Slavoj Žižek - Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism (06.19.2009)

I think Žižek does a very good job of articulating the notion of concrete universality in an incredibly valuable context here. If only the man wasn't so hideously sloppy--both in his physical and his philosophical style. Towards end of the lecture he loses his grip on the issue at hand and you get some clever philosophical provocations that aren't worth too much.

David Harvey - The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis (05.29.2009)

Nietzsche as precursor of deconstruction

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.

Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived?

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. "Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

"A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction."

(Gilles Deleuze, Preface to Difference and Repetition)

"Are we aware that [bureaucracy] is our only true contact with the divine in our secular times? what can be more "divine" than the traumatic encounter with bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells me that , legally, I don' t exist? It is in such encounters that we get a glimpse of another order beyond mere earthly everyday reality. Like God, bureaucracy is simultaneously all-powerful and impenetrable, capricious, omnipresent, and invisible. Kafka was well aware of this deep link between bureaucracy and the divine: it is as if, in his work, Hegel's thesis on the State as the terrestrial existence of God is "buggered," given a properly obscene twist. It is only in this sense that Kafka's works stage a search for the divine in our deserted secular world—more precisely, they not only search for the divine, they find it in state bureaucracy."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

"First, one has the difficulty of emancipation oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately, one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness, even after he has broken the chains."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked, science, speed and footwork as cold as a well digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside his opponent's sense of time.

(Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

Stop Making Sense

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.

It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.

He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.

The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: thus are things well matched.

I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins—it wanteth to laugh.

I no longer feel in common with you; the very cloud which I see beneath me, the blackness and heaviness at which I laugh—that is your thunder-cloud.

Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation; and I look downward because I am exalted.

Who among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted?

He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive—so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Posthumous men — I, for example — are understood worse than timely ones, but heard better. More precisely: we are never understood — hence our authority.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

Notes on Burroughs by Marshall McLuhan

1. Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the “corporate” responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides. Both books are a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes, which exist in the new electric environment.

2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.

3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.

4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.

5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.

6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies, dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his “content.” He programs the sensory order.

7. For artists and philosophers, when a technology is new it yields Utopias. Such is Plato’s Republic in the fifth century B.C., when phonetic writing was being established. Similarly, More’s Utopia is written in the sixteenth century when the printed book had just become established. When electric technology was new and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into time or space:

That’s she, the little girl behind the rose bushes, and she’s dead. The young mother, also dead, is coming down the steps. The cousin’s carriage crunches the sand. The small brother (he’s in India!) over there in the field of pinks, in front of the sunset. The old men they’ve buried upright in the wall covered with gilly-flowers.

But when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear. Naked Lunch can be viewed as the anti-Utopia of Illuminations:

During the withdrawal the addict is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations external and visceral.

Or to give a concrete example from the symbolist landscape of Naked Lunch:

A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper [...] sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer [...]

The key to symbolist perception is in yielding the permission to objects to resonate with their own time and space. Time and space themselves are subjected to the uniform and continuous visual processing that provides us with the “connected and rational” world that is in fact only an isolated fragment of reality — the visual. There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities of space and time. The Symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary world of the iconic and the auditory. Their art, to be visually oriented and literary man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. It is, in John Ruskin’s words:

… the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connections; of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. (Modern Painters)

The art of the interval, rather than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all, it is the art mode of instant electric culture.

8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and self-alienation. Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass. Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the psychic mutations of man living in “the magnetic city,” the instant, electric, and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.

9. The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological fixes:

You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender.

We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology:

Apomorphine is no word and no image — [...] It is simply a question of putting through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets image and image IS virus –

Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power to control the psychic and social consequences:

Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off –

Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties, is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation that cannot be endured indefinitely:

We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business –

It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body can bear a good deal of new program notes.”

10. Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it is occupied with the theme of “the extensions” of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast:

The keys to. Given!

Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.

11. It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.

(Marshall Mcluhan, The Nation, 28 December 1964, pp 517-519)

"The New Idol" from Thus Spake Zarathustra

Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.

A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."

It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.

This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understandeth not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs.

But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.

False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its bowels.

Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicateth this sign! Verily, it beckoneth unto the preachers of death!

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

See just how it enticeth them to it, the many-too-many! How it swalloweth and cheweth and recheweth them!

"On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God"--thus roareth the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees!

Ah! even in your ears, ye great souls, it whispereth its gloomy lies! Ah! it findeth out the rich hearts which willingly lavish themselves!

Yea, it findeth you out too, ye conquerors of the old God! Weary ye became of the conflict, and now your weariness serveth the new idol!

