would have had much time for such "mystical cretinism"), but instead if there is a "mysticism" here it is as a result of a political metaphysics of time.

In Debord and Sanguinetti's "Theses on the SI and its Time" (1972) they note that "since its origin, the SI had been a vaster and more profound project than a simply political revolutionary movement." (# 41) The reason for this, I would argue, is not some supplementary mysticism but the relation of the SI to time, which is not to fear time because "it is made up of qualitative leaps, irreversible choices, and opportunities that will never return." (# 29) In the refusal of work, better its detournement, the SI revealed capital's subsumption of time and the "momentary brilliance" of the possibility of a time which is not "empty and homogenous" (Cf. Benjamin). And yet this cannot be revealed by the simple repetition of the SI, but rather through mastery of its own strategy of time.

This, then, is something of the aporia of the present, in which time ebbs in the sense of not being "enlivened" the test becomes the possibility of re-tracing the possibility of this political metaphysics of time.

The Seventh Continent in Images

The only trace of Austria? (The L refers to Linz)

The exit door leads in

The utopian trace

Money as voidable excrement

The labour of destruction

Dying Fish

The power of love

The terminal image

Deptford Black and Red Base

From the Institute, and good to hear about black & red cooperation

He's Just Not that Into You (an 18thC solution)

Eliza Haywood was known as 'Mrs Novel', and a best-seller of the early novel alongside Defoe (although you wouldn't know it unless you happen to be be taught by someone who has got beyond Ian Watt). She was, charmingly as usual, described by Alexander Pope in the 'Dunciad', 'With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes'. She has an excellent novella 'Fantomina' (1725), which I've just read in the rather nice Broadview edition. Spoiler alert, but the story concerns a gentlewoman heroine who decides to disguise herself as a prostitute to see what it's like (!). Being approached by the dashing Beauplaisir (they don't name them like that any more) she decides to go the whole hog (so to speak), knowing her reputation will be intact. She invents the identity of Fantomina and proceeds to have some fun.

Keeping up the deceit she realises that Beauplaisir is fickle, like all men, and becoming bored with her. Rather than chucking things in, she tries a new disguise, Celia the saucy country girl:

The Dress she was in, was a round-ear'd Cap, a short Red Petticoat, and a little Jacket of Grey Stuff; all the rest of her Accoutrements were answerable to these, and join'd with a broad Country Dialect, a rude unpolish'd Air, which she, having been bred in these Parts, knew very well how to imitate, with her Hair and Eye-brows black'd, made it impossible for her to be known, or taken for any other than what she seem'd.

This only allows a brief dalliance so then she moves on the another disguise, as the saucy widow Bloomer. The result is that 'She had all the Sweets of Love, but as yet had tasted none of the Gall, and was in a State of Contentment, which might be envy'd by the more Delicate.' As Haywood wrote conduct manuals, Fantomina seems to offer what we might call an 'alternative' reading.

At one point, thanks to her disguises, she ends up two-timing herself in the two identities of Fantomina and the widow:

When the expected Hour arriv'd, she found that her Lover had lost no part of the Fervency with which he had parted from her; but when the next Day she receiv'd him as Fantomina, she perceiv'd a prodigious Difference; which led her again into Reflections on the Unaccountableness of Men's Fancies, who still prefer the last Conquest, only because it is the last. — Here was an evident Proof of it; for there could not be a Difference in Merit, because they were the same Person; but the Widow Bloomer was a more new Acquaintance than Fantomina, and therefore esteem'd more valuable.

Eventually this all grinds to a halt when she becomes pregnant, but, as the editors of the Broadview edition point out, her finally taking up of a place in a Monastery in France can only be considered moral closure if one ignores the somewhat dubious reputation of such institutions at the time, and the wide range of eighteenth-century pornography focused on such institutions.

'And thus ended an Intreague, which, considering the Time it lasted, was as full of Variety as any, perhaps, that many Ages has produced.'