Edit: Somehow, I messed up the link to the syndicated feed; hopefully it should be working now.
Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as…sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty.
Which seems to be nothing so much as an invocation of a _true_ sex and a true love behind the simulacra provided by capitalism. But this essentializing move is disasterous, because the idea of a true love, a true sex, a true body, a use value beyond exchange value, is precisely what supports capitalism, the fantasy that allows it to keep going (unlike what your old-school Marxist would tell you, it is not in his declaration of the death of reality, but in his nostalgia for that reality, that Baudrillard is most clearly the ideologue of capital).
Similar questions, in the context of anti-essentialist feminism, have also been animating the splendid Bitch Lab recently. There's also this recent article, 'Pornography is a Left Issue', which is curious in that it argues, as far as I can see, that pornography is _not_ a left issue. The argument, that is, is that leftists should be opposed to pornography because porn work is exploitative; but of course _all_ work is exploitative, and the only attempt to define the specificity of porn is:
In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to our sense of self. Whatever a person's sexuality or views on sexuality, virtually everyone agrees it is an important aspect of our identity. In pornography, and in the sex industry more generally, sexuality is one more product to be packaged and sold.
This notion of the "importance" of sex then goes completely unexamined; which is unfortunate, because it allows a nominally feminist gloss on a classic position of patriarchy: women who have the right sort of sex are good, those who don't are bad (although perhaps, poor victims of patriarchy, they can't help it).
Perhaps sex is important in a different way. As Foucault put it, "sex is boring"; but, he immediately went on to say, discourse about sex is interesting. Or, to put it another way, sex is not important because it is _naturally_ important, but because of the particular and entirely artificial position it occupies in contemporary ideology. This would also suggest an alternative to the rather sub-Chomsky notion of media criticism employed in the article above (porn companies make money out of sexist stereotypes? Who knew?). The point of a critique of the media (which can surely only be weakened by trying to isolate and fence off pornographic tropes) can't be to point out the things in the media which are false; the problem is the way in which the media constructs the truth.
What I would like to see is a different sort of critique, which attempted to understand the methods used to construct truth so we could construct other truths, with more egalitarianism both in the methods and the outcomes. Such a critique would also relate to pornography in a somewhat different way: if porn is objectionable because it is so powerful in constructing a particular sort of domination, what can it tell us about the techniques for constructing non-domination?
But I'm not sure that, for most people in the UK at least, the secularism of Christmas is like that; the festival is not a celebration of identity whether in the full-blooded fundamentalist sense as the true identity, or in the decaffeinated multiculturalist sense of one identity among others. Christmas seems more like a purely excessive celebration, with Christianity simply the latest specific reason to be overcome. Most people no longer work in agriculture, but we continue to celebrate in winter: this isn't a disavowed Solstice celebration, but a celebration _in spite of the irrelevance_ of solstice. Likewise, Christmas is not a disavowed celebration of the birth of Christ, but a celebration predicated on the irrelevance of Christianity. Practised in this way, Christmas would be the direct opposite of the multicultural "holidays" -- an unbounded sum of negations, rather than a chain of identities.
That, at least, is what I hear when I listen to the Girls Aloud Christmas CD, which, and I don't think this is a coincidence, contains no carols (and at least one track -- 'Not Tonight Santa' -- which really ought to make its way into the Christmas airplay heavy rotation).
> inevitable features of our society. They spring from two 'malfunctioning' institutions:
> the labour market and the family. ... Behind these lines of analysis lurks my key
> hypothesis, namely that the household economy is _alpha and omega_ to an resolution
> of the main postindustrial dilemmas, perhaps the single most important 'social
> foundation' of postindustrial economies.
>
>
--- Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies
The interesting thing about reading political economy is that the positive categories used by social scientists are eerily similar to the critical concepts used by theorists. The ruling class are nothing if not honest, after all.
> What can I say? Except that it was the best thing ever. Few things are as satisfying as
> seeing your own deepest beliefs adapted for a pop culture medium and featuring
> zombies. I am going to tell you the plot because it's not like I can ruin it, because
> it's just the narrative of the first Bush "presidency," I mean, I guess if you were
> hybernating from March 2003 through the electoral fiasco last year, beware of the
> "spoilers." Other than that, it's all Allegory, except that Ze Semiotic Collapse of Ze
> Zeitgeist pretty much ensures that allegory is verite now.
