Tony Blair’s favourite band
U2 as Badiou-ian revolutionaries? Unlikely. Surely the problem with Blairite capitalist culture is not a _lack_ of “yearning, the horizon, the utopian”, let a lone a lack of “hairy-chested wailing.” On the contrary, capitalism now thrives on a certain sort of passion. U2 are a great engine for constructing a ’sincerity’ with no content (they mean nothing, but they _really mean it_). This is the same sincerity that is at issue when arguments about the Iraq war shift to discussions of Tony Blair’s character, with what he _believed_ in the run up to the war. The absence of WMDs serves to retrospectively make him _more sincere_; thus, the more wrong Tony Blair turns out to be, the more justified he can claim the invasion was.
The affects of passion and sincerity are the cornerstone of what k-punk calls innocynicism, the ruling ideology right now. It’s no surprise that U2 suddenly became cool again in the late ’90s: but, now more than ever, it’s important to remember just how shit they are.
Incidentally, is Joshua Tree where Foucault used to go to drop acid with Geo’s landlord’s mate? Or was that a different, more northerly, desert?
Domination and…?
I was talking to a friend of Manos’s a few weeks ago who has written a book containg a Marxist analysis of the hacker movement, and Free Software in particular. There’s a certain strand of utopianism around the Free Software movement that puts it forward as a direct alternative to proprietry software, which could replace capitalism without a direct antagonism towards it. Yet, at the same time, corporations and pro-capitalist ideologues love Free Software, seeing it as precisely what an immaterial free market needs to avoid copyright monopolies.
We face a similar contradiction from the side of resistance, as well. There’s a pro-filesharing argument that downloading MP3s acts as free publicity for artists, and so boosts sales and benefits the music industry; I’ve always assumed this was put forward in completely bad faith — but what if it’s actually true? If capitalism is becoming increasingly communicative, increasing the communication of commodities is going to strengthen capitalism; yet, of course, _completely_ free communication of commodities would prevent them being ‘commodities’, and spell the end of capitalism.
In other words, the contradications of capitalism seem to be increasingly visible. Hardt and Negri make the good point in Empire that the contradictions of capitalism are contradictions _for capital_; for us, they are opportunities. But of course the important thing is how we grasp these opportunities. Deleuze seems to get this in a way Negri misses:
> Computer piraÂcy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the
> nineÂteenth century called “sabotage” (”clogging” the machinery). You ask
> whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resisÂtance
> that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal
> organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be
> nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and
> communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly perÂmeated by
> money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack
> speech. Creating has always been something difÂferent from
> communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of
> noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Hardt and Negri, with their belief that communicative labor directly prefigures communism may, in fact, be stuck in the ’70s, when the worker’s flexibility seemed to be an immediate challenge to capitalism. But we know now that capitalism can capture communicative labor for its own valorisation; the goal of communists, then, cannot simply be to develop communicative labor, but must instead or also be to find ways to sabotage its capture.
“If you don’t push it, it won’t fall”
> Anguish is in fact the recognition of a possibility as _my_ possibility; that is, it
> is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut from its essence by
> nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom.
>
>
Sartre, Being and nothingness
Interesting post by Bat and discussion at Long Sunday about reactionary vs. Leninist counterfactuals. I wonder if the distinction isn’t at least in part about _agency_. For the what-if historian, the question of who caused the alternate world is irrelevant if it is even coherent (it’s a necessary truth of Kripke’s possible worlds that we cannot actualise them). But for the revolutionary, as Bat says, the only question that matters is how we can bring about the alternate world; when we see that the possible future is _our_ future, and one from which we are “separated by [our] very freedom.”
I think Negri says somewhere that, whenever we think of political subjectivity, we find ourselves returning to Lenin; I hope he said that, because it’s true. I’m kind of surprised, though (perhaps I shouldn’t be), to find the political so close to the surface in Being and nothingness. It’s a commonplace to say that Sartre concentrates on the centrality of the subject in the world; but what seems often to be missed is that this is a necessarily political, and even a class, subject.
> There exist concretely alarm clocks, signboards, tax forms, policemen, so
> many guard rails against anguish.
“Westward the course of empire takes its way”
So Anna, one of my new flatmates (can we be flatmates in a two-story apartment?), was telling me about when she went to the UK to study. It sounds like she had a bad time when she arrived: she was jetlagged and stayed in bed for most of a week; she had an eye infection, so she couldn’t see anything; she had a broken leg, so she couldn’t move around; and (here’s the punchline) she was in Reading.