Heroes and honourable ones, it would fain set up around it, the new idol! Gladly it basketh in the sunshine of good consciences,--the cold monster!

Everything will it give YOU, if YE worship it, the new idol: thus it purchaseth the lustre of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes.

It seeketh to allure by means of you, the many-too-many! Yea, a hellish artifice hath here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honours!

Yea, a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!

The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all--is called "life."

Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft--and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them!

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.

Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money--these impotent ones!

See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness--as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.--and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.

My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices!

Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.

Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

There, where the state ceaseth--there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.

There, where the state CEASETH--pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?--

Thus spake Zarathustra.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

The tragic fantasy of all of today's sad young literary men is to write a book that no one could ever possibly fully understand with a title that anyone with his wits about him could easily quote.

A classic footnote from Capital

Proudhon begins by taking his ideal of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted, he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal ideas,” of “naturalité” and “affinité”? Do we really know any more about “usury,” when we say it contradicts “justice éternelle,” équité éternelle “mutualité éternelle,” and other vérités éternelles than the fathers of the church did when they said it was incompatible with “grâce éternelle,” “foi éternelle,” and “la volonté éternelle de Dieu”

(Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1)

From Kojin Karatani's The Principles of the New Associationist Movement

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique is one of the best books on Marxism and contemporary Capitalism that I've come across. What follows are a few excerpts from a manifesto of sorts he put together for what he calls the New Associationist Movement.

Thus we address the principles of our movement to the people of the world who struggle in various situations with the intention to abolish "capitalism=nation=state", for a transnational solidarity and association.

...

In reference to Kant's term, we might say, "economic policy without ethics is blind, while ethical intervention without economic concerns is empty."

...

Socialism was ethical at its outset. This was not just to pursue economic equality. Being ethical is different from and even opposite to the morality that state and community impose. It is, as Kant stated, to be a free subject and treat others not only as means but also as free agents. This is only possible by abolishing the capitalist market economy that treats people only as means. Thus socialism appeared necessarily as an ethical intervention. Of course, the ethical motivation cannot by itself overcome capitalism. But it is because Marxists have omitted it that we must stress it now.

In the preface of Capital, Marx clarified his stance as follows:

"To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and landowner in rosy colors. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Träger] of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."

Marx never accused capitalism or capitalists from a simple-minded moral viewpoint. His ethics existed in his decision to abolish the relational structure of capitalism; it was never in the morality that behaves as if it went beyond the relational structures subjectively. It is precisely in this decision that Marx's ethics existed. The natural historical structure-like the relation between capital and wage labor-can never be abolished if it is left alone. If not for our ethical intervention, the capitalist economy will endure permanently. Socialism is not a natural historical necessity, but an ethical intervention. The people-or the others-who we have to take into consideration must include not only the living but also the dead as well as the unborn (the future others). If the present capitalist economy endures as it is, a global crisis will undoubtedly hit humanity. Sacrificing 'future others' for the sake of our present happiness by public consensus-is to treat the others as only means, not as free agents. Being ethical is possible only by terminating capital's unrestricted accumulation. Thus our movement is politico-economic.

...

Whether it is relying on parliamentarianism or armed force, the use of state power is itself violent. For the state power is grounded upon a monopolization of violence. According to Max Weber, the state is equal to a human community that demands an actual monopolization of the means of executing physical violence within a limited domain. Whether by compulsion or agreement, the execution of might is violent through and through. Therefore, all those who are involved in politics are flirting with the demonic power lurking in violence, it might be said.

...

...there are two ways to stop the perpetual movement of the capitalist economy. One is the struggle immanent in the capitalist economy. This is centered on boycott movements. Another struggle is to expand the non-capitalist market economy (producers/consumers cooperative and local currency). We call the latter an exscendent struggle. In the process M-C-M', there are two critical moments that capital has to confront: buying labor-power commodity and selling products to workers. Failure in either moment disables capital from achieving surplus value. In other words, it fails to be capital. That is to say that in these moments, workers can counter capital. The first moment is, in Antonio Negri's phrase, "Don't Work!" This really signifies, in our context, "Don't Sell Your Labor-Power Commodity!" or "Don't Work as a Wage Laborer!" The second moment says, like Mahatma Gandhi, "Don't Buy Capitalist Products!" Both of them can occur in the position in which workers can be the subject. But in order for workers/consumers to be able 'not to work' and 'not to buy', there must be a safety net whereupon they can still work and buy to live. This is the very exscendent struggle involving the producers/consumers cooperatives.

...

