Metastable Equilibrium

jean paul sartre driving a maehdrescher

2009-09-14T15:04:00.005-06:00

The worker who serves the machine has his being in it just as the employer does; and just as the employer reinvests his profits in it, so the worker finds himself objectively forced to devote his wages to the upkeep (at minimum cost) of a servant for the machine who is none Other than himself[...]But we must not be misled by this apparent symmetry: the machine is not, and cannot be, the worker's interest. The reason for this is simple: far from the worker objectifying himself in it, the machine objectifies itself in him. In so far as industrialisation and concentration determine the proletarianisation of a section of the rural classes, they constitute not only the opportunity for the new proletarians of selling their labour power, but also, in the field of practico-inert Being, a force of attraction which tears the peasant away from agriculture and puts him in a workshop before a loom.
[...]
Thus the machine defines and produces the reality of its servant, that is to say, it makes of him a practico-inert Being who will be a machine in so far as the machine is human and a man in so far as it remains, in spite of everything, a tool to be used: in short, it becomes his exact complement as an inverted man. At the same time, it determines his future as a living organism, just as it defines that of the employer. The difference is that it defines him negatively as an impossibility of living in the more or less long term. The machine does this not only through the counter-finalities which we have described (air pollution, destruction of the environment, occupational diseases, etc.), but also through representing, for him, in so far as it develops his being in the practical field of industrialisation, a permanent threat of reduced wages, of technological unemployment and of becoming disqualified.

- Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason

Badiou on Speculative Realism

2009-08-21T22:51:00.004-06:00

Katie Paterson, "All the Dead Stars", Laser etched black anodised aluminium, 3x2M

A map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars - all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.

It's already making/has made the rounds, but Ben Woodard has posted a short Q&A with Badiou on the topic of Speculative realism.

[...]the fundamental affirmation of SR is an ambitious point of view, a new possibility for philosophy. A new vision. Philosophy can continue. In this sense I am happy that it is not merely a continuation of classical metaphysics nor an end of it. In this sense I am in agreement with the word realism. We are beyond the end of metaphysics and classical metaphysics with the term realism. The question of realism as opposed to materialism is not a crucial question today. What is important is that it is not correlationist or idealist. It is a new space for philosophy, one with many internal differences but this is a positive symptom.

a house for pigs and people

2009-05-03T08:07:00.006-06:00

Recent posts by Nina and the Institute regarding H1N1 brought to mind Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's collaborative work Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (A house for pigs and people) that was presented in 1997 at Documenta X. It is a piece I had not thought about since, well, probably 1997 - and given the resurgent interest in pigs as of late I may have to track down the catalog.

While both artists still fascinate me, it is Höller who continues to hold more of my interest for a number of reasons, not the least of which being his "Laboratory of Doubt" project and the fact that he obtained a PhD in phytopathology with a thesis on olfactory communication between insects (even though he is probably more widely recognized for his slides that were installed at Tate Modern.)

Apparently, "A House for Pigs and People" was the piece at Documenta X. So much so that even the ever-so unlikeable Baudrillard was compelled to comment on it, providing this description:

... we still play-act representation. A good illustration of this modern hoax was provided by the Kassel documenta of 1997 with the ‘Pigsty’ Installation. Reaching up on tiptoe to see over a fence, spectators look down on a pigsty, while a large mirror opposite allows them to see themselves observing pigs. Then they walk round the shelter and park themselves behind the mirror, which turns out to be a two-way mirror through which they can once again see the pigs, but at the same time also see the spectators opposite looking at the pigs – spectators unaware, or at least pretending to be unaware, that they are being observed. This is the contemporary version of Velásquez’s Las Meninas, and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the classical age of representation
(via)

Hmm...Yes, well. This work was also, as I think the artists had intended, about the status of the animal in relation to the human - a persistent problematic even well after the ruination of Deleuze within academia. Most especially now given the play that the Badiousian Subject is getting. And for those who would criticise Badiou on this point (that he is 'hard on the animal') even Deleuzeans such as Eric Alliez have a knack for discerning the vitalist in Badiou when it comes to recuperating such elegant descriptions of a Subject as simply 'an upsurge within the enveloping animal'.

Concerning the animal, Daniel Birnbaum has written an article on Holler and Trockel's collaborative work that I think is worth citing:

Holler and Trockel's first collaborative animal project was Muckenbus (Mosquito bus), 1996, in which humans were to encounter mosquitoes inside a Volkswagen van to test whether sheer willpower alone could influence the insects' tendency to bite. Why is it that some people get bitten a lot, while others are completely spared? Does it have anything to do with the mind-set of the person in question? In the end, because of the risk of disease spreading from one visitor to the other, the project had to remain largely hypothetical. When the bus was finally exhibited, no mosquitoes could be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived (for the simple reason that there weren't any). But in later projects, the visual qualities have been much more emphatic, as in A House for Pigs and People, where the pigs and piglets appeared as part of some hyperreal tableau vivant. Actually, the whole setup could be seen as a piece of optical machinery emphasizing the eye of the spectator and the completely objectified animals that are not even allowed the opportunity to meet the gaze of the observer.

[...]

In his 1997 catalogue essay "A House Divided," Richard Shusterman gives a political interpretation of Holler and Trockel's Documenta work: "There are also many human pigs in our social world: races and ethnicities that fail to gain our recognition because they are seen through the one-way glass of socio-cultural privilege. Very often such despised ethnicities are denigrated as swine, though Hegel, in denying the African's humanity, compared him not to a pig but a dog." All of this is no doubt true, but there are also millions of real pigs that live short and miserable lives in industrial confinement only to be sent to the slaughterhouse and made into cheap meals for the masses. One needn't see the work as an allegory to see its political dimension. "Can domesticated animals protest against us in any other way than by diseases (swine fever, mad-cow disease, cardiac infarct)?" inquire the artists. These days, when militant vegans in Europe bum down burger joints and sausage factories, when apocalyptic minds declare that mad-cow disease is divine revenge, and less dogmatic souls like myself actively avoid certain meats, Holler and Trockel's houses for humans and animals cannot be seen merely as amusing visual arrangements of various zoological specimens or as works about the incomprehensibility of animal behavior and nothing else. They're also about power. Indeed, the philosophical underpinnings of humanism itself seem to be at stake. Do we humans need constantly to reassure ourselves of our supremacy over other species through the exclusion of that which is not us but looks, smells, and acts a bit like us--i.e., the animal?

In an interview conducted in 1989 by Jean-Luc Nancy for Confrontations ("Eating Well"), a speculative and outspoken Jacques Derrida delineated a theory of the Western subject as an essentially meat-eating creature. Western humanity has defined itself through a violent exclusion, and incorporation, of the animal: "The subject does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh." The subject of power is essentially male and carnivorous, says Derrida, and he inquires, "I would ask you: In our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d'Etat (a head of State) ... by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian? The chef must be an eater of flesh."

[the "Porkgasm"]

Birnbaum would certainly seem to share some common ground with Mike Davis, whose recent article "Capitalism and the Flu" (hat tip to both IT and ICR) describes H1N1 as 'a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatening to give the whole world a fever'. So after the media hysteria slows down, when panic is no longer the favored and aimed at response, they would still like for us to waver in the more ambient and subversive atmosphere of doubt - doubt as to the preparedness of countries, states and their hospitals, the economic repercussions of a still uncertain pandemic, or the actual fatality rate of something that was on its "evolutionary fast track" six years ago. There should even be doubt as to what name to give a virus threatening not only millions of people, but the irrational mass extermination of livestock as well...

But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production

- Mike Davis

HUO: What's the political side of doubt?

CH: Doubt becomes political when it is used beyond its usefulness. To further uncertainty and to establish a condition of no decision is a political weapon. Doubt is politically effective precisely because it is not against something, or is proposing "another" way, but instead admits confusingly more.

- Carsten Holler interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist

all clocks are labyrinths

2009-04-28T00:13:00.002-06:00

Tacita Dean on JG Ballard in The Guardian:

It was the writer, curator and artist Jeremy Millar who became convinced Smithson knew of Ballard's short story, The Voices of Time, before building his jetty. All Smithson's books had been listed after his death in a plane crash in 1973 - and The Voices of Time was among them. The story ends with the scientist Powers building a cement mandala or "gigantic cipher" in the dried-up bed of a salt lake in a place that feels, by description, to be on the very borders of civilisation: a cosmic clock counting down our human time. It is no surprise that it is a copy of The Voices of Time that lies beneath the hand of the sleeping man on the picnic rug in the opening scenes of Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames' classic 1977 film about the relative size of things in the universe.

Smithson understood the prehistory of his site. Beneath the Great Salt Lake was, for some, the centre of an ancient universe, and his jetty could have been an elaborate means to bore down to get to it. As if understanding this, Ballard wrote in the catalogue text: "What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty?" He elaborated later to me in a letter: "My guess is that the cargo was a clock, of a very special kind. In their way, all clocks are labyrinths, and can be risky to enter." The two men had a lot in common, and Ballard believed him to be the most important and most mysterious of postwar US artists. My interest in time, cosmic and human, future and past, as well as the analogue spooling of the now, has Ballard at its core.

art and professionalization

2009-03-14T11:10:00.002-06:00

An interesting article by Dan Fox over at Frieze (HT Leisurearts) on the professionalization of artists and what our 'professions' might have to look forward to - or what they are symptomatic of - in a dire economy. He even cites Infinite Thought's "The Art World Is Not the World", which is well worth a read - though I would avoid it if you happen to be an independent curator, as it might make the blood boil. Nu-language, Nu-labor, financial meltdown, name-dropping as collateral...Magic 8 Ball says, "outlook not so good". From the article:

The art world is a little like a second-hand computer: its exterior a desirably minimalist, Jonathan Ive-designed casing with titanium curves and winking lights that suggests high-speed processors able to deliver any number of creative experiences at the touch of a button, its interior a mess of circuitry that has been rewired and crammed back into the casing so many times that no one can begin to understand it. And there’s no manual to tell you how it behaves – or how it ought to behave. Why there might be lacunae between expectation and experience in the art world is worth further thought. Read any mainstream newspaper or certain hand-wringing jeremiahs in the art press, and you’ll be told that market forces are to blame. Certainly money is a massive factor – capital, in order to keep itself liquid, needs to create plausible costumes in which to go about its business – but the art market does not tell the whole story. Even before the cold winds of recession began to bite, Sarah Thornton’s account of high-powered professionals in Seven Days in the Art World (2008) was felt by many to describe only a tiny part of the picture. As Sally O’Reilly wrote in her review of the book in Art Monthly: ‘To take [Takashi] Murakami as the subject of the studio visit chapter is rather like offering Turkish Delight as a typical foodstuff.’4 Only a relatively small percentage of the art world sees anything like the kind of money and glamour Thornton describes so breathlessly, and now her book seems, if not like ancient history, then at least a demonstration of how fragile the image of success built on cultural commodities can be, perhaps because she forgot that the art world also comprises audiences of all shapes, sizes and degrees of interest, producers and commentators who struggle to make a living wage, and individuals who work tirelessly in museum education departments, in community outreach programmes, in art schools, in academia or as technicians and fabricators.

the invisible commitee in translation

2009-02-23T12:33:00.002-07:00

For anyone who has followed the developments of the tarnac9, or has even a marginal interest in Agamben, Debord, strategy, autonomy, communes, singularity, etcetera...there is a new translation of what will supposedly be the preface to Semiotext(e)'s printed version of The Coming Insurrection available here. Also, online versions of The Coming Insurrection are available here and here, with downloadable versions in French and English with footnotes. HT to rsg for the initial tip off on this one. I may be spending a lazy Monday reading these over.

politicians in my eyes

2009-02-12T13:59:00.002-07:00

Soundtrack:

Death - Politicians In My Eyes

Tina Turner - We Don't Need Another Hero (live)

they say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere: pre-terrorism and the fear of whatever singularities

2009-02-01T02:38:00.011-07:00

At the time of my posting this, students are being forcibly removed and dragged from the occupied lecture hall of Nottingham University, and yesterday's BBC article cites a growing fear of the left in France (but "striking is like a pastime for the French"...). This 'growing fear of the left' has been pinned specifically to a threat of insurrection that extends beyond France's borders and would cut across into all of Europe, apparently:

A spokesman for the interior ministry, Gerard Gachet, told the BBC that the threat was real.

"The term 'ultra-left' was used by the interior minister to set this group apart from the extreme left who turn up for elections and keep within the parameters of democratic debate," he says.

But talking of more radical groups, he points to recent pamphlets and books published anonymously, but sometimes with a circulation of about 20,000, with titles such as How to Start a Civil War and The Insurrection That is Coming.

"They say that the fires of revolt will spread everywhere," he says, "and we see acts like damage to bank branches or state buildings and claims of solidarity with the Greek rioters.

While I would not be in the business of overtly linking L'Inssurection to Tiqqun pamphlets - as Alberto Toscano has done an excellent job in discrediting such assumptions, pointing to significant stylistic differences while also illustrating the merits and shortcomings of these books and texts - it is still no doubt apparent that this BBC article is in fact referring to, in its selection of poorly translated titles, such Tiqqun authored works as this particular piece and of others like "Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire" and "Exercice de metaphysique critique"[pdf]. Works, it might be added, that were anonymously penned and so daringly distributed.

Collective living? The sharing of ideas and critique? Alternative modes of existence and experimentation with everyday life? It hardly takes much for one to fail seeing a problem with such things - a failure inevitably attributable for them to delinquency, terroristic impulses, perhaps even abnormality... In other words: not only should we quickly calm ourselves down so as to be model public opinion circulation experts who are well-behaved, acceptable and passive agents, it is also advisable to not think at all of solidarity or of alternatives to capitalism, and perhaps simply and most significantly: do not think.

- image via Claire Fontaine

The state of the spectacle, after all, is still a state that bases itself (as Badiou has shown every state to base itself) not on social bonds, of which it purportedly is the expression, but rather on their dissolution, which it forbids. In the final analysis, the state can recognize any claim for identity - even that of a state identity within itself (and in our time, the history of the relation between the state and terrorism is an eloquent confirmation of this fact). But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging (being Italian, working-class, Catholic, terrorist, etc.). And yet, the state of the spectacle - inasmuch as it empties and nullifies every real identity, and substitutes the public and public opinion for the people and the general will - is precisely what produces massively from within itself singularities that are no longer characterized either by any social identity or by any real condition of belonging: singularities that are truly whatever singularities.

[...]

The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like Cantor's inconsistent multiplicity). The whatever singularity - this singularity that wants to take possession of belonging itself as well as of its own being-into-language, and that thus declines any identity and any condition of belonging - is the new, nonsubjective, and socially inconsistent protagonist of the coming politics. Wherever these singularities peacefully manifest their being-in-common, there will be another Tiananmen and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear again.

- Giorgio Agamben, from "Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle", in Means Without End

let us be good sports

2009-01-27T22:03:00.007-07:00

Let us be good sports. Philosophers at work! It is well worth going out of your way to have a close look at such a spectacle! What spectacle? Why, comedy. Bergson (Le Rire) has explained and Chaplin has shown that, ultimately, comedy is always a matter of a man missing a step or falling into a hole. With philosophers you know what to expect: at some point they will fall flat on their faces. Behind this mischievous or malevolent hope there is a genuine reality: ever since the time of Thales and Plato, philosophy and philosophers have been 'falling into wells;. Slapstick. But that is not all! For ever since Plato philosophy has been falling within its own realm. a second-degree fall: into a philosophical theory of 'falling'. Let me spell it out: the philosopher attempts in his philosophy to descent from the heavenly realm of ideas and get back to material reality, to 'descend' from theory and get back to practice. A 'controlled' fall, but a fall nevertheless. Realizing that he is falling, he attempts to 'catch' his balance in a theory of falling (a descending dialectic, etc.) and falls just the same! he falls twice. Twice as funny.

Let us be good sports. Philosophers make a lot of fuss about nothing. They are intellectuals without a practice. Far removed from everything. Their discourse is nothing but a commentary on, and a disavowal of, that distance. they try, at a remove, to grasp the real in their words, to insert it in systems. Words succeed words, systems succeed systems, while the world continues its course as before. Philosophy? The discourse of theoretical impotence on the real work of others (scientific, artistic, political, etc., practice). Philosophy: what it lacks in titles it makes up for in pretension. This pretension produces beautiful discourses. So: philosophy as pretension will figure among the fine arts. An art. We are back to the spectacle. This time it is dance: dancing so as not to fall.

Yes, we are going to fall flat on our faces. Note that scientists (like all men engaged in a real practice) can also fall flat on their faces. but they do so in a particular way: when they fall, they calmly register the fact, ask themselves why, rectify their errors and get on with their work. But when a philosopher falls flat on his face, things are different: for he falls flat on his face within the very theory which he is setting forth in order to demonstrate that he is not falling flat on his face! he picks himself up in advance! How many philosophers do you know who admit to having been mistaken? A philosopher is never mistaken!

Althusser describing philosophy's "negative pole" in his introduction to the 'Philosophy Course for Scientists' delivered in October-Novermber 1967 at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists(Verso, 1990).

nice try though

2009-01-21T01:29:00.004-07:00

"[...]philosophy works through the leverage of straw men and women."
- Simon Critchley

the debate between Tarde and Durkheim

2009-01-17T22:55:00.001-07:00

Now this looks interesting.

Graham Harman and object-oriented philosophy

2009-01-08T14:17:00.002-07:00

[Update: Graham has started blogging over at Object-Oriented Philosophy.]

Via Larval Subjects, Speculative Heresy has posted thirteen of Graham Harman's previously unpublished essays. Many thanks.

geometry lessons

2008-12-26T17:07:00.001-07:00

Just re-watched this one. The soundtrack is excellent, and I think Bartleby the scrivner even makes an appearance...

New Metaphysics book series from OHP

2008-12-24T14:50:00.002-07:00

Making the rounds in the blogosphere:

New Metaphysics

Series editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical "sound" from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Please send project descriptions (not full manuscripts) to Graham Harman, graham@rinzai.com. Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective. OHP was formed by scholars to overcome the current crisis in publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online through www.openhumanitiespress.org.

prolegomena to any future numerical materialism

2008-12-05T18:24:00.007-07:00

Mathematical Logic from Peirce to Skolem

John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (History of Computing)

Category Theory (Lecture Notes in Mathematics), By M.C. Pedicchio, G. Rosolini

The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions

Richard Tieszen, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics

Handbook of the History of Logic, Vol. 3: The Rise of Modern Logic: From Leibniz to Frege

N. Bourbaki, Elements of Mathematics - Commutative Algebra

Martin Davis, Engines of Logic (or The Universal Computer): Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer

Treatise on Analysis Volume IV, J. Dieudonne

Essays on the Theory of Numbers by Richard Dedekind

The Shaping of Arithmetic after C.F. Gauss

Figures of Thought: Mathematics and Mathematical Texts
By David Reed

John Stillwell: Yearning for the Impossible: The Surprising Truths of Mathematics

A Century of Geometry : Epistemology, History, and Mathematics (Lecture Notes in Physics)
By L. Boi, D. Flament

Neurophilosophy at Work By Paul Churchland

Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, Joe Milutis

Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings

Sheaf Theory (London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series)
By B. R. Tennison

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic (Oxford Handbooks), stewart shapiro, ed.

Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics, Mark Balaguer

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning
By A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev

A Course of Pure Mathematics (3rd Ed.)(Cambridge 1921)
by G. H. Hardy

Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Hardy Classes on Infinitely Connected Riemann Surfaces

Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence (Studies in the history of mathematics and physical sciences)
by Gregory H Moore

wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd

2008-11-30T12:57:00.005-07:00

Via The Fortunes of the Dialectic , images above come from the blog wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd. It is worth a look, and I will be spending some time in the near future exploring it and its sidebar further. The kinds of projects presented on the blog are making me nostalgic for some of my early excursions into poetics, like the image below, which is an old Speak&Spell that was circuit-bent by a friend of mine and then handed my way to be re-cased. It still works, I believe - though I haven't tried it in years. It has a few loop settings, pitch-shift, reverse, etc., and makes for a nice instrument if you like that glitchy brand of minimalist electronica...

it is sometimes better to do nothing...

2008-11-26T14:01:00.004-07:00

- Mel Bochner

Excerpts from The Idlers Glossary

dizzy: It is every evolved person’s duty to cultivate the voluptuous panic of vertigo, by staring into that void in which all the forms and norms of our daily lives are revealed as artificial constructs. As if that weren’t difficult enough, you’ve got to revalue your values in light of this terrifying insight, and advance boldly into a new style of life. The problem with dizziness, as Sartre noted, is not how to keep from falling over the precipice, but how to keep from throwing ourselves over it. See: avoidance, distracted, flighty, giddy.

do-nothing: In politics, a do-nothing is an anti-progressive reactionary; elsewhere, though, he may be a saint. Oscar Wilde described his life’s work as the “art of doing nothing,” and insisted that for the person living in a society that worships action, “to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.” See: good-for-nothing, idler.

dodger: A dodger shirks his duties and evades his responsibilities neither for purposes of graft, nor out of fear, but simply out of an overwhelming distaste for labor. Think of Henry Miller ditching his career and family because he believed that “work . . . is an activity reserved for the dullard.” Dodging can be an artful form of idling, and dodgers can be an inspiration to us all. However, the dodger who never quits the job or situation that she detests is, finally, not an idler but a slacker. See: bartleby, kill time, skiver, slacker.

shopping and fidelity

2008-11-20T11:23:00.002-07:00

In the end, a generic procedure of fidelity is like some kind of inordinately fussy but endless shopping list in which the products to be bought have not even been made yet.
- Oliver Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory

Indeed.

the timeless lumpenness of radical cultural life

2008-11-14T12:58:00.003-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about art's relationship with philosophy (as well as politics) - whether that be art as, art vs., or art alongside/within philosophy. There is also this post at Fragments, or: which is very much worth reading.

