Short Circuits

Reading Ranciere. The first, from "Misadventures of Universality":

As a way of government consensus says: there can be different interests, values and aspirations but there is only one reality that we can experience and there is only one sense that we can give to that reality. There is a clear evolution of the world according to a global logic. But you cannot deny whatever opinions you may have, or whether it is good or bad. Dissensus begins precisely with the contention that there is not one reality, that the given which offers such or such possibility or impossibility is controversial itself and this is what political Subjectivisation is about: reframing the very field of the given, of the sensible, the intelligible and, consequently, the possible. It is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds. To my mind, the first breakaway from the logic of consensus, the first exodus, is the breakaway from the configuration that urges us to think of dissensus only as “exodus”. It is the breakaway from the spectacular partition between the in and the out. The breakaway from the consensual logic of historical necessity and global necessity. There are no historical necessities, there are forces, conjunctions of forces that frame such and such logic of the global necessity.

And from On The Shores of Politics:

Genuine participation is the invention of that unpredictable subject which momentarily occupies the street, the invention of a movement born of nothing but democracy itself. the guarantee of permanent democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of this fleeting subject. The test of democracy must ever be in democracy's own image: versatile, sporadic - and founded on trust. - p.61

Ernesto Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society"

In the interest of 'entertaining the reader', the following is from C-Theory's Digital Library

In these brief remarks I should like to refer to several problems which are central to the contemporary Marxist theory of ideology . In discussing these problems, it is evident that we presently live at the centre of a theoretical paradox. The terms of this paradox could be formulated as follows : in no previous period has reflection upon 'ideology' been so much at the centre of Marxist theoretical approaches; at the same time, however, in no other period have the limits and referential identity of 'the ideological' become so blurred and problematic. If the increasing interest in ideology runs parallel to a widening of the historical effectivity attributed to what was traditionally considered as the domain of the 'superstructures'-and this widening is a response.to the crisis of an economistic and reductionistic conception of Marxism-then that very crisis puts into question the social totality constituted around the base-superstructure distinction . As a consequence, it is no longer possible to identify the object 'ideology' in terms of a topography of the social .

Within the Marxist tradition, we can identify two classical approaches to the problem of ideology. These approaches have often-but not always-been combined. For one of them, 'ideology' is thought to be a levelofthe social totality; for the other, it is identified with false consciousness . Today, both approaches appear to have been undermined as a consequence of the crisis of the assumptions on which they were grounded: the validity of the first depended on a conception of society as an intelligible totality, itself conceived as the structure upon which its partial elements and processes are founded. The validity of the second approach presupposed a conception of human agency-a subject having an.ultimate essential homogeneity whose misrecognition was postulated as the source of 'ideology' . In this respect, the two approaches were grounded in an essentialist conception of both society and social agency. To see clearly the problems which have led the theory of ideology to its present impasse, we need to study the crisis of this essentialist conception in its two variants .

Let me turn, first, to the crisis of the concept of social totality. The ambition of all holistic approaches had been to fix the meaning of any element or social process outside itself, that is, in a system of relations with other elements. In this respect, the base-superstructure model played an ambiguous role: if it asserted the relational character of the identity of both base and superstructure, at the same time it endowed that relational system with a centre. And so, in a very Hegelian fashion, the superstructures ended up taking their revenge by asserting the 'essentiality' of the appearances . More importantly, the structural totality was to present itself as an object having a positivity of its own, which it was possible to describe and to define . In this sense, this totality operated as an underlying principle of intelligibility of the social order. The status of this totality was that of an essence of the social order which had to be recognized behind the empirical variations expressed at the surface of social life. (Note that what is at stake here is not the opposition, structuralism vs . historicism. It does not matter if the totality is synchronic or diachronic; the important point is that in both cases it is a founding totality which presents itself as an intelligible object of 'knowledge' [cognitio] conceived as a process or re-cognition .) Against this essentialist vision we tend nowadays to accept the infinitude ofthe social, that is, the fact that any structural system is limited, that it is always surrounded by an 'excess of meaning' which it is unable to master and that, consequently, 'society' as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility . Let us examine the double movement that this recognition involves . The great advance carried out by structuralism was the recognition of the relational character of any social identity; its limit was its transformation of those relations into a system, into an identifiable and intelligible object (i .e ., into an essence) . But if we maintain the relational character of any identity and if, at the same time, we renounce the fixation of those identities in a system, then the social must be identified with the infinite play of differences, that is, with what in the strictest sense of the term we can call discourse-on the condition, of course, that we liberate the concept of discourse from its restrictive meaning as speech and writing .

This first movement thus implies the impossibility of fixing meaning. But this cannot be the end of the matter. A discourse in which meaning cannot possibly be fixed is nothing else but the discourse of the psychotic . The second movement therefore consists in the attempt to effect this ultimately impossible fixation. The social is not only the infinite play of differences . It is also the attempt to limit that play, to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order. But this order-or structure-no longer takes the form of an underlying essence of the social ; rather, it is an attempt-by definition unstable and precarious-of acting over that'social', of hegemonizing it. In a way which resembles the one we are pursuing here, Saussure attempted to limit the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign with the assertion of the relative character of that arbitrariness . Thus, the problem of the social totality is posed in new terms: the 'totality' does not establish the limits of 'the social' by transforming the latter into a determinate object (i.e., 'society') . Rather, the social always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute society. At the same time, however, that 'totality' does not disappear: if the suture it attempts is ultimately impossible, it is nevertheless possible to proceed to a relative fixation of the social through the institute of nodal points . But if this is the case, questions concerning those nodal points and their relative weight cannot be determined sub species aeternitatis. Each social formation has its own forms of determination and relative autonomy, which are always instituted through a complex process of overdetermination and therefore cannot be established a priori. With this insight, the base-superstructure distinction falls and, along with it, the conception of ideology as a necessary level of every social formation .

