The City

"...it is in the urban environment--in a world that man himself has made--that mankind first achieved an intellectual life and acquired those characteristics which most distinguish him from the lower animals and from primitive man. For the city and the urban environment represent man's most consistent, and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more to his heart's desire. But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city he has remade himself."

(Robert Park)

Primer: American Debt and Global Capitalism

"The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit.... Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt."

(Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control)

"the self-movement of Capital is far from the circular self-movement of the Hegelian Notion: the point of Marx is that this movement never catches up with itself, that it never recovers its credit, that its resolution is postponed forever, that the crisis is its inner most constituent, which is why the movement is one of the 'spurious infinity,' forever reproducing itself."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

'Das Kapital reveals the fact that capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit. It is a Kantian critique of the ill contained drive of capital/reason to self-realize beyond its limit."

(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)

"What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx's critique of political economy, without succeeding on to the temptation of the ideologies of 'postindustrial' societies... the key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who 'really owns' the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, 'really owning' nothing--even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, who is again borrowing money from banks, who ultimately manipulates money owned by ordinary people like ourselves."

(Slavoj Žižek, Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?)

"To be sure, the increased availability of credit has contributed mightily to the American economy and has allowed consumers to make big-ticket purchases like homes, cars and college educations.

"But behind the big increase in consumer debt is a major shift in the way lenders approach their business. In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made."

(Gretchen Morgenson, "Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores."

"Globalization, in other words, allowed China and Japan to amass the fortunes they have been lending to the United States."
"But globalization also emboldened American capitalists to take huge risks they might have otherwise avoided — like borrowing to erect forests of unsold homes from California to Florida, delivering the speculative disaster of the day. They were operating with bedrock confidence that money would never run out. Someone would always buy American debt, delivering more cash for the next go."
"And this same interconnectedness appears to have reassured regulators in Washington about the health of the American financial system, as they declined to intervene against highly speculative lending during the real estate boom. Mortgages were being distributed to investors around the globe, and so were the risks, the regulators reasoned. Anyone who bought into that risk would have a strong interest in seeing that the American financial system stayed upright."
"In other words, in the estimation of people in control of money, the United States cannot be allowed to collapse, just as Fannie and Freddie cannot be allowed to fail. Too much is riding on their survival."
"The central truth of that logic still seems to be apparent as the Treasury keeps finding takers for American debt."

(Peter S. Goodman, "Too Big to Fail?", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare..."

"Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours."

"That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle."

"The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse... we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver 'energy security.' When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence."

(Eric Janzen, "The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for tomorrow's big crash", Harper's Magazine, February 2008)

"In the 1990s, the incomes of the richest 1% of taxpayers went up 10% a year in real terms (see chart), while those of the other 99% grew at an average annual rate of 2.4%. Between 2002 and 2006 the richest 1% saw 11% annual real income growth: everyone else got less than 1%. Three-quarters of the gains from the Bush expansion went to 1% of taxpayers, who now receive a larger share of overall income than at any time since the 1920s."

(The Economist, "Workingman's Blues", 7/24/08)

"Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them. But banks and the executives who ran them are quickly deemed worthy of taxpayer bailouts."

"On the ground, this translates into millions of troubled borrowers, left to work through their problems with understaffed, sometimes adversarial loan servicing companies. If they get nowhere, they lose their homes."

"Once again, this emergency action smacks of the regulatory responses of recent years: do nothing to curb the deal-making mania while it is occurring, but when the rout comes along, hurry up and rein it in."

(Gretchen Morgenson, "Borrowers and Bakers: A Great Divide", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering—the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is."

"As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering."

"Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms."

"Transparency is the hallmark of democracy, but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque—and as vulnerable to double- dealing—as a subprime CDO."

"The credit markets are fearful, and the financial markets are nervous. If gloom continues, our humbugged nation may truly regret losing sight of history, risk, and common sense."

(Kevin P. Phillips, "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know", Harper's Magazine May 2008)

"Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are 'temporary, correctable glitches' in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth, the 'exception' which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of the psychic apparatus)."

(Slavoj Žižek, "On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes")

Denumerable Multiplicities and Virtual Multiplicities

"Therefore there are two types of multiplicity: one is called multiplicity of juxtaposition, numerical multiplicity, distinct multiplicity, actual multiplicity, material multiplicity, and for predicates it has, we will see, the following: the one and the multiple at once. The other: multiplicity of penetration, qualitative multiplicity, confused multiplicity, virtual multiplicity, organized multiplicity, and it rejects the predicate of the one as well as that of the same."