Here is a short text by Art & Language, UK that I take from my oft perused Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology

The Timeless Lumpenness of Radical Cultural Life

...The timeless lumpenness of a radical cultural life; the gangrenous excrescence, stylishly exposed in the quiet salons. The market for the dry delicacies of pretentious gentility, the overfed opinion, the corpulent choice, the leisured appropriation, "society" and society in harmony are an objective condition of the class struggle. The privileged low-life of high culture is the massification of the people, is the enemy of inquiry, is an insult to, and sometimes an egregious product of, the achievement and goals of working-class movements, a denial of the real objectives of the working-class movement. It is not, however, the life of the unwitting fool. It has its own agencies.

The conditions of the production of high culture an not somehow apart from these machinations in brutality...and the artists are not exempt from the charge of connivance at the proliferation of force, violence: the barbarism of imperialism. Their "status" as an economic ,hors concours, serves the aim of the ruling classes in their continuing domination. It avails no one of a glimpse of "freedom." It is a status which allows a parvenu sincerity, the treachery of the successful product, to be deified in a fideism of "culture," a fideism in the interests of the ruling class.

Don't think that artists are somehow the victims of an underdetermined predestination: their attempts to fix forever their relations with "the rest of the world," irrespective of social change, are the last defensive gasps of an entirely static instrument of capitalism: empty-headed, it parasitized the ectoderm of social change in the effort to be the better fed by its masters.

And radical artist produce articles and exhibitions about photos, capitalism, corruption, war, pestilence, trench-foot and issues, possessed by that venal shade of empiricism which guards their proprietorial interests. Most people laugh easily at old fools' hack aestheticism; the by now undifferentiated mass of presence and piety. It is similarly easy to avoid debate with the serious anorexic autohagiographers who've shoved (?) and wheedled their way into the (what?) praxis of a ludicrous and equivalent "specialism." The air (and the ether) is toxic with the confident exhalations of their apprehension. Club-foot-Ph.D.-standards-as-style is nothing new in the global sales-pitch. American football helmets and meaningless photos are serious objects of contemplation (and...) if you happen to be obsessed by your career as the nexus of historiography. Heaven knows, anything must go; and it even goes against the sanction imposed by the appropriate Lebensphilosophie: the manieres of "semiotique: and the manieres of "social purpose' even sell that short. The artist, the bourgeois ideologist without "virtue," is just like anyone else without "virtue:" his "terror" is gratuitous and ultimately suicidal.

Critchley on Obama

2008-11-13T15:21:00.002-07:00

Via Jodi, Simon Critchley's essay What's Left After Obama?. Nevermind that it appeared on the Adbusters website...

in the events of the late evening of November 4th: as I walked to the subway at about 10 p.m. a vast United States flag was being unfurled in Union Square; there were spontaneous parties in the streets of my part of Brooklyn, and many others can testify to much more exotic, collective experiences. This was a moment when people, no longer cowed by the power of the state and held in check by the police, suddenly become aware of their power and the power of their activity, which is nothing less than the activity of liberty. At such a moment, no force can stop them and a demonstration or street party erupts into being. This is collective joy. There is the potential for a political moment here, but it is a potential whose actualization is denied by the very representative process which is being celebrated. At the moment when people become aware of their power through the activity of the vote, they are simultaneously rendered powerless by the representative process. Liberty slips from the hands of those who have suddenly become aware of its power. In the face of such human fireworks, it is not surprising that Obama cancelled the firework display planned to accompany his victory speech. The message is clear: ‘The victory is yours. But when you’ve finished celebrating, dancing and crying, return to your homes and be quiet. Thanks to you, the business of government is ours and we will take it from here. We’ll let you know how it goes. P.S. Please don’t take popular sovereignty too literally’.

Tariq Ali and others on Obama

2008-11-10T20:40:00.002-07:00

I suspect Zizek might be the next member of the Left to post something on the web. There are some pre-election thoughts from Mike Davis, Howard Zinn and more, one from Judith Butler, and a response from Bifo that I would have to translate to read, alas. Here is a snippet from Tariq Ali:

If change means that nothing changes and all we have is imperialism with a human face, then those who have put Obama in the White House might decide after a few years have passed that a progressive party in the United States has become a necessity.

It seems many people, myself included, are still soaking all of this in. My neck of the woods on election night reminded me a bit of WTO - except that people were smiling, and there were no rubber bullets or tear gas:

Leninade

2008-11-03T20:27:00.002-07:00

Tomorrow might be a good time to drink some of this in what would no doubt be a horrid cocktail (though as it reads on the label, a taste worth standing in line for). Time to get hammer and sickled!

And if anyone needed further evidence that Obama is in fact a capitalist and not a socialist, watch the Oct. 28th episode of The Colbert Report. Aside from the brilliant exchange between Colbert and Sherman Alexie, it features a brief 'interview' with Brian Moore, the official presidential nominee of the Socialist Party USA.

Among the many things currently on my mind are this post from Shaviro (whom I hope is proven wrong regarding the outcome of this election), and an older piece of Badiou's from which I draw the following:

The reason for the paradoxes of the vote are well known: its technical rationality means the result is gotten from a pure count, which authorises the infinite attentions of sociologists and political scientists -- as concerned with numerical details and variations as the specialists of climactic history -- and works to cover over massive irrationality. For why would number have political virtue? Why would the majority, modifiable at will thanks to the ruse of infinite modes of balloting, be endowed with the attributes of a norm? Such approximations are simply not tolerated in other domains where human thought is at stake. Great scientific creators and innovative artists have been right contrary to dominant opinion. Even violent amorous passions affirm themselves against mediocre social judgement. Is politics, and it alone, to be condemned to the conservatism of numerical means? Everything indicates that this is not the case. Since each time a capital political decision is to be taken, by everyone in their own name, the partisans of the just and the true are initially entirely in the minority, indeed, electorally insignificant. The résistants of the 1940's, those of the 1950's opposed to the sordid colonial wars, the "leftists" of the 60's and 70's: all of them were absolutely in the minority just as are those who today see imperialistic ambitions and the spirit of servitude hide beneath the mask of "humanitarian interventions", or the "war against terrorism". And, basically, everyone knows that number, the majority, won as it is from blind lists upon leaving the ballot box, has no real meaning.

Tronti and Badiou on the financial crisis

2008-10-19T17:46:00.002-06:00

Hats off to IT for posting Badiou's piece on the crisis. It was co-translated by her and Savonarola, who has independently translated the Tronti piece over at Institute For Conjunctural Research.

I would also like to wish IT a happy belated Birthday. I understand she has recently turned 30. Me too. Go read the review of Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation that Infinite has published over at Mute.

Collapse Volume V

2008-10-13T19:41:00.001-06:00

In the inbox today:

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that Collapse Volume V, entitled The Copernican Imperative, will be published on 15 December 2008. The volume will be available to order in advance from www.urbanomic.com from mid-November. As usual, the volume will be printed in a limited numbered edition of 1000.

The volume will include contributions from: Julian Barbour, Nick Bostrom, Gabriel Catren, Milan Cirkovic, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Nigel Cooke, Alberto Gualandi, Iain Hamilton Grant, Paul Humphreys, Immanuel Kant, James Ladyman, Thomas Metzinger, Carlo Rovelli, Martin Schönfeld, Conrad Shawcross, Keith Tyson and Damian Veal.

Copernicanism tore asunder the fit between the world and man's organs: the congruence between reality and visibility.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo proclaimed, through his mouthpiece Salviati, that he could 'never sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen' of those early advocates of Copernicanism who, 'through sheer force of intellect' - that is, without even the benefit of a telescope to confirm the theory observationally - 'had done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary'.

Since Galileo published his work in 1632, recognition of the deeply counterintuitive nature of scientific findings has become virtually commonplace, and the 'explanatory gap' between the 'manifest' and 'scientific' images of reality has long been a central concern for philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists alike. In this volume of Collapse, we bring together samples of the most intellectually challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of 'Copernicanism' from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.

As in previous volumes, the involvement in Collapse V of several major contemporary artists alongside groundbreaking philosophers and prominent scientists is designed to open up new perspectives and new directions for thinking outside disciplinary constraints. From multiple philosophical and artistic perspectives, and from scientific fields as diverse as theoretical physics and cosmology, biology, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and astrobiology, the volume addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, the relation between scientific and philosophical (Kantian) 'Copernicanism', and the enduring gulf between the spontaneous image of the world bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the physical sciences in the wake of Copernicus.

With several of the contributions in interview form, Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative will be an accessible and thought-provoking volume exemplifying that characteristic blend of speculative audacity and scientifically informed insight which has always been the hallmark of 'Copernicanism'.

Contents of Volume V will be as follows (some details subject to alteration):

In 'Anaximander's Legacy', theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and author of Quantum Gravity) charts the historical dynamics of science's ever more radical overturning of the commonsense image of the world from Anaximander through Copernicus to the 'unfinished revolution' of twentieth-century physics - a revolution which, suggests Rovelli, challenges us to find a way of understanding the world in the absence of the familiar stage of space and time.

Rovelli's question 'Can we think the world without time?' is one which has preoccupied renegade theoretical physicist and historian of science Julian Barbour (author of Absolute or Relative Motion? and The End of Time) for the best part of five decades. In our interview 'The View From Nowhen' we discuss the nature of his radical rethinking of the foundations of physics, his arguments for the non-existence of time and change, and the influence his ideas have exerted on contemporary quantum gravity research from outside the halls of academe.

In his contribution to the volume, Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson - well known for his intricate and provocative artistic displacements and extrapolations of scientific ideas - presents his own unique take on the enigma of Copernicanism.

In our interview with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (authors of dozens of ground-breaking popular science books, including their co-authored works The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does A Martian look Like?), we discuss with them the continuing collaboration between mathematician and biologist; the key conceptual innovations of their co-authored works; their trenchant criticisms of what they see as the overly conservative and unimaginative nature of contemporary astrobiology; and their positive programme for a new science of alien life, beyond astrobiology, which they call 'xenoscience'.

In 'Sailing the Archipelago of Habitability', cosmologist and astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic provides a sophisticated defence of anthropic reasoning (understood in terms of 'observation selection effects') against the charges brought against it by the likes of Cohen and Stewart as part of an ambitious project of laying the 'philosophical groundworks' of the nascent science of astrobiology.

In 'Where Are They?', philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom (Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy) revisits Fermi's Paradox, employing probabilistic 'anthropic' reasoning to motivate the conclusion that, far from being a cause for celebration, the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would in fact augur very badly for the future of the human race.

In his (2006) motion-sculpture Binary Star artist Conrad Shawcross gestured 'Beyond Copernicanism', simulating the experience of life in a solar system where there is 'no such thing as one'. In his contribution to the volume Shawcross investigates the relationship between his work and the philosophical trope of Copernicanism.

In an interview charting the journey 'From Copernicanism to Nemocentrism', Thomas Metzinger (philosopher of neuroscience, author of Being No One) discusses his 'self-model theory of subjectivity', the potential social and cultural ramifications of the findings of contemporary neuroscience, and responds to criticisms of his radical eliminativist position with regard to the existence of 'selves'.

In his 'Thinking Outside the Brain', philosopher Paul Humphreys (author of Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method) proposes that computational science is fast displacing humans from the centre of the epistemological universe, speculates on the possibility of a 'science without humans', and presents his proposals for a radically non-anthropocentric empiricism.

The paintings of Nigel Cooke present a philosophically-informed meditation on the continual displacement of the author-subject in the history of thought and artistic representation. His contribution in the form of a series of drawings, 'Thinker Dejecta', contributes to a thinking-through of the consequences of Copernicanism from this perspective.

In our fourth and final interview, 'Who's Afraid of Scientism?', James Ladyman (philosopher of science, co-author of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised) discusses the forlornness of contemporary analytic metaphysics and the prospects for a radically naturalised metaphysics which would fully take on board the most counterintuitive findings of contemporary physics, finally dispensing with the habitual ontology of 'little things and microbangings' which continues to hold sway in contemporary 'pseudo-naturalist philosophy'.

In his 'The Phoenix of Nature' Martin Schönfeld (artist and philosopher of nature, author of The Philosophy of the Young Kant) presents us with a vivid picture of Immanuel Kant profoundly at odds with the recent popular characterisation of him as a conservative, anti-Copernican thinker, via a stimulating exploration of his early cosmology. Here we are presented a radically anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian, naturalist, speculatively audacious Kant who pushes 'Copernicanism' to its limits; who abolishes the hand of God from, and introduces a history and evolution into, the Newtonian cosmos; and who as early as 1755 strongly anticipates the fundaments of what became the Standard Model of modern cosmology only in the 1930s.

To accompany his piece Schönfeld also contributes a new translation of Immanuel Kant's 'Concerning Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Both Space and Time', an extended excerpt from his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in which this astonishingly prescient cosmology of 'island universes' and the birth and death of 'worlds' is most magnificently and perfervidly portrayed.

Tackling the great philosophical 'Copernican Revolution' head-on, Iain Hamilton Grant (philosopher, author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling) examines the 'Prospects for Dogmatism after Kant'.

In 'Copernicanism, Correlationism, Critique' Damian Veal (philosopher, editor of the volume) critically re-examines the question of the meaning of 'Copernicanism' for philosophy, providing reasons for rejecting the idea popular amongst recent 'speculative realists' that a proper philosophical assimilation of the findings of the modern sciences demands a thoroughgoing break with the Kantian critical legacy.

In 'A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution' Gabriel Catren (Director of the project 'Savoir et Système' at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) presents what he calls a 'speculative overcoming' of recent influential quasi-Kantian interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than being limited to a mathematical account of the correlations between 'observed' systems and their 'observers', or pointing to the inherent 'transcendental' limits of physical knowledge, Catren argues that quantum mechanics furnishes a complete and realistic description of the intrinsic properties of physical systems, an ontology which exemplifies the Copernican deanthropomorphisation of nature.

In 'Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the Copernican Revolution', Alberto Gualandi (philosopher, author of Deleuze and Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporain) indicates the features common to certain speculative philosophies of nature in 1960s France and problems facing contemporary evolutionary biologists.

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative
December 2008
Eds D. Veal, R. Mackay
450+pp tbc
Limited Edition 1000 Numbered Copies
ISBN 978-0-9553087-4-1
£9.99

Žižek on the financial crisis

2008-10-10T13:11:00.003-06:00

I had been wondering when Žižek was going to have something to say regarding the financial crisis. Dow was down 600 points and G7 members were just driving through the gates when I checked the news about an hour ago. From the London Review of Books, "Don't Just Do Something, Talk":

The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision.

Concept-Horror Deux

2008-06-16T10:41:00.002-06:00

For anyone in the Falmouth area...

Also, Collapse IV contributor Benjamin Noys has a new blog, No Useless Leniency.

Collapse launch party

2008-06-01T13:15:00.003-06:00

UMELEC - Magazine of the Art Dead and COLLAPSE - Journal of Philosophical Research and Development
invite you to celebrate the publication of Collapse Volume IV

* CONCEPT HORROR *
showing original works from COLLAPSE IV by JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN, KEITH TILFORD, KRISTEN ALVANSON, CHINA MIEVILLE, TODOSCH, RAFANI, and more...
with live experimental grime noise from the mighty PATRICIDE
on SATURDAY 7th JUNE, from 6pm (Noise begins at 8.30).
at Divus Unit 30, Shoreditch, London.

Too Soon to Speculate

2008-05-24T13:02:00.003-06:00

I have been trying to track down some resources on Lautman and Cavailles - to no avail, really. I will be working on translating Gilles-Gaston Grangier's short article "Lautman et Cavailles, deux pionniers", which I was able to find on-line. My French being how it is, should take me about a week. Interestingly, I was able to find a small review from 1947 by Max Black, whom I am completely unfamiliar with, but thought to reproduce it here.

Jean Cavailles and Albert Lautman. La pensee mathematique. Separate papers by the two authors, with discussion by Cartan, Chabauty, Dubreil, Ehresmann, Freche, Hyppolite, Paul Levy, Shrecker, and the authors. Bulletin de la Societe Francaise de Philosophie, vol. 40, no. 1 (1946), pp. 1-39.
This is a report of a public discussion, held February 4, 1939, on views about the nature of mathematics expressed in two doctoral theses (III 167 and V 20) by Cavailles and Lautman, respectively. The brief opening statements made by the authors re-state their published doctrines; there follow critical comments by mathematicians and philosophers, and replies by the fist speakers.
Cavailles held that the attempt to reduce mathematics to logic ("ce fameux espoir de reduire les Mathematiques a la Logique") has failed - mathematics uses notions that are not purely logical, and Godel's work shows the impossibility of representing mathematics in a unique formal system. Accordingly, a philosopher of mathematics is justified in reaching the following positive conclusiions. Mathematics cannot be defined; constitutes a ,becoming ("un devenir"), a reality irreducible to anything except itself ("une realite irreductible a autre chose qu'elle-meme"); and is autonomous ("autonome") in the sense of developing unpredictably; but nevertheless subject to an inner necessity ("autonomie, donc necessite"); and mathematicians are engaged in an experiential activity ("une activite experiementale"); concerned with an object momentarily created by mathematical operations ("toujours correlatif de gestes effectivement accomplis par le mathematicien dans une situation donnee").
Lautman differs in holding mathematical truths to be objective: mathematics participates in a realm of Dialectic ("Dialectique"), constituting a higher reality of Ideas ("une realite plus haute et plus cachee, qui constitute, a mon avis, un veritable monde des Idees"). The task of mathematical philosophy is to erect the theory of Ideas, by describing the ideal structures incarnated ("incarnees") in mathematics, establishing a hierarchy of such structures, and demonstrating the reasons for their applications to the sensible universe ("les raisons de leurs applications a l'Univers sensible").
It is understandable that the comments of the mathematical participants in the discussion show them to be somewhat at a loss. I doubt, however, that their attitude of wondering respect is justified. The metaphysical conclusions presented by Cavailles and Lautman seem to the reviewer to be based upon fragmentary and incomplete evidence and to be expressed in a terminology which can only promote ofuscation. The work of Godel and Skolem, to which so much weight is attached in these remarks, by no means shows the impossibility of "reducing" mathematics to logic' nor is it ever made clear why mathematics should be in the peculiar position of resisting attempts at definition. In the absence of clear understanding of these relatively technical points, it seems premature to engage in metaphysical speculation about the ontological basis of mathematics.

Max Black, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, No. 1, (Mar., 1947), pp. 21-22

Quentin Meillassoux, "History and Event in the writings of Alain Badiou"

2008-05-14T13:10:00.006-06:00

Work-in-progress translation of Quentin Meillassoux, Histoire et événement chez Alain Badiou Intervention au séminaire « Marx au XXIe siècle : l’esprit & la lettre » Paris : 2 février 2008 [available here] I welcome any suggestions. Relatedly, see this post over at Poetix.

rue Gay-Lussac, May 1968

I would like to present before you the principal theoretical decisions of the philosophy of Alain Badiou concerning the themes of this day: history and event. I do not speak about Alain Badiou as a disciple, since I develop philosophical positions distinct from those of his own: but it seems important to me, if one seeks to enter into a conceptual contemporaneity with the Marxian and post-Marxist exigency of politics and of history, to adopt a view extensive with its system, constructed henceforth around two principal books which are Being and Event (EE) and The Logic of worlds (LM). This philosophy is particularly complex, but it seems to me that one can apprehend it precisely through the two concepts of history and event. I will in effect attempt to make explicit a nodal and apparently paradoxical thesis of Badiou's: namely that there is history only of the eternal, because only the eternal proceeds by way of the event. To put it differently: there is not history of truths, as any truth is strictly eternal, and impossible to reduce to an unspecified relativism.

Badiou thus refuses two antithetic positions: on the one hand that there would be eternal truths deprived for this reason of historicity - a position, say, characteristic of traditional metaphysics - and on the other hand that there would inversely not be any eternal truth, the entirety of discursive statements being irremediably inscribed in a historico-cultural context that strictly delimits the range of the particular instance that it supports. On the contrary, EE upholds that there exist many eternal truths, but that they are not unifiable within a metaphysical system, because they are distributed between the four procedures of truth which are science, art, politics, and love - philosophy itself not possessing the capacity to produce truths. But these truths, moreover, cannot exist in a Sky of Ideas: they are the result of an undecidable event and a fidelity of the subjects which attempt to investigate their world in its light. And LM will quite the reverse go on to say that any process deprived of truth is not historical in the true sense, but is reduced to a simple temporal modification without range for the truth and the subjects which adhere to it.

To elucidate the sense of these statements, we should preliminarily understand the two theses constitutive of a Badiousian philosophy:

1/ mathematics is ontology;

2/ any truth is post-evental.

We will then be able to measure and separate out the precise connection existing between the three principal terms of our intervention: history, event, eternity.

***

1/ The inaugural decision of EE relates to ontology and combines, in this regard, two theses: the affirmation, on the one hand, of its rational possibility (against Heidegger), and the refusal, on the other hand, that philosophy carries its burden (against dogmatic metaphysics). Because it is, from time immemorial, mathematics, and mathematics only, which constitutes, according to Badiou, the discourse of Being qua being. Consequently, ontology is identified with an unachievable science, evolving at the same rhythm as the most fundamental projections of the science which deploys it, and it does so without the knowledge even of the mathematicians. "Knowledge", because only the philosopher can release the ontological significance of mathematics - mathematicians being ontologists who are unaware of themselves as such. Thus the "metaontologic" role of philosophy whose challenge is to locate the place in which mathematics effectively manages to speak Being. Of this the "Platonic gesture" consists, mathématising and not poeticising, as far as Being is concerned for Badiou.

2 Ontology, for our time, is thus identified with set theory, in the sense that it is this theory which reveals to us that any mathematical entity can be thought as multiple. Being, in the most general sense, and most fundamental, is being a set, and therefore a multiplicity. From here arises Badiou's ontological theses: Being is multiplicity - and furthermore: nothing but multiplicity. In other words, Being is multiple with the strict exclusion of its opposite - namely the One. Being is therefore not a multiplicity composed of stable and ultimate parts, but a multiplicity made up in its turn of multiplicities. In effect, mathematical sets have for elements not units but other sets, and so on indefinitely. When a set is not empty, it is composed in its turn of sets of multiples.

