The Trash Heap of Political Economy

It's pretty weird but Baudrillard's Forget Foucault is a rather precise critique of accelerationism avant la lettre, of course only if you ignore Baudrillard's own alternative to Deleuze&Guattari / Lyotard / Foucault, with seduction / reversibility, et al (a kind of negative accelerationism). As Baudrillard says 'Beware of the molecular!'; here are some further quotes:

This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any foxed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. This is the form itself which the current reailzation of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies.

to rediscover a phantasmal and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital.

it is the kind of generative inscription of the code that one expects - an immanent, ineluctable, and always positive inscription that yields only to infinitesimal mutations.

For I Know Not What I Do

Negation results from affirmation: this means that negation arises in the wake of affirmation or beside it, but only as the shadow of the more profound genetic element – of that power or “will” which engenders the affirmation and the difference in the affirmation. Those who bear the negative know not what they do: they take the shadow for the reality, they encourage phantoms, they uncouple consequences from premises and they give epiphenomena the value of phenomena and essences.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (my emphasis)

Sounds a good programme to me...

Deconstruction

Having at one point been a true Derridean, and now coming to try and write critically on Derrida for the new book (it's virtually impossible btw, and probably pointless), I came across the new issue of Diacritics on Derrida and democracy. Even back in the day the 'democracy to come' stuff never really impressed me, and nothing much so far in the issue prompts me to change my mind. I did find this, however, me raised my post-Derridean ire - from a paper on Derrida's 'nonmaterialism':

'As the undoing of the power of the subject, the force of materiality cannot lead to a political program. Indeed, it is what resists and confounds any teleology such as that of Marxism and even any purposive or end-oriented action that is based on rational calculations or the projection of an ideal end.'

Great... say goodbye to rational calculation, end-oriented action, or an 'ideal end' (like, say, a fairer society, or avoiding a class-stratified environmental catastrophe). Or, welcome the irrational contingencies of the market, in which the only teleology is accumulation...

Of course we are supposed to respect this as about theory and not the dread empirical, and no doubt if I could be bothered to read my own work I might well find similar such acceptance of contemporary commonplaces. I can't help but find this stuff depressing. In the interest of fairness here is the next part of the passage:

'But as that which opens power up uncoditionally to the other this force also has a messianic dimension. It aporetically implies an absolute or incalculable hospitality to the other that demands a response in which we calculate the given conditions in order to act in a responsible manner.'

That, however, doesn't seem to me to provide the answer, especially considering the later comment that although the impossible other 'is not unfigurable as such, [it] is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse.' Well quite...

Of course Mark and Owen are the people to refer to here when discussing the knee-jerk ideological rejection of planning.

Enough of my spite, look at Nina's fine photos, especially this one, for Owenem Hatherleyem - currently gracing the cover of the NLR as his alter ego Owen Hatherley.

Black and Red papers

Some of the papers from the 'Is Black and Red dead?' conference are available here, for mine scroll down this blog to 'Space is the Place'.

The State of Theory

The re-drafting of the Persistence of the Negative is currently taking up most of my time, and I'm very grateful to all the readers/commentators who have at least prevented some of the more major errors. Certainly I'm a lot happier now with the Derrida chapter (more streamlined), the Latour chapter (nastier), and the Negri chapter (fairer).

I just got some overall comments from John Roberts, author of this excellent book, and they form their own analysis of the state of theory, this is an extract:

"It [Persistence of the Negative] renders the theory and philosophy as moments within a collective 'research programme', despite all the professional and political animosities of the given writers (an approach that Badiou pursues himself in his recent essay on post-French philosophy in NLR). Your decision then to connect this body of writing through the concept of 'affirmationism' is vivid, insofar as it becomes clearer forty years after May 68 and 10 years after this 68 philosophical legacy begins to fall into decline, that in these authors’ shared desire to accelerate away from a certain crisis in the form and affective life of revolutionary politics, the celebration of the actual becomes a chronic liability. I myself see this as a result, firstly of a misreading and then abandonment of Hegel (and Marx's fundamental indebtedness to Hegel), in the widespread turn within this tradition to discontinuism, conjuncturalism, alinearity, and anti-causality, which finds its perfected form, of course, in Logics of Worlds, where causality is exchanged for a kind of telescopic historical abridgement. The relations between affirmation, negation and historical development, therefore, have been sundered in this tradition, which, in a sense is where your book enters the fray. But as I said, in our discussion, the absence of a discussion of Hegel renders the critique of a post-historical affirmationism (certainly in Badiou) without a philosophical anchor."

Post-Lapsarian Anarchism

Two events for the libertarians out there. The first is this:

Imperceptible Strategies, Unidentified Autonomous Organizations
:: A Drifting Seminar :: London, October 23rd, 2009 ::

Anarchist and autonomous politics are often associated, in a kneejerk way, with a celebration of chaos and disorder: a rejection of all forms of organization. The reduction of radical politics to a cheap joke (‘anarchist organization, what’s that?’) comes to substitute for an actual understanding of autonomous organizational practices. Far from rejecting organization all together, the history of autonomous politics contains a wealth of different modes of organizing, from the formation of temporary autonomous zones to affinity group models, maroon communities to networks and collectives.

These are forms of organizing that not always acknowledged as being organizations because they do not conform to what it is assumed organizations necessarily are: durable, static, and hierarchical. This understanding of organization obscures and makes difficult an actual engagement with the merits and weaknesses of different forms of organizing. But what would be found if rather than working from a fixed and unchanging concept of organization, one that excludes temporary forms of organization from consideration, it was attempted to tease out the organizational dynamics from all the temporary alliances and alliances that appear and disappear?

