I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President

Pas au-dela endorses the spirit of Molly Ivins's statement (via). As far as we're concerned, she's the closest thing to a Republican next to Leiberman, maybe closer.

Update: Thanks to Dan Green for a related article on old school George McGovern (though he was before my time, I have been known to proudly sport a handed-down T-shirt adjuring us still, to vote for him, from time to time):

He calls the Patriot Act “completely unnecessary … a contradiction of the Bill of Rights” and counsels resistance if and when the federal police come for our library cards: “I’ll go to jail rather than accept such an invasion of my freedom as an American.”

At 83, George McGovern remains a voice for peace and freedom in a party that looks ready to nominate the militaristic schoolmarm Hillary Clinton as its next standard-bearer. Oh, how the Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism

potenzia

Colin McQuillan in July 2005's Kritikos:

Judith Butler seems to think that Agamben argues for the expansion of the concepts of “humanity” and “politics” to include marginalized and excluded elements of the community.2 Yet she fails to realize that, for Agamben, it is life itself which is at stake. That Butler has not appreciated this is evident in her new book Precarious Life, where she fails to explain why it is life–bare life–which is precarious, excluded, and imperiled, even as she considers the fragility of human rights and the rights of citizens, and a host of other critical political categories.

Slavoj Zizek, reads something different in Agamben, when he says that Agamben shows that liberal democracy is a mask hiding the fact that “ultimately, we are all homo sacer,” that is, in Zizek’s understanding, we are all subject to totalitarian domination and the mechanisms of biopolitical social control. He uses Agamben to make the further claim that there is no democratic solution to this problem. However, inasmuch as he equates bare life merely with the subject of domination and control, Zizek has failed to grasp the potentiality of bare life, that is, life itself, that Agamben develops, in Homo Sacer and elsewhere. This leads Zizek to abandon the intricacies of Agamben’s analyses, and to champion a heroic politics of decision–a politics that Agamben clearly does not share.

[...]

My contention, in this paper, is that Agamben’s conception of the political life is the result of a radical rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as potentiality.

To begin to explore this theme in Agamben’ work, I think it is important to note the Heideggerian matrix of Agamben’s thought. It is important to realize, against Negri, that Spinoza is not the only philosopher of the positivity of potentia and its necessarily political character. These can also be found in Heidegger.

[...]

Further, Agamben understands thought, as Heidegger did, as the appropriation that lets beings be, which lets there be a world. Agamben even calls thought “the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life,” so that only where there is thought can there be a form-of-life “in which it is never possible to isolate something like [bare] life,” clearly echoing Heidegger’s claim that thought is a way of dwelling whose essence is “being-in-the-world.”12 World is the “abode” or “dwelling” of Dasein, its essential context–there is no Dasein without a world, the world is the da- of Dasein, its place. For Agamben, this “essential context” or “indissoluble cohesion” is the “inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities.” And this “inseparable unity” is the potentiality of bare life, comprising both its power to be and its power not to be.

This bears some explaining. Agamben reads Aristotle’s claim that “all potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same”–as meaning that potentiality “maintains itself in relation to its own privation... its own non-Being.”13 In the Arabic tradition, this was known as “perfect potentiality.”14 But it has the curiosity of understanding potentiality only with respect to impotence. Thus, to be a potentiality or to have potential means “to be in relation to one’s own incapacity” and “to be capable of [one’s] own impotentiality.” “Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality,” Agamben writes, “they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality,” by what Heidegger and Agamben will call “poverty.”15

It is only on the edge of the abyss of this impotence, in poverty, then, that “the two terms distinguished and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and form of life) abolish each other and enter into another dimension.”16 In rendering the very opposition of these terms ineffective, Agamben thinks impotentiality opens a space–a margin, a threshold–on which life can survive, free from the sovereign decision, unhinging and emptying the “traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities” which have borne it.17 This impotence does not, however, negate the potentiality of life. Rather, impotence is an integral part of potentiality–it is that part of potentiality that makes “a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life”–in which “the single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always above all power”–possible.18 It is the power of thought. As Agamben writes in The Coming Community:

…thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think... Thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the thought of thought... What it thinks here, however, is not an object, a being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality... In the potentiality that thinks itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself, or, rather, writes its own passivity.
(you might read the whole thing)

In further pursuit of questions raised already here, here and here.

Some of Agamben's own thoughts here, seemingly responding to criticisms vis-à-vis pornography.

Update for non-RSS-slaves: You may also wish to see comments to Kotsko's post here, or the two posts by printculture culminating here.

Richard Rorty jumps aboard

I took down the post linking to Rorty's darkly ironic plea for academic freedom, yes. Let's put it back up but in doing so make some remarks about context. Here's Rorty's context. The reader is invited to compare, if she will, with that of another country, for instance one that has already experienced Fascism. I am thinking of pages 166-173 in David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (if you don't have a copy, you may see The Site for the first three pages, and then The Google for one more--to get a sense. There is ample humor in such cultural comparisons).

But in this country especially, the fact remains that universities and colleges are mostly conservative places, despite the prevailing popular myths. This would seem too obvious to even mention, were it not for the calcified, persistent voices always rising to the occassion, in equal parts chanting, and subtly implying otherwise.
Updated: Tim has more.

Yesterday's news

I'm starting fires elsewhere, apparently. More of related interest here and especially here (maybe beginning with part one).

Critical Theory in South Africa

Based in South Africa, Theoria is an engaged, multidisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal of social and political theory.

Unfortunately, they seem to have stopped pulishing in April of '05, and very little is online. I don't suppose anyone has back copies?

In other last year's news:

"Making fun of something does not prevent you from taking it much more seriously..."

The questions in the second part are more interesting, in response to which, incidentally, Z. sounds a lot like Habermas.

jouissance and boredom

And so, as a currupt nation watched the next Eichmann drone on and on, it's attention was increasingly drawn to the warmly rigid, quasi-smiles of the female mannequins strategically propped behind him, one in puritan frill and the other a sexless dark suit. Their every facial tick, once every few long minutes, provided infinite more of interest than the platitudinous lies floating somewhere in the background. Everyone agreed this meant the strategy was working. (Thank God that, once again, everyone was wrong(?)) Of course if the democrats don't stand up now, they never will.

classic

Mark Crispin Miller, best Daily Show foil yet. Cruel and unusual, or just payback's a bitch? On the latest trends at Satire, Inc., Jodi Dean has more.

not much Internets in Africa

...of the last 100 visitors. Totally forgot for a while, the things sitemeter can do.

Here's Long Sunday, as it sleeps (or rather, collects trackback spam)

And we can zoom in on each of those little dots, with satellite precision and everything.

