Making time
> The room suddenly clearered of its pink haze: there were great blank spaces between
> the objects it contained. … The lamp, the mirror with its leaden reflections, the clock
> on the mantelpiece, the armchair, the half opened wardrobe, suddenly appeared to
> him like pitiless mechanisms, adrift and pursuing their tenuous existences in the void,
> rigidly insistent, like the underside of a gramaphone record obstinately grinding out
> its tune. Mathieu shook himself, but could not detach himself from that sinister,
> raucous world.
>
>
Sartre, The age of reason
Being and time is quite a modernist book, in many ways; but an early modernism, a pre-fordist modernism (which perhaps explains the more explicit nostalgia of the later works, and Heidegger’s support for and later disillusionment with the Nazi party — the problem for him was that fascism wasn’t reactionary _enough_). Sartre, on the other hand, understands. Compare the passage above with Heidegger’s discussion of the disclosure of the world by the ready-to-hand object.
For Heidegger, the ready-to-hand is ready for a _particular_ Dasein; the hammer of a particular carpenter, the workshop of a particular artisan. Hence, for Hiedegger, when accessed through the ready-to-hand objects which imbue the world with meaning, the temporality of the world is thus revealed as Dasein’s ownmost being. Sartre, however, writes of the era of the mass worker, the worker whose world and time is constructed by the factory; the worker whose temporality is always the temporality of the _they_. Could we say, also, that this is the temporality of the Big Other?
How exciting
Sorry for this site not working for a couple of days, I forgot to pay a bill for excess bandwidth (I think it was the Žižek pictures that caused it). A post, lovingly hand-written while I was out of reach of a computer, may arrive here shortly.
“So I phoned up Nasa and said, ‘We want to put Mick Jagger on a rocket’”
There was a terrible programme on the BBC yesterday about Live Aid; terrible in an instructive way, quite apart from being absurdly long. You might have imagined in advance that hearing about how such an enormous event was organised would be at least somewhat interesting. But no — except for the Spinal Tap style plan to have Bowie and Jagger do a duet from two different rockets. The talking heads had clearly been coached to make sure any trace of interest had been expunged, and what we got was a programme which explained that organising Live Aid was exactly like organising any other event. Probably a bit more interesting than organising a party, a bit less interesting than organising a trip.
Also, are George Orwell and Freddie Mercury related? I think we should be told.
Using the media?
It is quite amazing that after many months of recorded media hysteria or liberal wishy-washyness about the G8 meeting and protests, finally an article depicting the radical side of the movement has broken into the mainstream press. Kay Summer and Adam Jones (both involved in Dissent!) in their comment piece “The first embedded protest “, in the Guardian, explain that the Live 8 “protest” concerts are to protest what embeded journalism is to proper journalism — a parody that serves only the status quo.
Blair and Brown do not want a repeat of Seattle, or Genoa, or any of the other summits that have been accompanied by mass acts of disobedience. They want a stage-managed, benign spectacle, and so they play along with Live 8 and Make Poverty History, creating the world’s first “embedded” mass protest.
This article opens two questions, one of political substance and one about political tactics. The question of substance is to what extent something that looks like protest is by itself a protest. Or in other words what is the substance, the beating heart of protest — beyond the mere actions that protesters perform. This debate is only a slight generalisation, of the “I cannot see the point of marching from A to B type protests” discussion, repeated many times in the anti-war movement.
I would attempt to answer this question: it is a question of who is in control. If at any point an organisation’s hierachy or the state itself is in control of the protest then the protest has effectivelly been already neutralised. If on the other hand decision making structures have been set-up for protester themselves to decide all aspects of the protest it has some liberatory potential. Of course this devialtion is exactly what the state fears, and for this reason, in the UK, it stamps out even minor digressions (i.e. playing Samba in a street without permission) to regain control. Not by coincidance Sarah Young has already spoken about this “control doctrine”, in a different context:
Whenever our protest deviates from what the state has decreed as being acceptable (i.e. writing to MPs or marching from A to B), we inevitably come into contact with the forces of the state.
The second issue concerns the difficult relation of the protest movement with the media. So far we have reclaimed the media, mainly for communication inside our movement. We have also abused the media, by learning how to run stories that are often a bit exagerated or doctored for the audiance. The Guardian article though shows that there might be a possibility to put messages accross in their pure form, without ‘toning down’. Still just one example in 6 months of crap journalism…
Big Brother
I don’t think I’ve seen the Big Brother psychologists since the first series; did they not, back then, make at least some pretense at professionalism? Well, those days are long gone, it seems.
God, Craig is a whiny bitch, isn’t he? A useful illustration of bad faith. I like that Sam appears to be bored all the time. Is Science a 5%-er? Saskia is quite charming, I think; she shows great poise in dealing with the attacks of the arsehole faction (Craig, Derrek, Roberto), and in politely shrugging off Maxwell’s over-affectionate behaviour (though I did like his attempt to pay her a compliment: “for a bird with such a small head, she’s got a very pretty face”). She also looks great dressed as a pirate.