If we now pass to the second approach to ideology-ideology as false consciousness-we find a similar situation . The notion of false consciousness only makes sense if the identity of the social agent can be fixed. It is only on the basis of recognizing its true identity that we can assert that the consciousness of the subject is 'false' . And this implies, of course, that that identity must be positive and non-contradictory . Within Marxism, a conception of subjectivity of this kind is at the basis of the notion of 'objective class interests'. Here I am not going to discuss in detail the forms of constitution, the implications and the limitations of such a conception of subjectivity . I shall rather just mention the two processes which led to its progressive abandonment. In the first place, the gap between 'actual consciousness' and 'imputed consciousness' grew increasingly wider. The way this gap was filled-through the presence of a Party instituted as the bearer of the objective historical interests ofthe class-led to the establishment of an 'enlightened' depotism of intellectuals and bureaucrats who spoke in the name of the masses, explained to them their true interests, and imposed upon them increasingly totalitarian forms of control . The reaction to this situation inevitably took the form of the assertion of the actual identity of the social agents against the'historical interests' which burdened them. In the second place, the very identity of the social agents was increasingly questioned when the flux of differences in advanced capitalist societies indicated that the identity and homogeneity of social agents was an illusion, that any social subject is essentially decentred, that his/her identity is nothing but the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities. The same excess of meaning, the same precarious character of any structuration that we find in the domain of the social order, is also to be found in the domainof subjectivity . But if any social agent is a decentred subject, if when attempting to determine his/her identity we find nothing else but the kaleidoscopicmovement ofdifferences, inwhat sense canwe say that subjects misrecognize themselves? The theoretical ground that made sense of the concept of 'false consciousness' has evidently dissolved . It would therefore look as if the two conceptual frameworks which formerly made sense of the concept of ideology have broken up, and that the concept should consequently be eliminated. However, I do not think this to be a satisfactory solution . We cannot do without the concept of misrecognition, precisely because the very assertion that the 'identity and homogeneity of social agents is an illusion' cannot be formulated without introducing the category of misrecognition.

The critique of the'naturalization of meaning' and of the'essentialization of the social' is a critique of the misrecognition of their true character . Without this premise, any deconstruction would be meaningless . So, it looks as if we can maintain the concept of ideology and the category of misrecognition only by inverting their traditional content. The ideological would not consist of the misrecognition of a positive essence, but exactly the opposite : it would consist of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, of the impossibility of any ultimate suture. The ideological would consist of those discursive forms through which a society tries to institute itself as such on the basis of closure, of the fixation of meaning, of the non-recognition of the infinite play of differences . The ideological would be the will to 'totality' of any totalizing discourse . And insofar as the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning, without the discourse of closure, the ideological must be seen as constitutive of the social . The social only exists as the vain attempt to institute that impossible object: society. Utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice .

Counterclaims

Context, context, and more context:

One often hears that to understand a work of art one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace, a Deleuzian counterclaim would be not only that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art (i.e., that to enact this contact one should abstract from the work's context), but also that it is, rather, the work of art itself that provides a context enabling us to understand properly a given historical situation. If someone were to visit Serbia today, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him confused. If, however, he were to read a couple of literary works and see a couple of representative movies, they would definitely provide the context that would enable him to locate the raw data of his experience. There is thus an unexpected truth in the old cynical wisdom from the Stalinist Soviet Union: "he lies as an eywitness!"

- Zizek, Organs Without Bodies

'Stubborn Attachments'

- Joe Malia

The advantage of Hegel's account of disciplinary practices over Foucault's is that Hegel, as it were, provides the transcendental genesis of discipline by answering the question: how and why does it let itself be caught in it? Hegel's answer, of course, is the fear of Death, the absolute Master: since my bodily existence is subject to natural corruption, and since I cannot ge rid of the body and thoroughly negate it, the only thing I can do is embody negativity: instead of directly negating my body, I live my bodily existence as the permanent negativization, subordination, mortification, disciplining, of the body...
[...]

So we are back at the problematic of 'stubborn attachment', since it is absolutely crucial to bear in mind the co=dependence between detachability from any determinate content and excessive attachment to a particular object that makes us indifferent to all other objects - such an object is what Lacan, following Kant, calls 'negative magnitude', that is, an object which, in its very positive presence, acts as a stand-in for the void of Nothingness (or for the abyss of the impossible Thing), so that wanting this particular object, maintaining one's 'stubborn attachment' to it come what may, is the very concrete form of 'wanting Nothingness'.

- Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p.106-07

And TIQQUN, from Soft Targets:

Gloss: What do we mean by Imaginary Party? That the Outside has moved inside. The turning outside-in of the liberal State into Empire has occurred silently, without violence, as if in the night. From without, nothing seems to have changed. ONE is simply struck by the sudden uselessness of so many familiar things, and the old divisions that once had so much weight now no longer function.
A nagging little neurosis makes ONE want to continue to distinguish the just from the unjust, the healthy from the sick, work from leisure, the criminal from the innocent or the ordinary from the monstrous. But we need to acknowledge the obvious: these old divisions are no longer intelligible.
They have not been suppressed, however. They are still there, but without consequences. The norm has not abolished the Law—it has merely voided the Law and ordered it to its own ends, in line with its own immanent practices of calculation and administration. When the Law enters the force field of the norm, it loses all its faded luster of transcendence, and can only function in a sort of state of exception that repeats itself indefinitely.
The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law.
There is no longer any visible Outside—no pure Nature, no Great Madness, no Great Criminal and no classical Great Proletariat with its really-existing Homeland of Justice and Liberty. These have all disappeared, above all because they have lost their imaginary force of attraction. There is no longer any Outside precisely because there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical tissue. Madness, crime or the proletariat no longer make up a world outside the world, their own ghetto with or without walls. With the dissipation of the social, they have become reversible modalities, latent violences or suspect possibilities of each and every body. This suspicion is what justifies the continuous socialization of society, the perfecting of the micro-mechanisms of control. Not that Biopower claims to directly govern men and things—to the contrary, it governs possibilities and conditions of possibility.
Everything that had its source in the Outside (illegality, first of all, but also misery and death) is, to the extent it is administered, taken up in an integration that positively eliminates these exteriorities in order to permit their subsequent recirculation. This is why, at the heart of Biopower, there is no such thing as death: there is only murder, and its circulation. Through statistics, an entire network of causalities embeds each living thing in an aggregate of deaths. . . . The truth is that there is no margin that can be identified as such, since liminarity itself has become the intimate condition of all that exists.
The Law fixes divisions and establishes distinctions, it outlines what defies it, and recognizes a world it both forms and gives duration to; the Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what is outlawed. The Law says its outside. The inaugural gesture of the Law is to exclude its own foundation—sovereignty, violence. But the norm has no sense of foundation. It has no memory, and stays as close as possible to the present, always claiming to be on the side of immanence. Where the Law gives itself a face and honors the sovereignty of what is outside it, the norm is acephalic—headless—and is delighted every time ONE severs the head of some sovereign. The norm has no hieros, no place of its own, but acts invisibly over the entirety of the gridded, edgeless space it distributes. Nothing and no one is excluded from this space, or rejected into an identifiable exteriority. What is called "excluded" is here only a modality of a generalized inclusion. It is therefore no longer anything but a single and same field, homogenous but diffracted into an infinity of nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain the play between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of intensity. In this space, an ungraspable agency of totalization reigns, dissolving, digesting, absorbing and deactivating all alterity a priori. A process of omnivorous immanentization deploys itself on a planetary scale. The goal: make the world a continuous biopolitical tissue. In the meantime, the norm stands watch.
Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal and everything must be normalized. What functions here is a positive paradigm of power. The norm produces all that is, insofar as the norm is itself, ONE says, the ens realissimum. Whatever does not belong to its mode of unveiling is not, and whatever is not cannot belong to its mode of unveiling. Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as such, but reduced to a simple default of the norm, a hole to be taken back up into the biopolitical tissue. Negativity, this power that is not supposed to exist, is quite logically abandoned to a traceless disappearance. Not without reason, since the Imaginary Party is the Outside of the world without Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged at the heart of a world rendered continuous.

...

Savonarola points to the new issue of SOFT TARGETS. Among the net-available material is their interview with Zizek, "Divine Violence and Liberated Territories" - and this from the first issue, which I found particularly amusing:

- Jason Fox, Peaceful Warrior

Problematic Plurality

Everything must efface itself, everything will efface itself. This is in accordance with the infinite demand of effacement that writing take place and take its place.

Even if writing leaves traces, and, leaving them, makes traces engender themselves and produce themselves out of the life of traces? One can answer: to write is to go by way of the world of traces, towards the effacement of traces and of all traces, since traces are opposed to totality and always already disperse themselves. Another response: writing marks, but does not leave marks. More precisely: there is between mark and traces such a difference that it almost accounts for the equivocal nature of writing. Writing marks and leaves traces, but the traces do not depend on the mark and, at the limit, are not in relation to it. the traces do not refer to the moment of the mark, they are without origin, but not without end in the very permanence that seems to perpetuate them, traces which, even in becoming confused and replacing each other, are there forever, and forever cut off from that of which they would be the traces, having no other being than their plurality, as if there were not a trace, but traces, never the same and always repeated. The mark of writing. To mark is in a certain way not to leave marks and only, by this active lack of marks, failure to distribute plurally in a well delimited space, already to demand the line of demarcation not to cross and yet to demand it as from this crossing in view of a completely other space. To mark is, by this separation of mark and traces, to make the traces not refer to the mark as to their beginning and always multiply and superimpose themselves, traces by traces, not to be deiphered, but to efface themselves pluraly.

The mark, it is to be absent from the presence and to make the present be absent. And the trace, being always traces, does not refer to any initial presence that would still be present, as remainder or vestige, there where it has disappeared.

Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond

From Two to Three (and not 300)

Apropos moving on from Zizek's 300 piece, while sustaining some of the more interesting points that have emerged from the cross-bloggery, the International Journal of Zizek Studies has a new piece out by Mr. Slavoj, "Badiou: Notes From an Ongoing Debate" which 'gives a critical account of the event in Badiou'. In it, Zizek hits on some of the issues which his 300 piece stirred up - notably his approach to the 'Three of being, worlds, and truth'. I am not entirely convinced that a "materialist dialectics" is as opposed to "democratic materialism" as Badiou often claims (doesn't Badiou admit that a materialist dialectics is - much like its opposite - ideological, and that much of a subject's involvement in a truth-procedure obliges them to make creative use of the language within a given situation - that is, does not a truth-prcedure require the working-through within the maxim of democratic materialism which says that "there are only bodies and languages"? [the relevence of Agamben, Deleuze, Virno and others comes to mind here]). Zizek also makes use of an unpublished manuscript by Adrian Johnston to briefly explore the potentials/limitations of a "politics of minimal difference" and a "pre-evental discipline of time" as they might function alongside the "inhuman" dimension (quoting Johnston):