"(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)"

Resistance––for this was a resistance on my part––often indicates the sensitive point in a reading, the point of incomprehension that organizes it. "How can he write this?" I asked myself. And of anyone?....When Paul de Man dared say that Rousseau's text bore no "blind spot" I felt the same impatience. Impatience is never justified. It should incite one to take one's time and to submit oneself to what is not self-evident––without avoiding it....work at reading and rereading these difficult texts....work at going along with their strategy, made up of audacity, cunning and prudence, and with the intractable necessity that contrains them, with their rhythm, above all, their breath....Their time is that of a long-distance run during which you follow someone who continually addresses you....If sometimes you have the feeling that you are dealing with a thinker who is panting or harried, don't kid yourself: you are reading someone who on the contrary is tracking––polemos without polemics––the most powerful thoughts of our tradition.

JD, Introduction: Desistance, in Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics

from Dream Songs #14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights and gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its! tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

-John Berryman

Boredom, boredom, boredom.

Let the junkspace war,
(bludgeons of soft
war) on boredom rage,
though at safe distance
from potential of those private selves,
in the form of shouts
through plexiglass, always.

Franco Moretti and a UR-blog

Three critical pieces on the celebrity scholar, one here and one here and one here. Elsewhere, a response, abeit rather glib and polished, and perhaps not exactly reassuring.








And if 'literature' is not graspable as genre? If it is uncomfortable and homesick with itself as genre, or as novel, and must be so, by very definition?? Ah, but then the crickets chirp: "all good / all good." To them the grass is mountains. Their song distracts us from the moon.




It's journal season again (to adopt briefly a journalistic tone). New issues of Contretemps (may I recommend the Carolyn D'Cruz), Foucault Studies and IJBS are out, though not yet PMC...you may also wish to read this apt review on the rhetorics of class in the film, "Sideways." Update: also Radical Philosophy (via Theoria).

from The Most High, Aminadab and The Infinite Conversation

"In every room there's a constant coming and going of the most serious working people, an extraordinary buzzing of activity, everyone's busy, and yet the visitor is struck by something sad and useless, as if everyone were yawning in idleness and boredom."

-Maurice Blanchot, The Most High

"With the exception of a few who lost their senses and who had to be reduced to silence, most everyone was on their best behavior, and we witnessed a great effort of solidarity, concord and mutual aid that established a new atmosphere in the house. Nevertheless, although nearly everyone enjoyed a pleasure and comfort they had never known before, no one was happy. Something was missing. Boredom cast its shadow over people's faces. We did not know why the days remained empty, or why, on rising in the morning, we thought with such melancholy of the long hours we would have to live through before the consolation of sleep. At the same time, we began to observe some strange phenomena, or that seemed strange at least to our idle, disengaged minds. First there was a relaxation of enthusiasm and of discipline. This was, you might say, very normal. Enthusiasm gave way to half-heartedness; charity and patience gave way to ill will."

-Aminadab

"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, as Friedrich Schlegel, just as carbon dioxide accumulates in a closed space where too many people find themselves together.

Boredom is the everyday become manifest: consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential––constitutive––trait of being unperceived. Thus the everyday always sends us back to that inapparent and nonetheless unconcealed part of existence that is insignificant because it remains always to the hither side of what signifies it; silent, but with a silence that has already dissipated as soon as we keep still in order to hear it, and that we hear better in the idle chatter, in the unspeaking speech that is soft human murmuring in us and around us.

The everyday is the movement by which man, as though without knowing it, holds himself back in human anonymity. In the everyday we have no name, little personal reality, scarcely a figure, just as we have no social determination to sustain or enclose us. To be sure, I work daily; but in the everyday I am not a worker belonging to the class of those who work. The everyday of work tends to draw me apart from that membership in the collectivity of work that founds its truth..."

-The Infinite Conversation

good things in the world

Courtesy of Chekhov's Mistress, I learn that Dan Wickett of The Emerging Writers Network is offering a 3-for-2, or 4-for-3 deal on subscriptions, from a list of 24 participating literary journals. This sounds like an excellent idea, though I wonder which of these may be most worth reading? Thoughts?

Elsewhere, Marco Roth reviews Kafka: The Decisive Years; and Steve Mitchelmore takes a look at How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett.

without content, precisely

Daniel Morris, writing for BOOKFORUM:

Agamben explains how the dependence of the spectator on that which he cannot produce becomes wholly alienating: "the spectator sees himself as other in the work of art, his being-for-himself as being-outside-himself; and in the pure creative subjectivity at work in the work of art, he does not in any way recover a determinate content and a concrete measure of his existence, but recovers simply his own self in the form of absolute alienation, and he can possess himself only inside this split." But what happens, then, to the function of aesthetic judgment and art criticism? Enter Agamben, philosophical chiaroscurist at large. Piercing the crepuscular contours of art, he recognizes that "every time aesthetic judgment attempts to determine what the beautiful is, it holds in its hands not the beautiful but its shadow, as though its true object were not so much what art is but what it is not: not art but non-art." He notices further that "we must admit, even against ourselves, that everything our critical judgment suggests to us before a work of art belongs precisely to this shadow. . . . When we deny that a work of art is artistic, we mean that it has all the material elements of a work of art with the exception of something essential on which its life depends, just in the same way that we say that a corpse has all the elements of the living body, except that ungraspable something that makes of it a living being."

Contemporary critics of Agamben at times accuse him of reveling in the indeterminacy of naked life. Some even charge that he aestheticizes the denuding of life as a pornographic transfixion for his gaze, and that therefore his understanding of human life is left wanting. These critiques are usually launched against Agamben's two best-known books, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995 [1998]) and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998 [1999]). I mention these criticisms here not because they are facile and misinformed (though they are) but because they emerge from a refusal to understand the full range of Agamben's philosophical project. Agamben is today in his early sixties. When he published The Man Without Content, he was twenty-eight. For decades, his thought has been sailing in search of that ungraspable something that not only constitutes life but also makes it worth living. The Man Without Content begins to chart that course in order to resist the dark temptations of unknowability and ineffability. Kant says somewhere in the Critique of Pure Reason that all possible knowledge and experience are marooned on an island surrounded by the dangerous waters of the unknown. The trick is to discover the best way to set sail. Only when there is no mast in knowledge or experience that can be raised are we in trouble. "In civilizations without boats," Michel Foucault remarked in a 1967 lecture, "dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates." The boats of thought capsize when they no longer carry ideas, categories, and concepts as brigand chasers of our dreams.