And she's right, it's pretty damn good. It's interesting that the form of a horror film, in licensing a certain amount of gore, also appears to license a suprisingly long scene of Karl Rove's head getting beaten to a pulp, and Anne Coulter getting shot in the back of the head.
Download it here.
> Tony Blair's plans to benefit poorer families by expanding choice in education and
> health ...
Oh, thank-you, John Carvel, for keeping me so well informed of Tony's kind and generous plans to help poorer families by destroying the fucking welfare state.
(Which reminds me that while we were hanging around the other day in the CS office swapping Spivak gossip, I forgot to mention this fine story of craziness)
> in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the cultivation of flowing
> locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut of clothes.
>
> ...
>
> I entertained scant sympathy for what I regarded as hygenic fads; and
> the emphasis with which the lady averred that she touched neither flesh
> nor alcohol, and felt that by this abstinence she was not "besotting her
> brain nor befouling her soul," amused me much.
>
> ...
>
> "It is you bourgeois socialists, with your talk of helping us, and your
> anxiety about using your property 'to the best advantage,' who are the
> ruin of every movement," he said, addressing me in an uncompromising
> spirit. "What is wanted is enthusiasm, whole-hearted labour, and where
> that is, no thought is taken as to whether everything is being used to the
> best advantage. If you are prepared to enter the movement in this spirit,
> without any backward notion that you are conferring a favour upon
> anyone---for indeed the contrary is the case---well and good; but if not,
> you had better side with your own class and enjoy your privileges as long
> as the workers put up with you."
>
> It was what I had all along instinctively felt. Private property was, after
> all, but the outcome of theft, and there can be no virtue in restoring
> what we have come by unrighteously.
>
>
--- Isabel Meredith, A Girl Among the Anarchists
> Occupation seems to be a lark for them, a chance to indulge their
> caddish habit of cheating at sport.
This is the core of the condemnation of the Iraqi resistance: they're terrorists, they don't obey the laws of war. Well, fuck the laws of war. Just war theory has always been an alibi for imperialism. It's no accident that it began to be seriously elaborated in the 16th century, by Spanish scholastics seeking to justify the occupation of the Americas. It's a species of casuistry, taking on the structure of counterfactual justification identified by Bat. The laws of war forbid the targetting of civilians; this is then held to justify actual wars, despite the fact that there has never been a war in which civilians have _not_ been targetted.
This is the logic which sustains instrumental justification for war. When the use of violence is treated as an unpleasant but necessary means to a good end, the unpleasantness tends to get elided in favor of the justness of the end; or, as with Tony Blair, the willingness to make "hard choices" is taken to be in itself an argument for the rightness of these choices. Which makes me think that there's actually no surprise in the apparently paradoxical conjunction of the rise of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and the ongoing normalization of torture. Torture is perhaps the clearest example of the instrumental use of violence, and so, far from being opposed to humanitarian intervention, torture represents its truth.
To substantiate the connection to Naziism (particularly as expressed by Heidegger), we can look at the politics essay. Weber argues for an ideal-type of the politician as a "sober hero," a responsible, cautious political actor who is nevertheless passionately devoted to a cause. Weber does not specify a particular cause. Any cause will do, or, rather, the 'cause' here is a structural role the content of which, of necessity, cannot be filled in. Why is this? Well, it may relate to the role played by the sober hero in securing politics in the face of rationalization and bureaucracy. If the content of the cause were specified, it would be calculable and so subject to the realm of bureaucracy. The empty space left by the undetermined cause keeps open the political determination of ends, makes politics more than a simple matter of technocratic rationality.
What does this mean, though, when added to the theory of the sober hero? Or, to put it another way, what does the sober hero actually _do_? Weber is clear that there is no way back from our disenchanted bureaucratic-capitalist world, and so the sober hero cannot rescue politics by actually replacing administration with politics. All the sober hero can offer is a kind of redemption of politics. Perhaps a Christ-like redemption. But perhaps, rather, a Fuhrer like redemption: the sober hero redeems by being the one sovereign political moment, vanishing and point-like within the system of bureaucracy.