Such a type of multiple that no law of the One stabilizes, Badiou names "inconsistent multiplicity", in opposition to consistent multiples, i.e. fixed unities. Being, far from identifiable with the stable base of a phenomenon which would be perishable in regard to it, is pure dissemination, withdrawn from our immediate experience of reality, where we discover on the contrary, in ordinary time, multiplicities of the consistent type (of the man-ones, the god-ones, the star-ones, etc). This is what, although a Platonism, Badiou would want, beyond the heritage of his Master, a Platonism of the pure multiple: ontology must, faced with the apparent consistency of situations, go back to the point the inconsistent being of multiplicities.

3 The second task of the philosopher, which is also more specific, consists then, since relieved of the obligation to think Being (as this is the task of the mathematician) to think instead its exception, that is to say the event - what arrives and not what is. The event is an exception to Being not in that it would not be multiple, but in that its multiplicity is ontologically proscribed, i.e. mathematically rejected, at least within the axiomatic standard of sets . The event for Badioiu is in effect a multiple pertaining to itself: a reflexive multiple of equal value to the number of its elements. However, from one of its axioms (the axiom known as foundation), set theory prohibits the existence of these multiples to which the mathematicians have nicely given the name of "extraordinary".

In what way does such a reflexive multiple adhere to the intuition that we can have of an event when we think by this term a pure sudden appearance, whether in art, politics, science, or in our love life? Art, science, politics and love are in effect what Badiou calls "procedures of truth", i.e. the four fields of thought which partake in the occurrence of true events - and by extension - eternal truths.

The example of politics is, as is often the case in the writings of Badiou, the most immediately accessible. What does one want to say to the Right, when one says that "May 68" was an event? By this expression, one does not indicate simply the set of facts which punctuated this collective sequence (student demonstrations, occupation of the Sorbonne, massive strikes, etc). Because such facts, even when joined together in an exhaustive way, do not make it possible to say that there was something like an event, rather than a simple conjunction of facts without specific significance. If "May 68" were an event, it is so precisely because it deserved its name: that is to say that in May 68, there was the occurrence not only of many facts, but equally the occurrence of May 68. In May 68, a site, in addition to its own elements (demonstrations, strikes, etc), presented itself. What are we to make of such a tautology, which characterizes any political event (in 1789, there was "1789", etc.) ? Precisely that an event is the taking place of a pure rupture, that nothing in the situation permits it as classifiable under an indexed fact (strike, demonstration, etc). Let us risk the following formula: an event is this multiple which, presenting itself, exhibits the inconsistency subtending situations, and throws into a panic, in the flash of an instant, constituted classifications. The novelty of an event rests in the fact that it interrupts the normal regime of description and knowledge, which always adheres to the accepted classifications, and imposes the requirement of another type of process by which it will be admitted that some thing, there, in this place, as yet unnamed, has well and truly passed.

It is that an event, in effect, could not concern scholarly discourse, being at the same time new and aberrant in regard to the laws of Being. An event is always undecidable in relation to knowledge, and can thus always be cancelled by those who believe only in the brute facts: is there political revolution, or merely the simple accumulation of disorders and crimes? An amorous encounter, or simple sexual desire? Pictorial innovation, or formless clusters and imposture? Etc. This undecidability of the event is given to traversing the fact that this one is always-already [toujours-déjà] disappeared the moment that it happens, and consequently implies the suspicion that nothing took place, save the mirage of an innovation. The fragile being of an event therefore leaves a trace that only a militant discourse - and not erudition - can prolong: the subject is thus the name of the operational fidelity to an evental trace, i.e. having wagered on the existence of an event, and having decided upon the drawing-out of its consequences. The question of a subject is: "if something indeed took place, how to construct for it a remaining fidelity?" : "how to paint, if cubism is a new form, and not an imposture?", "how to act, if 1789 is a revolution, and not a disorder?", "how to modify our lives within this two, if this encounter proceeds by way of love, and not a passing fancy?", etc.

Another example, given in EE, is that of the "French Revolution": if we seek to demonstrate the existence of this Revolution the same way in which we would try to exhibit an empirical fact, we will undoubtedly fail: because the Revolution is none of the facts which composes it - the General Meeting of States, storming of the Bastille, the Great Fear, etc. - and it is not more their meeting, since nothing in this ensemble imposes by itself the name of Révolution rather only chaos, disorder, or divine punishment. When Saint-Just affirms in 1794: "the Revolution is frozen", what do we say of it, in consequence? It does not speak about an objectively noted fact, but an event attested to not only by its site - the France of 1789 to 1794 - but also and especially by the militant nomination that was its product. Naming the Revolution the Revolution, this indeed affirms the sense that there is to remain a fidelity by way of hypothesis: hypothesis, wager, that something fundamental is in the process of being produced in the political field which is worth the difficulty of a being's fidelity, and inviting the release of what, within the situation, concerns an emancipating truth, in the process of elaboration, and that is opposed to all the forces of the old world.

The subject is thus the invention of a fidelity with what, perhaps, took place, in kind to partially produce, by a succession of finite operations, a truth whose Being is as far as he is concerned always infinite. Because a truth - as with everything that is - is a multiple, but a multiple that Badiou names "generic". This property characterizes a set from which the mathematical singularity escapes any possibility of classification by a continuation of linguistic predicates, even supposedly infinite. You are given an infinite "encyclopaedic" language, able to name and differentiate an infinity of properties: then there will exist for this language, affirms the ontologist (i.e. the mathematician), a multiple which this language cannot name, because it will be made of "a little bit of everything" says Badiou: of "A", but also of "not A" ("A" could thus not characterize it)"B", but also "not B", etc., and so on ad infinitum. A truth is such an infinite multiple, always to come and piercing a hole in knowledge, resulting from a fidelity concerned with the unlimited consequences of an event. Emancipated society, mathematized science, love subverting sexual difference by the invention of a new connection between man and woman, artistic discipline convoking the revolution of a form: such are the four types of truths - produced by the four procedures of politics, science, love, and art - susceptible to the production, always rare, of a subject capable of introducing an exception within the ordinary modes of knowledge, opinion, selfishness, and trouble.

We now understand in what way a truth, being the result of a patient series of local enquiries under the risky assumption of an undecidable event, cannot exist apart from the concrete history of subjects. But in what way can such truths be known at the same time as eternal, and as bearers of history, of the sole true history? It is that a truth carries with it consequences infinite in number: thus an ensemble of limitless lines of enquiries, likely to be prolonged during historical moments, and in profoundly different contexts. In other words, a truth is the bearer of theoretical gestures which compose between them a historicity at once deep and discontinuous. This is why an event always produces, in the minds of those who decide upon on a fidelity, a retrospective genealogy of precursors. The precursor, one knows, it is that which one knows afterwards as what arrived before. However, there does not exist an innovation which does not attempt to forge a historical thickness as far as the unknown quantity, by regrouping episodes of the thought previously dispersed in the common conscience, to make a line heralding its present. There is no truth, however new it is, which does not claim to achieve a thought already germinating about it in a past hitherto ignored, or misinterpreted. A Revolution, as Marx already knew, cannot occur without enveloping tattered rags of the past - politics being one of the major places where the new resumes again with ancestors defeated in their time, and whose torch shines again in the present configuration. But one would say as much of the scientific revolutions: Galileo claims to recapitulate the steps invented by Plato of stereometry against Aristotle's expelling of mathematics in favor of the physis, the inventors of the infinitesimal calculus plunge themselves feverishly into the rediscovered manuscripts of Archimedes, to attempt a revitalisation of their theoretical audacity, the pictorial revolution of the 15th century thinks itself like a Renaissance of the aesthetic exigencies of Greece, etc.

This is why the truths are eternal and historical, eternal because historical: they insist within history, suturing [nouent] temporal segments across the centuries, unfolding always more profoundly the infinity of their potential consequences, traversed by captivated subjects, separated sometimes by extraordinarily remote epochs, but all equally paralysed by the urgency of an eventality which illuminates their present. Truths, because eternal, reappear, but because they are infinite, do not reappear in the form of a simple sterile repetition: on the contrary, it is to excavate in a revolutionary fashion each one with their reactivation. They do not reappear within history, interrupting the becoming of their identities recommencement: it is they on the contrary that make history itself reappear with their reactivation, utilizing through an intervention into the monotonous string of work and days, ordinary oppressions and current opinions, their power of inexhaustible innovation. It is such a segmented history which is opposed to the simple passage of time without signification from which are woven its pointless hours and empty times, which do not deserve manifestly for Badiou the name of history in the true sense.

But if we want to give a rigorous form to this intuition of historico-eternal truths, it is necessary for us to now turn to the second volume of EE entitled LM. Because it is in this second work, published in 2006, that Badiou thinks in depth the concept of world, i.e. of truths and their context of appearance. LM will thus enable us to think connection between a truth therefore posed like an immutable inconsistency of the multiple, and the extraordinarily varied historico-cultural contexts in which the same truth can be revealed to these subjects that are separated by an elsewhere.

The Logic of Worlds

Let us begin by exposing the general direction of the work of 2006.

Which principal objectives respond as an extension of Being and Event, through to The Logic of Worlds? The preface of the work releases two in particular.

The prime objective is to adjoin to a theory of Being , a theory of appearance. It acts in effect, for Badiou, as the confrontation of a problem left in suspense in EE, namely: how is it that Being - pure inconsistent multiplicity - somehow manages to appear as a consistent world? The ontological multiples in themselves are deprived of the order manifested for us in the empirically given: they are only multiples composed in their turn of multiples. A building is a multiple of bricks, which in turn are a multiple of molecules, made of a multiplicity of atoms, themselves decomposable into a multiplicity of quarks - and so on to infinity, since the ontology of Badiou does not hold to the data of current physics - to make of any entity a pure multiple in which no fundamental unit is ever encountered. It is always the count which introduces the One: a house, a brick, a molecule are one because they are counted for one. But this introduction of the One by the count is done setting off from a being in which thought never meets anything other than multiplicities without end. The problem is then to understand why Being is all the same not presented through any such inconsistent multiplicity: because there are many things which come to us through bonds intrinsic between them in the given, as stable units on which we are able to construct a background: material objects, communities, institutions, bodies. These units are not provided in their entirety by an arbitrary act of the subject who brackets them by exterior unity in the count, it really governs if not Being then at least its appearance, its sensible donation.

Consequently, a question of the transcendantal type arises: how in the order of appearance is it possible if these do not proceed by way of Being taken in itself? But if the question raised by Badiou is transcendental, the proposed treatment could not be Kantian. Because Kant's response to the fact of phenomenal order consists in the exhibition of a priori forms of a constituent subject. However, in the writings of Badiou, inasmuch as they are materialist, the subject is never constituent, but constituted. As one saw, the subject is rare, generally nonindividual (the political subject can be a party, a revolutionary army, the subject in love is a couple, etc.); it is sequential (it is finished in time), and it always depends on the taking-place of an event which it cannot itself produce.

If in appearing it can have consistency, this can thus result only from an asubjective order, which is at once in connection with being - since it is always being which appears - and all the same distinct from it - since its order does not itself result from multiple-being. It is thus a question of thinking the singularity of its appearing with respect to being, and of thinking the bond, in spite of everything, of the latter to the former. However, consistency appears according to extremely varied logics, contrary to an ontology subjected to only traditional logic. Indeed, the theory of sets is the regime of all or nothing. In the ontology of the multiple, it is one of two things: either a set A is an element of a set B, or else it is not: the thesis is either true or false, and there is not a third option - tertio non datur. But appearance is far from always obeying the law of the excluded third: the many colored thickness of the given imposes on us balanced judgements, "more or less" true, with complex degrees of probability, all that faces realities escaping a strict disjunction from affirmation and negation. In short, the given constrains us to associate with a mathematics of being a logic of appearance able render intelligible the diverse consistencies revealed in our experience.

It is thus necessary to mobilize a logic likely to "capture" the innumerable modes of possible appearances for being and give some sort of pliability and nuance to visible things. But seeing as how such appearance will always appear as being, this logic will be a mathematized logic, a logic penetrating mathematical procedures: and much like the theory of categories introduced by LM, a mathematical logic able to theorize innumerable classical or non-classical universes. The technical aspect of these logics is much too complex to be exposed here. But it is important to have in mind the idea which governs the installation of these formalisms: Being in itself is immutable being - as inconsistent multiples - appearing in a large number of distinct worlds which for them are governed by very diverse logics. By "world", one can say that Badiou intends a context in the most general sense: a world, it can be one period, one moment of artistic history (dodecaphony), a battle, a culture, etc. The worlds can thus be successive in time as well, as synchronic, and it is the same being that can appear in a thousand manners, in a thousand different worlds at the same time. The central question of LM will then be to show how a truth appears in a world and in particular how the same truth - transhistoric, transworldly, all things considered eternal - can appear in distinct worlds. This appearance of a truth in a world, Badiou names a subject-body: the mode of appearance in a given world of a subject developing its fidelity with the trace of an event.

The second objective of LM consists in being opposed to a dominant paradigm of contemporary thought: "democratic materialism". Democratic materialism can be summarized by the following statement: "There are only bodies and languages". A decision that returns within much post-Deleuzean vitalist philosophies, as with postmodernity, with their attendant historical and linguistic relativism. Badiou, substantially, takes aim at any kind of linguistic relativism, cultural or historical: any belief that there is no truth likely to traverse the particularity of a period, a milieu, is but linguistic play. Democratic materialism, he says in this sense, is the only true historical materialism. This is certainly why there exist many exceptions to history in the writings of Badiou: "History (with a grand H) does not exist" a twice written reprisal, the first time in Theory of the Subject, notably to challenge a totalizing Hegelian history - even Marxist-Hegelian - and a second time in LM to essentially challenge the absorption of eternal truths in a contemporary historical relativism.

To this democratic materialism, Badiou opposes a syntagm which he says itself "returned from the dead" - that is to say "dialectical materialism" ( which is distinct, however, from the old Marxist "materialist dialectic"). His materialism can be called "dialectical" in the following way: in that it exceeds a duality - that of the bodies and languages of democratic materialism - by a third which some exclude, that is to say: "There are only bodies and languages, but also truths". These truths, that Badiou always names "eternal", are certainly made only of body and languages, but the infinite being of a truth is always in excess - although the relativists dissent, saying that existence is a perishable material by which the visible is given. Because the worldly, historico-cultural context in which these truths appear, and which is in effect related to the languages and the cultures of their times, cannot begin to be trans-historical, as Badiou illustrates, in the foreword of LM through the close analysis of several examples, in the four procedures of truth.

To counter the historical relativism induced by democratic materialism, and its refusal of any hierarchy of ideas, one can in effect look to what exists as invariant within disparate worlds.

Let us take the mathematical example, a very seminal procedure of thought for Badiou. That is to say the arithmetic theorem which states, in contemporary terms, that there are an infinity of prime numbers. It is known that Euclid had already demonstrated this theorem in the Elements, and one could thus deduce from this the restlessness of an eternal truth, intangible and unchanged by history, as true for a Greek as for a contemporary, and concealing the same kernel of significance for one as for the other. But the partisan of historical relativism, as self-styled "anthropologist of cultures" will underline our naivety, making apparent that the equivalence of two statements, present in two different cultural worlds, do not have a common truth - which already revealed by a difference in their formulation. Euclid, indeed, could not demonstrate the infinity of the prime numbers, since infinite arithmetic did not have any meaning for a Greek. It simply demonstrated that prime numbers were always higher in quantity than a given (finite) quantity of prime numbers. Other differences in formulation will end up convincing our relativist that the two statements support an incommensurable truth.

Badiou retorts that this naive illusion is on the side of the anthropologist, and not of the mathematician. Because the Greeks had discovered, via this theorem, a truth essential for number. The demonstration of Euclide, in effect, proceeds as a demonstration that any whole number is decomposable into prime factors. But Badiou insists that this truth always governs contemporary mathematics, in particular modern abstract algebra. This covers, in a given operational domain, the definition of operations similar to those of addition or multiplication, but also proceeds to break up its "objects" into primitive objects, in the same way that a number is always decomposable into prime numbers. There is thus, across the centuries and cultural and anthropological worlds, these truths which, though eternal, are not fixed but produce the sole authentic history: that of fertile theoretical gestures, always recommencing in diverse contexts, with the same fidelity, and yet at the same time the results of innovators.

Let us take another example, which this time will show how the subject-body [corps-sujet] functions and that which Badiou names the resurrection of a truth.

It still concerns a political example, that of the revolt of a handful of gladiators around Spartacus, analyzed on several occasions in LM. One knows that following this revolt, the slaves composed bodies in great number around a primary insurgence, instead of being dispersed according to the will of their owners. Badiou sets down that the trace of the event-revolt, that to which the insurrectionists dedicate their fidelity, holds in a simple statement, namely: "We, slaves, we want to return to our home." The slaves coming together in an army constituted from that moment on a new type of body-subject related to the production of a new present, characterized by what the event suddenly made foreseeable as distinctly possible: even now, to cease being slaves, and to return home. This body-subject is the appearance of a true subject within the world of Roman enslavement a century before Christ. And this subject is not an individual, but an army: a particular body, a collective, dedicated to an uncertain event - the capacity at this time of these slaves to cease being slaves in their present, and to behave as liberated men, Masters of their fate.

The consequent fidelity of this subjectivé body is that the army implemented by Spartacus is then deployed within time, according to a succession of decisive alternatives that Badiou names points. By the term points, it is necessary to understand that what confronts the global situation are choices or an engaged "yes" and "no": "Is it necessary to go towards the south, or to attack Rome?", "Is it necessary to face the legions, or to be concealed?", etc. The organization, the deliberation, and the discipline which will aid the body-army in treating the situation point by point constitutes the true becoming-subject of this body, its capacity to produce the yes or no of a new present issuing from the evental trace. This body, it should be added, is always organized, i.e. articulated in differentiated bodies ready to specifically address such and such a point of the situation: thus the military detachments directed by Spartacus for opposition to the Roman cavalry. That the subjectivé body is organized means as well as this body is essentially "cleaved", "erased" - i.e. it is never completely adapted to the effective situation. It is divided into an organ appropriate to the negotiated point, and "a vast inert component". Vis-a-vis the Roman cavalry, this unadapted component will - opposed to the body of disciplined gladiators - constitute the disorder of the group induced by the cosmopolitanism of the slaves, the women, the rivalry of the chiefs, etc. But this last component will reveal on the contrary the ferment of a new egalitarian organization, deliberative of sides, facing the elitist arrogance of the gladiators.

The form of the subject's fidelity thus consists of the subordination of a cleaved body to the trace of an event by which is constituted, point by point, a new present.

The subject called "reactive" is of such a kind of enslavement that this time, not daring to revolt, resists the innovation of the event, not only under the terms of the old inertia but above all by the creation of "arguments of resistance adjusted to the innovation itself.". Because there are many things that Badiou calls "reactionary innovations" producing original intellectual dispositifs, the only object of which is to support the refusal of a present fidelity. Lastly, the obscure subject is that which, such as the patrician of ancient Rome, aims at the pure and simple abolition of the new present. The obscure subject always has recourse to the invocation of a Body transcendent and pure, a full, ahistorical Body (City, God, Race), whose only end, by the mobilization of its phantasm, is to destroy the real body - the cleaved body issuing from the emancipating event.

Thus, one sees taking shape what Badiou nominates as the three possible "destinations" of the subject: the faithful subject organizes the production of the evental present, the reactive subject, its refusal, the obscure subject its occultation.

But there is finally a last destination of the subject, a fourth destination, which consists in organizing the resurrection of the evental present: whether it is Toussaint-Louverture, leader of the revolt of the black slaves of Santo Domingo and nicknamed "black Spartacus", or whether Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, leaders of the Spartakist Revolution, the Spartacus-event does not cease reappearing, by way of eternal truth, in different worlds, according to radically distinct contexts, and yet always as this same statement that servitude has ceased which affirms in a present the time of a fidelity. In other words, even as the theoretical gesture of Euclid or Archimedes can reappear in a fecund way, across the distance of centuries, even as the fights carried out by vague men, finally defeated and even crushed by overpowering Empires, see their struggles honoured with a name - which is theirs, Spartacus - and so much that the name becomes common to any slave, by others revolting over the distance of millenia. [At the end of a film by Kubrik, based on a novel by Howard Fast: once the slaves have been defeated, every participant in the revolt responds to the Roman legionnaire asking for Spartacus: "I am Spartacus". It appropriates for a present - a present now eternal - a proper name which is now the generic name of any slave involved in struggle.]

It is finally necessary to underline the major characteristic of an events emergence in a world: the maximal appearance of the inexistant of a situation. There is indeed a whole gradation of eventality in LM, a whole hierarchy of the emergence of novelty in a world. An event in the strongest sense is given the name of singularity by Badiou: and a singularity, as I said, has as its proper criterion the appearance in an intensive mode of what until that point - though in its being it was already present - was invisible in the situation. Therefore let us try to clarify this characteristic of the event, and its enigmatic property: the blinding present of its inexistant.

To understand this point, it is necessary for us to start by clearly distinguishing being and existence in Badiou.

Let us initially attempt to apprehend the bond between the being of a multiple, and its appearance. The multiple-being of a being is that which, to him, is eternally actual and motionless, without variation. It is important to underline that for Badiou, Being is static: these are multiples always disseminated infinitely, seized in their immutable nature by this science of the motionless that is mathematics, the true ontology. It is such an eternal inconsistency of being which in some way rises to the surface with the event, along with its capacity to upset classifications and the well ordered consistent distinctions of ordinary knowledge. Appearing, on the other hand, is what, as diffracted in an infinity of aspects and fragile conjunctions, does not cease multiplying in the diversity of worlds where it is locally ascertainable. The same being (identical by way of its multiple-being) can thus appear in different multiple worlds in very different and likewise fragile manners.

For example: the ordinals, immutable in respect to their mathematical being, can appear in the world in manners as different as the pagination from a book, a percentage of vote, the metric line of verse, etc. In each case, we are dealing with the immutability of number, but number assumes a greater or lesser importance according to the situations: crucial in the vote, anecdotic in the pagination of a novel. The being of number is immutable, and its appearance, like its intensity, is variable. In the same fashion, the same man will appear in a different way in his professional environment, his musical passion, or among his personal relations. To the immutable analysis of its ontological being (a multiple is composed of its elements, always the same) is juxtaposed the local analysis of its being in distinct worlds.

