mai più senza fucile…
it’s good to see that the old toni negri is still in there somewhere. he says, in an excerpt from an interview in La Vanguardia, by Victor M. Amela.
(…)
VA: And you wager on multitudes…?
TN: On the multitudes as multiplicity of singularities capable of
recogizing itself in the common, of autonomously expressing its
reasons. And it is intelligent. This power exists and we have to
develop it today.
VA: And if not, what?
TN: If not, empire: that is to say, the global government that the
global market requires. And, thus, always someone who will decide over
us! Someone who will decided wars, for example.
VA: I don’t know if that can be remedied…
TN: Yes: the multitude should have arms available. Everyone should
have arms freely, as happens in the United States.
VA: Are speaking seriously?
TN: Yes. I know it can have negative effects, like the case of
Columbine… but this clearly it’s clear that the only democratic
defence is resistance from inside the community. It is the guarantee
of peace, of avoiding wars made today by armies that, made up of
mercenaries, act as global police.
incidentally, tim might want to work the next article in La Vanguardia, on how Playboy defends the rights of women, into his “tart” argument…
“And if you’re a man, your penis is prehensile”
> Nietzsche’s aristocratism; Blanchot’s, Gadamer’s, Schmitt’s, and Heidegger’s Naziphilia; Bataille’s dark mysticism and fascistic leanings; Guattari’s, Deleuze’s, and Lacan’s loathing of science while saturating their writings with puns, portmanteau words, and neologisms based on scientific terms; Foucault’s, Negri’s, and Tronti’s ultra-leftism that in fact aspires to a perpetuation of capitalism; and Althusser’s strive to defend both the Stalinist bureaucracy and the capitalist regime worldwide — all this and more have been and still are among the most effective ideological weapons that the ruling classes have used to keep one generation after another of young students away from the knowledge that may lead them to join the emancipation struggle of working-class populations.
Apologies for the rather incoherent nature of my last post; I had various ideas which seemed tantalisingly close to fitting together, but didn’t quite resolve. A few links, anyway:
* One of my occassional forays into coherence: a paper I’ve for various reasons re-read lately, about Aristotle and Hobbes. I think it’s quite good, but I was criticised for my ‘unjustified Heideggerianism’
* A fantastic explication of Lenin; reminded me why I like the bugger.
* And a humorous cod-Lenininist critque of Hardt and Negri; reminded me why I like the buggers.
* More splendidness from Shannon/AnimeG (particularly, the last paragraph raises a very good point about the way contemporary power structures love structural arguments _unless they’re directed against them_).
* Grime MCs over the beats from ‘Toxic’. Yeah, you heard me.
More of a less coherent sort shortly, I hope, in the form of posts on why I’m in favour of eight-year-olds dressing like tarts and why people downloading MP3s are accidentally marxists.
unemployment
I am currently writing an essay on “Are the cures for unemployment simplyt eh reversal of the causes.” My lecturer thinks that trade unions were the cause of unemployment by pricing workers out of jobs. (This would explain, I suppose why Britain had nearly full employment for years after ww2, despite unions beingmuch more effective than now.) I also have to talk about “active labour market policies” such as cutting benefits and forcing people to attend training schemes. should get on with it now. bye.
a black widow spider…
lives in our loo. she doesn’t bother us, and we don’t bother her. this, of course, proves the efficacy of a policy of mutually-assured destruction.
Waving a big bat in a typhoon
For those of you who are interested, the following extracts from Dave Simmons at the Live were recorded by my housemate with his Nokia, and are available from me as amr.
* Gordon is a moron
* Fairytale of New York
* I believe in a thing called love
* No sex in Blackburn
* Blackbird I’ll have him
Two files: AMR-NB.zip is Windows codec that should allow you to hear the files; and AMRcon12-setup allows you to convert the Amr files to Wave.
The stupid person’s Richard Perle
Marx’s line about history repeating itself proves its utility once again. German fascism was pressaged by the work of, for example, Ernst Junger. American fascism, it seems, will have to make do with Tom Clancy. When I was talking earlier about splendid James Bond communism, I forgot to mention the related phenomenon that is Tom Clancy’s communism. There’s something pleasingly Hegelian about the constructive aufhebung of multiple negations going on here: Clancy constructs a manichean image of evil designed as the negative of his own values; we communists negate Clancy’s values and negate his negative image, thereby gaining access to a fictionally-existing communism that can mediate our own negation of actually-existing communism, allowing it to become a creative, rather than merely reactive (that is, bourgeois liberal) negation.
As with James Bond, the essentially fictional status of Clancy’s communism becomes more apparent after the end of the cold war. With actually existing communism no longer a credible dramatic threat, Clancy’s communism becomes ever more spectral, with each book in his saga constructing a more convoluted genealogy to explain how the threat-du-jour (Islamic terrorists, Japanese post-fascists) is in fact a cats-paw of the Evil Chinese.
Like PNAC, Clancy realises that, in the abscence of a real threat, the American right-wing narrative needs to create a threat — and, if you’re creating a threat, the more mythical (hence threatening and undefeatable) a threat the better. One difference is that Clancy is less imaginative than Richard Perle, and so rather than coming up with the all-new threat of Al Quaeda, is reduced to repeating the old anti-communist story in increasingly silly ways. The second difference, of course, is that Clancy is merely a bad novelist, and so does not have the power to make his fictions become real.