Might it be possible that we are already enmeshed in a world of unidentified autonomous organizations, a milieu of potential liberation that has remained imperceptible because of a narrow understanding of what organizations are? And might it not be that this imperceptibly, rather than being a condition to be addressed as a problem, could rather be part of building of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls an infrapolitical sphere: a space for politics coming out of people’s everyday experiences that do not express themselves as radical political organization at all.

The aim of this encounter is to explore the connections between anarchism, autonomism, and the revolutions of everyday life, drawing out conceptual tools useful to developing and deepening the politics of these infrapolitical spaces and organization. How can we strategize and build from the connections and movements of the undercommons, working from everyday encounters to compose new forms of social movement? How can we connect and work between spontaneous forms of resistance without forcing them into some larger form that ossifies them?

This event will not be based around formal presentations, but rather will rather take the form of a drifting seminar. Participants will be asked to read several pieces of text that will form the basis of discussion and exploration.

Registration for the event will be approximately 10 quid. There will be some limited travel funding available. If you wish to be considered for this funding indicate this when you register.
For registration and information contact: stevphen [NO SPAM] autonomedia [DOT] org / Sponsored by the Anarchist Studies Network & Minor Compositions

The second is this series of seminars, for details contact Saul Newman:

The Libertarian Impulse

From October 2009 until March 2010 RUPE will hold a series of seminars on the theme of libertarian politics and theory. With the collapse of state socialism, the unseemly decline of social democracy, and with the devolving of liberalism into a narrow politics of security, we believe it is high time to turn to political heresies like anarchism, left-libertarianism and autonomist Marxism, which have existed until now on the margins of more recognized political traditions. With the unprecedented deployment and expansion of state power and surveillance post-9/11, and with the symptomatic crisis of legitimacy experienced by representative party politics, we think it is important and timely to investigate alternative sites of the political – the autonomous and anti-systemic social movements and activist networks which have proliferated across the global horizon in recent years. The series will focus on different ways of thinking about individual and collective liberty, difference and equality, as well as political identities, practices, modes of organization, action and democracy outside the state order.

This seminar series will explore related themes of: anarchist theory, utopian thought, cosmopolitanism, the politics of direct action, new social movements, social liberty, autonomous politics, piracy and biopolitics, and continental radical political philosophy. It will bring together a series of experts and thinkers from different disciplines – Politics, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Policy – who are all moved in some way by the libertarian impulse.

The seminars will be held on Tuesday evenings 6-8pm in the Senior Common Room (Level 2 RHB), Goldsmiths. Drinks will be provided, and everyone is invited. The program is as follows:

Autumn Term
6 October – Professor Kevin McDonald (Sociology, Goldsmiths): 'Between autonomy and vulnerability: grammars of action and experience in movements today'

13 October – Dr. David Graeber (Anthropology, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

10 November – Dr. Carl Levy (Politics, Goldsmiths): ‘Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism’

17 November – Dr. Simon Griffiths (Politics, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

1 December – Professor Gianni Vattimo (Philosophy, Turin): Title TBC, Venue TBC

Spring Term
19 January – Dr. Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths): ‘Freedom, Claustrophobia and Colonisation: Lessons from the Anarchist Geography of Elisee Reclus’

2 February – Dr. Ruth Kinna (Politics, Loughborough): ‘William Morris: Time & Utopia’

9 February – Dr. Nicola Montagna (Criminology, Middlesex): Title TBC

2 March – Amedeo Policante (Politics, Goldsmiths): Title TBC

16 March – Dr. Saul Newman (Politics, Goldsmiths): Booklaunch: ‘The Politics of Postanarchism’

Life v Capital

Stewart Martin's article 'Artistic Communism - A Sketch' in the new issue of Third Text (which yes contains yours truly as well) offers a fascinating periodisation of 'Marxist vitalism'. His argument is that this vitalism passes through a number of phases, from the 'spiritualist vitalism' of German Idealism to Marx's 'materialist vitalism' in the first instance. Marx, and I think this is the most disputable part of the periodisation, poses a situation of 'life versus capitalism' (489).

Then we have Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Englightenment, which registers the dissolution of the independence of culture, or the subsumption of culture. This leads to a disclosure of capital as 'dead labour' - their mordant images of capitalism qua dead and deadening force. In Debord, capital's colonisation of life is registered, but only the beginnings of this process. This leads to an affirmation of the unity of culture and life and the insistence that life remains uncolonisable.

Finally, we have the current situation in which the colonisation of life is played out through the medium of art and culture ('creative' / 'artistic' / 'cognitive' capital). In this situation life, and so vitalism, can no longer play the unequivocal role of point of resistance.

'Capital would no longer be opposed to life as its other. Rather than a form of non-life or death, capital becomes itself a form of life [from vampire to zombie?]. And opposition to capitalism is no longer grasped by the affirmation of life tout court, but by an affirmation of non-capitalist life or communist life, which is thereby also a negation of capitalist life.' (493)

I think what is key for me here is the possibility of formalising and historicising the passing of vitalism as point of resistance, notably in the passage from formal to real subsumption - at least as a tendency or, in Martin's phrase, 'an imminently approaching horizon' (493). There is plenty to cash out here, and I am not knowledgeable enough to truly assess the relation of Marx to German Idealism, especially in relation to art, but Martin's work, as usual, is both insightful and provocative.