Part of the misadventure of aesthetic thought for Agamben is that it traffics in nothingness, death, and the skeletal remains of the living. "Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work," he argues, "it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements. . . . What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. . . . Caught up in laboriously constructing this nothingness, we do not notice that in the meantime art has become a planet of which we only see the dark side, and that aesthetic judgment is . . . the reunion of art and its shadow." In contemporary art, art criticism reaches its terminus: extreme object-centeredness, as Agamben dubs it, "through its holes, stains, slits, and nonpictorial materials, tends increasingly to identify the work of art with the non-artistic product. Thus, becoming aware of its shadow, art immediately receives in itself its own negation. . . . In contemporary art, it is critical judgment that lays bare its own split, thus suppressing and rendering superfluous its own space." Many critics, theorists, and philosophers have phlegmatically resigned themselves to this space of abnegation. Art is important to us because it has no purchase on meaning, significance, or the world. That it does not have to matter is perhaps the only reason it does. Yet Agamben won't go there. Where will he go? In a phrase: to Aristotle, Benjamin, and Kafka.

Agamben finds in Aristotle a radical conception of rhythm that anticipates Benjamin's idea that messianic time itself explodes the continuum of time. He draws a lovely analogy between music and art. A musical piece, though it is somehow in time, allows us nonetheless to perceive rhythm as "something that escapes the incessant flight of instants and appears almost as the presence of an atemporal dimension in time. In the same way, when we are before a work of art or a landscape bathed in the light of its own presence, we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time. There is a stop, an interruption in the incessant flow of instants that, coming from the future, sinks into the past, and this interruption, this stop, is precisely what gives and reveals the particular status, the mode of presence proper to the work of art or the landscape we have before our eyes." Agamben proceeds to say that beholding a work of art is not a static experience but rather an ecstatic one: "It means ecstasy in the epochal opening of rhythm, which gives and holds back. . . . In the experience of the work of art, man stands in the truth, that is, in the origin that has revealed itself to him. . . . In this being-hurled-out into . . . rhythm, artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground."

What art, then, can offer is a solid sense of where we are without itself becoming the ground underneath our feet. If Agamben is right, then chiaroscuro as a philosophical attitude inspired by art makes all the sense in the world. In any case, the work of art as the site of both mystery and epiphany leads Agamben from Aristotle to Benjamin. As is well known, Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" was penned in Paris while he was working on his Arcades Project. By far the most famous of the theses is the stunning reading of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus as an image of the angel of history. The angel sees the sorry debris of the past before its eyes because it is looking in that direction. But the angel can do nothing about this. The storm of progress catches hold of its wings as a violent hurricane, propelling the angel forward. It is throttled headlong into the future but with its eyes and back turned away from what lies ahead. So it cannot see where it is going. All the angel can witness is debris mounting ever more violently as the singular disaster that appears to be history itself. As it is buffeted by the storm of progress, it witnesses less and less this disastrousness. What may have been painfully clear is now a faraway shine. The debris becomes dross. And dross cannot be exchanged for gold. If history is sadness, if what hurts cannot be healed, the angel of history must be a very melancholy angel. "The angel's melancholy," Agamben suggests, "is the consciousness that he has adopted alienation as his world; it is the nostalgia of a reality that he can possess only by making it unreal." Just as artists and spectators belong together, so the angel of history and the angel of art must inhabit the same damaged world. "The past that the angel of history is no longer able to comprehend reconstitutes its form," Agamben therefore claims, "in front of the angel of art; but this form is the alienated image in which the past finds its truth again only on condition of negating it, and knowledge of the new is possible only in the nontruth of the old."

In a rather novel way, Agamben brings Benjamin and Kafka into dialogue as a way of imagining the historical redemption of the aesthetically alienated image of the past. He finds in Kafka "the figure of the guilty innocent, of the tragic hero who expresses in all his greatness and misery the precarious significance of human action in the interval between what is no longer and what is not yet." Even though tragedy lies in this interval, the interval itself cannot be totally tragic. As revelatory appearance, as truth, this space returns to us our essential solidarity and common ground. But that means returning to the original space of art in the wake of aesthetics exposed in its nakedness: cadaverized categories of analysis useful only for men without content......

well, fuckit, ok

Tens of thousands of people used the ImpeachBush.org web site to send an email or fax to their elected official demanding that Bush and Cheney be impeached for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. More than one thousand people per hour sent letters in the first twelve hours alone.

Stupid fucking sanctimonious waste of paper.
Update: Help this blog atone for its deplorable veneer of cynicism by clicking a link, or two.
Update II: Oh that's it man, Yglesias has got to go. This has been a pas au-delà event.

these debates they are not new

"The quarrels about “pure art” and about art with a tendency took place between the liberals and the “populists”. They do not become us. Materialistic dialectics are above this; from the point of view of an objective historical process, art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds necessary rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and feeling closer and contrasts them with one another, it enriches the spiritual experience of the individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes it more flexible, more responsive, it enlarges the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, it educates the individual, the social group, the class and nation. [A pre-toast to Matthew Arnold here.] And this it does quite independently or whether it appears in a given case under the flag of a “pure” or of a frankly tendencious art. In our Russian social development tendenciousness was the banner of the intelligentsia which sought contact with the people. The helpless intelligenstia, crushed by Tsarism and deprived of a cultural environment, sought support in the lower strata of society and tried to prove to the “people” that it was thinking only of them, living only for them and that it loved them “terribly”. And just as the “populists” who went to the people were ready to do without clean linen and without a comb and without a toothbrush, so the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice the “subtleties” of form in its art, in order to give the most direct and spontaneos expression to the sufferings and hopes of the oppressed. On the other hand, “pure” art was the banner of the rising bourgeoisie, which could not openly declare its bourgeois character, and which at the same time tried to keep the intelligentsia in its service. The Marxist point of view is far removed from these tendencies, which were historically necessary, but which have become historically passé . Keeping on the plane of scientific investigation, Marxism seeks with the same assurance the social roots of the “pure” as well as of the tendencious art. It does not at all “incriminate” a poet with the thoughts and feelings which he expresses, but raises questions of a much more profound significance, namely, to which order of feelings does a given artistic work correspond in all its peculiarities? What are the social conditions of these thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historic development of a society and a class? And, further, what literary heritage has entered into the elaboration of the new form? Under the influence of what historic impulse have the new complexes of feelings and thoughts broken through the shell which divides them from the sphere of poetic consciousness? The investigation may become complicated, detailed or individualized, but its fundamental idea will be that of the subsidiary role which art plays in the social process...

[T]he Formalist school...leads to the superstition of the word. Having counted the adjectives, and weighed the lines, and measured the rhythms, a Formalist either stops silent with an expression of a man who does not know what to do with himself, or throws out an unexpected generalization which contains five per cent of Formalism and ninety-five per cent of the most uncritical intuition."

–Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunksky, 168-172

poshlost'

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo–these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost' in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, mothmythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know..."