Badiou names existence the intensity of appearance of a being in a world. As I said, the specificity of existence consists in what, contrary to being, it admits of infinite variations from one world to another. The same multiple will be able to exist maximally in one world and very faintly in another, where it will be as if effaced. By this, Badiou captures the fact that the same being exists in a more or less intense way according to the contexts in which it appears. One will say as well that the syllabic number, very present in an Alexandrine poem, is very far from present (though nevertheless always there) in a free verse poem; or, of a person, who is radiant among their colleagues, is as if "effaced" when seen with family.

Thus, Badiou tries to show that an innovation is not so much the creation from nothing of a novel being, but, starting from an event which throws our ordinary knowledge into a panic, is the imminent arrival of an intense something already-there, but whose existence, in appearing, was profoundly denied by the situation. This is the case with the slaves, where their humanity is denied by societal enslavement, denied to the point of making them mere men with speaking instruments, or bipedal oxen, and who suddenly appear alongside Spartacus with dazzling intensity, in the heart of a historical situation which until then included them without perceiving them. The slaves were there, or it could almost be said since always - always being that of the ancient Mediterranean societies - but their constant being was given a place of only minimal appearance: the slaves are but do not exist, until their revolts recommence again in the century before Christ, and which culminates in years 73 to 71 before sinking back into the night. Here/there is are what signifies: to make appear maximally the inexistent characteristic of a situation.

Badiou gives another example: that of the Parisian proletariat during the Commune. Let us conclude with this examination, which will permit us to expose his typology of the different types of eventalities.

In Book V of LM, Badiou in effect details the way in which a composition of appearance inherently changes with the emergence of a truth in a world. In EE, Badiou was satisfied with an ontological characterization of the event through the reflexive multiple. This time three types of eventality will be distinguished using a (phenomeno-)logical description of their appearance: the occurence, the weak singularity, and the strong singularity.

It is then neccessary to initially distinguish evental changes from simple temporal modifications which are, for them, subjected to the laws of appearance. Thus, to describe the varying degrees of identity between appearing in a public demonstration does not amount to its merely restoring an image fixed at a given moment, but implies as well a detailed account of the temporal variations of these degrees in time, of the initial reassembling of the demonstrators and their final dispersion. There is no event in this type of change, which is not the introduction of a reflexive multiple. A world without any event is not a fixed world, but a world which follows the ordinary course of things and their modification.

The first type of evental change, which is of weaker range, is the occurrence. This one is an event of which the appearance in a world is of low intensity, and whose consequences in this world will be derisory, even null. Badiou acknowledges, in the same way, the triumphal declaration over the central Committee of the Commune on the very day of its crushing by Versailles. It is a true historical event, but without any consequence nor continuation: an event at the threshold of its abolition affirms its will-have-taken-place without which there would be nothing for what immediately follows, save its repression of itself. In opposition to occurrences, the strong singularity is an event of maximum intensity, that brings to existence a non-existent characteristic of the site which supports the event. Let us always take the example of the Commune, as an evental production in the world: "Paris after the Franco-Purssian war". On March 18, 1870, when the people of Paris prevent the government from seizing the guns of the national Guard, along with the act of fleeing the City, on that day arises from the workmen and the socialist militants the political capacity to exert power by themselves. There is then the proper inexistent of the site which supports the event: the "day of March 18", that is to say the workers political capacity, existing then maximally in the consequences of the founding act of 1870. Consequences which will irrigate the struggles of revolutionaries for a century. Lastly, between the two, the weak singularities are events whose range is intermediate: such, according to Badiou, is the foundation of the Third Republic, turning upon a real popular movement, but rapidly confiscated by the politicians as already attested by the time, and which therefore does not reveal the inexistent peculiarity (the political capacity of workers) of the object-site.

All things considered, the differing evental intensities are discriminated by their capacity, within the various procedures of truth, to make a being shine which until that point was constrained and inexisted and that, once it has maximally appeared, forces us to retrospectively reconsider the entire history of its predecessors: the slave, the proletarian, are today according to Badiou the workers without-papers [sans-papiers] (only named "without-papers" in the media, as a way of obliterating their condition as workers, and to make of them potential delinquents) - these are the political invisibles who, at the moment when they are deployed at the outposts of history, entirely reconfigure its logic with the eyes of contemporaries, and contribute in giving a new aspect to the present as well as the past, repainting them with the colors of their struggle. But one would say as much of art, love or science, whose innovations are often rediscoveries of what, without being an entirely absent characteristic, existed only minimally until their maximum appearance in the event of an avant-garde, a discovery, or an encounter.

***

In conclusion, one can wonder about the disconcerting bond between the Badiousian conception of a truth and the Christian conception of the Incarnation. In EE, meditation 21 devoted to Pascal opens on thought 776 (éd. Lafuma): "The history of the Church must properly be called the history of truth". And in fact, one can say that Badiou accords to Pascal to have seized, and with him Pauline Christianity, to which was expressly devoted a book, that which one could call the "genuine proceedings of the truth". Because if Christianity is founded on a fable, according to Badiou, its force comes from having seized if not its contents then at least the real form of any truth: it proceeds by way of a event not demonstrable by a constituted knowledge - the divinity of Christ - of which one would know more than the trace - the testimony of apostles, of evangelists, etc., but its being is already abolished, crucified, and even its body has already disappeared, while the belief starts to emerge that it will have taken place. And the Christian truth is the ensemble of enquiries of fidelities, i.e. their intervention in the Palestinian situation, then Middle-Eastern and Roman, in the light of their having held the place of Christianity. Lastly, universal history, for the Christians, is nothing other than the ensemble of enquiries of the Church-subject over the course of centuries, made of schisms and heresies, therefore of research into the formula and action of a fidelity to the absolute event of man's divine creation. Out the Church, not of history, and not of hello, only the monotonous chaos of passions and perditions.

Badiou is thus here in extreme fidelity... - with the structure, if not the contents - of Christian eschatology. It is by no means the denial of this dream, as it is he who makes of Paul the "founder of universalism": that which seized the first militant nature, and not the erudition, of truth. In this sense it without doubt represents one of the possible evolutions of Marxism, shared since the beginning between critical thought and revolutionary eschatology. A great part of the ex-Marxists renounced eschatology, considering that it was effectively religious residue, a principal source among the promethean disasters of real socialism. The singularity of Badiou seems on the contrary to consist of this: that he isolates from Marxism its eschatologic share, separates it from its pretension, that he considers economic scientificity illusory, and delivers it, burning, on the disseminated subjects of all kinds of struggles, political as well as amorous. With the place of the religious illusion of eschatology dissolved by criticism in the writings of Badiou, eschatology becomes irreligious so that the event can deploy its critical power on the colorless present of our ordinary renouncements.

Parrhesia

2008-05-01T12:41:00.003-06:00

A new edition of Parrhesia is up on the web. Aside from contributions by Alexander García Düttmann, Samuel Weber, and one by Christian Kerslake which I am very much looking forward to reading, there is a journal review within the journal of Collapse.

Collapse IV: Concept-Horror

2008-04-10T12:00:00.003-06:00

The latest installment of Collapse will soon be available for pre-order, and is due out in May, with a contribution by yours truly in the form of a series of images from 2004-2008 inserted alongside Graham Harman's essay On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. I had the pleasure of reading Harman's essay beforehand, and, philosophical differences aside - whatever they may be, and being whatever they are more as a consequence of my being a 'non-philosopher' unacquainted with Husserl than anything else - we both certainly agree that objects (whatever they might be) have an inner life of their own, which is very strange indeed... [This was also my introduction to Harman's work, and the reader should here turn to Nick's excellent post on Harman over at The Accursed Share for more about him]

The title of my contribution - an assemblage from/of Jean-Luc Nancy's quote that sits atop this blog - was an attempt to think how bringing together a selection of images produced within the last four years might fit thematically both within the context of the journal and on their own. That decision (all matters of disingenuousness aside)resulted from concerns which have preoccupied me for nearly a decade. In any case, it would refer less to Hegel or Nancy (the latter's work having only recently been a part of my investigations) than it was thought as something suggestive of those strange movements one might find in the work of Blanchot (whose writing is no, er, stranger to dread, horror...), and that folded back on my own interest in exploring the oppositions and correspondence between drawing and that fragmentary, 'insane game' of writing. But...Nancy and Blanchot both having their own curious relation to Husserl, and my own thought having a curious relation to both Nancy and Balnchot, the decision by Robin to pair my work with Harman's should surely succeed in their 'creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another'. Of course, I have never imagined my work to be an 'illustration' of theory, or Philosophical concepts, but - pace Deleuze - they share the same shadow, as it were.

From Urbanomic's website:

Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror' is an investigation into the philosophical, existential, aesthetic, religious and political dimensions of horror. Its task is not to promote theories of horror, but to uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable.

The volume brings to fruition Collapse's vision of a miscegenated text in which contributions interact and produce a series of interzones or objectively-collaborative spaces. Throughout the volume many different styles of philosophical texts and graphic works intermingle, creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of victimhood.

In weird fiction author Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of nihilism...

...As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Ukrainian Oleg Kulik, a prominent contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series 'Dead Monkeys'.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the ontologies of horror from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his ability to evoke the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake Chapman, half of the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld, who unveil their infernal new work Fucking Hell in London next month, contributes a set of etchings created exclusively for Collapse in response to the other contributions in the volume.

Quentin Meillassoux's work is familiar to our readers. In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous.

German artist Todosch's (Thorsten Schlopsnies) meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation...

...A perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the naturephilosophische work of Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

A rising star, Canadian artist Steven Shearer, contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal, the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit...

...Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 330pp[TBC] // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Flight and Expulsion

2008-03-31T12:07:00.002-06:00

[via Information Aesthetics]

Every year, the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees (UNHCR) issues a report concerning the number of approximately 21,000,000 people worldwide falling under its mandate: as refugees who were forced to leave their countries due to war, political, racial or religious persecution, as internally displaced persons, or as repatriates on their way back home.
This interactive visualization attempst to give an insight into the phenomenon of global flight and expulsion, based on the annual UNHCR statistics between the years of 1995 and 2004.

From Agamben's "We Refugees":

...the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face us, we will have to abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in which we have represented political subjects up to now (man and citizen with their rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, etc.) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning with this unique figure.

[...]

This is not the place to review the history of the various international commissions through which the states, the League of Nations, and later, the United Nations stempted to deal with the problem of refugees - from the Nansen Bureau for Russian and Armenian refugees (1921), to the High Commission for Refugees from Germany (1936), the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (1938), and the International Refugee Organization of the United Nations (1946), up to the present High Commission for Refugees (1951) - whose activity, according to its statute, has only a "humanitarian and social," not political, character. The basic point is that every time refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as happened between the two wars, and has happened again now), both these organizations and the single states have proven, despite the solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of man, to be absolutely incapable not only of resolving the problem but also simply of dealing with it adequately. In this way the entire ques- tion was transferred into the hands of the police and of humanitarian organizations.

Dark Deletion

2008-03-30T10:35:00.004-06:00

The following is an excerpt from Italo Calvino's short story "Implosion". The new blog design carries a quote from this in the title, which may not stay, but, having recently re-read this story I felt compelled. Calvino can be terribly grim, though his writing is not without humor:

No, I'm not deaf to your reasons; I could even join you. Go on! Explode! Burst! Let the new world begin again, repeat its ever renewed beginnings in a thunder of cannonfire, as in Napoleon's times...Wasn't it that age, by the way, with its elation at the revolutionary might of artillery fire that made us think of the explosion not just as harmful to people and property, but as a sign of birth, of genesis? Isn't it since then that passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so is its opposite; ever since that August when the mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbol only of absolute negation. But that was something we already knew anyway, from the moment when, rising above the calendar of terrestrial chronicle, we enquired of the destiny of the universe, and the oracles of thermodynamics answered us; every existing form will break up in a blaze of heat; there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Only a few old stars know how to get out of time; they are the open door to jump from a train headed for annihilation. At the limit of their decrepitude, shrunk to the size of red dwarfs or white dwarfs, panting out the last glimmering gasp of the pulsar, compressed into neutron stars, here they are at last, light lost to the waste of the firmament, no more than the dark deletion of themselves, ready for the unstoppable collapse when everything, even light itself, falls inwards never to emerge again.

Corruptible Matter

2008-03-09T17:36:00.004-06:00

Books are a corruptible matter. Books are made of wood: biblos, liber, codex, buch, it's always bark or tree. It burns, it rots, it decomposes, it can be erased, it falls to the gnawing criticism of mice. Bibliophilia is, just as much as philosophy, an impossible love, its objects discolored, faded, worn-out, cut-up, full of holes. Books are miserable, hateful. Descartes hates the job of making books. There is nothing for the Subject - the other, the same; who says 'I'(think)- in the tomes, nothing but loss of time, a life uselessly consumed in reading the scraps of knowledge that I myself can found. There should be some legal restraint aimed against inept and useless writers, as there is against vagabonds and idlers. Both I and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. This is no jest. Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age. When did we write so much as since our dissensions began? Since our writing has been troubled.

J.L.Nancy, "Exscription"

Page 123

2008-03-04T20:06:00.003-07:00

I've been tagged by Fido with the 123 meme. Rules are as follows (though I am not exactly following them):

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five bloggers.

Since I have been lagging for about three days, I will have to add a variation on the meme (in the hopes that it might survive, of course) by using the three books that were nearest me over the last three days.

The most refined technico-cultural specialisation required the greatest possible extension of primary education and the greatest care to encourage secondary education for the largest number. Naturally, this need for creating the broadest possible basis for the selection and training of people with the highest technical qualification - of giving, that is, a democratic structure to high culture and advanced technique - has its inconveniences: the possibility is created of large unemployment crises among the middle intellectual strata, as in fact happens in all modern societies.
It should be noted that in reality the elaboration of intellectual groups does not take place on an abstract democratic basis, but according to very concrete traditional historical processes.

Antonio Gramsci, "The Formation of Intellectuals", in The Modern Prince & Other Writings (International Publishers, 2007)

Hmm...The next one comes from Hallward's monograph on Badiou - where I will be counting the first truncated sentence as the first sentence on the page, and not counting Hallward's cite of Badiou as any of the sentences but including them anyway so that I might arrive at the following passage, which is rather lengthy, but quite nice:

Considering the example of May 1968, Badiou acknowledges that
yes we were the genuine actors, but actors asolutely seized by what was happening to them, as by something extraordinary, something properly incalculable....Of course, if we add up the anecdotes one by one, we can always say that at any given moment there were certain actors, certain people who provoked this or that result. but the crystallisation of all these moments, their generalisation, and then the way in which everyone was caught up in it, well beyond what any one person might have thought possible - that's what I call an evental dimension.None of the little processes that led to the event was equal to what actually took place...; there was an extraordinary change of scale, as there always is in every significant event....Lin Piao - someone rarely mentioned these days - once said, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, that the essential thing was to be, at a revolutionary conjunction, both its actor and its target. I quite like this formula. Yes we are actors, but in such a way that we are targeted by, carried away by, and struck by the event. In this sense there can undoubtedly be collective events.
An event is the hinge in this transition from calculation to the incalculable, and every crisis of calculation means precisely that an answer to the question "What is to be done?" can be not discerned but only decided, as Lenin well knew. An event cannot dictate its own consequences. To fall in love does not determine the ensuing relationship as loving.

Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minnesota, 2003)

And finally:

What is utterly unthinkable in this universe is that someone who does not doubt the existence of God should live his life in complete disregard of Him.
Yet this is the very split that Don Juan embodies. This is why his attitude becomes completely unbearable (for the community) only at the moment when he - despite all the substantial evidence and grace offered to him - utters his final 'No and no!'

Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (Verso, 2000)

I will skip commentary on these, and tag Larval Subjects, Jodi, Infinite, Savonarola, and Nate.

Dis-locations

2008-01-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

The countryman, the peasant, is someone whose occupation is the country and the land. He occupies it and takes care of it, and he is occupied with it: that is, he takes it in hand and is taken up by it. Occupy comes from capio, ‘‘to take, to grasp.’’ Being a peasant means taking in hand the place and the time of the country. Its culture and cultivation, as one says; that is, the fashioning of one by the other— the occupier and the occupied, the toiler and the toiled (which are by turns the one called ‘‘the peasant’’ and that which surrounds him, which is called ‘‘the land,’’ ‘‘the countryside [le campagne],’’ in the sense of the field [le champ], which, for its part, is also a corner or a piece of earth, but opened, extended, cleared by and for the occupation of growing and grazing). The peasant is the one who occupies himself with the land, but he is not, for all that, necessarily someone who works in agriculture. He can be the landsman of all sorts of lands, languages, peoples. What defines him is that he is occupied by or with belonging. Thus there are peasants of the cities or even of science or philosophy. There is some peasant in anyone who belongs and who is taken up with time-and-place, in anyone who makes his own some corner of the here-and-now: it can be a machine, a highway, or a computer as much as a field of beets or a stable. (To be sure, the peasant is, properly speaking, someone who is occupied with an immobile land, and this extension of the concept that I am proposing is only acceptable if we ‘‘immobilize’’ the machine or the computer: if we make of them a sort of ground or region [contre´e] that one can dig into, dig up, uncover . . . Why wouldn’t the Internet also be a kind of movable earth?)

-Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p.70

Murakami on the Moon

2007-12-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

[In lieu of actually updating the previous post.] While Laurie Anderson may be the first ever artist-in-residence at NASA, this image of theirs that depicts the dark side of the moon (via Strange Maps) - one of a series produced between 1971 and 1998 - looks suspiciously like a Murakami painting. Enjoy.

Inventory 2773

2007-12-01T14:33:00.001-07:00

Detail of colored etching and aquatint,
"Christie's Auction Room", by Thomas Rowlandson &
Augustus Charles Pugin from
The Microcosm of London, Volume 1
(London: R. Ackerman, 1810).

[I will be updating this post in the coming week]

Risible Rhetorics

2007-10-02T09:50:00.000-06:00

IT has written an excellent post regarding Blair and a certain variety of empty speech. In an aside on the 'Nu-job' market, IT writes

There are, of course, an increasing number of baroque jobs, specialising in precisely the promulgation of gabble: the consultants of the world may have the pay accorded to one whose speciality is the manipulation of generic edicts (with seriously damaging effects, as anyone who's ever been fired on the basis of a 'recommendation' from a consultant will know). There exist, too, the immaterial labourers of the art-world, the conceptual 'curators' and 'networkers' who flit about the margins (sorry, the 'non-centres') of galleries and production spaces, gorging on faddish terms and churning out meaningless reams of turgidity in catalogues, conferences and magazines. Jobs devoted to this kind of rhetorical production produce the affective equivalent of 'Taste the Difference' lard: poshly packaged crap for the 'cultured' classes.

While the proliferation of such languages is no doubt symptomatic of what Badiou has called 'Democratic Materialism', I will refrain from asserting that ALL of the art-world's 'immaterial production' is so detestable (because I would prefer not to, of course)- though it is assuredly detestable that for the most part it is not the artists working within these spaces who are at fault, but the curators, critics, historians, commentators, etc., regulating the discourse from above. But I suppose this was precisely IT's point...

(And please visit here in order to learn all about this brand of 'poshly packaged crap'.)

A Meme

2007-09-07T12:42:00.000-06:00

Via Love and Terrorism

- Grab the nearest book.

- Open the book to page 123.

- Find the fifth sentence.

- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

- Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

"The disagreement appears definite as concerns the Other." (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, The University of Chicago Press, 1978)

Glazed Over

2007-09-06T10:39:00.000-06:00

Haven't tried to watch any of them yet, but I will be staring at my computer screen for a while if this webpage does in fact contain full video lectures from EGS instead of the minute or so clips they used to put up. Aside from the usual suspects of Badiou and Zizek, there is even one on poetry and mathematics with Jacques Roubaud, one of my favorite poets.

The Crystal of Non-Knowledge

2007-09-01T15:00:00.000-06:00

Blanchot, from "Rene Char and the Thought of the Neutral":

"How can we live without the unknown before us?" In the evidency of this question-affirmation there is something that summons us; a difficulty that, holding us in its sight, nonetheless steals away in a nearly reassuring form. It has to be sought. the unknown is neutral, a neuter. the unknown is neither object nor subject. This means that to think the unknown is in no way to propose it as "the not yet known," the object of a knowledge still to come, any more than it would be to go beyond it as "the absolutely unknowable," a subject of pure transcendence, refusing itself to all manner of knowledge and expression. On the contrary, let us (perhaps arbitrarily) propose that in research - where poetry and thought affirm themselves in the space that is proper to them, separate, inseparable - the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown. A phrase all the same disconcerting, since it proposes to "relate" the unknown inasmuch as it is unknown. In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed - and under what aspect? - precisely in that which keeps it unknown. In this relation, then, the unknown would be diclosed in that which leaves it under cover, Is this a contradiction? In effct. i Research - poetry, thought - relates to the unknown as unknown. this relation discloses the unknown, but by an uncovering that leaves it under cover; through this relation there is a "presence" of the unknown; in this "presence" the unknown is rendered present, but always as unknown. This relation must leave intact - untouched - what it conveys and not unveil what it discloses. This relation will not consist in an unveiling. The unknown will not be revealed, but indicated.
(In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we should make it clear that if this relation with the unknown sets itself apart from objective knowledge, it does so no less from a knowledge that would arise out of intuition or a mystical fusion. The unknown as neutral supposes a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence.)(The Infinite Conversation, p. 300)

Of course, if any of that seems boring, it is worth noting that boredom is

An unserious seriousness from which nothing can divert us, even when it is lived in the mode of diversion. as we discover through the experience of boredom when indeed boredom seems to be the sudden, the insensible apprehension of the quotidian into which we slide in the leveling out of a steady slack time, feeling ourselves forever sucked in, yet feeling at the same time that we have already lost it and are henceforth incapable of deciding whether there is a lack of the everyday or too much of it - thus held by boredom in boredom, which develops, says Friedrich Schlegel, just as carbon dioxide accumulates in a closed space where too many people find themselves together. (Blanchot, "Everyday Speech", ibid., p. 242)

Relational What?