This other sort of temporal discipline would be neither the undisciplined impatience of hurriedly doing anything and everything to enact some ill-defined, poorly conceived notion of making things different nor the quietist patience of either resigning oneself to the current state of affairs drifting along interminably and/or awaiting the unpredictable arrival of a not-to-be- actively-precipitated 'x' sparking genuine change (Badiou's philosophy sometimes seems to be in danger of licensing a version of this latter mode of quietism). Those subjected to today's frenetic socio-economic forms of late-capitalism are constantly at risk of succumbing to various forms of what one could refer to loosely as 'attention deficit disorder,' that is,a frantic, thoughtless jumping from present to ever-new present. At the political level, such capitalist impatience must be countered with the discipline of what could be designated as a specifically communist patience (designated thus in line with Badiou's assertion that all authentic forms of politics are 'communist' in the broad sense of being both emancipatory as well as 'generic' qua radically egalitarian and non-identitarian) - not the quietist patience condemned above, but, instead, the calm contemplation of the details of situations, states, and worlds with an eye to the discerning of ideologically veiled weak points in the structural architecture of the statist system. Given the theoretical validity of assuming that these camouflaged Achilles' heels (as hidden evental sites) can and do exist in one's worldly context, one should be patiently hopeful that one's apparently minor gestures, carried out under the guidance of a pre-evental surveillance of the situation in search of its concealed kernels of real transformation, might come to entail major repercussions for the state-of-the situation and/or transcendental regime of the world.'

Elsewhere in the article:

What Hegel says about the curtain that separates appearances from true reality (behind the veil of appearance there is nothing, only what the subject who looks there put it there), holds also for a revolutionary process: 'seeing' and 'desire' are here inextricably linked, i.e., the revolutionary potential is not there to discover as an objective social fact, one 'sees it' only insofar as one 'desires' it (engages oneself in the movement).

Avec Jean-Luc Nancy:

But the unity of the event is not numerical.It does not consist in being gathered at a point of origin (for ontology, there is no Big Bang). Because it is or creates surprise, its nature and structure are such as to be disperesed in the flow [l'alea] of events, and, as a result, also in the flow of that which does not constitute an event and withdraws discreetly into the imperceptible continuum, into the murmur of "life" for which existence is the exception.

If the event were fundamental and unique in the ordinary - or "metaphysical" - sense of these words, it would be given, and this giving would also be the originary dissolution of all event-ness. There would be no surprise. Only because it is not given, but instead happens, is there surprise and an unpredictable [aleatoire] multiplicity of what might now be called the arrivals (or the "arrivings") of the unique event. In this sense, there are only events, which means that "there is" is eventlike [evenementiel] (Sein, Ereignis). This means they are not only diverse, discrete, and dispersed, but also rare. Or, in other words: the event is simultaneously unique, innumerable, and rare.

It never stops happening - and surprising. Thinking never stops catching itself in the act [se surprendre a] of seeing it coming, its open look turned upon the transparency of nothing. A thought is an event: what it thinks happens to it there, where it is not. An event is a thought: the tension and leap into the nothing of Being. It is in this sense that "Being and thinking are the same" and that their sameness takes place according to the incisive ex-tension of ek-sistence.

-"The Suprise of the Event", Being Singular Plural

All for now. Sleep (or its ideological opposite) awaits.

Excerpts from a recent translation of Giorgio Agamben's "Metropolis" via Generation Online

Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of exclusive society, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm. According to Foucault, the political space of modernity is the result of these two paradigms: at some point the leper starts being treated like a plague victim, and viceversa. In other words, there emerges a projection onto the framework of exclusion and separation of leprosy, of the arrangement of surveillance, control, individualisation and the articulation of disciplinary power, so that it becomes a case of individualising, subjectivating and correcting the leper by treating him like a plague victim. So there is a double capture: on the one hand the simple binary opposition of diseased/healthy, mad/normal etc. and on the other hand there is a whole complicated series of differentiating dispositions of technologies and dispositifs that subjectify individuate and control subjects. This is a first useful framework for a general definition of metropolitan space today and it also explains the very interesting things you were talking about here: the impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialisation, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.

I said that the city is a dispositif, or a group of dispositifs. The theory that you referred to earlier was the summary idea that one could divide reality into, on the one hand, humans and living beings, and, on the other, the dispositifs that continuously capture and take hold of them. However, the third fundamental element that defines a dispositif, for Foucault too I think, is the series of processes of subjectivation that result from the relation, the corpo a corpo, between individuals and dispositifs (6). There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation, to talk of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects.

What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated. Obviously this is also complicated by the fact that modern dispositifs not only entail the creation of a subjectivity but also and equally processes of de-subjectification. This might have always been the case, think about confession, which shaped Western subjectivity (the formal confession of sins), or juridical confession, which we still experience today. Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of suvbjectivation that they create. But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes acttached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque.

Mid-Afternoon Melange

Browsing artist Paul Chan's website National Philistine. Stop by and listen to Lite Rock Leftist Talk, or the audio books in My Own Private Alexandria - which includes a reading (filed under 'mispronounced english') of Ranciere's "The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes". Also from the website:

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives."