–Vladimir Nabokov


King Kong. Baudrillard. Shopping Malls. Disney Land. MTV. Dave Eggers. *

On some level one cannot help but recognize the sheer dominance of these forces. Speaking generally, they are the air we breath. This does not mean that they are natural. Liberals (the politicians, not the ideals of any philosophy - which for many reasons, such as Capitalism, do not exist) would have more nuanced cooking shows, a slightly better quality of life for slightly more people for a slightly longer time. A stronger, more gentle war on various emotional states. Their prospects, of course, hinge on a fundamental delusion of sorts – namely a world where conservatives (at their current stage on the several-decades-developing road to fascism) simply do not exist. Indeed, much of the liberal delusion consists of an elaborate maintainence of this snobbery.** (And, to be fair, much of the conservative machine depends on exploiting the resentment springing from this impression.) But those are all familiar enough complaints, to be sure. And like everywhere, such generalizations are perhaps only useful up to a certain point.

But if it is even worth mentioning (and I'm not convinced it is), this realm is where a stupid film like Team America hits hardest. It "hits" in the sense that it literally performs a kind of violence on its audience (for which we have few words yet, really – apart from the usual phrases, "beating over the head," "insulting the intelligence," etc.) Lenny Bruce's form of satire comes to mind (and yet, is it funny? Really?). That it panders equally to liberals and conservatives is perhaps worth a chuckle. It's also very much of Zizekian topicality, in fact. I wonder if he's seen it.

Having so warned against generalizations, I will now proceed to generalize rather grossly. I do think there is some wisdom in making an effort not to speak of the banal, or at least carefully, and not in a manner that treats it with any more dignity than that with which it may handles us. But faced with such wanton excess (itself a symptom, or a kind of virus, yes of course, if one that also seems now like a sort of pre-requisite for writers of all stripes to catch, and especially if one is to be such a thing as the voice of one's generation – and what alternatives for "success" are there, really?) - faced with such wanton excess (and now it's merely reactionary cousin, cuteness or "the new sincerity"),.....actually, you know what? I'm not at all sure we even understand the original context of this "new sincerity" enough to comment, and certainly not enough to...what's the word for such lazy dismissive gestures, albeit founded on a bedrock of initial intelligence, anyway? Maybe before denying it of any and all potential for future good, we should take another look. (Then again, maybe not.)

Ah, but if only these problems were simple.



*This list is dangerously unfair. One order not to be taken as a t-rist, one should probably be more precise.

** Unwilling as they are to confront their own embeddedness in the class and warfare about which they may not ever philosophically speak, knowing full-well that communism and Jack Kennedy are long dead and of course underground.

Update: This post tries to say far to much in one breath, and should probably be destroyed entirely, discreetly and quietly.

all your philosophy is belong to chatter; Or: 'resistance' to the present

Freud:

"that the interpretation of dreams may enable us to draw conclusions as to the structure of our mental apparatus which we have hoped for in vain from philosophy"

Cavell:

"our vain waiting for philosophy is now to be replaced by the positive work of doing something else, call it psychoanalysis [Or...] that our waiting for philosophy is at last no longer vain, that philosphy has now been fulfilled in the form of psychoanalysis."

and Herbert Schwaab, writing to the film-philosophy listserv this morning, adds:

Good films compel us to think, talk and write about them. We cannot prove that they are good films, but we can let others participate in the experience of the films. Good readings of good films succeed in communicating this experience, turning the reception of the reading itself into a worthwhile and entertaining experience. It is a also transformative and teaching experience. That's when the philosophy embodied in them is more than a simple illustration of philosophical items. The film themselves contribute to philosophy.
I'd like to discuss a contrasting phenomenon: What are bad and uninteresting movies doing to us? Do they lead to something which could be called philosophical chatter? Cavell is very relunctant to talk about more recent films. In "Cities of Words" he refers to "The Matrix" as a film of some interest, but there is nothing that compels him to write about it. Isn't all the writing on "The Matrix" philosophical chatter? We have already discussed the topic of philosophically overrated movies in the salon some months ago (The Usual Suspects) but it is one of those items which should be discussed again and again. Cavell offers some good thoughts on that topic, because whereas as films such as "The Matrix" and "The Truman Show" have the label philosophy pinned on clearly visibly for everyone, Cavell deals with films that are not forcing philosophy on us.

Imagine the stray jobs that will drop* when the anti-Theorists finally come to realize that not everyone responding to/and in an age of analysis...

More interestingly, a wonderful new blog on the horizon.

And their seminar.

*"Stray Jaws; Straw Jobs" – maybe a good and honest political slogan?

Update: Relatedly, John Holbo has a fascinating post on Heidegger and baby toys an ear for irony, lest there be any doubt.

Highly recommended reading

Today at ReadySteadyBook. Also finally reading this (via).

Blanchot porn

courtesy of the good guys, Nancy et.al.

more quickly than we thought, we

degenerate...

Gary is absolutely right of course.

listing

The brilliant national dialogue continues. (For those who need it (?) an obvious translation of the latter.)

Medea Benjamin's list of good things is pretty much spot on. From the t r u t h o u t community, this handsome frustration with the Democrat big mommy party stands out.

Juan Cole (now with sporadic comments) and Roberto Unger have some actual thoughts.

Iran: Cold Warriors on the spittle march (how many times will the American consumertorturee let this bad episode rerun––and if you haven't seen "The Power of Nightmares" by this point....well pffft. You're simply not a public citizen.) All options remain on the table. (For the stubborn, envious little Bush, every problem is just so much sapling brush, begging to be cleared and burned.)

the story so far

Simon Schama in the Guardian:

Sibyl looked mournfully ahead and saw that the second half of the noughties would see the beginnings of interPodding: wePods designed for Sharing; uPods that could store memories and retrieve them on command. But she sighed when she remembered the success of godPods, which purported to deliver personal messages from the Beyond to the wired. They were only half over and Sibyl was already sick of the Noughties. Roll on the Tenties, she thought. What a dickhead that would be!

YH finds "an antidote to [the] Frankfurterisch take on the Enlightenment..."

SM compiles some modest demands for litbloggersauditors; and here's the very newest and very latest thing you absolutely need to read, or die regressing.

broken flowers

Ah, Jorge Luis Borges. The barbs for French literature are well-placed.

bringing the past to light

A proposal: from now on, every crime committed in The United States (and very soon the world) shall be considered as an affront to the physical body of the "President" himself. This would have the added benefit of eliminating the need for a lot of trial lawyers, as well as activist judges. The law would simply become a matter of decree, just executions, spectacular public stonings and so forth.

Not that all property would necessarily belong to the "President," but the five or six owning corporations could all petition him equally for favor in his rulings.

Either that or someone could just give the Infinite Corrector, the Most Corrected-in-Chief–– a copy of SIMS (TM), Penal Eddition. We could tell him it was real (it could distract him from the bottle for a while).

King Torture

Meanwhile, somewhere in the UK...



Susan Sontag, writing a year and a half before she died (via):

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''

Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide.

[...]

To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. (more)

See also Tom Tomorrow; FRONTLINE; Paul Street; Gary Corseri...