Conspiracy theories are a fundamentally bourgeois passtime (much like freemasonry), and so are rendered useless by the baggage of bourgeois notions of agency, causation, etc. It’s a conspiracy theory, and politically useless to boot, to suggest that Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz or any group of neo-cons are responsible for the September 11th attacks, for example. But it’s not a conspiracy theory to point out that the structural conditions which favour neo-con ascendency are precisely the ones that allow (in fact, require) something like September 11th to happen. Like the stoic dog running behind the cart, the neo-cons have been merrily tinkering around the edges of these structural conditions, smashing various parts of the world, and creating their twin myths of The New Perl Harbour and America As Peace Maker, and waiting for their fantasies to come true without intervention on their part.
I’m not sure how far to push this, but you could claim that the contemporary anti-imperialist left are in the same position as Perle and Clancy, their it’s-still-the-sixties praxis saved in the nick of time by the intrusion into reality of its required fictional imperialism (Micheal Hardt toys with this idea in an interview which is an excellent read for entirely separate reasons). The difference is, as anthrochica quite rightly says, that the neocons being exemplary post-modernists know that their enemy is their own shadowy creation and don’t care. Anti-imperialism, still hung up on proving that imperialism is really real, alienates it as some kind of objective reality, and thus precisely plays into the neocons’ game.
The problem with Straussianism is that, as it’s publicly committed to not telling the truth about itself (the celebrated esoteric/exoteric distinction), it’s natural to assume that its public face is a deception, and to imagine that it’s involved in a conspiracy. Thus, it manages to get away with conducting its non-conspiracy in plain sight. The more obviously fascist Clancy likes to fantasise about a secret intelligence organisation set up by the US president but unaccountable to any democracy (and if you think my talk of metaphorical jackboots is excessive, check out the literal jackboots on that cover). The post-fascist PNAC creates a public organisation that sets up its own president by taking advantage of an increasingly non-democratic democracy (’post-fascist’ is a useful term from Italian politics; it means ‘fascist’).
So, what’s the upshot of all this? I’m not exactly sure, except that it seems the world is a confusing place; and I hope I have managed to convey that adequately with this confusing post.
The 18th Brumaire of Cheryl Tweedy
If history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, perhaps the more positive dialectical reverse is true as well, with history also repeating itself as comedy, then as triumph. That certainly seems to be the case with Girls Aloud, who are surely the Spice Girls done right, their Girl Power manifesto taken, magnificently, not just seriously but, as Nietzsche would say, taken joyfully.
Meanwhile, I do like the song, but I’m not sure I approve of the unseemly haste to cash in on Derrida’s death.
BTR vs. APOC
this post is for those avid followers of the crucial debate between Bring the Ruckus and Anarchist People of Color. Among the issues separating the two otherwise like-minded organizations is the difference between “settler” politics and “race traitor” politics, and the respective views of the white working class that the two entail.
Specifically, much of APOC centers around former members of BTR (Ernesto Aguilar and Heather Ajani), who split with the organization recently. Their specific reasons for leaving were laid out in internal organization communications, but can be pieced together from this more recent critique of an article by BTR member Roy San Filippo.
The BTR site also offers recent pieces on the election: here, here, here, here, and i most especially recommend the one here.
Also of interest on the APOC site are a couple of articles on the Revolutionary Communist Party, specifically this critique and this argument for why anarchists must work with the RCP. Their reading section also has a wonderful selection of resources on race and anarchism, and for the sake of our british readers, i highlight a selection on one of my pet peeves, “Anarchist Orientalism.” APOC also has, i should note, a cool PDF export feature, which means of course that they win the debate by virtue of sheer technological prowess.
“If there is some confusion, who’s to blame?”
I’m not sure it’s entirely consistent to hate U2 and love REM as much as I do; after all, ‘Star 69′ just _is_ ‘Vertigo’, although admittedly ten years earlier and with a better bassline, and Green is hilariously stadium rock in retrospect (and probably was when I first heard it, I just didn’t know better). It does, though contain the prototype for most of what they’ve done since (with the possible exception of New adventures in hi-fi). Meanwhile, I certainly didn’t realise when I was thirteen that Monster is a very gay record indeed (or, to be more precise, very _queer_, where U2 are practically the definition of closet-case heteronormative masculinity). Of course, this makes me like it even more, but I am slightly embarrassed it’s taken me ten years to realise that ‘Crush with eyeliner’ is about crossdressing.
“I’m twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?”
Neighbours‘ new policy of giving each episode an individual title has, I’m glad to see, been embraced as a new possibility for intertextuality. Today’s episode centred on Max’s fertility troubles. The episode title? ‘Bad apples’.
Now, Blue appear to be versioning ‘Gangsta’s paradise’ on Top of the Pops. Nice.
The implications of the title of this post have just caught up with me. Was Coolio really no older than I am now when he released ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’? I’ve got used to the fact that I’ll always be older (by six months and a day, it turns out) and have acheived less than Beyoncé, but this is a new blow.