What's interesting here is the similarity and difference to a conception of politics like Badiou's. Both share a desire to defend politics in the face of administration; but Weber seems only able to construe this political moment in a single individual, rather than in a collectivity. Isn't this precisely the moment where both the fascist and the populist danger arise: when an individual (whether that individual be a single person or a hypostasized unitary people) is substituted for the open collectivity which provides the genericity which makes this incalculable, non-administrative, politics possible?
Is "contrarianism" ever anything other than an attempt to make middle-aged Tory fulminating look interesting? Which brings me, in a way, to American Apparel, who have been pissing me off with the "edgy" abusive porn aesthetic of their ads (and the slightly Nazi flex-spec smugness; oh, your maquiladora is in LA rather than Mexico, how reassuring). This isn't a general objection to pornography or even to its employment in advertising: of which, in fact, I share Agamben's quasi-approval. But here we see "edgy" misogyny (and, at this point, I'm not sure its perpetrators even notice that that's what it is) combined with a more old-fashioned, non-ironic, sexual harrasment.
Coincidentally, there's something sort of related in this week's Onion.
CRITICAL SENSE: A JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY
CALL FOR PAPERS SPRING 2006
Utility, Excess, Value, Waste:
Interrogating the Productive and the Unproductive
The difference between the productive and the unproductive vexes us in the most banal and daily ways: we use these terms to categorize not only our work, but also our social exchanges, our affective states, our political activities, our time itself. We do not merely "do" productive or unproductive things, we _feel_ productive or unproductive. We unconsciously attach a normative value to these descriptions of our daily activity and labor, attributing goodness, usefulness and meaning to productivity, and waste, laxity, and luxury to that which is unproductive.
For this special issue of Critical Sense we are interested in a variety of approaches to these concepts: work that rethinks productivity and its attending terms within the discourse of economy; work that translates the categories of the productive and the unproductive into other discursive contexts; and work that is critical of the concepts themselves. If these terms trace their origin to classic political economy--in which they may claim to be structural or descriptive rather than normative--they have become equally important to (and the objects of critique within) a range of other fields and discourses. We welcome a wide range of submissions that deal with this topic.
Questions or issues that might be relevant include:
* Productivity of the “symbolic work” of marketing and branding; role
of affective labor in production
* Feminist/gender theory critiques of the concepts of the productive and
unproductive; role of reproduction at the level of the family as well
as within ideological forms
* Adequacy or inadequacy of these terms to pre-colonial, colonial, or
neocolonial slavery and slave labor
* The value of the unproductive, that which cannot find equivalent,
which cannot produce economic value or be thought in its terms, that
which is excessive or beyond measure: the lazy, the ineffectual,
resistance and refusal
* “Non-productive” (and, indeed, non-economic) economies of gift and
sacrifice
* Relevance to the aesthetics of decadence, excess, or immoderation
* Relevance to/role within libidinal economies; productivity or
unproductiveness of drives, desires, repressive labor
* Relevance of productivity to the epistemological, cognitive, or
philosophical
* Productivity in politics: examining cults of efficiency or critiques
of mass or elite politics invoking the notions of efficiency,
expediency, waste, and/or unproductive activity
We also welcome book reviews on any topic within the orbit of political and cultural theory, whether related or unrelated to the issue’s theme. Papers should be no more than 30 pages; reviews, no more than 10. All submissions are due by JANUARY 31st, 2006 electronically to
criticalsense@lists.berkeley.edu.
Critical Sense is located online at http://criticalsense.berkeley.edu/.
(Incidentally, like Moll I recently read Civilization and Its Discontents for a class. Our professor commented that, while we'd been happy to take Marx, Bentham or Nietzsche on their own terms, we had been much more substantively critical of Freud. I wonder if this isn't because Freud, unlike the previous authors, is almost a direct spokesperson for contemporary normalizing capital)
Which brings me back to my title; inasmuch as Foucault is an anti-Marxist, he is opposed particularly to certain strands of Western Marxism: the Freudian Marxism of the Frankfurt School, but also a similar kind of economic/hydraulic mode of thought that you find in, for instance, Gramsci's theory of hegemony. On the other hand, Foucault seems much more compatible with non-Western Marxism: he worked with Maoists in the GIP, and a number of his ideas are clearly similar to ideas previously put forward by Fanon (whose own relationship to Marxism wasn't simple, of course).