From the first issue of n+1

Editorial Statement

We are living in an era of demented self-censorship. The old private matters–the functions of the body, the chase after love and money, the unhappiness of the family–are now the commonest stuff of public life. We are rotten with confession. But try saying that the act we call "war" would more properly be termed a massacre, and that the state we call "occupation" would more properly be termed a war; that the conspiracy theories, here and abroad, which have not yet been proved true by Seymour Hersh or the General Accounting Office are probably, nonetheless, true; or that the political freedoms so cherished and, really, so necessary, are also the mask of a more prevasive, insidious repression–try saying all this, or any of it, and see how far you get. Then try saying it in a complex way, at some length, expressing as you do so an actual human personality.

We are living in a time when Nabokov and Henry James are read in Tehran but we have pornography and publicity at home; a time when serious writing about culture has become the exclusive province of bullies, reactionaries, and Englishmen; a time when journalists can refer to Vladimir Sorokin, a towering figure of Russian postmodernism, as a "shocking" writer who became a "best seller" after his books were trampled in public by a neo-fascist youth group; a time when a magazine like Lingua Franca can't publish, but Zagat prospers. In the future, it will be seen as a time when some of the best people in our intellectual class gave their "critical support" to a hubristic, suicidal adventure in Iraq.

The problem is hardly a lack of magazines, even literary magazines. Culture can expand now to fill the superstore. But civilization is the dream of advance–to find the new, or take what we know from the past and say it with the care that only the living can claim. "One must have been in exile and in the wilds to appreciate a new periodical," said Alexander Herzen, founder of the mighty Bell. Perhaps you live in the city or the town, and in the safety of your own country. But you have known the exile, and are acquainted with the wilds.

Reproduced with permission, and in gratitude.
You may of course subscribe, here.

"I am not a crook"

At the speed of blog, Alain at Long Sunday picks up on a previous note.

Perhaps some further help is needed to distinguish the terrorist:



from the democratic citizens:



Does that help you now, President Cheney? Ian McEwan?

Meanwhile, somewhere in the UK...

Holiday Cheer, updated, erased, updated

My post at Said the Gramophone is finally up. Quite an honor.



We have a running joke that the last song really says, "cept you in me, babe..."




Thanks also to The Decline, whose sugggestions very nearly made the cut (an impossible task, choosing three songs; they are inevitably just Mrs. Right Now's). The Decline suggested "Way it Goes" from the wonderful tribute album, Por Vida, which I have since purchased along with two other Alejandro Escovedo albums.

Impulse

An interesting article on Canadian-born Impulse Magazine:

During the course of its brilliant 15-year run (its last issue was in 1990), Impulse proudly showcased contributions from so many cultural heavyweights, a look back at the roster is dazzling: Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Duane Michaels, Alex Katz, Patti Smith, Leon Golub, Joel-Peter Witkin, Arnaud Maggs, Art Spiegelman, Komar + Malamid, Christian Boltanski, Semiotext(e) founder Sylvere Lotringer, Kathy Acker, Paul Virilio, Jenny Holzer, Eduardo Galeano, Gerard Malanga, Russ Meyer, James Wines, Maurice Blanchot, Bruce Mau, J.G. Ballard, Marguerite Duras, William Burroughs, Jean Baudrillard, as well as a lot of Canadian artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers who are now all in mid-career [...]

It's dizzying for sure. And sobering. The past sure is a different country -- and it's a really great place to visit. Actually, the whole Impulse Archeology exhibition gives a kind of pang: Everything's a lot tighter now, more bureaucratic, more circumspect. We're all more careful. But Impulse Archeology is a reminder of the way we all were. The exhibition doesn't so much awaken nostalgia as it does rekindle desire. Here's an excerpt from an editorial Garnet wrote in Impulse's summer issue for 1987 (it's on the gallery wall as you go in): "We want to know everything. We want it to be different. We want it fresh, we want it alive. We'd rather be a part of culture than history. At Impulse, we take it in and we give it out. We reflect the mirror in which we reside. You are the image in the mirror of the magazine you hold in your hands. We want you to know you are not alone. And we want you to know." It was bliss, wasn't it?

every year

I swear I keep wanting this wonderful fellow to begin speaking in Spanish.

In other literary news, John Emerson posts Nine Theses for the MLA Convention; some more direct and mildly amusing stuff from the MLA conference if that holds any interest; and President Nixon answers some questions about executive power (via Counterpunch):

NIXON: Well, what I, at root I had in mind I think was perhaps much better stated by Lincoln during the War between the States. Lincoln said, and I think I can remember the quote almost exactly, he said, "Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation."

Now that's the kind of action I'm referring to. Of course in Lincoln's case it was the survival of the Union in wartime, it's the defense of the nation and, who knows, perhaps the survival of the nation.

FROST: But there was no comparison was there, between the situation you faced and the situation Lincoln faced, for instance?

NIXON: This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president. Now it's true that we didn't have the North and the South—

FROST: But when you said, as you said when we were talking about the Huston Plan, you know, "If the president orders it, that makes it legal", as it were: Is the president in that sense—is there anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that suggests the president is that far of a sovereign, that far above the law?

NIXON: No, there isn't. There's nothing specific that the Constitution contemplates in that respect. I haven't read every word, every jot and every title, but I do know this: That it has been, however, argued that as far as a president is concerned, that in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we're all talking about.

Ah yes, how far we've come. We'd all be in despair alley were it not for American Samizdat's The Rose-Colored News Report.

D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

It is a great book.

At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won't do.

And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he's not sure of himselœ And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

The artist was so much greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical- transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or any- thing else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

One wearies of the grand serieux. There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.

In his 'human' self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great.

It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things...(full here)

courtesy of John Pistelli

Lazy Sunday

The Alcoholic in Chief, and then...

there's this...is it just me or does one of those guys look very much like the now-legendary freestyle donut-warrior?

hobbyhorse, anti-Enlightened

This just in: FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA WAS REALLY NOT THAT GOOD. Yes, the originals are still better.

It's true, we've linked to things like this before. And now the most tired and tiresome debate in academic history is producing––in what must surely qualify as a miracle after decades of sucking on nature's pipe––indeed fresh juice. We could go further, of course, and point to a real, living example easily enough (no Real-ly, we could). Just as easy as the next fellow, in fact. Meanwhile, "Nobody needs French Theory," so sayeth Baudrillard, and like all mail-order mystics and dime-a-dozen pap gurus, his words they do carry an indulgent grain of truth. In any case John Holbo will be thrilled, we can be sure of it. (And no, it is not without some bemusement, we confess, that we observe the latter, irenic chief anti-Theory/[T]heory investor, caught unawares having been scooped twice in one week, first by one Michel Foucault and then by one Slavoj Zizek....the Rule of Affability, she dictates that we can only assume the latter response, no doubt the painstaking fruition of "serious study" of Zizek's better work, was far more Socratic than it was revealing.)