This is what, on a totally different level, Walter Benjamin was trying to articulate in his explicitly anti-evolutionist notion of the Messianic promise of a revolutionary Act that will retroactively redeem the Past itself: the present revolution will retroactively realize the crushed longings of all the past, failed revolutionary attempts. What this means is that, in a properly historical perspective as opposed to evolutionist historicism, the past is not simply the past, but bears within it its proper utopian promise of a future Redemption: in order to understand a past epoch properly, it is not sufficient to take into account the historical conditions out of which it grew -- one has also to take into account the utopian hopes of a Future that were betrayed and crushed by it -- that which was 'negated', that which did not happen -- so that the past historical reality was the way it was. To conceive the French Revolution, one has to focus also on the utopian hopes of liberation that were crushed by its final outcome, the common bourgeois reality -- and the same goes for the October Revolution. Thus we are dealing not with idealist or spiritualist teleology, but with the dialectical notion of a historical epoch whose 'concrete' definition has to include its crushed potentials, which were inherently 'negated' by its reality.
--Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, PG90

And the Zizek 300 bout continues with more at Antigram, Rough Theory, I cite, and Poetix who had this to say:

I suspect the real difference between “left” and “right” here has to do with the place of values in a larger schema; and Daniel’s quite right to say that for Freud and Nietzsche they form part of a circuit connecting the world of material forces with itself, rather than standing apart from that world and offering a set of timeless criteria with which to judge its contents. But this is why Badiou speaks of the logics of worlds: a world is not simply a blind dissemination of existents, but a relational order equipped with an array (OK, a lattice…) of truth values. These values are not only immanent, but local to the particular world they organize. (The defining quality of a truth, as opposed to a truth-value, is then its eternity or non-locality).

Meanwhile Shaviro continues on the "oblique" path with posts from current in progress book chapters regarding Kant, Deleuze, and the Virtual - avec Whitehead. For the moment at least, I don't have a great deal to add but a paste of my notes from Jean-Luc Nancy's "Cosmos Baselius" in Being Singular Plural:

The unity of a world is not one: it is made of a diversity, and even disparity and opposition. It is in fact, which is to say that is does not add or subtract anything. The unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity, and this, in turn, is a diversity of worlds. A world is a multiplicity of worlds; the world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the mutual sharing and exposition of all its worlds - within this world.

The sharing of the world is the law of the world. The world has nothing other; it is not subject to any authority; it does not have a sovereign. Cosmos, nomos. Its supreme law is within it as the multiple and mobile trace of the sharing that it is. Nomos is the distribution, apportionment, and allocation of its parts: a piece of territory, a portion of food, the delimitation of rights and needs in each, and at every time, as is fitting [il convient].

But how does it fit? The measure of the suitability [la convenance] - the law of the law, or absolute justice - is only in the sharing itself and in the exceptional singularity of each - of each instance [cas], each according to this sharing. Yet, this sharing is not given, and "each" is not given (that which is the unity of each part, the occurrence of its instance, the configuration of each world). This is not an accomplished distribution. The world is not given. It is itself the giving [le don]. The world is its own creation (this is what "creation" means). It sharing is put into play at each instant: the universe in expansion, the un-limitation of individuals, the infinite need of justice.

Notes on the Unforeseeable

As for the present moment, it is at the same time a moment like any other - passing, like any other, into the other, and the moment that grasps itself as moment, naked opening of history that lets itself be glimpsed, for an instant, as simple hollowing out and as act of negativity. It is the moment of the absolute thought as such: as absolution, that is, as unbinding, detachment, and laying bare - not as absolutization. it is the absolution of separation and of relation: everything is at the same time separated and in relation, everything is only separated and in relation. It is this absolution that Hegel named "history," and for which, our time, completing Hegel's, advanced other concepts, that of "technology," for example (and perhaps already beyond this word, the liberation of still another, necessarily unknown, form).

Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p.28

If one had to expound the teachings of antiquity with utmost brevity while standing on one leg, as did Hilles that of the Jews, it could only be in this sentence: "they alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos." Nothing distinguished the ancient from the modern man so much as the former's absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impuulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Raush]. For it is in this experience alone that we assure ourselves of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact within the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not. Its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations, can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale - that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling classs sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a blood-bath. The master of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. but who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of childred by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship betsween genrations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning its development. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families. One need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of time, to encounter there rhythms from which the sick shall draw strength as they did earlier on high mountains or on the shores of southern seas. the "Lunaparks" are a prefiguration of sanatoria. The paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call "Nature." In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epiliptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence. If ikt is not gripped to the very marrow by the discipline of this power, no pacifist polemics will save it. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation [Rausche der Zeugung]. [Translated by Edmnd Jephcott]

-Walter Benjamin, From One-Way Street (1923-1926), "To the Planetarium"

‘[...]a truth is certainly an experience of the inhuman. However, “our’’ point of view that forges (in philosophy) the theory of truths and subjective figures has a price: we cannot know if the types of truths we experience are the only possible ones. other species, unknown to us, or even our own species, at another stage of its history (for example, transformed by genetic engineering), can, perhaps, accede to types of truths of which we have no idea, and even no image’,

Alain Badiou, The Logic of Worlds, p. 80.

There are no authors today who could console themselves by thinking their work will be read in a century (by what kind of human beings?)[...]

Agamben, Means Without End, p. 73-74

Perhaps it Must be Called Night

Image via BibliOdyssey

Whoever wants to write and to produce has ceaselessly to put this exaltation to sleep within himself. Mastery presupposes this sleep by which the creator pacifies and deceived the power that leads him on. He is creative and capable, according to the capability which leaves its trace upon the world, only because he has placed between his activity and the center from which shines the original word, the interval, the thickness of sleep. His lucidity is made of this sleep. One would be deceived, then, about surrealist experiments, and these would deceive us about the place where inspiration is situated, if they invited us to see in inspiration an event like sleep. In fact one sleeps, in a way, to evade it. Kafka repeatedly says to Gustav Janouch, "If it weren't for these terrible nights of insomnia, in general I wouldn't write." He must be understood profoundly: inspiration, that errant word which cannot come to an end, is the long night of insomnia. And it is in order to defend himself against it, by turning away from it, that the writer actually comes to write. Writing is an activity that returns him to the world where he can sleep. That is also why surrealism does not put its trust in sleep when it entrusts itself to the dream. If there is a relation between "inspiration" and dream, this is because the dream is an allusion to a refusal to sleep within sleep - an allusion to the impossibility of sleeping which sleep becomes in the dream. The adepts of the first surrealist hypnoses believed they were abandoning themselves to sleep. Hypnosis, however, consists not in putting to sleep, but in preventing sleep. It maintains within concentrated night a passive, obedient light, the point of light which is unable to go out: paralyzed lucidity. The power that fascinates has come into contact with this point, which it touches in the separated place where everything becomes image. Inspiration pushes us gently or impetuously out of the world, and in this outside there is no sleep, any more thatn there is rest. Perhaps it must be called night, but night - the essence of night - does not, precisely, let us sleep.. In it there is no refuge to be found in sleep. Sleep is a way out through which we seek to escape, not the day, but the night, from which there is no way out.

Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p.184-85

More on That "Strange Movement of the Example"

Audience: In "The Order of Things", is "episteme" a substitute translation for "paradigm"?

Agamben: No, Foucault often speaks of episteme. They are not interchangeable. The paradigm is one of the ways to build an episteme. He speaks of the epistemological paradigm but then never defines it. The word comes again and again, and no definition.

Audience: I’m still fascinated by the table which is not a table, which is beside itself, and I’m wondering if the relation between the table and its knowability similar to that of the table and our ignorance.

Agamben: It is because we are ignorant and trying to understand the table that we have to employ examples.

Schirmacher: So the dark side is coming. Now we are on the same page again.

Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?"

Freedom is freedom-with or it is nothing, because it is neither independence, nor autonomy, nor the free will of a subject - no more than it is the independences of many juxtaposed subjects, even to imagine them without oppositions. It is rather the liberation of the subject: its taking leave of the density of being. One cannot say that the self is free, for such a being is in itself the negation of freedom. Freedom, to the contrary, is the negation of this negation, or negativity for itself. "the pure idea...is an absolute liberation." If it is liberation, and not given freedom, it is because it liberates itself in and through its other: the movement of recognition is also the movement of liberation.

Freedom and negativity thus mutually expose one another. On the one hand, the negation of the given or of being-in-itself, in other words, its entry into becoming, into manifestation and desire, goes toward nothing other than freedom - more precisely, to its freedom, and still more precisely, to its liberation. Negation is first of all this movement of a self-liberation-from-immediate-being: negativity is from the very fist nothing other than the hollowing out of being by its own liberation. And, on the other hand, liberation is nothing other than negativity for itself, for it is the negation of this simple negation that is the being held-back-in-itself of being.

The Hegelian privilege of negativity and the decisive character of the formula "negation of the negation" is thereby justified: the first negation is the position of the given, the fixity of which holds back, freezes, and annuls the movement of sense. To posit that being is in itself nothing is not to open an abyss in which speculative ideality would plunge the entirety of the real; to the contrary, it is to posit the thoroughgoing insufficiency of the self considered in itself - and even, in truth, the impossibility of considering the self for itself, of identifying it as a substance of subsistence, as an assurance or a certitude. the first negation is already freedom, but still only negatively indicated. If I penetrate this first truth, that neither the stone nor the ego has the value of simple being-there or of an identity (for example, my name, but also my self-image), this penetration is already liberation. And it is liberation of the grasping of this: that the self is not there, that it does not assume the form of being-given-there.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, 69-71

That "Strange Movement of the Example"

The blogosphere has been abuzz recently thanks to a certain movie review by Zizek that prompted a flurry of posts by Steven Shaviro (here and here), Antigram, K-punk, and Larval Subjects

What interests me here is not so much the group critique of Zizek's current writings proliferating cyber-space (that he's being lazy, if only he would take a break with the appropriate time to reflect, works great as a stand-up comic but should clarify his ideas more, etc.) so much as the territories of the negation/affirmation problematic that have emerged through these discussions (though in any event, what to make - in light of some other recent interventions - of Zizek's plea - ever-so-impossible demand as it may be - in his conclusion to Did Sombody Say Totalitarianism? [with its "modest Marxist point"], that "since the digital network affects us all - since it already is the network that regulates our daily life right down to its most common features, like the water supply - it should be socialized in some form or another."?). Shaviro in his post calls for "obliqueness" via a detour through Whitehead which would resonate - correctly, I believe - with Deleuze's notion of transversality. This might also be added to Althusser's insistence that every philosophy carries within it its opposite - and that, as such, every philosophy is inherently rife with contradiction (a thematic taken up noteably through Felix Gonzalez-Torres' artistic practice as an "oblique" trajectory through the unresolved artistic, aesthetic, or conceptual developments of modernism). As Shaviro writes in his post:

The crucial point is not to affirm, but to move in new directions. To create.* We need to get out of the trap of merely reversing, or giving the exact opposite of, a dominant discourse. The important thing is not to reverse direction, but to move in another dimension altogether. Any three points describe a plane, a flat field upon which vectors of antagonism may be locked in battle (excuse the mixed metaphors). Obliqueness means, not staying on the plane, but moving off along another axis, in a third spatial dimension.