Meanwhile, more Big Brother news from San Francisco.
anarchists thinking about venezuela?
what’s gotten into them? seriously, this is good news, though they are a “red” and anarchist network so i don’t know how much this represents a significant development, especially since Chuck0’s response was predictably shite:
“I think that American anarchists (or Yankee anarchists if that’s more specific) have been following the situation in Venezuela. The fact that another leftist is in power in some country isn’t an excuse for us anarchists to soften our criticism of the Chavez government. There are enough signs already that the Chavez government is drifting towards being just another authoritarian government.”
venezuela has become quite rightly a focal point for determining who are serious allies. it’s also putting some necessary pressure on holloway, et al, who will probably end up on the right side in the end. after all, it’s pretty difficult to maintain the old claim that the state cannot function as a viable instrument for change in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary. (interestingly, and evidence of the importance of chavismo is the fact that indigenous activists in bolivia are calling for a constituent assembly, as you can see in this spectacular photo. this is the new vehicle for radical transformation, and it has nothing to do with european theories of “constituent power.”)
without the claim of impossibility, anarchists are forced to either come to grips with reality, or to fall back on the much weaker claim that given historical evidence, chavismo will turn out badly in the end. the problem, of course, is that this means nothing to those who need change in the present.
also: mos def on assata shakur.
also: i second tim’s reaction to the new common album, especially excellent is “corners,” which features last poets. see the video.
Producing red consciousness
> Youth are rebellious against meaningless work and face the problems of less skill
> and
> seniority, lower pay scales, dirtier work. Unemployment and underemployment are
> massive among youth; young people are used as a reserve pool of low-skilled labor.
>
>
— Weather Underground, Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism
A further point on post-fordism. It’s interesting that the idea of the ‘global petit-bourgeoisie’ from Agamben is prefigured in the last place you would expect, in the statement of the arch-Third Worldists, the Weather Underground. What makes their particular brand of Third Worldism still relevant is that they recognise that imperialism is not something that just happens abroad. In Prairie Fire, they argue that imperialism is the name for the oppression of the first-world working class as much as it is the name for colonialism and neo-colonialism. This is one of the book’s most contemporary references; replace ‘imperialism’ with ‘globalisation’ and you could almost be reading Hardt and Negri.
Almost, but not quite — Weather’s perspective on the flattening of the first and third worlds concedes less to the boosters of globalisation (such as the absurd Thomas Friedman) who cheer the skyscrapers of New Dehli as a sign of the limitless expansion of the first world. The reality is more complicated and less pleasant. In the era of real subsumption, capital and empire are not _simply_ limitless, with no outside. Instead, empire increasingly depends on a direct inclusion of its outside which, paradoxically, maintains its character as an outside even while it becomes absolutely central (again, we have a precise political-economic equivalent of Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception). The subsistence economy of the favela is no longer marginal, no longer a sign of capitalism’s failure, but of its success
Bruce Springsteen update
Not a criticism, but ‘Rosalita’ is really a remarkably ridiculous song. I’d look over my complaint about original soundtracks if Channel 4 made a programme entirely accompanied by Bruce Springsteen songs (the same goes, obviously, for Divine Comedy songs).
And, do you suppose Girls Aloud could be persuaded to cover ‘Dancing in the dark’?
Not a Bruce Springsteen update, but Common’s new album (available from a BitTorrent site near you) is very good. It includes some of Kanye’s best beats, I think; he expands his sample palette to include some soul tracks influenced by Afrobeat, which is nicely relevant to Common’s conscious lyrics. There’s also a great example of how Kanye’s samples and the lyrics can play off one another in Testify [MP3].
Pictures
UC Berkeley:
The Financial District, San Francisco:
For full enjoyment
k-punk on the neurophysiological effects of capitalism:
> Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the
> psychology of the worker, who, qua worker, is interested in oldstyle class conflict, but, as
> someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing their investment. There is no
> longer an identifiable external enemy.
We considered something along these lines in our reading-group discussion of Agamben’s The coming community as a way of explaining Agamben’s puzzling claim that the first-world/third-world division in being replaced with ‘a global petit-bourgeoisie’. It is not simply that class struggle is re-emerging within nation states; rather, a distinct proletarian subjectivity is being replaced with a subjectivity in which workers are both excluded (lumpenproletarian) and forced to act as ‘entrepreneurs’ (petit-bourgeois). Of course, this is ideological (see, for instance, this creepy post), but, like all ideology, it’s ruthlessly materially enforced (Adam Kotsko is writing good stuff on this). k-punk continues:
> The consequence is that, as Christian put it in a
> memorable image, Post-Fordist workers, are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the
> ‘house of slavery’: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also
> abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.
Which of course makes me think of Agamben’s discussion of abandonment in Homo sacer; it would be interesting to try and re-read Homo sacer in political-economic, rather than juridical, terms (is that something Virno does?).
One thing we might get from such an investigation is a stronger understanding of something which I was pleased to see k-punk mentioning, which is that our response to the problems of post-fordism must not take the form of a nostalgia for fordism and its welfare state. This is one of the things I like about the term ‘precarity’, for all its cumbersomeness (an early Wombles flyer on precarity explained the word’s Latin roots, and why it is a pun in Italian). The obvious alternative term, ‘casualisation’, fails to understand that this is not a process which simply needs to be arrested; we already are entirely causalised, and so precarity is a condition we find ourselves in.
European precarity activist are at least attempting to find a way out of the desert: the next high-profile attempt probably being the Carnival for full enjoyment, taking place in Edinburgh during the G8. But without a doubt, we’re still largely without direction.