The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the
standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil: acceptable
if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or
family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal
choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging
to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality.
In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality
of the choice itself: it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a
veil that effectively chooses a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal
democracies, people who maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a
subordinate position: their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal
choice, but the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them—a
matter of substantial belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’.
Plainly, the ‘subject of free choice’, in the ‘tolerant’, multicultural
sense, can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of
being uprooted from one’s particular life-world.
It seems to me this opens up the space from which Fanon's discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism takes off. And on the ideology of human rights:
It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
violence. Rony Brauman, who co-ordinated aid to Sarajevo, has demonstrated
how the very presentation of the crisis there as ‘humanitarian’, the very
recasting of a political-military conflict into humanitarian terms, was
sustained by an eminently political choice—basically, to take the Serb side
in the conflict. The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in
Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, Brauman argues, thus
disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. [9]
From this particular insight we may problematize, at a general level, the
ostensibly depoliticized politics of human rights as the ideology of
military interventionism serving specific economico-political ends. As Wendy
Brown has suggested apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the
innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defence of the individual
against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture,
state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations
or instantiations of collective power against individuals. [10]
However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who intervene
on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they oppose? Do
they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they stand in
opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear that the
us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms of ending the
suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by hard-headed
politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate idea of the
political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’ was to be delivered
to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism, insertion into the
global market economy, etc. The purely humanitarian, anti-political politics
of merely preventing suffering thus amounts to an implicit prohibition on
elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation.
And on violence:
The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the
standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instrument
of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation. [7] The
‘irrational’ brutality of violence is thus aufgehoben, ‘sublated’ in the
strict Hegelian sense, reduced to a particular ‘stain’ that contributes to
the overall harmony of historical progress. The 20th century confronted us
with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political forces, others
generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in
this way. Their instrumentalization into the tools of the Cunning of Reason
is not only ethically unacceptable but also theoretically wrong, ideological
in the strongest sense of the term. In his close reading of Marx, Balibar
nonetheless discerns an oscillation between this teleological
‘conversion-theory’ of violence, and a much more interesting notion of
history as an open-ended process of antagonistic struggles, whose final
‘positive’ outcome is not guaranteed by any encompassing historical
necessity.
Balibar argues that, for necessary structural reasons, Marxism is unable to
think the excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrative of
historical Progress. More specifically, it cannot provide an adequate theory
of fascism and Stalinism and their ‘extreme’ outcomes, Shoah and Gulag. Our
task is therefore twofold: to deploy a theory of historical violence as
something which cannot be instrumentalized by any political agent, which
threatens to engulf this agent itself in a self-destructive vicious cycle;
and also to pose the question of how to turn the revolutionary process
itself into a civilizing force.
And finally, Jodi Dean makes a fine point about Hardt and Negri's optimism and Gramscian pessimism as two sides of the same coin (with Žižek and Benjamin providing the necessary alternative).
Conscious grime, meanwhile, courtesy of DJ Lioness, G Double E with 'Harmony' (about 15 minutes in). That set has also has a couple of cracking tracks from DaVinChe; I particularly like the hardcore-esque flourishes on 'Pryin'. Speaking of which, it's good to see Ruff Sqwad keeping an old happy hardcore tradition alive with their remix of 'Died in your arms tonight' (via).
You know, I swear when I was in town today I heard someone with Drinking Bear as their ringtone, but that surely can't be true?