I have no problem accepting this. However, I would not be so swift to agree with his notion that any position of affirmation would be merely ethical in status and unable to 'link up' with the political or aesthetic. Concerning contemporary artistic practices in the very least, I have attempted to sketch out some of the problematics involved here elsewhere. And while I am likewise reluctant to run headlong into any defence of Deleuzian affirmationism, it might be worth pointing to Daniel W. Smith's essay (for the sake, of course, of "examples")"Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics" (found here):

Your drives have been constructed, assembled, and arranged in such a manner that your desire is positively invested in the system that allows you to have this particular interest. This is why Deleuze can say that desire as such is always positive. Normally, we tend to think of desire in terms of lack: if we desire something, it is because we lack it. But Deleuze reconfigures the concept of desire: what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation, and in this sense desire is always positive. Lack appears only at the level of interest, because the social formation, the infrastructure in which we have already invested our desire has in turn produced that lack. The result of this analysis is that we can now determine the proper object of a purely immanent ethics, which is neither my conscious will, or my conscious decisions, but neither is it my pre-conscious interests (say, my class interest, in the Marxist sense). The true object of an immanent ethics is the drives, and thus it entails, as both Spinoza and Nietzsche know, an entire theory of affectivity at the basis of any theory of ethics.

But enough of this affirmative ethics, then. There is after all, the infinite abyss...And it is worth taking note of what, in his "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter" Althusser had to say when speaking of Pascal: that "whether one calls this infinity full or empty is, after all, merely a question of the name one chooses to give it, and has no bearing on the content of the reasoning that name designates." Badiou for his part gives a rigorous and compelling analysis of how Spinoza's 'infinite modes' are none other than the place of the void, that name to which Spinoza does not return that marks the errancy of the void

Spinoza is very clear on the options available for establishing an existence. In his letter 'to the very wise young man Simon de Vries' of March 1663, he distinguishes two of them, corresponding to the two instances of the donation of being; substance (and its attributive identifications) and the modes. With regard to substance, existence is not distinguished from essence, and so it is a priori demonstrable on the basis of the definition alone of the existing thing. As proposition 7 of Book 1 of the Ethics clearly states; 'it pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.' With regard to modes, there is no other recourse save experience, for 'the existence of modes [cannot] be concluded from the definition of things.' The existence of the universal - or statis - power of the count-as-one is originary, or a priori; the existence in situation of particular things is a posteriori or to be experience.

That being the case, it is evident that the existence of infinite modes cannot be established. since they are modes, the correct approach is to experience or test their existence. However, it is certain that we have no experience of movement or rest as infinite modes (we solely have experience of particular finite things in movement or at rest); nor do we have experience of Nature in totality or facies totius universi, which radically exceeds our singular ideas; nor, of course, do we have experience of the ab solutely infinite understanding, or the totality of minds, which is stricktly unrepresentable. A contrario, if, there where experience fails a priori deduction might prevail, if it therefore belonged to the defined essence of movement, of rest, of Nature in totality, or of the gathering of minds, to exist, then these entities would no longer be modal but substantial. They would not be given, but would constitute the places of donation, which is to say the attributes. In reality, it would not be possible to distinguish Nature in totality from the attribute 'extension', nor the divine understanding from the attribute 'thought'.

We have thus reached the following impasse: in order to avoid any direct causal relation between the infinite and the finite - a point in which a measureless errancy of the void would be generated - one has to suppose that the direct action of infinite substantiality does not produce, in itself, anything apart from infinite modes. But it is impossible to justify the existence of even one of these modes. It is thus necessary to pose either that these infinite modes exist, but are inaccessible to both thought and experience, or that they do not exist. the first possibility creates an underworld of infinte things, an intelligible place which is toally upresentable, thus a void for us( for our situation), in the sense that the only 'existence' to which we can testify in relation to this placde is that of a name: 'infinite mode'. The second possibility directly creates a void, in the sense in which the proof of the causal recurrence of the finite - the proof of the homogeneity and consistency of presentation - is founded upon an inexistence. Here again, 'infinite mode' is a pure name whose referent is exlipsed; it is cited only inasmuch as it is required by the proof, and then it is cancelled from all finite experience, the experience whose unity it served to found.

Spinoza undertook the ontological eradication of the void by the appropriate means of an absolute unity of the situation (or presentation )and its state (representation). I will designate as *natural* (or ordinal) multiplicities those that incarnate, in a given situation, the maximum in this equilibrium of belonging and inclusion (meditation 11). these natural multiples are those whose terms are all normal (cf. Meditation 8), which is to say represented in the very place of their presentation. According to this definition, every term, for Spinoza, is natural: the famous 'Deus, sive Natura' is entirely founded. But the ruld for this foundation hits a snag; the necessity of having to convoke a void term, whose name without a testifiable referent ('infinite mode') inscribes errancy in the deducttive chain.

The great lesson of Spinoza is in the end the following: even if via the position of a supreme count-as-one which fuses the state of a situation and the situation (that is, metastructure and structure, or inclusion and belonging), you attempt to annul excess and reduce it to a unity of the presentative axis, you will not be able to avoid the errancy of the void; you will have to place its name.

Necessary, but inexistent: the infinte mode. It fills in - the moment of its conceptual appearance being also the moment of its ontological disappearance - the causal abyss betweeen the infinite and the finite. However, it only does so in being the technical name of the abyss: the signifier 'infinite mode' organizes a subtle misrecognition of this void which was to be foreclosed, but which insists on erring beneath the nominal artifice itself from which one deduce, in theory, its radical absence.

Badiou, Being and Event, p. 118-20

And to be somewhat "oblique" myself while seconding K-punks call to a reading of Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, an excerpt from an essay of the same title as the recently completed book to which he is refering that appeared in Think Again:

Badiou distinguishes between the infinte but indeterminate cardinality of the state and the infinite but determinate cardinality whereby the political truth procedure measures the excess of the state (cf. *AM* 162). That measure or determination of an indeterminate infinity is effected through forcing,a procedure that 'constrains the correctness of statements according to a condition that anticipates the composition of an infinite generice subset'. Forcing describes the process whereby a truth procedure hazards assertions on the basis of the supposition that, although unverifiable within the situation as it stands, they will prove verifiable according to an extension of this situation that can and will exist even though it does not exist as yet. through forcing, the knowledge that constrains the possibilities of thought within an actual situation is supplemented and those possibilities reconfigured by the situation's generic extension, which is brought about by statements made according to a condition anticipating the existence of the elements that will legitimate them. Thus, while the elements of a genric sub-set cannot be named - since the latter is incomplete on account of its infinity and indiscernible because its components cannot be enumerated by means of predicative difinition - the generic extension can be brought into being according to a process whereby statements are made about these indiscernible elements according to the hypothesis that if this or that element existed in the putatively complete generic sub-set, then this or that statement about this or that elemtn would be correct.