Yesterday, I went to an orientation meeting for new international students. As well as boring visa and work permit stuff, there was a rather ludicrous session in which we were solemly advised on how to adjust to living in the US. This included a list of ‘values’ shared by ‘majority culture Americans’, and ways in which we might (mis)perceive them (directness might come across as rudeness, egalitarianism as disrespect, etc). Apart from being a bit ridiculous, I think this misunderstands where the difficulty lies in coming to terms with American culture; the problem is not that we don’t have any idea what to expect, but that we have _too much_ of an idea of what to expect, and it’s not always entirely obvious whether we’re responding to things as they are, or as the globally diffused American culture would have us believe they are.
Later, I hung out with some friends of Geo and Abby’s, who are splendid. It turns out bitching about primitivists is an international anarchist sport.
hello
I haven’t posted on here for a while since I’m spending most of my time reading philosophy and economics stuff for next year but I don’t have much to say about that yet. I need something to distract me from microeconomics (oligopoly and game theory) now though. I tried baking a cake but that didn’t turn out too well: it was flat and I think I used too many eggs (the recipe said to use 4 but I’m fairly sure that 2 or 3 would have been better).
At work, on Wednesday I argued with people about the Gate Gourmet caterers, and the solidarity shown by the BA workers. Most people at work disapproved of the baggage handlers because the strike was unofficial. I always find it very strange when people say that illegal action should never be taken. What are we supposed to do? Simply feel sorry for the sacked workers (and allow then to remain sacked?). The story would surely not even have been mainstream press news if it hadn’t been for the solidarity action. From Lenin’s tomb:
>There’s a line spun by the media that we should all feel sorry for the sacked workers at Gate Gourmet, but that we should also condemn the solidarity action taken by BA baggage handlers. In other words, we’re being told that it’s ok to see people as victims, but we mustn’t actually do anything about it (except bring our own packed lunches if we’re travelling by plane).
No visas, no nations
We know, of course, that globalisation is rendering the nation-state increasingly unsustainable. It’s nice, then, that this sometimes functions in the ideological sphere, too, rendering the idea of the nation-state ludicrous. With the difficulty of travel reduced (or, perhaps, transformed into the general capitalist difficulty of obtaining money), to the extent that you can buy a plane ticket on the internet in five minutes, isn’t it just silly that you also need a visa, so you have to wait a month for an appointment, _go down to the fucking embassy in London_, wait for four hours to hand in some papers, and then wait another week till they send your passport back?
That being said, the US visa does look quite pretty, with a big picture of Abraham Lincoln impersonating the Statue of Liberty (well, actually, I assume it’s the Lincoln Memorial — interesting they choose a representation of a representation, rather than a simple picture of Lincoln himself), as well as some text in the kind of monumental typeface (very much not a Swiss sans-serif) that reminds you how European the UK is. The same thing happens with money: the clean lines and bright colours make Sterling notes and Euros almost indisitinguishable next to the 19th century stylings of the Dollar.
Conspiracy theory
> You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resisÂtance
> that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal
> organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do
> with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been
> corrupted. They’re thoroughly perÂmeated by money—and not by accident but by
> their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something
> difÂferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of
> noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
>
>
– Gilles Deleuze
>
> It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of
> rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.
>
>
– Alain Badiou
There’s an unfortunate tendency (I blame that old reactionary Chomsky) to think that power functions only by supressing the flow of information, and so that there is something inherently revolutionary about communicating something which is (or which you think is) being hidden by those in power. One place this shows up is Indymedia, where a number of posters think that, by endlessly repeating conspiracy theories about 9/11 and, now, about the London bombings, they _must_ be doing something progressive. They’re wrong, unfortunately, because conspiracy theories are by their nature reactionary: they’re the last gasp of individualist, voluntarist attempts to understand something that could better be understood in material terms. Trying to discover the small group of individuals who are manipulating history distracts from attempts to understand the structural forces that constrain individuals; but also, because these conspiracy theories always depend on the existence a small powerful group _who are not us_ to manipulate the great majority of people, they are effectively an extended description of our own powerlessness.
The conspiracy theories which blame PNAC or the CIA for 9/11 are dumb (particularly the CIA one, given that the CIA has, insitutionally, been pretty hostile to the Bush doctrine). For the conspiracy theorist, however, both groups are too overt and too large to be the real conspirators; the logical tendency is to look for powers behind the throne (I’ve mentioned this before). This may be one reason why even comparatively moderate conspiracy theorists (who, say, believe that the US government blew up the Twin Towers, an a priori plausible idea stymied only by the complete lack of any evidence for it) tend to take their lead from the out and out nutters like Alex Jones. Unfortunately, it’s at this point, of looking for hidden powers, that the really nasty elements of conspiracy theory come to the surface. Alex Jones, for instance, doesn’t just believe that A long kiss goodnight is a secret prediction of 9/11 from the Illuminati, he also publishes a whole host of anti-semitic shit. The flipside of conspiracy theory is populism, and the populism of Alex Jones is of a particularly ugly sort.