Oh, poor Socratic tick, you say, how thy smiling loophole, "I was only making fun of myself" doth find its cousin in the "I was only joking" for which the "Theorists" are forever castigated.

However, now that the 1970s and 1980s are probably over, and literature departments have had ample time to either earn some philosophic chops and genuine humility or risk being mocked off the podium altogether (it is only a matter of time; in the grip of this backlash we are forever ebbing and regressing––but don't think to hard about it, these things are all inevitable), well let's go off, shall we? Off to study some Francophone philosophy while we still can, shall we? And with someone interested in reading the philosophers themselves, that is, if we are truly lucky. Perhaps even in another language. Their own, for example. Poetry and literature too, absolutely, but please none of that Baudrillardian vomit. No, it was not your professors' faults, but you people have ruined literature departments for good. We mean it; that's it, man, we're back to The Snowman age again, Christian morality in Frost (yes, we remember that movie too) and counting caesurae, enjambments, alliteration and rhyming couplets; thanks for nothing. Don't get us wrong; we were brought up on this stuff, and we love it dearly. But the way things are looking now, if we're very lucky, in a good twenty years poststructuralism may even be discovered. Oh, how the image eternally returns, and the shape of the poem itself is so very snowman-like, almost an allegory of itself (one might someday say!) but Nietzsche he is long dead, and Bachelard was just some hobo in a Santa suit. And anyway none of them spoke English, and probably their ears were frozen (philosophers, as we all know, cannot sing).

The would-be genre historians of "Theory" are still all 'wong', of course (hell, in Russia they call it "filosophia," or so we hear; perhaps someone shall write a book condemning that soon enough), but let us leave them, for now. Condemned as they are to tread water upside down; happily lecturing the fishes, they are also drowning.

Still, Dear Lord, the sheer volume of bubbles they will release! Both goggled and madly googling, treading upside down as they address the same old gathered fishes (to be fair, those must be magnifying goggles) and gossiping so very freely about the whales! Our Vermont neighbor Greenblatt, sure, he's close enough for Derrida, as is Eagleton for Wittgenstein. These are exotic fish indeed, if one's target is actual philosophy. But so on they tred, splashing and quoting so much they can hardly hear themselves talk (noses, eternally pinched), but confident nontheless, that their books will eventually sell well enough, condemned as they are between the trivial and the obvious, and something they would rather still talk nothing about (let's call it for now the sun, shining on an upturned ass).



All by way of saying that I'm supremely grateful this year for some extraordinary pagan presence.

And...then...some and some...

the best thing written about DFW in some time

...is here, in case you missed it. Simply spot on. I wonder if SEK agrees. -MAC

..

this smart...and this very funny.

...

I thought this was very interesting.

Plus ça change

....



Time to pick up some threads from back here shortly. (Sorry again, about all the fine comments being flushed, but I suppose some things are inevitable. This space has never really aspired to a popular audience anyway, at least not without serious disquiet and reservation, call it snobbery if you want. But I do sound a bit boring in comparison. Everyone should, I think, be forced to re-read their own blog at least once a year. A note to whoever's been downloading, please be advised by my pride that it's ancient and unworthy and long since revised stuff, there.)

note to self

Do not give correct email address to Amazon.com, ever.

Either that or Google is just selling us off, in pieces, as we all expected they eventually would. Spam filter my ass. Really, is there anything less interesting than spam?

Cheney Administration Votes "Go Fuck Yourself" #722

Merry Fucking Christmas, and we'll target gay pride rallies as terrorist plots if we damn well feel like lying about it. So this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back, eh? Undercover feds nostalgic for cointelpro days, staging arrests to provoke the crowd to justify tear-gassing them, and snapping photos from unmarked cars, etc? I must say, even if the NYTimes sat on these stories for a year, it hardly comes as any revelation, at least not to any of those who actually attended these protests. Yes, that's right, I confess to looking kindly on one of those "potential terrorists" insofar as he protested this war before it began as opposed to two years too late, and only when politically feasible. And I further confess that on more than one occasion he may have pointed out the aspiring photojournalist undercover gents, on more than one occasion as they sat in their speedy unmarked cars, to kind middle-aged yuppie folks concerned about the sea turtles as they deigned to walk across the street, on their merry way to and from exercising their legal right to peacable assembly (despite the very latest in police provocation) and to that dreaded once-revolutionary force known as freedom of speech. (This fellow I know, even his blond dog was a potential terrorist, wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I'm more loyal than Lieberman, Daschle, Clinton...etc.") Pointed them out, he did, half a decade ago, as they sat there snapping pictures and telling jokes.

But anyone who's read anything about the 60's era knows that it was only a massive public outcry that instigated all the reforms in 70's in surveillance laws, reforms explicitly designed to protect these rights (while in reality the insidious military-prison-industrial backlash--including the despicable torture of modern-day slaves, otherwise known as US inmates--has happily quadrupled itself, unabated). But whatever nudges the decrepit and rusting wheels of justice along at this stage, hey, let's have it. They blatantly broke the law this time, yet still expect us to blindly entrust the constitution to pathological liars. Just when you think this all-war all-petty-emotional-blackmail all-the-time schtick can't possibly get any more ridiculous, it does. That would be Chutzpah, folks; spelled "real balls." When the alternative is Lieberman, I'll grant you that it's not exactly a tough sell.

Harold Bloom waxes blunt; New discoveries in Sovietology; And better news elsewhere, particularly from the global south (narcosphere has more).

ReadySteadySymposium

Do check out Mark Thwaite's Books of the Year Symposium (of which I'm greatly honored to be a part, if slightly embarrassed to be placed, straggler-fasion, on top). Truly, there is not enough time in the day, nor days in the week..

..

I've done a petty and futile, shameless thing.

oh dear...

A bit of (feminist) Theory, and NPR self-destructs. All their pat humanistic clichés and softly-smug male condescension, it comes a crumblin' down.

Typepad, meanwhile....well.

During routine maintenance of our network and storage systems last night, we experienced an issue with our primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored. [oops!] We are currently running diagnostics on the device, and working to restore your data as soon as possible. Verifying data can be a slow process and will take time. [i.e., all day]

In the meantime we are currently deploying backup copies of your weblogs from approximately 2 days ago. [actually, six] This is what will be displayed for your blog. [weird] The TypePad application is currently unavailable, which means that users will not be able to log in, and visitors to weblogs will not be able to post comments. We are working to bring TypePad back online as soon as possible.

We appreciate your patience as we work through these issues. [We also have no way to transfer ownership, and our spam filter just plain doesn't work.]

Say, who knows anything about WordPress?