And beyond this, it might also be appropriate to return to that most disquieting of philosophical questions which Agamben attempted to answer: "What is a Paradigm?"

Anyway we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in the human sciences, or even in art?

[...]

It’s a singularity which in some way stands for all the others. I try to show it’s an element of the set which is withdrawn from it by means of the exhibition of its belonging to it. This is the strange movement of the example.

[...]

Schirmacher: Remember Badiou, he told you about this forcing. You have explained tonight how the paradigm is a forcing. Badiou explained that forcing is an evil thing, we can’t stop it but we should be aware of it. What can’t be named is never meant to be named, and we have to protect not-naming. But again, your other work shows that you know that.

Agamben: We can find an example for that too…

Update: Shaviro has more on affirmation, negation and desire

...Like Sheets of Precise, Slant Rain

For people who have been reading too much hard-core Marxist theory, it is hard to deal with the fact that they're not saints. And I say no, they're not. Everything is full of contradictions; there are only different degrees of contradiction. We try to get close them, but that's it, they are always going to be there. The only thing to do is to give up and pull the plug, but we can't. That's the great thing about Althusser, when you read his philosophy. Something that I tell my students is to read once, then if you have problems with it read it a second time. The if you still have problems, get drunk and read it a third time with a glass of wine next to you and you might get something out of it, but always think about practice. The theory in the books is to make you live better and that's what, I think, all theory should do. It's about trying to show you certain ways of constructing reality. I'm not even saying finding (I'm using my words very carefully), but there are certain ways of constructing reality that helps you live better, there's no doubt about it. When I teach, that's what I show my students - to read all this stuff without a critical attitude. Theory is not the endpoint of work; it is work along the way to the work. To read it actively is just a process that will hopefully bring us to a less shadowed place.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

But red wine is the poorest, it is the least expensive of poisons. Its horror is attached precisely to its misery: it is the garbage can of the marvelous.

-Georges bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge

'Die Wels ist alles, was der Fall ist' (Wittgenstein): the world is everything that 'falls', everything that 'comes about [advient]', 'everything that is the case' - by case, let us understand casus: at once occurrence and chance, that which comes about in the mode of the unforeseeable, and yet of being.

Thus as far back as we can go, 'there is' = 'there has always been' the 'has-always-already-been', the 'already' being absolutely neccessary in order to mark this proiority of the occurrence, of the Fall, over all its forms, that is to say, all the forms of beings. this is Heidegger's es gibt, the inaugural deal [la donne] (rather than what has been dealt out [le donne], depending on whether one wishes to highlight the active or passive aspect); it is always prior to its presence. In other words, it is the primacy of absence over presence (Derrida), not as a going-back-towards, but as a horizon receding endlessly ahead of the walker who, seeking his path on the plain, never finds anything but another plain stretching out before him (very different from the Cartesian walker who has only to walk straight ahead in a forest in order to get out of it, because the world is made up, alternatively, of virgin forests and forests that have been cleared to create open fields: without Holzwege).

In this 'world' without being or history (like Rousseau's forest), what happens? For there are occurrences there, taking this phrase in the impersonal, active/passive sense [car il y advient: 'il', actif/passif impersonnel]. Encounters. what happens there is what happens in epicurus' universal rain, prior to any world, any being and any reason as well as any cause. What happens is that 'there are encounters' [ca se rencontre]; in Heidegger, that 'things are thrown' in an inaugural 'destining'. Whether or not it is by the miracle of the clinamen, it is enough to know that it comes about 'we know not where, we know not when', and that it is 'the smalles deviation possible', that is, the assignable nothingness of all swerve. Lucretius' text is clear enough to designate that which nothing in the world can designate, although it is the origin of every world. In the 'nothing' of the swerve, there occurs an encounter between one atom and another, and this event [evenement] becomes advent [avenement] on condition of the parallelism of the atoms, for it is this parallelism which, violated on just one occasion,induces the gigantic pile-up and collision-interlocking [accrochage] of an infinite number of atoms, from which a world is born (one world or another: hence the plurality of possible worlds, and the fact that the concept of possibility can be rooted in the concept of an original disorder_.

Whence the form of order and the form of beings whose birth is induced by this pile-up, determined as they are by the structure of the encounter; whence, once the encounter has been effected (but not before), the primacy of the structure over its elements; whence, finally, what one must call and affinity and a complementarity [completude] of the elements that come into play in the encounter, their 'readiness to collide-interlock' [accrochabilite], in order that this encounter 'take hold', that is to say, 'take form', at last give birth to forms, and new Forms- just as water 'takes hold' when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, or mayonnaise when it emulsifies. Henced the primacy of 'nothing' over all 'form', and of aleatory materialism over all formalism. In other words, not just anything can produce just anything, but only elements destined [voues] to encounter each other and, by virtue of their affinity, to 'take hold' one upon the other - which is why, in Democritus, and perhaps even in Epicurus, the atoms are, or are described as, 'hooked', that is, susceptible of interlocking one after the other, from all eternity, irrevocably, for ever.

Louis Althusser, "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter", Philosophy of the Encounter, 190-92