(Gilles Deleuze, Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson)

Number and Numbers

0.1. A paradox: we live in the era of the despotism of number, thought is submitted to the law of denumerable multiplicities, and yet (or rather precisely in so far as this default, this failure, is nothing but the obscure obverse of a submission without concept) we have at our disposal no recent, active idea of what number is. The question has been the subject of immense intellectual effort, but for the most part the significant achievements of this labour belong to the beginning of the twentieth century: they are those of Dedekind, Frege, Cantor, and Peano. The factual impact of number brings with it only a silence of the concept. How can we understand today Dedekind’s question, posed in his 1888 treatise, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen [“The Nature and Meaning of Numbers”]? What purpose numbers serve, we know very well: they serve, strictly speaking, for everything, they provide the norm for everything. But what they are we don’t know, or we repeat what the great thinkers of the end of the nineteenth century – no doubt anticipating the extent of their future domain – said they were.

0.2. That number reigns, that the imperative must be: "count!" – who doubts this today?

0.3. Firstly, number rules our political conceptions, with the currency (consensual, even if all politics of the thinkable is enfeebled) of suffrage, of opinion polls, of the majority. Every "political" assembly, general or local, municipal or international, voting-booth or public meeting, is settled with a count. And every opinion is measured by the standard of an incessant enumeration of its advocates (even if such an enumeration makes of every fidelity an infidelity). What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross- references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical exegesis.

0.4. Number rules over the quasi-totality of the "human sciences" (even if this ciphered alibi can scarcely hide the fact when we speak here of "science", what we have is a technical assemblage whose pragmatic basis is governmental). It is overrun by the statistical data of the entire domain of its disciplines. The bureaucratisation of knowledge is firstly an infinite excrescence of numbering.

0.5. Number governs cultural representation. Certainly, there is television, viewing figures, advertising. But that is not the most important thing. It is in its very essence that the cultural fabric is woven by number alone. A "cultural fact" is a numerical fact. And inversely, whatever produces number can be assigned a cultural place; that which has no number will not have a name either. Art, which has to do with number only insofar as there is a thinking of number, is a culturally unpronounceable word.

0.6. Obviously, number governs the economy, and it is there without doubt that we find what Louis Althusser called the "determination in the last instance" of its supremacy. The ideology of modern parliamentary societies, if they have one, is not humanism, the rights of the subject. It is number, the countable, countability. Every citizen is today expected to be cognizant of foreign trade figures, of the flexibility of the exchange rate, of the developments of the stock market. These figures are presented as the real through which other figures are processed: governmental figures, votes and opinion polls. What is called "the situation" is the intersection of economic numericality and the numericality of opinion.

0.7. Number informs our souls. What is it to exist, if not to assert oneself through a favourable account? In America, one starts by saying how much one earns, an identification that has the merit of honesty.

0.8. Marx: "the icy water of egoistic calculation". And how! To the point where the Ego of egoism is but a numerical web, so that the "egoistic calculation" becomes the cipher of a cipher.

0.9. But we don’t know what a number is, so we don’t know what we are.

0.10. Must we stick with Frege, Dedekind, Cantor or Peano? Hasn’t anything happened in the thinking of number? Is there only the exorbitant extent of its social and subjective reign? To what extent does their idea of number prefigure this anarchic reign? Did they think number, or the future of generalised numericality? Isn’t another idea of number necessary, in order for us to turn thought back against the despotism of number, in order to subtract the Subject from it? And has mathematics assisted only silently in the comprehensive socialisation of number, of which latter it had previously held a monopoly? This is what I wish to examine.

(Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers)

Nietzsche: On War

"No government admits any longer that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense.Moreover the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state does, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. Fundamentally, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor, and thus proves a hostile disposition and hostile tactics. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for foreign conquests."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works vol. 2)

"And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, 'We break the sword,' an will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of intense emotion--that is the means to real peace, which must rest on peace of mind; whereas so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and , half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared--this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Marx and McLuhan on Method

"Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialized forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality."

(Karl Marx, Capital volume I)

"...if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."

(Mashall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy)

...and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced ‘laymen’)

"What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating anti-totalitarian force of laughter, or ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of this underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally."

"...the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we 'continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction'; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request -- to make us obey ideological form -- are only there to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)

Reading the Philosphical Text

"...the text functions as a writing machine in which a certain number of typed and systematically enmeshed propositions (one has to be able to recognize and isolate them) represent the 'conscious intention' of the author as reader of his 'own' text, in the sense we speak today of a mechanical reader....Here the lesson of the finite reader called the philosophical author is but one piece, occasionally and incidentally interesting, of the machine."

(Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)

Empire

“The Era where all of humanity together will be a political reality still remains in the distant future. The period of national political realities is over. This is the epoch of Empires, which is to say of transnational political unities, but formed by affiliated nations.”

(Alexandre Kojève, from a memorandum of advice to Charles de Gaulle written in 1945 at the end of the Second World War)

'We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.'

(Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire)

Piracy is Terrorism

Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview at INA, you suggest we should look in more detail at three kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and above all the control of "communication" that's on the way to becoming hegemonic. On the one hand this third scenario relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination, but on the other hand any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist Utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precise­ly the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a tech­nology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it's less Utopian than it used to be?

Deleuze: We're definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of discipli­nary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from dis­ciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Bur­roughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they're breaking down because they're fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth­ily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anoth­er closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful con­tinual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system noth­ing's left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain any­thing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harsh­est confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "uni-versals of communication" ought to make us shudder. It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer pira­cy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nine­teenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery) . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resis­tance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly per­meated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something dif­ferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

("Control and Becoming", Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri)

Value is Chaos

"Chaos is the name for a peculiar preliminary projection of the world as a whole and for the governance of that world... beings as a whole projected relative to the body and its bodying."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 3)

"If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract."

"Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

The Challenge of the Next Great Philosophy

"...it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. It is indeed never at rest, but carried along the stream of progress ever onward. But it is here as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn – there is a break in the process, a qualitative change and the child is born. In like manner the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world."
"But this new world is perfectly realised just as little as the new-born child; and it is essential to bear this in mind. It comes on the stage to begin with in its immediacy, in its bare generality. A building is not finished when its foundation is laid; and just as little, is the attainment of a general notion of a whole the whole itself. When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. In the same way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages. The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of spiritual culture; it is the reward which comes after a chequered and devious course of development, and after much struggle and effort. It is a whole which, after running its course and laying bare all its content, returns again to itself; it is the resultant abstract notion of the whole. But the actual realisation of this abstract whole is only found when those previous shapes and forms, which are now reduced to ideal moments of the whole, are developed anew again, but developed and shaped within this new medium, and with the meaning they have thereby acquired."

(Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit)

"[Philosophical] greatness [lies is in confronting] the image of life as a whole in order to interpret it as a whole, while the subtlest minds cannot be freed from the error that one can come closer to such an interpretation if one examines painstakingly the colours with which this image has been painted and the material underneath. . . . The whole future of all the sciences is staked on an attempt to understand this canvas and these colours, but not the image. It could be said that only a man who has a firm grasp of the over-all picture of life and existence can use the individual science without harming himself; for without such a regulative total image they are strings that reach no end anywhere and merely make our lives still more confused and labyrinthine."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy)

"It is especially difficult for modern man to find his way into the essential, because in another respect he is familiar with too much and indeed believes he is familiar with everything. For him everything earlier is something past by means of which he can illuminate what comes later and what pertains to him according to his needs. Here earlier has no power of decision because it no longer is experience as incipient in history. The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly the future. We must think about the inception this way...Remembrance of the inception is therefore not a flight into the past but a readiness for what is to come."

(Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts)

"The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of the modern world, in that the former consisted in the cultivation and perfecting of the natural mind. Testing life carefully at all points, philosophizing about everything it came across, the former created an experience permeated through and through by universals. In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. In straining to grasp it and make it his own, he rather strives to bring forward the inner meaning alone, without any process of mediation; the production of the universal is abridged, instead of the universal arising out of the manifold detail of concrete existence. Hence nowadays the task before us consists not so much in getting the individual clear of the stage of sensuous immediacy, and making him a substance that thinks and is grasped in terms of thought, but rather the very opposite: it consists in actualising the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts. But it is much more difficult to make fixed and definite thoughts fuse with one another and form a continuous whole than to bring sensuous existence into this state. The reason lies in what was said before. Thought determinations get their substance and the element of their existence from the ego, the power of the negative, or pure reality; while determinations of sense find this in impotent abstract immediacy, in mere being as such. Thoughts become fluent and interfuse, when thinking pure and simple, this inner immediacy, knows itself as a moment, when pure certainty of self abstracts from itself. It does not “abstract” in the sense of getting away from itself and setting itself on one side, but of surrendering the fixed quality of its self-affirmation, and giving up both the fixity of the purely concrete – which is the ego as contrasted with the variety of its content – and the fixity of all those distinctions [the various thought-functions, principles, etc.] which are present in the element of pure thought and share that absoluteness of the ego. In virtue of this process pure thoughts become notions, concepts, and are then what they are in truth, self-moving functions, circles, are what their substance consists in, are spiritual entities."