John Whitelegg issues the sole dissent in a debate on environmentalism and capitalism:

At the core of this debate I am sure that Jonathan [Porritt] and I share a vision of what a sustainable community, town, city, region or world could look like. I don’t think we will get there by putting all our eggs in the basket of capitalism. Capitalism, after all, has given us slavery, small children working down coal mines, death and disease from pollution, and appalling disregard for people and communities – including my own family and community when cotton mills shut down in Oldham, Lancashire, in the early 1960s. Such depredations continue around the world today, often invisible to the eye even of the most informed or sensitive of observers.

This destructive, unsustainable dynamic has to stop. The process of stopping it will involve all those things that capitalist do not like (including regulation and taxation); changes in local government to give local communities and local people more power over what happens on their “patch”; and the kind of social change that ended slavery and brought down the Berlin wall. I have absolutely no doubt that this social change will take place and if I have my way it will be sooner rather than later.

ipop, you pop, we pop (and look to France)

Thinking of Zizek's recent comments (he has some funny things to say about Rawls, indeed)...but also about another student rebellion (and a genuinely populist one at that--in eclectic composition not unlike the genuinely international, though unfortunately-dubbed "anti-globalization" movement, whose roots are traceable back to Seattle, etc.)...

Meanwhile Negri: "This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants."

Zizek's calls the recent riots in France a "zero-level protest," or "a protest that wants nothing" in speaking of the "cycles of violence" identifiably linked to the neoliberal state (which produces its own excess and backlash, etc.) Violence being de facto an admission of relative impotence. But in his conception, if "post-ideology" means anything it is the context of this certain nihilism.

Might it be at all valuable, or worthwhile, to point out the deep roots of this alleged "post?" After all, what has come to be cited and invokded as "May '68" was by no means a purely, or clearly, utopian confluence of identity politics or politically-targetted and precise rebellion, judging from Blanchot and similar on the matter...Zizek opposes the recent riots to May '68, but his argument (such as it is) only serves to unite them. One wonders if he's even read much of the history (and philosophical fall-out), or whether he's borrowing yet another page from those who have patiently explored these questions in more detail (for instance, Nancy).

So what does this conception of a "post-ideology" (or a post-politics) actually mean? And in describing too quickly a return to such things as "an operatic staging of the other" does one not also risk prescribing their inevitability? Is it just that Zizek does a disservice to the nuances of his own argument (is there more room for hope outside of this banal mimetic or sacrificial indemnification), or is it that he simply doesn't have much of an argument to begin with? Nothing wrong with that of course (his comment about philosophers rightly (re)posing the questions is well-taken, and somewhat uncharacteristic perhaps), but maybe it's high time to hold Z. accountable for the seductive but pat maneuvers he makes, in this his apparently full-time capacity as a "public intellectual."

I don't mean to merely degrade him, of course. He is without question one of the most unconvential, engaging and brilliant theorists today. But as is the case with most popular spokesmen figures, those more familiar with the actual history (and in his defense, perhaps Z. would say that he was only citing popular history, I don't know), cannot help but raise their eyebrows, incredulous...still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Anyway, this makes many of the same arguments Z. does. There are some condescending overtones there, mixed in with equal parts romanticization and apocalypticism. It's all a bit redundant, indulgent and quite lazy. But then I also tend to think that Baudrillard should have long ago been hung from the nearest available billboard:

But it is also a movement without strategy, a movement more prone to gaze at itself on television screens, drawing its ephemeral strength from the media coverage it produces, and thus depending on the self-censorship of information put in place to avoid "the telethon effect." It is a movement nevertheless more Luddite than playful, sustaining itself at the source of real despair, but lacking utopia, its horizon limited by bars and block towers.

For sociologists, journalists and certain revolutionaries, this movement is incomprehensible since it resists the well-oiled arguments they use to explain social movements: neither social analysis, nor the study of the composition of class succeeds in defining its specificity.

These riots are made by an unidentifiable mob—rebellious bodies whose existence is reduced to bare necessity, and who have not found any other language than that of destructive gestures.

Let us not fool ourselves; in everyday life many of this mob are detestable; some are numbed by religion, many alienated by consumerism, or enthusiasts of masculine values, sharing with the masters of society the stupid worship of sport (some riots were suspended during televised football games). Many are contemptible in their behavior toward women—whose absence in the riots signals an unacceptable limitation. Most of this mob would certainly not be friendly to us.

What is remarkable, however—beyond them—is their revolt. Through their actual contradictions, they represent the dark face of a vengeful social unconscious held back for too long, as those in bygone days representing the “dangerous classes.” But, at the risk of plunging back even more bitterly in their poverty, it will be necessary for them to draw on the lessons of their recent experience in order to gain lucidity. Already they have seen at work the repressive role of the imams and of Islam, mere auxiliaries to the police— as is all religion. This movement still has to get rid of all forms of puritanical and masculinist morality so that women will join them as equals—like the women fire-raisers of the Paris Commune in 1871—to take an active part in all future stuggles. Likewise, they must have done with the stupid gang rivalry that nails them to their “territories” and deprives them of a mobile offensive. And finally, they must learn to choose more directly political targets.

In a society in which all previous forms of belonging, and therefore of associated consciousness, have been wiped out, these events testify to the eruptive and uncontrollable return of the social question, firstly under an immediately negative form, that fire—emblem of all apocalypses— symbolizes. Indeed, unlike the rebellions in Los Angeles in 1965 and in 1992, the population of the districts here did not massively join the rioters. And in contrast to May ‘68 neither poetry nor brilliant ideas are on the barricades. No wildcat strike is going to spread widely with these troubles. But the rulers have been give a good hotfoot and have been forced to unmask themselves.

A democracy which, in order to face up to a quantitatively limited movement (considering the number of participants), has been obliged to put back in force an old colonial law, but also to reveal its constituent deception: that is, where the police abuse their powers, the state of emergency gives to their abuse the legitimacy that it lacks. What we long ago called "individual freedom" is today known as the “discretionary power” of the cops.

In a flash, such warning lights have revealed—during these November nights—the return of a possibility that seemed to be lost: that of throwing power into a panic even when its forces are harassed in a disorganized manner through the whole territory by a handful of forsaken social casualties. From now on, we can imagine the strength of an uprising that would—beyond the inhabitants of the ghettos—include the whole population suffering from the rise of impoverishment, and would turn into civil war against the organs of capital and the state.

Beyond recent infernos presented as the very image of a nightmare, it is time that the dream of concrete utopia is raised anew.

Perhaps those such as Derrida's warnings about Benjamin (and an apocalyptic turn) are not to be taken so lightly.

Isn't it just possible that we're entering a more desperate, and more disenchanted stage of the necessary global protest against neoliberalism, marked also – though hopefully not equally – by episodes of localized populist outbursts (of the worst sort)? And the world ended in banality; Oy. Time to fight for some articulation.

Anyway, the funny bits on Rawls and operatic staging and the racist construing of the other during "Katrina" were all well and good, even if he still just gets it all from Derrida. The debate with Laclau (and 'Long Sunday) over populism has provided lots to think about.

vote, act

for Political Theory Daily Review. And if you haven't seen it already, the the Al Jazeera Staffer's blog is worth a look, and link (don't believe me--watch Control Room). Yes, it's been mentioned once or twice before.