My parents have been visiting this past week, and (as you perhaps might expect from a visit to Berkeley), it's been all Mao all the time. First, we stopped in at the Red-Color News Soldier exhibit at the Journalism School while I was showing my parents round campus. The photos really are all stunning, particularly when displayed at full poster size.A few days later, we went to Stanford and stopped in at Revolutionary Tides: The art of the political poster 1914-1989 (unfortunately, the website requires Flash). It's a very interesting exhibition, focussing on the ways in which masses and crowds have been represented in graphic art. There was a great range of posters; the usual suspects of Russia, China (although fewer than I would have liked), as well as Nazi Germany and wartime posters from the West; but also the Spanish and Iranian revolutions, for instance, which I've seen very little of.
The juxtaposition of these very different historical moments could, of course, carry the standard liberal pronouncement that all mass movements are bad (as with the SF Chronicle's outstandingly superficial review, all the more annoying as the critic seems to think he's saying something incredibly clever, rather than parroting the party line of contemporary capitalism). But while there was an element of that, the general thrust of the exhibit rather seemed to be interested in analyzing the masses as a central figure of modern politics, which had to be reckoned with by any form of political organization, although the figure could be mobilized in many different ways. Particularly interesting was the discussion of various anatomical metonyms (the fist or the mouth of the masses). I thought of Hardt and Negri's discussion of the flesh of the multitude, and I wondered how we might represent that 'crowd without organs' in our own political agitation.
I've also discovered a site of Russian posters, many of which are marvellous. My favorites so far are probably this futurist one, and these images of technology (one including Lenin).
That, at least, is how I like to imagine the script of Shopgirl coming about. It's an odd film; clearly set in the present day, but just as clearly animated by an archaic sensibility. Sometimes, this just leads to surface incoherence. Steve Martin is humorously unaware of what 'jerk chicken' is, presumably demonstrating that he is an old man, out of touch with the wild food habits of the modern age. But a few scenes later, we see Martin deftly wielding chopsticks, as suave, cosmopolitan dot-com millionaire. More seriously, it makes it difficult to figure out the narrative: are we supposed to take seriously the broad strokes that delineate Claire Danes's character (Mirabelle) as A Lonely Young Woman (she sleeps alone in a double bed; she has a cat)? Shouldn't we be more troubled than the film appears to be by the power relations in her relationship with rich old Steve Martin? I'm not saying the film has to forthrightly condemn old men shagging young women; but the _assumption_ that seems to be implicit, that his is an appropriate mode of courtship, seems like it should have been untenable for about 50 years.
There's also the strangely unsure tone of the film. There's a lot of broad comedy around Claire Danes's other suitor (and I mean BBC sitcom broad, that is to say, unfunny); are similarly uncomfortable moments in her relationship with Martin also supposed to be funny? It seems not. How, then, to understand the resolution of the film, in which Jeremy's transformation by yoga self-help tapes makes him a suitable partner for Mirabelle in contrast to Ray (Martin's character)? Though "resolution" is a slightly odd word to use of the end of a film which entirely lacks narrative momentum. That lack is not necessarily a problem -- In The Mood For Love is the same, and I love it in part _for_ that -- but there seems no obvious reason other than the plot for this film to exist at all.
Still, anthrochica liked it, so maybe I'm missing something. And Claire Danes is both an excellent actor and consistently wears lovely clothes throughout, so the film's not a total waste of time.
It's common for hardcore rap albums to end with an elegaic or more uplifting track (even the none-more-hardcore Immortal Technique wimps out with the rather lovely 'One' at the end of Revolutionary vol. 2). This generally, then, has the function of positing an alternative to the grim situations described by much of album; the function maybe utopian (and hence, potentially, revolutionary), but because it posits an alternative at some indefinite time, it tends to function catharticly, that is, it provides a purely formal resolution of the critical space opened up by the rest of the tracks.
Which is why it is so great to have Illmatic start with 'It ain't hard to tell', which is what you get when you play the album backwards. I mean, it's a great track anyway (I love the way the 'Human nature' samples are used), but it's utopianism serves to open up a space in which the more descriptive content of most of the tracks takes on a subtly different aspect: not a grim description of despair, but a call to action.
Coming soon: a post on Marxism and determinism, featuring Set Theory!
Theses you should write on tour
You can look at my notes for my presentation (Word format only for the moment, sorry), if you like. It's a bit scrappy, but I like the basic idea.
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