In The German Ideology, Marx made an addition to the text written by Engels: "Communism for us is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise." Since that time, Marx persisted in this stance. In the twenty years after, he discovered the possibility of communism in several "movement[s] which abolish the present state of things"-the cooperatives of producers/consumers. He, for instance, saw stock companies as "the abolition of capital as private property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production itself." This is because stock companies abolished the previous integrity of capitalists by the separation of capital and management. Yet this is only a passive abolition of the capitalist system. Marx discovered the positive abolition in the producers' cooperative of which stockholders are workers themselves. In this context, Marx spoke of a new phase of "individual property" as opposed to "private property."

The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely, co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labor itself.

What does this distinction between "private property" and "individual property" mean? Precisely because modern private-ownership was that which was awarded by the absolutist state in exchange for paying taxes, private-ownership is equal to state-ownership. So it is a total fallacy to abolish private property by means of state-ownership. The abolition of private property must be an abolition of the state itself. To Marx, communism came to signify the establishment of a new kind of individual property, and this was because he considered communism as being equal to an association of producers' cooperatives. This is where wage labor (labor-power commodity) is done away with. This notwithstanding, however, producers' cooperative and/or consumers' cooperatives have been belittled by those Marxists who believed in communism as being equal to the state owned planned economy. The cooperative movements were originally conceptualized by utopian socialists such as Robert Owen. They actually began to grow in Britain in the 1850s, after innumerable setbacks. Far from denying the cooperative movement, Marx in fact saw communism in it-the association of free and equal producers.

In The Civil War in France--written as an address to the general council of the international working men's association--Marx wrote: "if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production--what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, 'possible' Communism?" In this sense, communism is a project in attempt to shift the social relation that is realized by the monetary exchange in the capitalist economy into the association of free and equal producers, and furthermore, into a global association of associations.

(Kojin Karatani, The Principles of the New Associationist Movement)

From The Society of the Spectacle

At risk of being called a cynic by Mr. Obama, I will say directly that I was not inspired by today's inauguration. First, I was astonished by this line in Obama's inaugural address: "Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched." The bizarre psuedo-religious attitude towards the market seemed awfully out of place. It's a troubling statement on whatever level you parse its meaning, especially for anyone whose learned anything from Marx. The markets ability to generate unparalleled poverty and bondage for some while at the same time generating unparalleled wealth and freedom for others has been demonstrated time and time again. Indeed, the question of when, how, and to whom the market is a lever good and when, how, and to whom the market is a lever ill is a fundamental and prescient political and economic question.

Second, the Obama phenomenon brings to mind two principles from Foucault's preface to Anti-Œdipus:

1) "Do not become enamored of power." Its hard to say that the Obama phenomenon is not a case of people becoming enamored of power. The unrelenting dissemination of images that represent the immense joy brought forth by the fact a person of African American descent can attain an office that possesses immense and unjustified powers isn't something that warms my heart.

2) "Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia." David Brooks wrote a good column in the New York Times today about Obama's "Politics of Cohesion". Brooks writes: "Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed in the early 1960s. He sees himself as a pragmatist, an empiricist. Politics is not personal with him. He does not turn political disagreements into a status contest between one kind of person and another. He is convinced that most Americans practice their politics between the 40-yard lines. ... Look for him to emphasize the themes of responsibility, cohesion and unity." All notions of "e plurbus unim" as a method of justifying political thought and action worry me theoretically and ethically, so I am quite wary of Obama's rhetoric and philosophy which boils down to little more than "e plurbus unim".

With there being very little doubt that today was all about the spectacle, it seems like a good time to reread a few passages from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle:

3. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, that which is good appears.' The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

14. The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

19. The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project ... The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality.

22. The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23. The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.

34. The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.

54. The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided.

60. The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are not really global. They are not really varied.

61. The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification. The agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities. Official differences between stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the presupposition of their excellence in everything. Khrushchev became a general so as to make decisions on the battle of Kursk, not on the spot, but at the twentieth anniversary, when he was master of the State. Kennedy remained an orator even to the point of proclaiming the eulogy over his own tomb, since Theodore Sorenson continued to edit speeches for the successor in the style which had characterized the personality of the deceased. The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it.

64. The concentrated spectacle belongs essentially to bureaucratic capitalism.

72. The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production rests. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it. What brings together men liberated from their local and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires a profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression. What creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom.