2007-09-01T14:12:00.000-06:00

I have been browsing Temporary Services' website for a while - a collaborative trio I discovered today by way of their Library Project (HT LeisureArts), which is subversively adding, without being solicited, 100 new books and artist's projects to a collection of books currently in excess of 6 million at The Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. According to the essay by Marc Fischer, some of the projects include:

The subject of war presented in the form of a coloring book (crayons included)
A critical analysis of photographic representation of prisoners in the United States
A short commentary on the discomfort of being dressed by an adult when you are a young child
A collection of photos from a social event archive
Email messages forwarded by an artist’s mother to provide emotional and spiritual guidance
An alphabetical reordering of the complete contents of romance novels
A detailed resource guide that uncovers the involvement of white supremacist groups in the underground punk and metal music scenes
The accounts of an "Uncontrollable" member of the Iron Column during the Spanish Civil War
Two self-published books documenting hundreds of drawings of vernacular architecture that were placed inside bottles and scattered throughout public places in Los Angeles
A story book in the style of those published by American Girl that teaches young girls how to pee standing up so that they can write their names in the snow.

I also highly recommend the Public Phenomena Archive, that "looks at the ways in which people modify the shared spaces of their cities", and contains numerous photos which are not only amusing, but thrive on the inexhaustable matrix that is 'everydayness':

[Basketball hoops, parking space savers & piles of bikes (slideshow)]

Vitalism B

2007-08-30T10:54:00.000-06:00

Being in the mood to revisit some things, I ended up browsing Bergson before bedtime last night and was pleasantly surprised by a number of things. Among them were "On the Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality" [truth 'does not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what will be'] and this from "The Endurance of Life":

But too often one reasons about the things of life in the same way as about the conditions of crude matter. Nowhere is the confusion so evident as in discussions about individuality. We are shown the stumps of a Lumbriculus, each regenerating its head and and living thenceforward as an independent individual; a hydra whose pieces become so many fresh hydras; a sea-urchin's egg whose fragments develop complete embryos: where then, we are asked, was the individuality of the egg, the hydra, the worm? - But, because there are several individuals now, it does not follow that there was not a single individual just before. No doubt, when I have seen several drawers fall from a chest, I have no longer the right to say that the article was all of one piece. but the fact is that there can be nothing more in the present of the chest of drawers than there was in the past, and if it is made up of several different pieces now, it was so from the date of its manufacture. Generally speaking, unorganised bodies, which are what we have need of in order that we may act, and on which we have modelled our fashion of thinking, are regulated by this simple law: the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. But suppose that the distinctive feature of the organised body is that is grows and changes without ceasing, as indeed the most superficial observation testifies, there would be nothing astonishing in the fact that it was one in the first instance, and afterwars many. The reproduction of unicellular organisms consist in just this - the living being divides into two halves, of which each is a complete individual. Ture, in the more complex animals, nature localizes in the almost independent sexual cells the power of producing the whole anew. But something of this power may remain diffused in teh rest of the organism, as the facts of regeneration prove, and it is conceivable that in certain privileged cases the faculty may persist integrally in a latent condition and manifest itself on the first opportunity. In turth, that I may have the right to speak of individuality, it is not necessary that the organism should be without the power to divide into fragments that are able to live. It is sufficient that it should have presented a certain systematisation of parts before the division, and that the same systematisation tend to be reproduced in each separate portion afterwards. Now, that is precisely what we observe in the organic world. We may conclude, then, that individuality is never perfect, and that is is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is an individual, and what is not, but that life nevertheless manifests a search for individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed.
[...]
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. (Key Writings, p.178-180)

The old philosophers can be so charming

Guattari on Postmodernism

2007-08-24T11:27:00.000-06:00

Via Larval Subjects

Are we not, then, at the center of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the postmodern condition, which I, unlike him, understand to be the paradigm of all submission and every sort of compromise with the existing status quo? For Lyotard, postmodernism represents the collapse of what he calls the grand narratives of legitimation (for example, the discourses of the Enlightenment, those of Hegel’s accomplishment of the Spirit and the Marxist emanicipation of the workers). It would always be wise, according to Lyotard, to be suspicious of the least desire for concerted social action. Any promotion of consensus as an ideal, Lyotard argues, is to be regarded as out-dated and suspect. Only little narratives of legitimation, in other words, the ‘pragmatics of linguistic particles’ that are multiple, heterogeneous, and whose performativity would be only limited in time and space, can still save some aspects of justice and freedom. In this way, Lyotard joins other theorists, such as Jean Buadrillard, for whom the social and political have never been more than traps, or ’semblances’, for which it would be wise to lose one’s fondness.

Whether they are painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernism have in common the belief that the crises experienced today in artistic and social practices can only lead to an irrevocable refusal of any large-scale social undertaking. So we ought to take care of our own backyards first and, preferably, in conformity with the habits and customs of our contemporaries. Don’t rock the boat! Just drift with the currents of the marketplace of art and opinion that are modulated by publicity campaigns and surveys.

But where does the idea that the socius is reducible to the facts of language, and that these facts are in turn reducible to binarizable and ‘digitalizable’ signifying chains, come from? On this point postmodernists have hardly said anything innovative! In fact, their views are directly in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences appears to have been a carry-over from the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization. The secret link that binds these various doctrines, I believe, stems from a subterranean relationship– marked by reductionist concepts, and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and new cybernetic research. The references that everyone continually made to the new communications and computer technologies were so hastily developed, so poorly mastered, that they put us far behind the phenomenological research that preceded them.

Here we must return to a basic truism, but on pregnant with implications; namely, that concrete social assemblages– not to be confused with the ‘primary group’ of American sociology, which only reflects the economy of opinion polls –call into question much more than just linguistic performance: for example, ethological and ecological dimensions, as well as the economic semiotic components, aesthetic, corporeal and fantasmatic ones that are irreducible to the semiology of language, and the diverse incorporeal universes of reference which are not readily inscribed within the coordinates of the dominant empiricity… (The Guattari Reader, 111)

Fischli & Weiss vs. Justice vs. Simian

2007-07-16T13:37:00.000-06:00

Fischli & Weiss, "The Way Things Go"

Justice vs. Simian, "We Are Your Friends"

Bring the Noise

2007-07-02T21:10:00.000-06:00

Michel Serres: "Spaces of Transformation", in The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Individual spots, categories or phenomena, praxes or wrought objects, placed together under the name of Hermes - these were the spaces of transformation encountered at first.

Interference is an aural and visual phenomenon, a phenomenon of physics; it is a metaphor and an art of invention. The exchanger is a builder where the moving parts are sorted as to meaning and move along according to that sorting, a sort of winnowing machine with several hoppers where the transformation is only cinematic. At the crossroads, the morals turn around the decision, sometimes murders are committed; bifurcation, that of space and of logic, suddenly rises to a fantastic level and takes charge of old tales where language is as close as possible to its birthplace; one's reason for living - one's reason, quite simply - is changed. The discourse speaks of the path taken and follows its meanderings. The well, the bridge, the labyrinth: these are vignettes or figurings, games, strategies, chances or random occurrences, circumstances, built or constructed monuments, phenomena as well since death soon comes around, but still fantasies and still exact theorems for changes of phase. A rich series of varied spaces, separated, for multiple transformations, maybe the richest and most baroque. On the contrary, the open, chaotic space of the Norman heaths, at Lessay, loses a bit, loses a lot of its features, too well defined by a god who is too determined, though mobile, to become simple, both formally and concretely. how can we cross the heath? How can we cross the sea? What does it mean to cross the sea? Images. the space of transformation as such emerges from this hodge-podge of abundance whose merit lies in having taken diagonally, askew, crosswise, many of the usual and stupid distinctions of philosophy. Translation is both a praxis and a theory; turbulence is a stable and unstable phenomenon where liquid moves and stays in a randomly fixed form; the organism - my body - is now an exchanger of time. at this point in time, several chronies intertwine. Perhaps I have encountered only spaces of transformation, singular spots or slack varieties. the simplest of these, absolutely, is the void, the void in which the atoms fall, in which, suddenly, bursts the clinamen: be it an order brought to its elementary state, elements of distribution for an element of order, a void purged of all determination; be it a transformer brought to its elementary states, almost to the zero state, both in the theoretical and in the concrete. From that, however, a global system is formed, a world in the universe of worlds. the distance of performance is as large as the origin is near nothing and the final phase is near totality. given, the following sequence: a distribution, a signal, a system. The hum of the universe - chaos, the blink of an eye, the world. Thus the space of transformation came back to physics and to phenomena typical of sight and hearing.

States change phase, and systems change state, by transition of phases or of states. But the system itself is never stable. its equilibrium is ideal, abstract, and never reached. The state, in the first meaning of the word, is outside time. the state is the contrary of history, for history tries to block and to fix the state. The state is the mortal enemy of history. And it can kill history. We are not far from this now. It moves ahead like the beam on the unstable wall when the winds blow and the earth shakes. It falls, it does not fall; it rights itself, it falls. It wears away; it is abraded; it is split by the flow. An aggregation, it loses parts like a vase covered with cracks. A miracle reunites its fragments and makes its synthesis blaze; time slowly disaggregates it. that is what existence is: facing death, being in perpetual difference from equilibrium. These flows never stop running over lacunar lands. To devour them, parasite them, nourish them, and make them live. the fall kills us and creates us. We move unfailingly toward noise, but we come from noise. Oxygen feeds the heat of our lives, but aging is an oxidation. It works because it doesn't work. The system is very badly named. maybe there is not or never was a system. As soon as the world came into being, its transformation began. the system in itself is a space of transformation. There are only metabolas. what we take as an equilibrium is only a slowing down of metabolic processes. My body is an exchanger of time. It is filled with signals, noises, messages, and parasites. and it is not at all exceptional in this vast world. It is true of animals and plants, of air crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. transformation, deformation of information.

I thought that the exchangers were intermediaries, that interference was on the fringe, that the translator was between instances, that the bridge connected two banks, that the path went from the origin to the goal. But there are no instances. Or more correctly, instances, systems, banks, and so forth are analyzable in turn as exchangers, paths, translations, and so forth. the only instances or systems are black boxes. when we do not understand, when we defer our knowledge to a later date, when the thing is too complex for the means at hand, when we put everything in a temporary black box, we prejudge the existence of a system. when we can finally open the box, we see that it works like a space of transformation. The only systems, instances, and substances come from our lack of knowledge. the system is nonknowledge. the other side of nonknowledge. One side of nonknowledge is chaos; the other, system. Knowledge forms a bridge between the two banks. Knowledge as such is a space of transformation.

The whole question is fractal.

Leibniz described fractal reality, formed of pools and fish, filled in turn, with fish and pools, ad infinitum. Mandelbrot repeats this of the world, inventing the world, and undoubtedly, the thing. I am saying the same thing of the process of knowledge.

La danse mimerait la pensée encore indécidé*

2007-07-01T17:56:00.000-06:00

*Dance would mime thought as yet undecided
- Alain Badiou

Back tomorrow with something for the B.L.O.G. - off now to D.A.N.C.E.

An act philosophically justifiable, you see; but not by way of any disco-Marxism mind you.

Perfect Lovers

2007-06-26T19:40:00.000-06:00

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Perfect Lovers, 1987-90

The latest issue of Artforum has allowed a worthwhile on-liner: Glenn Ligon gives a book review of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. At some point I think I will have to take from Ligon who took from Gonzalez-Torres (who always wanted to give for us to take) and recreate the above work to hang on my studio wall as well.' What we might call “identity” or the “self” is a storage room with a busted lock: We go in looking for “me” and instead find “we.”'

Oh yes, and, Sylvère Lotringer - who some may know as the founder of Semiotext(e) (and who apparently never told Felix Guattari he was friends with Jean Baudrillard) - writes on Baudrillard's recent death.

Buggery

2007-06-11T18:49:00.000-06:00

For those interested in Zizek's always 'masterful' conversion of Deleuze's anti-Hegelianisms into Hegelianisms, two recent articles on the net: "Deleuze and the Lacanian Real", and "Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real".

From the former:

If "individuation is a relation conceived as a pure or absolute between, a between understood as fully independent of or external to its terms - and thus a between that can just as well be described as 'between' nothing at all" (Hallward 154), its status is then that of a pure antagonism. Its structure was deployed by Lacan apropos sexual difference which, as a difference, precedes the two terms between which it is the difference: the point of Lacan's "formulas of sexuation" is that both masculine and feminine position are two ways to avoid the deadlock of the difference as such. This is why Lacan's claim that sexual difference is "real-impossible" is strictly synonymous with his claim that "there is no sexual relationship." Sexual difference is for Lacan not a firm set of "static" symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity that relegates homosexuality and other "perversions" to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that RESISTS every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very "impossibility" that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what "sexual difference" will mean. And the same goes for the political difference (class struggle): the difference between Left and Right is not only the difference between the two terms within a shared field, it is "real" since it is not possible to provide its neutral description - the difference between the Left and the Right appears differently if perceived from the Left and from the Right: for the first, it signals the antagonism which cuts across the entire social field (the antagonism concealed by thje Right), while the Right perceives itself as the force of moderation and social stability and organic unity, with the Left reduced to the position of an intruder that disturbs this organic stability of the social body - for the Right, the Left is as such "extreme."

And from the latter, apropos of OM's question in the comments to this post:

When Eliot writes that, when judging a living poet, "you must set him among the dead," he formulates precisely an example of Deleuze's pure past. And when he writes that "the existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted," he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between the completeness of the past and our capacity to change it retroactively: precisely because the pure past is complete, each new work re-arranges its entire balance. Recall Borges' precise formulation of the relationship between Kafka and the multitude of his precursors, from old Chinese authors to Robert Browning: "Kafka's idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. /.../ each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." [8] The properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of "Is it really there, in the source, or did we only read it into the source?" is thus: it is there, but we can only perceive and state this retroactively, from today's perspective.

Biopolitics

2007-06-10T12:11:00.000-06:00

I was considering transcribing it myself as I just purchased the book last week, but Influxus did the work already by posting in full Jean-Luc Nancy's "A Note on the Term Biopolitics" from his recently translated The Creation of The World or Globalization

The term biopolitics in fact designates neither life (as the form of life) nor politics (as a form of coexistence). And we can certainly admit that in fact we are no longer in a position to use either of these terms in their ordinary senses. Both are, rather, henceforth subject to what carries them together into ecotechnology.

I was also interested in this passage from elsewhere in the book:

The fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is in a sense the fact from which any thinking of the world follows, to the point, however that we do not exactly know what "to destroy" means, nor which world is destroying itself. Perhaps only one thing remains, that is to say, one thought with some certainty: what is taking place is really happening, which means that it happens and happens to us in this way more than a history, even more than an event. It is as if being itself - in whatever sense one understands it, as existence or as substance - surprised us from an unnamable beyond. It is, in fact, the ambivalence of the unnamable that makes us anxious: a beyond for which no alterity can give us the slightest analogy.

It is thus not only a question of being ready for the event - although this is also a necessary condition of thought, today as always. it is a question of owning up to the present, including its very withholding of the event, including its strange absence of presence: we must ask anew what the world wants of us, and what we want of it, everywhere, in all senses, urbi et orbi, all over the world and for the whole world without (the) capital of the world but with the richness of the world.[p.35]

I beg your pardon, Sir, this is X, is it not?

2007-06-02T17:49:00.000-06:00

Back in college I was interested for a time in modified books and book objects. Aside from turning Sartre's Being and Nothingness into a roll of toilet paper, I also disected Beckett's trilogy, turning The Unnameable into a single sheet of text (which was amusing, of course, on account of there being no paragraph breaks after - what was it, four pages?). I'm not sure why I kept the following passage from Molloy floating around in my ephemera files, because...It's too difficult to say, for me. To be unable, you understand.

For my native town was the only one I knew, having never set foot in any other. But I had read with care, while I still could read, accounts of travellers more fortunate than myself, telling of other towns as beautiful as mine, and even more beautiful, though with a different beauty. And now it was a name I sought, in my memory, the name of the only town it had been given me to know, with the intention, as soon as I had found it, of stopping, and saying to a passer-by, doffing my hat, I beg your pardon, Sir, this is X, is it not?, X being the name of my town. And this name that I sought, I felt sure that it began with a B or with a P, but in spite of this clue, or perhaps because of its falsity, the other letters continued to escape me. I had been living so far from words so long, you understand, that it was enough for me to see my town, since we're talking of my town, to be unable, you understand. It's too difficult to say, for me. And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long donata of the dead.

Short Circuits

2007-05-28T14:46:00.000-06:00

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"

2007-05-27T22:17:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-23T19:47:00.001-06:00

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'

2007-05-21T12:55:00.004-06:00

- 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.

...

2007-05-19T19:22:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-18T18:41:00.000-06:00

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)

2007-05-14T20:06:00.000-06:00

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.

2007-05-14T19:52:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-14T14:37:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-11T18:00:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-10T21:33:00.000-06:00

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"

2007-05-09T19:13:00.000-06:00

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"

2007-05-04T20:06:00.000-06:00

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

2007-05-01T21:03:00.000-06:00

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

Dream A Little Dream For Me

2007-04-30T15:36:00.000-06:00

Well this blog has been in somewhat of a slumber since my last post oh so long ago...But now that the problem of having a year's worth of web research disappear (and the computer I worked from along with it) has been resolved, plans in the coming months include some thoughts on the irresolveable dialectics and recombinant narratives of video/video installation artist/photographer Stan Douglas, as well as writing vs. drawing vs. Badiou vs. ontology vs. approximation vs. cartography. Or something.

Perhaps even a few remarks on the beautiful little Kino Fist zines that arrived in my mailbox last week, where the brilliant issue on Chris Marker and the coolness of a Jean Cocteau drawing of Tristan Tzara that appears on the back of one of them is overshadowed only by what Nina Powers has to say regarding the game of Chess. For the moment may the reader enjoy the following assemblage:

The dream is the guardian of insomnia which keeps it from falling asleep.

- Gilles Deleuze, "The Exhausted"

The philosopher is useful, because he or she has the task of observing the morning of a truth, and of interpreting this new truth over against old opinions. If « we must endure our thoughts all night», it is because we must correctly corrupt young people. When we feel that a truth-event interrupts the continuity of ordinary life, we have to say to others: "Wake up! The time of new thinking and acting is here!" But for that, we ourselves must be awake. We, philosophers, are not allowed to sleep. A philosopher is a poor night watchman.

-Alain Badiou, "Philosophy as Creative Repetition"

What an enigma sleep presents for philosophy! How can the cogito ever slumber? It's duty is to keep vigil till the end of time, as Pascal understood and reiterated. Sleep reproduces life in the womb and foreshadows death; yet this kind of rest has its own fullness. In sleep the body gathers itself together, building up its energy reserves by imposing silence on its information receptors. It closes down, and passes through a moment with its own truth, its own beauty, its own worth. This is one moment among others, a poetic moment. It is now that the 'space of the dream' makes its paradoxical appearance. At once imaginary and real, this space is different from the space of language, though of the same order, and the faithful guardian of sleep rather than of social learning. Is this then the space of 'drives'? It would be better described as a space for the poetic reconstruction of situations in which wishes are present - but wishes which are not so much fulfilled as simply proclaimed. it is a space of enjoyment, indeed it establishes a virtual reing of pleasure, though erotic dreams break up on the reefs of the dreamer's pleasure and disillusion. The space of the dream is strange and alien, yet at the same time as close to us as is possible. Rarely coulored, even more rarely animated by music, it still has a sensual-sensory character. It is a theatrical space even more than a quotidian or poetic one: a putting into images of oneself, for oneself.

- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

But does not the dream thus reflect a contradiction just where one might succeed in discerning the cipher of existence? Does it not designate at one and the same time the content of a transcendent world and the original movement of a freedom? The dream is deployed, we saw earlier, in a world which secretes its opaque contents and the forms of a necessity which cannot be deciphered. Yet at the same time it is free genesis, self-accomplishment, emergence of what is most individual in the individual. This contradiction is manifest in the content of the dream when it is deployed and offered to discursive interpretation. It even bursts forth as the ultimate meaning in all those dreams that are haunted by the anguish of dean. Death is experienced as the supreme moment of that contradiction, which death constitutes as destiny. Hence the meaningfulness of all those dreams of violent death, of savage death, of horrified death, in which one must indeed recognize, in the final anlysis, a freedom up against a world. If consciousness sleeps during sleep, existence awakens in the dream. Sleep, itself, goes toward the life that it is preparing, that it is spelling out, that it favors. If it is a seeming death, this is by a ruse of life, which does not want to die; it "plays dead," but "from fear of death." It remains of the order of life.

The dream is no accomplice of sleep. It ascends again the slope that sleep descends, towards life, it goes towards existence, and there, in full light, it sees death as the destiny of freedom. For the dream, as such, and by birture of the meanings of existence it bears with it, kills sleep and life that falls asleep. Say not that sleep makes dreaming possible, for it is the dream that makes sleep impossible by waking it to the light of death. The dream, as with Macbeth, murders sleep.

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
the death of each day's life, score labour's bath,
balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast...

In the depth of his dream, what man encounters in his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is his very existence being accomplished.

-Michel Foucault, Dream and Existence

Language only designates things; only the negation of language opens up to the absence of a limit of what is, which is nothing.
The only limit of the marvelous is a result of this: the marvelous, made of the transparency of "what does not happen" in "what happens," dissolves when death, the exxence of which is given in "what does not happen," takes on the meaning of "what happens."
The same anguish every night. as inert in my bed as a fish is on the saned, telling myself that time, which descends on me, which brings me nothing, is useless. I don't know where I'm from. Reduced to saying, to feeling the uselessness of life, the utility of which has disappointed me.
Strange burden insomnia: I lost, if not the order, the reason, which maybe I didn't have, to write these phrases. would my reason be a literary search? Meanwhile, I cannot conceive of the possibility of not having written them. i have the feeling of writing above all in order to know, to discover, at the heart of my insomnia, what I can, and what I must do. I drift off waiting for the sleefping pill to take effect.

- Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, 227

It is one of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis that the clear-cut antithesis of sleeping and waking has no value for determining the empirical form of consciousness of the human being, but instead yields before and unending variety of concrete states of consciousness conditioned by every conceivable level of wakefulness within all possible centers. The situation of consciousness as patterned and checkered by sleep and waking need only be transferred from the individual to the collective. Of course, much that is external to the former is internal to the latter: architecture, fashion - yes, even the weather - are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are inside the individual. And so long as they preserve this unconscious, amorphous dream configuration, they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like. They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Gilles Deleuze, "Spoilers of Peace"

2006-07-02T19:37:00.000-06:00

This text originally appeared in Le Monde, April 7, 1978, and is reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness (Semiotexte, 2006)

How could the Palestinians be "genuine partners" in peace talks when they have no country? But how could they have a country when it was taken from them? The Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the actions of the Israelis are considered legitimate retaliation (even if their attacks do seem disproportionate), whereas the actions of the Palestinians are without fail treated as terrorist crimes. And the death of a Palestinian has neither the same interest nor the same impact as the death of an Israeli.
Since 1969, Israel has unrelentingly bombed and strafed Southern Lebanon. Israel has explicitly said that its recent invasion of Lebanon was not in retaliation for the terrorist attack on Tel-Aviv (eleven terrorists against thirty thousand soldiers); on the contrary, it represents the culmination of a plan, one in a whole series of operations to be initiated at Israel's discretion. For a "final solution" to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other States (with various nuances and restrictions). A people without land, and without a State, the Palestinians are the spoilers of peace for everyone involved. If they have received economic and military aid from certain countries, it has been in vain. The Palestinians know what they are talking about when they say they are alone.
Palestinian militants are also saying that they have managed to pull off a kind of victory. Left behind in souther Lebanon were only resistance groups, which seem to have held up quite will under attack. the Israeli invasion, on the other hand, struck blindly at Palestinian refugees and Lebanese farmers, a poor population that lives off the land. Destruction of villiages and cities, and the massacre of innocent civilians have been confirmed. several sources indicate that cluster bombs were used. This population of Southern Lebanon, in perpetual exile, keeps leaving and coming back under Israeli military strikes that one is hard-pressed to distinguish from acts of terrorism. The latest hostilities have ousted more than 200,000 from their homes, now refugees wanderin the roads. The State of Israel is using in southern Lebanon the method which proved so effective in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is "Palestinizing" Southern Lebanon.
Palestinian militants for the most part come from this population of refugees. Israel thinks it will defeat the militants by creating more refugees, thereby surely creating more terrorists.
It is not merely because we have a relationship with Lebanon that we say: Israel is massacring a fragile and complex country. There is something else. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealth with elsewhere, even in Europe. the worldwide cooperation of States, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual "terrorists." This situation os analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain sereved as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.
Today Israel is conducitng an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries. There is great continuity in Israeli politics. israel believes that the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the occupied territories into the right to establish colonies there. It thinks sending an international peace-keeping force into Southern Lebanon is an excellent idea... provided that this force, in the place of Israeli forces, transforms the region into a police zone, a desert of security. This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: "genuine partners" in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

Of The Refrain

2006-06-18T18:22:00.000-06:00

The Lyre bird imitating sounds

We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also assembled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren family: the male takes possession of his territory and produces a "music box refrain" as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests in his territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives, he sits in front of a nest, invites her to visit, hands his wings, and lowers the intensity of his song, reduced to a mere trill. It seems that the nesting function is highly territorialized, since the nests are prepared by the male alone before the arrival of the female, who only visits and completes them; the "courtship" function is also territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since the territorial refrain becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All kinds of heterogeneous elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not only the assemblage marks that group materials, colors, odors, sounds, postures, etc., but also the various elements of given assembled behaviors that enter into a motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a dance, clicking of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck outstretched, cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain...the first question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assemblage. This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of heterogeneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set, a discrete set that later takes on consistency.
[...]
The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages. there have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions on bird song, but the results vary both by species and according to the kind and timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs of other species, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will reproduce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch, however seems much more devoted to its own matters of expression and retains an innate sense of its own tonal quality even if exposed to synthetic sounds. the outcome also depends on whether the birds are isolated before or after the critical period. In the first case, chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second, the subjects in the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an abnormal, nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the group (see Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given moment. whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released. that in fact is the distinction we would like to propose between maching and assemblage: a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. What we cal machinic statements are machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression. Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.

Deleuze and Guattari, "Of The Refrain"

Psychodiagnostik

2006-06-18T18:01:00.000-06:00

Andy Warhol, Rorschach, 1984,
synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 90 x 70 in.

Spencer Finch, "102 Colors from My Dreams"| 2002, each 9" x 9", ink on paper.

Spencer Finch, "102 Colors from My Dreams" (detail) | 2002, each 9" x 9", ink on paper.

Artist's webpage

Gnarles Barkley, "Crazy"

Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto × Karl Kliem - Trioon I

2006-06-06T01:37:00.000-06:00

Marc Bijl

2006-05-04T11:43:00.000-06:00

Dark Symbolism, 2003

graffiti intervention on a building next to the frankfurter kunstverein
2003

artist's webpage

Browsing the sidebar before the weekend

2006-04-28T22:17:00.000-06:00

Over at The Naked Gaze, Crojas has a post up on power naps by people in power and the censorship of art in China, while Savonarola translates the following bit from Brecht that he calls "A beacon of communist-nihilist optimism to shine on these dark times":

Briefly: when culture, in the midst of its collapse, will be coated with stains, almost a constellation of stains, a veritable deposit of garbage;
when the ideologues will have become too abject to attack property relations, but also too abject to defend them, and the masters they championed, but were not able to serve, will banish them;
when words and concepts, no longer bearing almost any relation to the things, acts and relations they designate, will allow one either to change the latter without changing the former, or to change words while leaving things, acts and relations intact;
when one will need to be prepared to kill in order to get away with one’s life;
when intellectual activity will be so restricted that the very process of exploitation will suffer;
when great figures will no longer be given the time needed to repent;
when treason will have stopped being useful, abjection profitable, or stupidity advisable;
when even the unquenchable blood-thirst of the clergy will no longer suffice and they will have to be cast out;
when there will be nothing left to unmask, because oppression will advance without the mask of democracy, war without the mask of pacifism, and exploitation without the mask of the voluntary consent of the exploited;
when the bloodiest censorship of all thinking will reign supreme, but redundant, all thought having already disappeared;
oh, on that day the proletariat will be able to take charge of a culture reduced to the same state in which it found production: in ruins.

Blanchot

2006-04-25T16:21:00.000-06:00

Knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the horror of knowledge, its squalor, the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with the most insupportable aspects of power. I think of that young prisoner of Auschwitz (he had suffered the worst, led his family to the crematorium, hanged himself; after being saved at the last moment - how can one say that: saved? - he was exempted from contact with dead bodies, but when the SS shot someone, he was obliged to hold the victim's head so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck). When asked how he could bear this, he is supposed to have answered that he "observed the comportment of men before death." I will not believe it. As Lewental, whose notes were found buried near a crematorium wrote to us, "The truth was always more atrocious, more tragic than what will be said about it." Saved at the last minute, the young man of whom I speak was forced to live that last instant again and each time to live it once more, frustrated every time of his own death and made to exchange it every time for the death of all. His response ("I observed the comportment of men...") was not a response; he could not respond. What remains for us to recognize in this account is that when he was faced with an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the so-called dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge. And how, in fact, can one accept not to know? We read books on Aushwitz. The wish of all, in the camps the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.
The Writing of the Disaster, p.82

Scattering Some Speculations About the Scattering of "Scattered Speculations on the Qustion of Value" in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

2006-04-20T16:01:00.000-06:00

Cross-posted at Long Sunday, as part of the symposium on Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak

So I have moved into another text, outside of the main text under consideration (detour has been my M.O. as of late). And besides, how can one concentrate on just one text, when so many other texts are woven into it? Interestingly Spivak only informs the reader of just what place Value holds in her theory within the pages of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: it is a Derridian “lever of intervention” – the lever of transgression and bafflement with which to turn the text.

Hoping then, that this will not appear too off-topic but fold into the on-topic, I want to begin with Spivak’s treatment of an exchange between Deleuze and Foucault as a “site of betrayal”. Their problematic dismissal of representation (to which I must attend to my own re-readings of certain passages in The Order of Things) through a “postrepresentationalist rhetoric” utilizes what Spivak perceives – correctly to some degree – as a “vocabulary [that] hides an essentialist agenda” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 271). So she will then “spend some time with the hegemonic radicals” (248) in order to unpack the problematic in the full knowledge of her precarious position.

Using the form of the conversation to “glimpse the track of ideology” (CPR, 249), Spivak maintains that

“Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West in the eighties was the result of an interested desire to conserve the Subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized “subject-effects” often provided a cover for this subject of knowledge.” (CPR, 248)

“Intellectuals and Power” was a conversation that happened in March of ’72 – and Spivak seems to miss the relevance of the time of this exchange (four years after May ’68). She therefore misses the larger textual weave of those statements by Deleuze and Foucault, implicated as they are in the revolutionary desire of oppressed groups – even if - part of the problem – only in France - that began to speak for themselves (even if there was no speech, but the speaking manifested itself in the struggle). Spivak might criticize Deleuze for positing unicity at the level of the worker – as in the workers’ struggle – but she misses the problem of organization that is here implied, that Deleuze does engage with ideology, but will have nothing to do with the value, the desire, that would manifest itself in any “ideology of the proletariat” (organization through leadership vs. self-organization) – thus it is not Deleuze and Foucault, or the fault of this critique of subjectivity that posits an “undivided subject”. They themselves are not necessarily responsible for this, but rather those who have used them in their wake (Spivak’s work must have its own consequences, of course). Spivak seems to be reprimanding them for not deconstructing properly (if at all, since they weren’t “deconstructionists”), for not being careful enough (and incidentally I must indicate that I do not myself feel as though I am being careful enough with Spivak’s text), that they were somehow being irresponsible thoerists.

Yet, it might also appear that Spivak’s reading here is itself somewhat irresponsible - that by way of her accusations, and the positions they imply, she must disregard that “larger textual weave” so as to miss in Deleuze the place of Science (thermodynamics, chaos…) that she grazes with McCluhan and Lyotard, the significance of a theory of the event (Spivak does however elsewhere acknowledge not being well equipped for such exposition), or the play and importance of major/minor distinctions (such as take place in ATP) and the concept of multiplicity (of importance when considering Foucault as well).

But then, there is always the realization that this particular kind of engagement might run directly against the form of analysis Spivak is putting forth as (“simply”) a literary critic, being too eclectic and perhaps actually providing a cover for the unacknowledged subject of knowledge. Do Foucault and Deleuze then, really remain “incapable of dealing with global capitalism”(250)? Or do they truly “ignore the international division of labor”(250)? While duly noting the points Spivak is making here, I must in partial defense of their exchange posit my own answer to these questions as “no”.

So why is it that Foucault and Deleuze might fall victim to the kind of valuing that Spivak is able to avoid? Well, she makes the reader aware of her complicities, of course. Spivak is seduced by cappuccinos, by Commes de Garcon, 100% artist-woven cotton, and a position at Columbia University along with the comforts it provides (that she can’t seem to say enough about - if only to reveal the complicities of the University itself, of course);she is after all, a real New Yorker. These points in her text, as she would say, are salutary.

But then just when dismissed, Deleuze returns, brushed off but still of some use – no different really, from the treatment he receives in “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value”, as Jon has already pointed to. The Anti-Oedipal gesture, it seems, has done some service toward the questioning of Value after all. The flows of “desiring-production” are recognized as a working out of the possibilities of the theory of value, marking the point where value and desire are nearly synonymous in their “nominalist catachresis”, since

“Just as “value” itself is a misleading word because, strictly speaking, it is catachrestic, so is “desire’ misleading because of its paleonymic burden of an originary phenomenal passion – from philosophical intentionality on the one hand to psychoanalytic definitive lack on the other.” (CPR, 105)

And the question that keeps returning: what kind of value? Aesthetic, subjective, otherwise? There is the “valuing” of individuals within regimes of communication, such as Foucault would point to. There is also Value’s role in canon-formation (the problem of choice, indecision, undecidability). (And if literary critics such as Spivak have faced such difficulties in seeking alternative canon-formations, for artists and art historians or critics, it has been no different. The question most asked today when confronted with major art historical texts or survey exhibitions is “what’s been left out?”, and inevitably there is always something, always an axe to grind, since a politics is always at work.) Nate has already mentioned in comments that it is not worthwhile to consider value as substantial, and this I think makes the invocation of Deleuze even more relevant, since perhaps value can be thought not as something substantially existing in time, but rather through time, as a movement and becoming. In the expanded field, value becomes parasitic, a parasite on use-value as Spivak notes. Adorno already recognized a consequence:

The more inexorably the principle of exchange value destroys use value for human beigns, the more deeply does exchange value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment. (The Culture Industry, 39)

Or yet again, Spivak:

In the broad stroke, the economic is the most abstract and rational instance. It is among the visible aggregative apparatuses whose irreducible constituents are the heterogenous pouvoir/savoir field, where the total or expanded form of value is incessantly coded, affectively, cognitively, and in ways that, by being named, are as much effaced as disclosed. (CPR, 104)

In passages that follow, Spivak warns to keep political avant-gardism at bay when considering affective labor – hence the “apocalyptic tone” invoked toward the end of “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” and its shearing of any utopianism. More problematic still are interest and intention, as all decisions have consequences (our complicities) such that our intentions are often those through which the road to a hybridized postmodern postcolonial multiculturalist globalization are paved. She warns as well that in placing ourselves within this textuality we not conflate and confuse “culture” and “power” (the words are comparable, but not the same – as she warns that shifts in the determinations of capital must not be seen as merely the effect of changes in culture). We should also beware of the lurking “epistemic violence” in theory, where the dangers of elitism are not trivial, since often theory can become just another way to differentiate oneself from the underclass. Spivak makes a not to be ignored suggestion that “we must learn to be responsible as we must study to be political” (CPR, 378), and that any “radical art” with a claim to politics must also be responsible if that claim to politics is to truly be implicated in the expanded field of its definition outside of the “simple” politics that merely inheres in aesthetics. (And for what its worth here, the “radical artist” that Spivak attacks in CPR, and so cunningly avoids naming, is Alfredo Jaar.) Every victory is a warning, she says. Caution, vigilance, distance, postponement…Value, class, culture, power…It is here that another warning, this time by Ranciere, comes to mind: “The most deceptive words are evidently the ones most frequently used.”*

I’ll end, then, on the open-ended, with the following from Spivak:

As far as I can understand it, my agenda remains an old-fashioned Marxist one. Marx attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism. They advanced their labor, the capitalist repaid them only partially. Their claim to the rest was their claim to socialism (tone it down: the welfare state; dress it up: civil society). Today in the old metropolitan countries, the capitalist is the benefactor “creating jobs,” and the worker is systematically deprived of welfare because it is a “free” gift. Suppose we analogized globally. Today in the psot-Soviet world, privatization is the kingpin of economic restructuring for globalization. It means a broadstroke change in the global economic pattern – “a new attempt to impose unification on the world by and through the ‘market.’” It is now more than ever impossible for the new or developing states – the newly decolonizing or the old decolonized nations – to escape the orthodox constraints of a “neo-liberal” world economic system that, in the name of Development, and now, “sustainable development,” removes all barriers between itself and fragile national economies, so that any possibility of social redistribution is severely damaged. In this new transnationality, “the new diaspora,” the new scattering of the seeds of “developing” nations so that they can take root on the developed ground, means: Eurocentric migration, labor export both male and female, border crossings, the seeking of political asylum, and the haunting in-place uprooting of “comfort women” in Asia and Africa. By analogy with the Marxian project above, the hyphenated Americans belonging loosely to the first and the fourth groups might rethink themselves as possible agents of exploitation, not its victims; then the idea that the nation-state that they now call home gives “aid” to the nation-state that they still call culture, in order to consolidate the new unification for international capital, might lead to what I call “transnational literacy”[referring to a command of a diversified historical and geographical information system]. Then our multiculturalism, or our sense of the word “culture,” will name different strategic situations from only our own desire to be the agent of a developed civil society. Which we need not give up; but let us want a different agency, shift the position a bit. I have been consistent in my insistence that the economic be kept visible under erasure [in Scattered Speculations]. What good will it do? Who knows? Marx’s books were not enough and the text of his doing remained caught in the squabbles of preparty formation and the vicissitudes of personal life. You work my agenda out. (CPR, 357-358)

* The Names of History, p. 34; also on that page is the following: “Social designates the nonrelation as a principle. It designates the gap between words and things or, more precisely, the gap between nominations and classifications. The classes that name themselves, and that are named, are never what classes must be, in the scientific sense: sets of individuals to which it is possible to attribute rigorously a finite number of common properties.” Deleuze knew this perfectly well when he made the statements to Foucault that Spivak has such malaise with.

Prohibido

2006-04-12T10:58:00.000-06:00

Jean-Luc Nancy, "Cut Throat Sun", translated by Lydie Moudileno

You are called Chicanos. This name shortens your name, Mexicanos, in the language that was once yours but has not remained the language of each one of you. Your name was given back to you, cut. In what language? What language is this word, your name? It is the idiom of a single name as well as your way to cut and shuffle languages: babel without confusion, that you do speak, that your poets do write. You were given back your name, cut, and your language, also cut. (But whom? The others, us, and you too, your other selves within yourselves.) It was a very old name, much older than this Castilian language in which it was first transcribed, copied, and cut; it was an indian name and much older than the name "Indian," by which Mexicans were forcibly baptized before Mexico was called Mexico. Born in the mistake of the Occident thinking it had found the Orient, this name cut off from themselves a land, a history, several territories and several histories, cut off cultures of the sun, suns of culture, of fire, feathers, obsidian, and gold. Iron was cutting into gold. But this iron was itself gold: the gold turning from takin, excrement of the sun, into silver, wealth and power, and it was that gold that severed the sun itself. The Occident brought forht only the Occident, aggravating it, and the same sun just had to set in another ocean. these are your ancestors, all these people, Indians and cutters of Indian. Cut races, mixed bloods.
Cut throut sun: May I return to you, as if it were your emblem, this line by a French poet with so Greek a name, Apollinaire? As if it were your emblem, and almost as your idiom and your music? I don't speak your language, your languages; I only appropriate them through these words of my own language - soleil cou coupe - and I give them back to you. Could it be that the state of language when it no longer belongs to anyone in particular, when it no longer belongs to itself and surrenders itself to all, is poetry?
Your throat: the throat of the rednecks, poor field-workers of Californian, Arizona, and New Mexico (is there a new Mexico?). But you are not the white rednecks. Your red is not overcooked white skin. It is a red gold replacing the white trash, its burns and its cuts. Cut throat: the Mexican sun has been cut from your head, with your head.
Throat slashed red, like a coagulating sun, like a dry and burning source of paint. It was to spurt, later in the thirties, on to the Chicago walls. At the time, you didn't have that identity - that had been yours for centuries, anyway - that chicano cut of identity to which you refer us today, but they were yours, these murals that Pollock or De Kooning would go to see.

This throat has been cut several times. Indian, by a Spanish cut, Spanish, by a yankee cut. Emigrants from the interior of Mexico, migrating through Spanish states like California, Arizona and others, you also became the migrants who cross the border in order to form another frontier, moving in long lines across the fields, penetrating into cities of barrios whose colors contrast so sharply (and the sounds, and the thoughts). Broadway Los Angeles, its buildings ornamented like those in Manhattan, with solemn and businesslike guilloche: how it has become your frontier and your fair and your fever!
Perhaps you barbecue sausages on Sundays in the heights of Griffith Park, and it makes me think of the way Turks barbecue sausages on Sundays in Berlin near the Reichstag. It's almost the same smell.
In order to get there, you had to cross the border, often the law, and the militia, and the police (one arrest every thirteen minutes), and also the Mexican smugglers who sometimes rob you. Sun cut down, one then has to spen the night, to swim across the Rio Grande on one's back with a bundle kept dry on the chest. You were the wetbacks. By this wet mark they recognized that you could be gunned down or exploited. That water is not the water streaming down the sides of the Mayflower, and you do not celebrate Thanksgiving by which America commemorates the gift of America to the Americans, with all its Indians and turkeys. Or, you are in need of water under the sun of that desert you illegally cross, and you are dead, with whitened bones, somewhere around Yuma. Or else, on the freeway that goes North from Tijuana to San Diego, cars, pickups, and Aztec buses have to stop: U.S. officials in their large hats with stiff brims can tell your Chicano faces at a glance. The place is a little above Camp Pendelton, where the Marines are stationed. They have a big board announcing that their camp is dedicated to protecting nature.