Also on the fascism front, Infinite Thought linked to some great pictures of women in various Communist costumes, which unfortunately turned out to be on the website of wierd Russian fascists, the National Bolsheviks. They’re more disturbing, but also more interesting, than the conspiracy theorists. After Stalinism, I guess the construal of Soviet symbolism as uniquely Russian is not entirely unexpected; their manifesto, meanwhile, is very nasty indeed, calling for spilling blood for the nation and reviving the old fascist slogan, ‘long live death’. Their website also has examples of some of their posters, which range from the seductively anti-capitalist, to the overtly fascist, to the spectacularly insane.
Could have been a great collaboration
When a radio DJ says, “coming up, Natasha Bedingfield and the White Stripes,” is it wrong to be disappointed when they play the new White Stripes song (quite good, as it happens), followed by ‘These Words’?
Those who have shown themselves unworthy of citizenship
Giorgio Agamben:
> The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took place in France in
> 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of ‘enemy’ origin; in 1922, Belgium
> followed the French example an revoked the naturalization of citizens who had
> committed ‘antinational’ acts during the war; in 1926, the fascist regime issued an
> analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown themselves to be ‘unworthy
> of Italian citizenship.’ … And one of the few rules to which the Nazis constantly
> adhered during the cause of the ‘Final Solution’ was that Jews could be sent to the
> extermination camps only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of
> the residual citizenship left to them after the Nuremburg laws).
Tony Blair:
> We have already powers to strip citizenship from those individuals with British or
> dual nationality who act in a way that is contrary to the interests of this country.
> We will now consult on extending these powers, applying them to naturalised
> citizens engaged in extremism and making the procedures simpler and more
> effective.
“I’m gonna merk them for talking shit about the Roll Deep Entourage”
Flo Dan has been my favourite member of Roll Deep for a while, so I’m pleased to see that his cartoon monster alter-ego on the In at the Deep End artwork is the best-dressed of all the group. It’s great album, too. Obviously I like the pop tracks (’The Avenue’, ‘Shake a leg’); silverdollar’s description of it as like listening to Rinse FM with Kiss FM bleeding in is quite right. It’s interesting: the problem with UK hip-hop for so long has been that is was basically Joss Stone with early New York hip-hop instead of soul (where the emphasis on authenticity just serves to make the artifice even more obvious). Suddenly, though, UK artists are capable of stealing wholesale chunks of hip-hop history without sounding either derivative or ludicrous. ‘Show you’ has the twitchy feel of the Wu Tang, but with the remnants of 2-step in the drum line, while ‘Bus stop’ pretty much is a Notorious B.I.G. track with grime-style MCing (and a line from Wiley about being proud of his E3 post-code). Listening to the album again just before posting this, I’ve noticed Wiley’s trademark Nintendo puck sample lurking among the Reasonable Doubt-era Jay-Z sound of ‘Flying away’.
The more obviously ‘grime’ tracks are great, too, and demonstrate how varied a genre it is — from the housey piano of ‘Let it out’ and ‘Remember the days’ (which for some reason make me think of the lights of Limehouse DLR at night) to the sinister accordion of ‘People don’t know’ and the futuristic sound of ‘Be careful’ and ‘Poltergeist’. The MCing remains distinctive throughout; again, unlike UK hip-hop, you get the feeling the MCs have some _need_ to say what they’re saying, beyond the exercise of copping hip-hop poses. Flo Dan, who I don’t think gets as much love as he deserves, comes off as eternally-wise (a little like Big Brother’s Science might be if he wasn’t so insecure). Shame the group are still lumbered with Scratchy D, the Vanilla Ice of grime, but apart from that, they can do no wrong, it seems.
The Guardian on Saturday described ‘Oh’ by Ciara as being “like Jay Z’s Big Pimpin’ crossed with date-rape drugs,” which is impressively accurate. By chance I heard ‘Big City Life’ by Mattafix on Jo Whiley this morning, which sounds like a cross between Helen Love and Beanie Man, and so is fantastic.
I should have said, like Helen Love covering ‘Never ever’, although probably not quite as good as that sounds. Li’l Jon’s happy-hardcore remix of ‘Gasolina’ is good, too.