213. When ideology, the abstract will and the illusion of the universal, is legitimized by the universal abstraction and the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society, it is no longer a voluntaristic struggle of the partial, but its victory. At this point, ideological pretension acquires a sort of flat positivistic exactitude: it is no longer a historical choice but a fact. In this type of assertion, the particular names of ideologies have disappeared. Even the role of specifically ideological labor in the service of the system comes to be considered as nothing more than the recognition of an "epistemological base" that pretends to be beyond all ideological phenomena. Materialized ideology itself has no name, just as it has no expressible historical program. This is another way of saying that the history of ideologies is over. [This particular argument by Debord could be seen as a direct response to what Brooks wrote, i.e. that "Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed in the early 1960s." Indeed, when Brooks writes that Obama "sees himself as a pragmatist, an empiricist" is this not what Debord calls "ideological pretension acquiring a sort of flat positivistic exactitude".]

(Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle)

Essential Principles

I've always thought Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Œdipus said very little with a whole lot of words, but every time I go back and read the Michel Foucault's preface this concise little summary of the main points of the book always strikes me as hitting the mark. Foucault has that incredible skill that Nietzsche demanded of a great philosopher: "the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm."

The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, caries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to every day life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
• Develop action, though, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western though has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
• Do not use though to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
• Do not become enamored of power.

(Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Œdipus)

Said Hegel: "All that is real is rational; all that is rational is real."

My correction: "All that is real was rational; all that is rational becomes real."

The irrational being the real, my correction could be reformulated thus: "All that is irrational was rational; all that is rational becomes irrational."

The rational being artifice, a second reformulation of my correction: "All that is real was artifice; All that is artifice becomes real."

And there is a third reformulation of my correction: "All that is irrational was artifice. All that is artifice becomes irrational."

Deleuze on Israel and Palestinian (1978)

This piece written by Gilles Deleuze in 1978 is eerily relevant to the current crisis in Gaza. Indeed, I'd argue that the tactics on both sides have changed very little in 30 years.

How could the Palestinians be "genuine partners" in peace talks when they have no country? But how could they have a country when it was taken from them? The Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the actions of the Israelis are considered legitimate retaliation (even if their attacks do seem disproportionate), whereas the actions of the Palestinians are without fail treated as terrorist crimes. And the death of a Palestinian has neither the same interest nor the same impact as the death of an Israeli.

Since 1969, Israel has unrelentingly bombed and strafed Southern Lebanon. Israel has explicitly said that its recent invasion of Lebanon was not in retaliation for the terrorist attack on Tel-Aviv (eleven terrorists against thirty thousand soldiers); on the contrary, it represents the culmination of a plan, one in a whole series of operations to be initiated at Israel’s discretion. For a "final solution" to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other States (with various nuances and restrictions). A people without land, and without a State, the Palestinians are the spoilers of peace for everyone involved. If they have received economic and military aid from certain countries, it has been in vain. The Palestinians know what they are talking about when they say they are alone.

Palestinian militants are also saying that they have managed to pull off a kind of victory. Left behind in southern Lebanon were only resistance groups, which seem to have held up quite will under attack. The Israeli invasion, on the other hand, struck blindly at Palestinian refugees and Lebanese farmers, a poor population that lives off the land. Destruction of villages and cities, and the massacre of innocent civilians have been confirmed. Several sources indicate that cluster bombs were used. This population of Southern Lebanon, in perpetual exile, keeps leaving and coming back under Israeli military strikes that one is hard-pressed to distinguish from acts of terrorism. The latest hostilities have ousted more than 200,000 from their homes, now refugees wandering the roads. The State of Israel is using in southern Lebanon the method which proved so effective in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is "Palestinizing" Southern Lebanon.

Palestinian militants for the most part come from this population of refugees. Israel thinks it will defeat the militants by creating more refugees, thereby surely creating more terrorists.

It is not merely because we have a relationship with Lebanon that we say: Israel is massacring a fragile and complex country. There is something else. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealt with elsewhere, even in Europe. The worldwide cooperation of States, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual "terrorists." This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain sereved as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.

Today Israel is conducitng an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries. There is great continuity in Israeli politics. Israel believes that the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the occupied territories into the right to establish colonies there. It thinks sending an international peace-keeping force into Southern Lebanon is an excellent idea… provided that this force, in the place of Israeli forces, transforms the region into a police zone, a desert of security. This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: "genuine partners" in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

(Gilles Deleuze, The text originally appeared in Le Monde, April 7, 1978, and is reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness [Semiotexte, 2006])

via http://lapointe.blogsome.com

"...by determining the relation which a philosophical work professes to have to other treatises on the same subject, an extraneous interest is introduced, and obscurity is thrown over the point at issue in the knowledge of the truth. The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety."

(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit)

"The glorification of the splendid underdogs ends up in glorifying the splendid system which made them so."

(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)