Cut throat americans, you are Mexican-Americans. What is this name, American? Another name that has been cut, transplanted, diplaced, stolen. It was not this Italian man called Amerigo, Spain's Piloto Mayor after Columbus had fallen into disgrace, who discovered America, no more than the ones called Americans (U.S. citizens) account for the peoples of the three Americas. You are more American (Native American and proud of it, as is sometimes declared on bumper stickers of old Oldsmobiles that belong to a Zuni, a Hopi, an Apache). More American: but what does American mean?
Language keeps social cohesion, but it keeps it to a limit, to the limit of its own looseness. Lannguage itself is always borderline; it is always at odds with language. But moreover, being loose and invasive, it passes and trespasses the limits; it underlines them and passes them. "American," "Chicano," one can merely understand, too well and not enough, at the same time.
All of this doesn't mean very much. It can only open on the undefined, multiple, radiating, reticulated, and broken track of mestizaje, of metissage, of the cutting, of the uncountable cuttings. Couplings and cuttings: what each "pople" is made of - made of/cut of. Which people can claim it is not? You are Visigoths, Jews, Mandingos, Manchurians, Vikings, Francs, Arabs, as well as people from Aztlan, the legendary land that the Aztecs had already emigrated from, immigrating to central Mexico.
Tell me when you are ready/for the rebirth/the dream of AZTLAN!(Mora)
But the birth of your people is an incessant birth and rebirth, continuing to today - when you come into this world, into this whole world inot which we are all coming. But your rebirth will not mean the return of myth. It will be, and it is already, the foundation of that which has neither pure foundation nor identifiable origin: of that Aztlan that you are coming in from yourselves, cut throat suns. It is a foundation in the cutting. You are, you will be - and who, of us, will be with you? - Like the founders of Los Angeles, the list of whom can be found in the rare-document section of the Berkeley Library: nine Mexican Indians, eight mulattos, two blacks, two Spaniards, one mestizo and one Chinese named Antonio Rodriguez. (Not only is this list a mestizaje of people: it is also a linguistic mestizaje: "mulatto" and "Spaniard" are not of the same register; we mix ideas of "blood" and "nation," and with what has each of these ideas already been mixed?) They founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles de Porciuncula; name that was cut down to LA; L.A. that is always your first city, and a city that is itself cut, made of cuttings. Your first city, but not your capital: decapitated capital, throat cut.
What is your foundation? What will it be? It is, will be, more that America's foundation or opening - cleavage, wound, open mouth - to its own absence of foundation. You make a Founding Fathers mestizaje, showing that all foundation is itself unfounded, and it is well founed to be unfounded. You aren't the only ones to do that. Here and elsewhere, and otherwise, it is the black, the Filipinos, the Jamaicans, the Koreans, the Thais, the Syrians, and however many others, who found in this way, who cut the cities, the languages, the marks. You will not melt into another identity; you will not accomplish the American Dream, no more than the dream of Aztlan. You are, on the contrary, actors of and witnesses to, an immense and extraordinary novelty, and yet it is not a dream: it is a different, completely different "identification," a different rift, a different sectioning of America. And it is not enough to take about America only: in Europe, blacks, Arabs, Chinese, Turks, and Vietnamese people also drive us toward our foundation in the absensce of all foundation, toward this cross-current that cuts and covers territories, faces, languages and makes hitories happen. A history is happening to us, yours or ours, inalienable like all histories. No one is its subject, and we cannot pin it down beforehand in order to know it. Yet, we know the flash signals its presence, but we cannot look at it head-on: the brightness from all those cut throat suns.
The brightness of a sun which is no longer the sacrificer but the sacrificed. It is a different brightness. Or, a brightness even more different: neither sacrificer nor sacrifice. The brightness of an existence - without justification, but not unjustified.
You use the word, and you claim to be, La Raza, the race, the people, nuestra gente.
Therefore you want us to hear this word "race" completely differently, for there is nothing of racism that you are unaware of: it also marks your cut. But you do not know to what extent the thought of "race," and its systematic implementation, extermination that is, prevents us from reeducating our perception of the word, despite everything, despite you. (You also come from an extermination that numbers in the tens of thousands of lives. But it had not imposed itself as "though"; it had not brandised a "concept" or an "idea" of race.) And yet what we will hear in your word, as well as besides the word, is that the gente chicana does not propose the purity of a bloodline nor a superiority. It gets its identity from the cut, in the cuttings. It is no less an identity for it, but it is not an identity in terms of blood or essence.
Your identity is obtained through cuts. Through mestizajes, but also through those cuts that irretrievably separate West Hollywood from East L.A., and those, in the heart of L.A., that slice through Santa Monica Boulevard leaving on one side the memories of the big studios, and on the other, the pawn shops where you hock all the watches, boots, and miserable bits and pieces you've had to forsake.
In naming la raza, you are naming a division of labor, class, and role. La raza was not simply born in Aztlan or in the barrios, it was born in the revolts, strikes, and riots, of the Crusada para la justicia and many other movements. It is not simply a class, but made of the cuttings of classes, as of languages and peoples.
La raza hurt,
bent back - sacrificed
to gringoismo - (Omar Salinas)
Gringo, the name you use for the white American (who claims to be white), derived from Griego, the Greek, who was in the past, the typical foreigner. The same foreigner that made you foreigners on your own land, on the land that everybody and nobody owns. Gringoismo: egoismo.
But I have no intention of celebrating the difference in la raza: that would be celebrating its poverty and mere estrangement. I will not glorify the cutting. The cutting, in its two senses - cutting themselves and mixing - is not to be glorified. There are no words, there is no rejoicing or mourning for its dark radiance. But there is your language and your languages, your poems, your paintings, your plays, and your movies. And let us also make sure we don't just for the sake of another dream of integration and assimilation, for the sake of an easy accommodation of our questions and expectations, assign them to the idea of a "transculture" with its multiple and enriching facets. Your difference, your differences, arrive in a world that pretends to be reclaiming differences in general (is there difference "in general"?), but that can always trap those differences into its indifference. It is always possible for the postromantic celebration of the "spirit of the people" to be made to serve the interests of some overall exploitation of all people.
In such a scheme, you and the black, the white trash, and all the rednecks of the earth are alike. Today an unjustifiable, intolerable identity that is forced on us today by the callous monster of technoeconomic necessity and the management or administration of this necessity. How to cut loose from it, what sort of revolution that would not be already outdated? Maybe that of mestizaje....But that would assume that the fate of misery is linked to the fate of identity: yet if they are linked de facto, must it be a single slice that severs one from the other? This unprecedented question concerns all of us.
Our naked existences: Who wants them? How do we want to want them? Naked: interwoven (metissees), ill-woven (mal tissees), but woven (tissees) on into the other. sharing and crossing and bordering.
This unprecedented question concerns all of us. but it does not return to us as the question of "another world" being born. If a world is a totality of presence where each existence is inscribed, it is no longer certain that we have to reproduce, even if this figure or configuration were transformed. "People of the world!": it is doubtful that such a call could still reach us. "People without a world"?
Chicanos, it may also be something you tell us. With you, with all the cuts similar to yours but singularly yours, large, multiple, less "identifiable" if that is possible - it is not merely change that is shaping up for the world. It is something else (how easy it is to say "something else" when a world is stamping and stamping on itself on the edge of what once was the world). It is a way to be on the border of every possible world: on the edge of what all our possibilities gauge as impossible (let's say: man without a world), that is, however, what happens to us, what is offered to us, exactly what we must confront.
Instead of a "world," its order, its ordinance, its presence, something else, another configuration of space, of time, of community, of history.
Something is happening to us, the same way Aztlan was born one day, the way the Americas were born, the way Chicanos were born, and always in the process of arriving. And, the same way, empires waver and indentities split. "America" can no longer have the absolute self-knowledge. It too is throat cut, a civilization falling to pieces, while "Europe" wonders what its own name might mean: a breathless discourse, breath cut short. A whole history is coming upon us: as always, we cannot see it coming. We only see that it cuts but without being able to tell who is cutting and who is being cut. From the depths of the cut, from its depths or tis surface, from its slice, a dark sun blind us: our own event is neither "one" nor "distinctive" (and is it even an event? How should we take that word?). It comes upon us as you do, clandestine, illegal, scattered. The freedom of history which is "ours," always surprises us.
It is no longer a question of what was called the meeting, or the confrontation, "of the Other." You are more other than the others, you are simultaneously the same as we are and cut from yourselves and from us, as we are also cut.
You say: not even the same where it most resembles, where it most assembles - and still the same, all the same, where it is different, where it disassembles the most. Each one encamped in his camp, and everyone displaced.
What if the U.S. was Mexico?
What if 200,000 Anglo-Saxicans
Were to cross the border each month
to work as gardeners, waiters
3rd chair musicians, movie extras
bouncers, babysitters, chauffeurs
syndicated cartoons, feather-weight boxers, fruit-pickers
and anonymous poets?
What if they were called Waspanos
Waspitos, Wasperos or Waspbacks?
What if literature was life, eh?
What if yo were you
& tu fueras I, Mister? (Guillermo Gomez-Pena)
I say: "you say". By what right? By virtue of whose authority? Or in what sign language? I cannot, I must not say "you say." Cut throat speech. But this speech can also cut: It can cut me/from you/from myself/ from the same/ and from the other. It is the cut that ties me and joins me - to what? to something, to someone that you and I don't know.
I cannot set myself free from this unknown, form this variable. everything has yet to be done: everything has yet to be learned, the ways, the art, and the strength needed to make the cut tie together. But I am already at a point where I can no longer detach myself.
It is no longer possible is to do nothing but look at you (and at myself at the same time). There is nothing left in the spectacle any more. It is no longer possible to take part in the representation of a New World, from the standpoint of another world.
There is sun and there is sun. Once there was Verlaine's sun:
Je suid l'Empire a la fin de la decadence,
Pui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composand des acrostiches indolents
D'un style d'or ou la langueur du soleil danse.
There is the one I am giving back to you, Apollinaires's:
A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
(...)
Tu en as asses de vivre dan l'antiquite grecque et romaine
(...)
Adieu Adieu
Soleil cou coupe
There is also, passing in fron of the sun, other voices close to you, all from far away, from California and elsewhere at the same time:
or growing crystalling
passing in front of the sun
brilliant diffusion speaking in scale
the trivial requiring time to speak of it
direction unvocalized clicks in succession. (Norma Cole)
Still others, farther, closer: the German writer from San Diego:
Als ich den Schalter erreichte, antwortete ich auf die Frage nach meiner Augenfarbe mit den Worten: "Brown, Sir!" Aber vor mir war ein junger Mexikaner an der Reihe, der wie aus einer Marchen aussan. Einem herbeigewunkenen Kollegen gegenuber bezeichnete ihnder Sheriff flusternd als "real cunt."(Reinhard Lettau)
Closer, farther, the Calabrian woman from Strasbourg:
Era nuovo il paese in cui abivata; gli amici non giudivacano le sue debolezze.(Dora Mauro)
We need to relearn everything from "peoples" and "people." We need to relearn everything about identities and cuts, relearn everything about the infinite of the finitudes that are our discrete existence: how they never cease not totalizing themselves, neither in each individual nor in each "people" nor in each "language" nor in "humanity," and how in truth that would be our chance. Our chance for truth. One cannot know that, on cannot seize it like an object of knowledge, or like a philosophical view of the "world." Nonetheless, we have to know, even in an impossible way.
Our science should be the cosmography of a universe of cut-throat suns. Or the anthropology of "l'humanite metissee" ("mestizo humanness," as Ricardo Snachez puts it). But this mestizaje would not be one of races, that would suggest a trope. it would be, in people, peoples, histories, events of existence, the mestizaje of their multiplicities that cannot be assigned to places of pur origins. It would be less a question of mixed identity d'identite metissee than of the mestizaje of identity itself, of any identity.
Singular existences, points of mestizaje, identities are made/cut of singularities (places, moments, languages, passions, skins, accents, laws, prayers, cries, steps, burts). They are in turn the singular events of these compositions and cuts. Like any proper name, Chicano does not appropriate any meaning: it exposes an event, a singular sense. As soon as such a name arises - cut - it exposes all of us to it, to the cut of sense that it is, that it makes, far beyond all signifying. "Chicano" breaks into my identity as a "gringo." It cuts and re-composes it. It makes us all mestizo.
Increasingly, the "mestizos" in South Africa refuse to use this word: metis is only another term of exclusion, imposed on them by a racist legislation. What if it were possible, somewhere else, to change this word into a word that excludes exclusion (not through inclusion and fusion, but through the inscription of cuts)?
The community: as if it were no longer the closure that excludes, but the multiple, cut network from which exclusion only is excluded? Neither the integration of nations nor the disintegration of the masses nor a "milieu" between the two, and always threatened by both: how is this conceivable?
Has there been a world so far? Has there been a History, one single destination for so many singular existences? has there been a singular for so many singularities? Nothing is less certain. But a multitude of arriving and leaving, of mixing and sharing. A multitude of presentations and exhbitions. This multitude gives us day after day, a little more to consider than we know how to consider.
Exposed existences: suspended, fragile, offered, like paintings exposed on walls. Cut throat suns. And we, all of us, you and us, who do not gaze at any spectacle, who do not contemplate any vision. Rather, the walls are holding us and tying us to the exposed fragility.
I can still see the stretched out rows of your people in the fields, bending down over rows of strawberry plants. And the scarlet tram that goes from San Diego to San Ysidro, on the border. And of that border, toward Chula Vista, the wire fence, breached and cut. And the unemployed lying on the sidewalds, in downtown L.A. But I have seen nothing, nothing but cuttings, and the red, and the brown.
Strasbourg, February 1989
Postscriptum
Reservation: Isn't it already going too far to talk about mestizaje? As if mestizaje were "some thing," a substance, an object, an identity (an identity!) that could be grasped and "processed."
Mestizaje is always a very long, vast and obscure story. It is such a slow process that no one can see it happening. A single mestizo does not make for mestizaje. It takes generations - and more, an imperceptible drift toward infinity.
When this story is completed, there is no point in retracing it. Ther end result cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect, encounters and influences.

For the end result is as new and as different as if another "raza," another people had been produced out of thin air. The mix gets lost in the act of mixing. The mixing itself is no longer "mixed," it is an other, no more, no less.
As a twentieth-century Frenchman, I am a mestizo of Spanish and Viking, of Celt and Roman, and more importantly: of je-ne-sais-quoi.
So in the end, what we call "mestizaje" is the advent of the other. The other is always arriving, and always arriving from elsewhere. There is no point in waiting for, predicting, nor programming the other.
Everything, everyone - male, female - who alters me, subjects me to mestizaje. This has nothing to do with mixed blood or mixed cultures. Even the process of "mixing" in general, long celebrated by a certain theoretical literary and artistic tradition - even this kind of "mixing" must remain suspect: it should not be turned into a new substance, a new identity.
A mestizo is someone who is on the border, on the very border of meaning. And we are all out there, exposed. As the century ends, our world has becom a tissue, a metissage of ends and fringes of meaning.
At each point, at each border where my humanity is itself exposed, cut throat, suns aflame with meaning.

Allan Kaprow Dies at Seventy-Eight

2006-04-08T10:11:00.000-06:00

Allan Kaprow: Words (1962-1975)

04.07.06 - Allan Kaprow, an artist who in the 1950s pioneered the form of artistic events known as "happenings," has died at seventy-eight, the Associated Press reports. Kaprow, who taught for years at the University of California, San Diego, passed away at his home in Encinitas; he had been ill for some time and died of natural causes, said friend Tamara Bloomberg. "Contemporary artists are not out to supplant recent modern art with a better kind," Kaprow said in 1966. "They wonder what art might be. Art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is uncertain." Born August 23, 1927, in Atlantic City, NJ, Kaprow often referred to himself as an "un-artist." He is survived by his wife, Coryl, their son, Bram, and three children from a previous marriage. - From Artforum's website.

Read this interview via ::: wood's lot :::

Trimethylxanthine

2006-04-06T16:29:00.000-06:00

Following up on Le Colonel Chabert's follow up to a Charlotte Street post on Balzac on Coffee, and thinking of caffeine in general, are the following excerpts from Martha Rosler's Contribution to Laboratorium(pp.249-271) that I was reminded of when reading the aforementioned blog posts.

Men fear that coffee gives women powers best reserved to men, damages their fertility, and implants dangerously subversive ideas in them, posing an ultimate danger to the family. Initially, english coffee houses ban women. but after everyone calms down, the devotion of women to coffee helps put it in every home. "Coffee, according to the women of Denmark," wrote Isak Dinsen in 1934, "is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the sould." Science and technology come to the aid of the domestication of coffee. "Coffee" - the drink - loses her magical power and becomes an industrial hand maiden both producer and product of the industrial processes of the developed world and of the forces of reproduction and maintenance necessary for this system to run. We have now emerged from the mists of myth to the solid narratives of science, locating historical events in the precise times and places that mark its way of telling. Coffee is the second most valuable (legal) commodity in the world economy, second only to that other fuel, petroleum; "the world's annual bean production could make 3,644,000,000 cubic feet [1,112,000,000 cubic meters] of liquid coffee, a volume equal to the Mississipi's outflow for an hour and a half."

Much more disturbing is the information on Coca-Cola provided by Rosler:

At the 1936 Olympics, Hitler decreed tht Coke bear a caffeine warning label. A German competitor stole some kosher Coke bottle caps and used them in his effort to wean customers away from "Jewish American" Coke. In response, the German Coke bottler provided free Cokes at Hitler Youth rallies and displayed huge swastikas at bottling conventions. At present I see before me a photo from 1939 of paarticipants in a Nazi Volk pageant at the opening of the House of German Art (Haus der Deutsches Kunst) in Munich. It shows two participants in their faux-medieval get-ups drinking bottles of Coke in front of a large Coca-Cola sign.

[...]
During the Second World War, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a telegram requesting ten "Coca-Cola" bottling plants for the troops overseas on June 29, 1943. More than five billion bottles were consumed by military personnel. In many countries, it gave local people their first taste of Coke, paving the way for unprecedented worldwide growth after the war. Eisenhower game Marshal Zhukov a Coke, but Zhukov worried about Stalin's reaction upon learning he was imbibing this symbol of U.S. imperialism. Coke obligingly left out the caramel color, put the drink in a clear bottle with a white cap and a red star, and sent him the first fifty cases of White Coke.
At the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Coca-Cola was there, passing out free six packs. Crowds in Warsaw cheered in 1993 when the first Polish Coca-Cola truck arrived. In South Africa, Coke executives conferred with Nelson Mandela and other political leaders on a smooth transition to black rule; anything else would have led to a decline in sales.

[...]
The first tow countries outside the United States to bottle Coca-Cola were Cuba and Panama, in 1906. French bottling began in 1920. In 1927, Coca-Cola began bottling in Belgium - as well as Bermuda, Columbia, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, Haiti and Burma. In that year, Coca-Cola crossed the Atlantic aboard the Graf Zeppelin.
In 1944, the billionth gallon of Coke syrup was made. In 1953, the second billionth, in 1959 the third billionth, in 1963, the fourht billionth, in 1966, the fifth billionth, in 1969, the sixth billionth, in 1971, the seventh billionth. Coke is now bottled in about one hundred and fifty countries in addition to the United States. If all the Coca-Cola ever produced were in 6.5-ounce bottles and placed end to end, they would wrap around the Earth more than 11,863 times. In 1985, Coke was the first soft drink known to be drunk in outer space. If all the regular-size bottles of Coca-Cola ever produced were placed end to end, they would stretch all the way from Mercury, past Venus, Earth, and Mars, to Jupiter.
The Multinational Monitor has named Coca-Cola - "the Atlanta-based junk drink pusher, with its world-wide domination of the industry and relentless marketing" - as among the ten worst corporations of 1998. It quotes then-president, Couglas Ivester: "This year, even as we sell one billion servings of our products daily, the world still consumes forty seven billion servings of other bererages every day. We're just getting started." Alas for Mr. Ivester and the shareholders of Coca-Cola! With over four hundred billion cups consumed every year, coffee is still the world's most popular beverage. (Interestingly, Japan's best-selling noncarbonated beverage is a coffee-flavored drink called Georgia, a Coca-Cola product.)
Coke buys its ways into school and universities, giving money for favorite programs - generally high profile sports like football - in return for a guaranteed sales monopoly. Mike West, in The Progressive, reports that most such exclusivity deals, such as those signed with large state universities like the University of Minnesota, are brokered by a company called CUM Laude. Its vice president commented: "We don't in fact approach a univeristy with any charitable intent. We're a for-profit corporation." Coke describes "our mission" on its Website: "We exist to create value for our share owners on a long-term basis by building a business that enhances the Coca-Cola company's trademarks. This is also our ultimate commitment." (Hey! What about taste, quality, value??? What about us????)

[...]
Experiment: raise a few generations on Coke and see if they develop osteoporosis, especially since women, spared the likelihood of early death during childbirth or from illness, are living much longer. It is a question whether Diet Coke (and Pepsi), with the substitution of non-nutritive sugar replacements, is an advance over the sugar-laden version; the artificial sweeteners have themselves been accused of negative health effects.
The Coca-Cola hotline informs you "If all the Coca-Cola ever produed were to erupt from the geyser Old Faithful at its normal rate of 15,000 gallons per hour, there would be enough Coca-Cola to flow continuously for 1577 years, from AD 423 to the year 2000."
[...]
Caffeine is that most unromantic alkaloid distillate from the coffee. Coca-Cola may now be the very symbol of American hegemony in the global market-place, but coffee, as we have seen, is closely associated with the history of European intellectual ferment and indeed with the history of the Europeanization of Europe. Coffee is the engine which powers the populace, gooses the brain, makes intellectuals thin like angels or demons - perhaps the shadow double to cocaine, after all. Coffee, drink of civilization, has powered offices and factories of the West since the labor force was persuaded to substitute a stimulant for a depressanet - alcohol - on the job. Coffee, sugar, and milk, the staples of a plebeian life. Cows, the hallmark of settled life since the Neolithic revolution, are naturalized everywhere. But coffee and sugar, and a few other crops, represent the tranformation of the world. Coffee, like sugar, is the transplantation of Arabia to the new colonies. their histories are linked irrevocably, as mentioned above, to the bloody traffic of bodies, to the importation and exploitation of slaves in the "New World," which thenceforth became the primary locale of world coffee production.

Borders, Boundaries, Barricades...

2006-03-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

Mark Tansey, "Doubting Thomas", oil on canvas

The question of boundaries, of possible shifts or displacements along them, and the question of what is being bounded (or unbounded) are preeminent ones. If we are indeed in a liminal period, then the border is not out there somehwere at the edge of the frame but rather it is here, at zero degree, where the x and y coordinates meet. It is a site of encounter, a point of transition. The marginal is all around. - Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, p.234

The guest/host relationship comes into existence solely in and as an occurrence, that of their meeting, their encounter. The host is no host until she has met her guest, the guest is no guest until she meets her host. Every encounter produces, even if for only the flash of an instant, a xenia - the occurrence of coexistence which is also an occurrence of strangeness or foreignness. It is a strange occurrence that, nonetheless, happens constantly; we have no other experience of living than through encounters. We have no other use for language than to have them.
[...]The border is not an edge along the fringe of society and experience but rather their very middle - their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter which being foreign to a situation (which may be life itself) provokes - a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone, with checkpoints and bureaus of exchange, a meeting place and a realm of confustion.
Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossission. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background. - Ibid., pp. 326-27
The term comes from the Greek, dilemmatos, and means "involving two assumptions," and so we begin by proposing that the boundary is not an edge but a conjunction - that the dilemma bears the meaning of conjunction: encounter, possible confusion, alteration exerted through reciprocal influence, etc. - the kind of situation that is typical, I might add, along borders between nations, between speakers of different languages, between neighboring ecosystems, etc. - Ibid., p.339

Elsewhere, the thread remains open, things continue to happen, and the call has been made to take the guardrails down:

The event will never arrive until every dream of carrying some political booty back to the land of the 'real' is renounced; until we reach a universal affirmation of something beyond the picket line, beyond unemployment - unemployability, vagrancy, precarity, the reversibility of futility and unconditional joy, the positivity of anguish. Refusal of the wage-labourer as fetishised ideal in favour of the vagrant, the vagabond. Beckett would surely appreciate this sentiment: only when every worker and student finds their inner tramp is the purposive exoskeleton of capitalism shed and its relative deterritorialization accelerated into the production of a 'new earth'.