Alternatively, one could start reading Amy Goodman's latest book in the middle, on page 181, with the subtly-titled chapter, Killing the Messenger (you may email me if you desire a gmail account to access GoogleBookSearch).

Update: Meanwhile, the time of impeachment draweth ever nigh...

Ah, the affable and sinister salesmen, may they continue to inherit the world.

Rose

On the recent tribute to Gillian Rose (insert jealous remark #722 here). By all accounts, a writer worthy of serious attention (though maybe not for the next LS Symposium?--how the word doth fly, +1).

Also of great interest, a rather thorough review of Deconstruction and Democracy. This Matthias Fritsch ought to get himself one of them blog.

growth, expansion, good

I've added Leiter Reports to the blogroll (right there, smack dab between AvW and 'lenin). To make up for it, here's this which looks promising. Maybe it's my quarter-age showing, I don't know. One simply can't write off the analytic icks forever, now can one. After all, they do rule the roost. And my sources say things about the roost that would have you drooling on your bowtie, let me tell you. Planes to catch right and left, and affable brown-skinned people to cook your pasta for you and such. Maybe when the guest-bloggers leave, I'll antiseptically remove it, in a gesture sure to take the world by storm, and shake it to its very roots. There are still some good 'ol grudges, of course. Not to mention the more obvious things, and things (and things).

Chomsky watch

So I watched this thing a while 'go. Not to subscribe, without some reservation, to the cult of Chomsky, but... Dershowitz is an ass. Oliver Kamm meanwhile, is a nobody. Right then.

the well

Please see A on events in Australia. The news, or should one say "the newscycle," from everywhere, was unbearable today. The tone of course was set early enough. Three times this morning, just myself and my visible breath, hand-making wreaths in the greenhouse smelling of balsalm and sap (yes, I'm a hardened farmer these days), my eyes well up with tears. How else to describe that feeling of despair; a resevoir suddenly tapped. I lean on the table for a few seconds, and put my head on my arms. There are sizes of despair. These waves were semi-pleasant; warming far more than crippling, and they didn't last long. Just checking in, my heart. Tinged with the familiar feelings of profound powerlessness and ineffectivity. Also a glimpse of another sort of well, in the return to...inoperativeness and im-potentiality. For maybe the second time this year, NPR was good a bit better than too little too late. How refreshing to hear genuine outrage, people calling on Bush by name, calling him a liar. People not intimidated by the latest Patriot Act, obviously (and how poised we are, to repeat that movie...I don't usually do this but, sign the motherfucking petition, please.)

Another Benjamin

The photographer did not approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar, or with the advice of ethnographers and sociologists, but, as the publisher says, "from direct observation." It was assuredly a very impartial, indeed bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of Goethe's remark: "There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with its object that it becomes true theory." [...] The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order, and the more rigidly its individual components are locked together in their death struggle, the more creative--in its deepest essence a variant (contradiction its father, imitation its mother)--becomes a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful--that is its watchword. In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists, even when this photography's most dream-laden subjects are a forerunner more of its salability than of any knowledge it might produce. But because the true face of this kind of photographic creativity is the advertisement or association, its logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction. As Brecht says: "The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality."

-from "Little History of Photography"

necessary aversion

John, on 'bookslut' Jessa Crispin on Pinter (more on Pinter and teh populism here). His comments on Rumsflee, also good. Yesterday, I heard Rumsfeld referred to the terrorists as "injuns" before correcting himself. This would be the kind of lame, direct inter-blogging I used to loathe. I still do, really.

In other news (that becoming-universal medium the mediocrity (and uncertain future) of which Benjamin described so well, in that essay, you know the one--it has to do with literature and politics), the tireless Michael Bérubé responds to the insomniac culture wars of the day with:

After all, at one point in our recent history, in certain contexts, virile, heterosexual masculinity was signified by lots of makeup, tousled hair, platform shoes, leather-studded body suits, and screaming, high-pitched vocals. It’s a wacky, multiaccentual world out there, in which a Nortel ad can quote Lennon’s “Come Together” and the BJP can quote Donna Haraway. Get used to it.

This sort of thing apparently gets him quite a lot of visitors.

(Certainly one can intuit easily enough why it is so fashionable and so tempting, and in this stolen age of regressive fundamentalisms especially, to adopt the Anglo-analytic approach, a toolkit ready-made for problems that must be solved. Unfortunately, I was long ago seduced by the the dark side (a wonderful consequence of that first necessary rupture, back in high school I think it was). What can I say? I was always more interested in reading, and the contradictions inherent to the problems themselves (not least of all the problem of 'reading'), than in their resolution onto some inevitably trivializing, and often violent and reductive plane. Perhaps the answers that were required seemed obvious enough not to warrant an infinite neutralization of the sort that followed from the meticulous logical faith in abstractions (there are places for this sort of rigor, but not in reading literature, and as a wise man once said, it's seriousness kills me). One could still debate moral relativism with Richard Rorty, I suppose (and he's right about the straw man the analytics constantly string up, of course). But far more interesting, more literary things have been going on in the meantime (not to mention the poetics of phenomenology). And to seek to diminish the role of literature in addressing itself to these questions, however indirectly, is to dismiss a great heritage. Those who would rather talk in circles than tackle the question of literature's relation to the history of philosophy (and there is ample good material on the subject) are simply irresponsible. Either that or they haven't read enough John Barth, or enough international modernist literature. Or enough German and then French (granted, though, they may be sometimes cute).

Clearly if something of value in "Theory" or "literary theory" is to survive (speaking in the pop-institutional idiom), "it" will have to confront/seek to avoid this complicity with, or easy cooptation/bastardization by advertising. Nothing new there. Then again, last time I checked, the real Theory was being done, as always, by people who still read. There is precious little real Theory out there, yes (but the alternative is just as frozen as it was in the 1950's, if you want to compare rotten apples, and so continue to ignore the barrel). Agamben seems to think, following a certain more-messianic-than-Marxist Benjamin and perhaps contra Zizek (to continue this somewhat obsequious chesstalk), that it must be a resistance taking place from within, to some degree. I'm not so sure.)

And wood s lot links to a rather timely article (soundtrack may be found here) on another faith-based villain (that special one conservatives are always invoking in their ill-planned preemptive strike on Godwin's Law (incorrectly attributed here.)) (The s lot (honestly, wherelse to get your daily blogpulse, dear reader?) -also links to some interesting essays on Derrida, Kant and the 'death of philosophy,' including a certain rather important one.) Sorry for the relative silence around here; no profound statements (especially not about boredom) intended. Sorry also, for the less than literary post. Fuck politics; back to books and politics shortly.