"Let the other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy – without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor Truth."

(Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit)

"If 'the 19th century,' to use Nietzsche's wicked phrasing, was a 'victory of the scientific method over science,' then [the 20th] century will be the one that saw the victory of scientific technology over science."

(Friedrich A. Kittler, On the Implemetation of Knowledge: Toward a Theory of Hardware)

From Antonioni

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

"Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer."

"We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean."

"I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks laid down by panic in the face of nature."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

Post-Ideological Politics?

"What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological'. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."

(Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

Read "Pop Culture" as Folk Religion

The spirit of a nation is reflected in its history, its religion, and the degree of its political freedom. The improvement of individual morality is a matter involving one’s private religion, one’s parents, one’s personal efforts, and one’s individual situation. The cultivation of the spirit of the people as a whole requires in addition the respective contributions of folk religion and political institutions.

Through the mighty influence it exerts on the imagination and the heart, folk religion imbues the soul with power and enthusiasm, with a spirit indispensable for the noble exercise of virtue.

(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Prospects for a Folk Religion)

The future of the future is the present.

'There is a wholly unique experience of dialectic. The compelling--the drastic--experience, which refutes everything "gradual" about becoming and shows all seeming "development" to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from a dream. ... The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass though and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!--Therefore:remembering and awakening are the most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance.'

(Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Dream City and Dream House, Drams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung", The Arcades Project)

'Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will becomes plain that mankind does not bring about any new work, but consciously brings about the completion of its old work.'

(Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge)

Derrida: The medium is the message.

"...it is difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techné, of orientation in general. In fact, it is not difficult, it is essentially impossible. And this is true of all discourse. From one discourse to another, the difference lies only in the mode of inhabiting the interior of a conceptually destined, or already submitted, to decay. Within that conceptuality, or already without it, we must attempt to recapture the unity of gesture and speech, of body and language, of tool and thought, before the originality of the one and the other is articulated and without letting this profound unity give rise to confusionism."

(Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)

Reading the Suprime Crisis

'This, then, is where we stand today: the antagonism imposed on us by the space of dominant ideology is the secondary antagonism between (what Badiou calls) "reactive" and "obscure" subjects, leading their struggle against the background of the obliterated Event.

In his reading of Badiou, Adrian Johnston discerned the ideologico-critical potential of the Badiouian topic of evental breaks: when the balance of an ideological situation is disturbed by arising "symptomal knots," elements which, while formally part of the situation, do not fit into it, the ideological defense can adopt two main strategies, the false "eventalization" of the dynamics which is thoroughly part of the existing situation, and the disavowal of the signs which delineate true evental possibilities, their reading as minor accidents or external disturbances:

one, making mere modifications appear to promise evental newness (a tactic that comes to the fore in the ideology of late-capitalism, whose noisily marketed "perpetual revolution" is really just an instance of the cliché "the more things change, the more they stay the same"-or, as Badiou puts it, "capitalism itself is the obsession of novelty and the perpetual renovation of forms"); two, making the sites sheltering potentially explosive evental upheavals appear to be, at a minimum, unremarkable features of the banal, everyday landscape, and, at most, nothing more than temporary, correctable glitches in the functioning of the established system.

Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification: Johnston writes that "the ideology of the worldly state, through a sort of bluff or masquerade, disguises its non-integrated weakest points, its Achilles' heels, as fully integrated cogs and components of its allegedly harmonious functioning-rather than as loci containing the potential to throw monkey wrenches in its gears and thereby generate evental dysfunctions of this regime, a regime that is never so deeply entrenched as it would like to appear to be in the eyes of its subjects." Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the threatening character of a disfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the necessary result of the system's inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder - Jews - disturbing the organic totality of the social edifice.

Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are "temporary, correctable glitches" in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth, the "exception" which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of the psychic apparatus).'

(Slavoj Žižek, "On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes")

all space-time in a knotshell

"Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well."

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad."

(Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History)

"The knot is the only support conceivable for a relation between something and something else. If on the one hand the knot is abstract, it must at the same time be conceived as concrete."

(Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome)

Slavoj Žižek - The Reality of the Virtual