How No Can You Go? (Part II)

2006-03-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

What follows is the second part of my contribution to the Long Sunday symposium on Tronti's "The Strategy of The Refusal". The first part is here. This is all still in draft, the last two parts especially. I'm still re-working everything - cleaning it up, deleting, adding, etc. - but it's here for those interested. Comments welcome.

III. Moving Cities: Francis Alys’ Paseos (Strolls)

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.
- Jacques Ranciere

The work of artist Francis Alys builds on a kind of homage to Fluxus that is half Situationist derive and half Benjaminian flaneur. Born in Belgium, Alys has for the past sixteen years lived as a citizen of Mexico City – and it is no doubt due to the eight years he spent as an architect before deciding to become an artist that his interests now are formed from themes of social, urban, and city space. When discussing his work, Alys speaks of “building situations” and “elaborating scenarios” through a ‘practice’ which allows him the fantasy of being a storyteller. There is a sense of playfulness or childishness to his strolls through the labyrinthian networks of the city which is all the more apparent when considering his series of portable sculptures called Ghetto Collectors: small “toy dogs” on a leash that have been outfitted with rollerskate wheels and magnets. Though reproduced in cities across the globe, Alys’ performances involving the Ghetto Collectors were initially designed to be taken through the streets of Mexico City as an examination of what he expressed as the “politics of survival of the place”; such survival was predicated on an economy he perceived to be essentially thriving on nothing – on recycled life. The toy dogs would consume the city’s waste (bottlecaps, bits of metal, coins…) as Alys went about his stroll, a stroll which would only end as soon as the power of attraction supplied by the magnets inside his Ghetto Collectors had been sufficiently used up.

Alys’ Paseos can also be seen as a way of refusing habit, of refusing the normalized pathways of the city so as to build stories ( of drift, fragmentary invention, absence of memory) through the act of walking. His Paseos also resemble the stroll as a kind of “speech act” described by de Certeau in his essay “Walking in the City”: Alys walks in an improvisational childlike wandering that subtracts itself from the city’s panoptic order, making stories that are “composed with the world’s debris”(53). For de Certeau, such walks would be the ‘proliferating illegitimacy of microbe-like, singular, and plural practices’ not eliminated by the order of the “proper name” of this or that particular street, this or that particular space; thereby embodying the “tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.” (58)

If Alys fancies himself as a storyteller then it may not be an exaggeration to make such comparisons to de Certeau, who views the act of walking as an engagement with the surrounding urban environment in which changing steps or cutting away through tangential skips would inform a whole “rhetoric of walking” that destabilizes language. A walk in the city, then, as defined by being a “field of trajectories”. For de Certeau, the city performs an emptying of the imaginary - it erases stories, legends, and fables; it empties itself of “special” and habitable spaces which might otherwise perform the function of exits, instead giving way to an art of walking that, by substituting for such vanishing exits enables space to open back onto “something different”:

What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. (59)

Paolo Virno has also analyzed contemporary forms of metropolitan behavior and their attendant ‘childishness’ – a childishness that can certainly be seen in the Paseos of Alys, which resist both the substantial and the legible. Characterized by a disappearance of “special places” that are slowly being supplanted by “common spaces”, repetition dominates these new behaviors that might provide refuge from the course of the world (60). In this sense Alys embraces what Virno effectively describes as the positive features of being a stranger in one’s own community and “not-feeling-at-home”. Even in Alys’ paintings – scenes derived from future, past, or altogether unrealizeable strolls and performances – solitary figures wander or hover about through desolate and liquid landscapes where they always appear, as Alys himself has acknowledged, to be “looking for a home”. “Common spaces” then, can also be solitary and desolate – or for that matter, precarious - spaces which skirt disaster yet still provide repetition as a form of refuge: the same fairy tale, game, or gesture one more time (61). Such repetition should recall Deleuze’s analysis of the return of the same: when someone (a child, a city-dweller, an artist) repeats the same story, game, or gesture, it is the return of the same inasmuch as that same is different. There might otherwise run the risk of what Virno calls “the emergence of a publicness without a public sphere” that would dictate redistributions of hierarchies and control (62). Alys’ strolls aim at becoming the positive form of a repetition that provides a refuge and a refusal, so as to strategically exit from such risks.

While any possible relationship of Alys’ Paseos to the particular romantic notion of an ‘artist’s journey’ – which I take to be the illusion of a decadent and vulgar individualism – is of complete irrelevance here, I do wish to further locate his urban interactions/interventions within the context of Benjamin’s flaneur, and to a certain extent the Situationist derive (even if Debord happened to have directly opposed the derive to the ‘classical’ notion of a stroll). To take, then, one project of Alys’ in particular: Narcotoursim/Copenhagen, 6-12 May 1996. This work, which truly investigated Deleuze’s assertion that “underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift”(63), outlined a week-long stroll where Alys would walk within the city under the influence of a different drug each day, and document his experience through photographs, notes, or any other material that became relevant. Nowhere in Alys’ many other performances is the solitary, impersonal figure of the flaneur more relevant than this one in particular. For Benjamin, the flaneur traveled in the time of a childhood not necessarily his own, through a “landscape built of sheer life” and anamnestic intoxication. The flaneur’s observations were not to classify, categorize, or otherwise single out the distinctions or social standing of a city’s inhabitants, but instead to level the world within a horizonal structure (‘a more terrifying labyrinth’, as Deleuze would say). And Hashish, which Benjamin for a time experimented with (and it can be assumed or at least imagined was one of Alys’ seven selections), gave similitude an “unlimited relevance” that produced a world where ‘everything was face’ (64).

So why continue with the Lafarguian flaneur as so analogous to the strolls of Alys, even when many critics have dismissed such a comparison as having little to bear on Alys’ projects? Perhaps because the best and most perfect flaneur not only found his home in the homeless multitude to which Benjamin’s fragment from Baudelaire would attest (65), but also because the flaneur found the idleness of the sidewalk stroll to be a productive venture – and Alys certainly fits the profile of a “productive walker”. Benjamin also noted the role of the journalist as flaneur, who counts his leisure hours as work hours too, constructing his stories while exhibiting a worktime visible to everyone in the space of a city where external agitations are made to be profitable. But most of all, it is the flaneur’s idleness, like the interruptive and interventionist idle chatter of humanity examined by Virno (66) which makes such a comparison so necessarily pressing – and as Benjamin wrote: “The idleness of the flaneur is a demonstration against the division of labour.” (67)

Alys’ behavior really is somewhat childlike; his Paseos comprise an art that speaks and builds stories, reappropriating the dreamworld while making maps of new experiences that mirror the desired effectiveness of a derive. And not to forget what on one occasion Deleuze had said about art: that it “ […] no longer retains anything of the personal or rational. In its own way, art says what children say. It is made up of trajectories and becomings, and it too makes maps, both extensive and intensive.”(68)

IV. Anorectic Subjectivities

Maurizio Lazzarato distinguishes in “Struggle, Event, Media”(69) between two paradigmatic bodies in Western control societies – either the obese subject who readily consumes the multifarious possible worlds offered up through advertising and media, or the anorectic who refuses the world, constantly seeing the starvation and destruction transmitted through the television. Yet, this simplification permits the television as only a stream of advertising interrupted by the film or the program, and the anorectic subject is limited to becoming “sick with the world” through absorbing only the disasters of society. There must be more to the anorectic subject than a mere refusal of the world of images depicting a certain hell of capitalism. Are there only negations, or can refusal count as affirmation – and what, exactly, is being refused?

There must be a positive, affirmative anorectic subject who refuses through invention; but it would also amount to an obese subjectivity, an insatiable desire to find or create untapped resources of the multitude. The gaps, voids, potentials are covered over by a world that has become advertising. The anorectic subject is forced to invent and create or risk having desire blocked. An unhinging of new forces of desire has to begin with refusal, it has to begin with the perception and understanding of the infinite ways that capital is capable of controlling and enforcing - through the most microscopic regimes - a received subjectivity that will always come back for more (advertising and media: it’s ‘so harmless’ after all…). But the programs on television are no longer only the interruption of advertising (or the other way around), the programs have themselves become advertising, and it is harder to distinguish between the space and time of the commercial and that of the program which would “interrupt” it. It could almost be said that product placement had moved from its uncanny presence in the Holywood film and directly infiltrated the television programs themselves, which before were the breaks between the advertisements. And in the cinema, the television model has been synthesized into an extended and uninterrupted commercial. There thus exists an indeterminate zone between what is supposed to be entertainment and what is expected of the subject.

As Deleuze might say, there are ways of seizing the possible in the gaps - those imperceptible arrangements and voids. Advertising is that forceful vengeance of capitalism that invades all of life and puts it to work wherever it is, and as Lazzarato recognizes, the prompt for ways of living (food, clothing, styles of life – ways of speaking and behaving), the circulation of opinion – in short: everything that is expected of the subject is something that insists in the hertz waves as ‘incorporeal transformations’. With the Deleuzian analysis that Lazzarato embraces, these sign regimes express commands disguised as seductive messages which describe the world as “something possible”. Massumi has also considered the home as a “regime of passage” – a pourous membrane allowing sings to enter in an circulate; the ultimate capture is one of the movement of the event itself which leads precisely to the problem of belonging.(70)

And what of ‘artistic practices’ within the new situations generated through globalization and the proliferation of institutions? What, if anything, is art supposed to do under such circumstances and how might it benefit from refusal – from its own ‘anorexia’? The upcoming Documenta XII may attempt, under the guise of ‘institutional practices’ to broach some of these questions. It’s three leitmotifs, “is modernism out antiquity?”, “what is bare life?”, and the third, oft repeated “what is to be done?” intend to take full advantage of immaterial production: the model for the latest Documenta will include a “documenta XII magazine” which proposes to utilize over 70 worldwide publications so that it might ask questions as to how artistic theory differs from practice or other forms of politics, artistic work from other kinds of work, etc. However, these questions are not entirely new, and Jacques Ranciere has already done considerable work toward clarifying them, particularly with regard to the notion of ‘modernity’ itself and the place of art within other kinds of activities, stating that: “Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these practices.”(71) Of course, the curator and the institution often have their own artistic ambitions, so to speak – and the organizers of Deocumenta XII, as their website indicates, are approaching these questions with “the aspiration of becoming a platform for the transfer and discursive consolidation of specialized knowledge”. Yet the institution that asks the questions invariably determines the market to a very large degree.

An arrival at antagonism, not a starting point. Saying no – or more appropriately, just refusing in general (however it might be decided to do so) - becomes the means to invest new forms of affirmation, new ways in which to grab hold of the gaps and run with them. The ‘immaterial transformations’ are the site of new potentialities, and Tronti was already beginning to acknowledge this when four years after writing “The Strategy of the Refusal” he went on to say that attention should be paid to capitalism’s “growing phase of development which creates a positive movement in the whole social texture of production without presupposing that the latter is owned and organized by the capitalist class”(72). Refusal, as de Certeau recognized, is an “ageless art” that goes back beyond our contemporary demarcations of workplace and worktime – a refusal might take the form of “la perruque” (“the wig”): “La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer”(73). To create diversions inside of the factory, the office, perhaps even the home by tricking the order through actions that do not obey the law of the place. Such refusals, as Berardi would note, are more about active life and its enhancement than merely indicating some “right to laziness” of which they are nonetheless a part. And then there is Negri, who is at his most cogent when he says that the refusal of work is one thing, outmoded and ineffective as it may be, but the refusal of command, well, that is something else entirely…

Notes

58. “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris.” Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”, in The Practice of Everyday Life (California, 1988), p.107

59. ibid. p.96

60. ibid., p.107

61. See Paolo Virno, “Publicness of the Intellect, Non-State Public Sphere and the Multitude”, archived at: http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/virno02_en.htm

62. ibid.

63. “Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational – not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.” Gilles Deleuze, “On Capitalism and Desire”, Desert Islands, p.262

64. “The category of similarity, which for the waking consciousness has only minimal relevance, attains unlimited relevance in the world of hashish. There, we may say, everything is face: each thing has the degree of bodily presence that allows it to be searched – as one searches a face – for such traits as appear. Under these conditions even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing opposed to it.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard, 1999), p.418 [M1a, 1]

65. “For the perfect flaneur,...it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow....To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world - such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial [!!] natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito....The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy. We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which, with each one of its movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life." Baudelaire, L'Art romantique (Paris), pp. 64-65 ("Le Peintre de la vie moderne"). Ibid., p.443,[M14a,1]

66. See Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude

67. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p.427, [M5, 8]

68. Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say”, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minnesota, 1997), p.65-66

69. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media”, archived at: http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.htm

70. Brian Massumi, Parables For the Virtual (Duke, 2002) p.84-88

71. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum, 2004), p.45

72. See Mario Tronti, “Social Capital”, archived at: http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/tronti_social_capital.html

73. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.25

Pushing Through The Middle

2006-03-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

I've been in a bit of a Deleuzian mood lately, prompted by some readings of the Italian Marxists and no doubt evidenced by the post immediately preceding this one with an excerpt from Deleuze. It has been part of my interest while reading Badiou to (re)consider Deleuze simultaneously, and move through the middle, as it were. Imagine the affective pleasure I experience then, when at the bookstore today I encountered a brand new publication from Semiotext(e) entitled Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. The table of contents also proved to be of interest, especially given that I'm unfamiliar with such essays as "The Indians of Palestine", "May ’68 Didn’t Happen" [on the excess of the event over history], and "The Spoilers of Peace" - all of which seem especially relevant give current circumstances.

Unfortunately I didn't buy it right away. It is, however, now at the top of my reading list with Althusser, Lacan, and some more of Zizek. But the treats don't stop just with Deleuze. Semiotext(e) is also publishing Felix Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers (be sure to look inside that one as well). Could this be...a smear campaign against Badiou's Continuum book-machine? Politics does invade every sphere, they say.

Deleuze: "How Do We Recognize Structuralism"

2006-03-17T15:12:00.000-07:00

Though there is no date assigned to this essay by Deleuze that appears in the Semiotext[e] publication Desert Islands, the papers are arranged chronologically and I suspect this particular essay was a pre-Guattari encounter piece of writing by Deleuze. I thought the following excerpt on the Subject, Practice and the "empty square" interesting and worthy of posting:

As symbolic, it must be for itself its own symbol, and eternally lack its other half that would be likely to come and occupy it. (This void is, however, not a non-being; or at least this non-being is not the being of the negative, but rather the positive being of the “problematic”, the objective being of a problem and of a question.) This is why Foucault can say: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled in. It is nothing more and nothing less than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”
Nevertheless, if the empty square is not filled by a term, it is nevertheless accompanied by an eminently symbolic instance which follows all of its displacements, accompanied without being occupied or filled. And the two, the instance and the place, do not cease to lack each other, and to accompany each other in this manner. The subject is precisely the agency [instance] which follows the empty place: as Lacan says, it is less subject than subjected [assujetti] – subjected to the empty square, subjected to the phallus and to its displacements. Its agility is peerless, or should be. Thus, the subject is essentially intersubjective. To announce the death of God, or even the death of man is nothing. What counts is how. Nietzsche showed already that God dies in several ways; and that the gods die, but from laughter, upon hearing one god say the he is the Only One. Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, and always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones. This is the sense in which Foucalt speaks of “dispersion”; and Levi-Strauss can only define a subjective agency depending on the Object conditions under which the system of truth become convertible and, thus, “simultaneously receivable to several different subjects.”
[…]
Henceforth, a set of complex problems are posed for structuralism, concerning structural “mutations” (Foucault) or “forms of transition” from one structure to another (Althusser). It is always as a function of the empty square that the differential relations are open to new values or variations, and the singularities capable of new distributions, constitutive of another structure. The contradictions must yet be “resolved”, that is, the empty place must be rid of the symbolic events that eclipse it or fill it, and be given over to the subject which must accompany it on new paths, without occupying or deserting it. Thus, there is a structuralist hero: neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal, it is without an identity, made of non-personal individuations and pre-individual singularities. It assures the break-up [l’eclatement] of a structure affected by excess or deficiency; it opposes its own ideal event to the ideal events that we have just described. For a new structure not to pursue adventures that again are analogous to those of the old structure, not to cause fatal contradictions to be reborn, depends on the resistant and creative force of this hero, on its agility in following and safeguarding the displacements, on its power to cause relations to vary and to redistribute singularities, always casting another throw of the dice. This mutation point precisely defines a praxis, or rather the very site where praxis must take hold. For structuralism is not only inseparable from the works that it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the products that it interprets. Whether this practice is therapeutic or political, it designates a point of permanent revolution, or of permanent transfer.

Benjamin's Flaneur

2006-03-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

In the post I'm working on for next week's Long Sunday symposium, I spend a brief amount of time comparing Benjamin's flaneur to the work of artist Francis Alys. The following fragment from Baudelaire made it into the footnotes, but was interesting enough that I thought to post it here. Reading it, I couldn't help but notice just why Deleuze had counted Baudelaire as one of his prized early encounters with literature. From The Arcades Project, p.443,[M14a,1]:

For the perfect flaneur,...it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow....To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world - such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial [!!] natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito....The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy. We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which, with each one of its movements, represents the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life." Baudelaire, L'Art romantique (Paris), pp. 64-65 ("Le Peintre de la vie moderne").

Long Sunday symposium: The Strategy of the Refusal

2006-03-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

An upcoming symposium at Long Sunday taking Mario Tronti's essay "The Strategy of the Refusal" as its point of departure. There's the possibility of a contribution to the posts on my end, with some rather extensive reading required in preparation - from which derives the following that I came across last night:

Sometimes we speak about the childishness of contemporary metropolitan forms of behavior. We speak about it in a deprecatory tone. Once we have agreed that such deprecation is foolish, it would be worth it to ask ourselves if there is something of consistency (in short, a kernel of truth) in the connection between metropolitan life and childhood. Perhaps childhood is the ontogenetic matrix of every subsequent search for protection from the blows of the surrounding world; it exemplifies the necessity of conquering a constituent sense of indecision, an original uncertainty (indecision and uncertainty which at times give way to shame, a feeling unknown to the non-human "baby" which knows from the beginning how to behave). The human baby protects itself by means of repetition (the same fairy tale, one more time, or the same game, or the same gesture). Repetition is understood as a protective strategy in the face of the shock caused by new and unexpected experiences. So, the problem looks like this: is it not true that the experience of the baby is transferred into adult experience, into the prevalent forms of behavior at the center of the great urban aggregates (described by Simmel, Benjamin, and so many others)? The childhood experience of repetition is prolonged even into adulthood, since it constitutes the principal form of safe haven in the absence of solidly established customs, of substantial communities, of a developed and complete ethos. In traditional societies (or, if you like, in the experience of the "people"), the repetition which is so dear to babies gave way to more complex and articulated forms of protection: to ethos; that is to say, to the usages and customs, to the habits which constitute the base of the substantial communities. Now, in the age of the multitude, this substitution no longer occurs. Repetition, far from being replaced, persists. It was Walter Benjamin who got the point. He dedicated a great deal of attention to childhood, to childish games, to the love which a baby has for repetition; and together with this, he identified the sphere in which new forms of perception are created with the technical reproducibility of a work of art (Benjamin, Illuminations). So then, there is some thing to believe in the idea that there is a connection between these two facets of thought. Within the possibility of technical reproduction, the child's request for "one more time" comes back again, strengthened; or we might say that the need for repetition as a form of refuge surfaces again. The publicness of the mind, the conspicuousness of "common places," the general intellect - these are also manifested as forms of the reassuring nature of repetition. It is true: today's multitude has something childish in it: but this something is as serious as can be.
Paolo Virno, "Publicness of the Intellect Non-State Public Sphere and the Multitude"

Understanding Duchamp

2006-03-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

By way of a blog at Seattle's free newspaper The Stranger, I came acrooss this site: http://www.understandingduchamp.com/author/duchamp.html (which for some reason I am unable to hyperlink to) devoted to Marcel Duchamp and put together by a man named Andrew Stafford - whose other project includes a website devoted to the 1965-1971 magazine-in-a-box Aspen. Duchamp has often been a source of inspiration and intrigue for me. So much so that I was compelled to make his work the subject of this blog's first post. At Stafford's site, the surfer can cruise along a timeline (which Duchamp may not have liked) and stop at his infamous The Large Glass to see a flash animation of all the components interacting with one another as interpreted by the site's author via Duchamp's notes (something Duchamp would have loved, no doubt). With the click of a button, you can also close or open his Boite en Valise as well. Clever.

Coin and Conscience

2006-02-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

"The Fight of the Money-Bags and the Coffers"
Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden (fl. 1557), after Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525–69.) Joannes Galle (1600–76), "excudit." [Belgium, 1558?].
23.7 x 30.4 cmCF b4 xx
Second state. Caption below image is in Latin, French and Dutch: Riches make thieves, or, gold and silver have destroyed many.

"Le Cornard Contant"
Engraving; F.L.D. Ciartres "excud." (François Langlois, 1589–1647). [France, early 17th century].
31 x 22 cm, imageCA f1 xx
Possibly a plate from his Oiseaux et Grotesques. The "happy cuckold" does not mind his lost honor, because his "horns of plenty" bring him immeasurable happiness. (French caption).

From Coin and Conscience: Popular Views of Money, Credit, and Speculation at Harvard's Baker Library - via BibliOdyssey.