No news on the Templars, though
As Alex Jones has so rightly observed, the Illuminati like nothing better than to hide in plain sight. Indeed they seem to be recruiting, while here in Berkeley the Rosicrucians are holding public meetings:
“I’m kind of glad I didn’t go camping”
So said one of the people I’m living with on his return from the Folsom Street Leather Fair. I think there’s a joke in their somewhere. Anyway, he told us about some of the entertaining things he had got up to, or simply witnessed, at the fair, which I won’t go into except to remark that one of his stories ended with the classic line, “and then she pulled down her pants and got out _her_ dick.”
In other news, if you have access to an academic library and fancy a laugh, I suggest you check out Local Players in Global Games: The Strategic Constitution of a Multinational Corporation, the funniest piece of work about capitalism since The Office. An epic tale of heroes and villains in the world of dairy processing equipment. Thrill to:
> The result was a highly flexible organisation in which many types and variants of
> pumps, valves, and fittings could be manufactured in small batches to customer
> specifications with low overheads and short lead times.
Gasp as we discover the shocking secret of:
> Ambitious experiments with work reorganization and ‘win-win’ bargaining, orchestrated
> primarily by local actors.
And find out what happens when:
> The Lake Mills plant was therefore able to enhance its competitive position within the
> MNC, bidding successfully for work from group facilities which had been closed, winning
> the right to participate as a junior partner in the manufacture of a new generation of pumps,
> and becoming the corporate leader for a new family of locally developed ice-cream
> freezers.
Channel 4 launches TV’s first interactive drama
Wow, how futuristic. And only 17 years after Children’s BBC did it, too.
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Naming the Other Campaign
> This political subject has had several names: ‘citizen’, for example, in the sense the French
> Revolution gives to the word; there is also ‘professional revolutionary’ and ‘grassroots
> activist’. Without a doubt, we live in a time in which the name is in suspense, in a time when
> _this subject’s name must be found_.
>
>
— Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Politics’
For a while, though, I’ve been vaguely bandying around an idea for a name for our current political subject, a name which, in a sense, stands in a tradition which begins with ‘Citizen’ and continues with ‘Comrade’. Wouldn’t it be a fine tribute to the Zapatista practice of commanding by obeying to refer to everyone (or everyone on our side, rather) as ‘Commandanta’? The Zapatista rebellion began almost twelve years ago and shows no sign of ceasing, in Mexico (where it continues to expand with The Other Campaign) or elsewhere.
Hopefully, Commandante Geo will post more information on the Zapatistas’ new campaign, in which they remain, as Marcos once put it, “very otherly.”
“That violence which is just under the skin”
The necessity of violent resistance to colonialism comes from a truth that, according to Fanon, every colonised subject knows:
> Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is
> violence in its natural state (61).
Here, Fanon implies an old opposition which will, in part, animate the rest of the chapter on violence: the opposition between the _body_ and the _mind_. Fanon does not, exactly, reject the binary formed by these two terms, but (in the manner described by Bogues as ‘heresy’) employs the opposition against its previous uses. This opposition, of course, has been the root of traditional racist tropes: the mind is held to be the distinguishing feature of the human being, and is restricted to the _white_ being; black people exist solely at the level of the body, and thus are not, really, human.
We can see this usage in the attempts of the colonial power to unite with the native bourgeoisie and intelligensia on the basis of a commonality of interests:
> It is therefore urgent and indespensible to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence
> is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any
> regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been
> shed” (62).
The commonality here is a commonality of intellectuality around the “green baize table.” The “affranchised slave” (61), the colonial power decrees, has a share of mind that differentiates her from and opposes her to the bloody body of the colonized people. For Fanon, who has already seen that colonialism is absolutely of the body, this claim by the colonial power to be defending the (white) mind against the (black) body can be nothing but a lie; the truth, in fact, is almost the direct opposite.
It might seem that Fanon’s theory of violence accepts at least some of the racist implications of the racialized mind-body opposition: if the colonial subjects’ response to the violence of colonialism is simply greater violence, they too remain on the level of the body. Fanon’s understanding of anti-colonial violence is not so simple, however: it is (and necessarily) bodily, but it is so as an _embodiment_ of the collective anti-colonial _mind_.
Anti-colonial violence arises from a rejection of the false intellectuality of negotiations with the oppressor: “The masses, without waiting for the chairs to be arranged around the baize table, listen to their own voice and begin committing outrages and setting fire to buildings” (62f). But this rejection is not bodily in the sense of being _without_ mind; on the contrary, it articulates itself, it is the masses responding to their own voice. Further, in the course of developing their means of violence, the consciousness of the revolutionary masses develops (as described throughout the chapter and specifically mentioned on 72).
One of the reasons, then, for the central role of violence in Fanon’s account of revolution is that violence is a _praxis_, a unity of theory and practice. It “fulfills for the native a role which is not simply informative but also operative” (70). Instead of an opposition between the mind and the body, then, which has been racialized and used to dehumanize, violence provides Fanon with a unity of mind and body through which the revolutionary subject can construct a complete humanity.
(Written for a class on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Dunno whether I want to start reproducing academic work on here regularly — it might lower the tone. We’ll see.)
Call for papers
Is the purpose of US television news solely to induce a state of abject terror? It certainly looked like it the other day. Hurricanes, exploding manhole covers, black people shooting one another: the whole natural world is attacking Americans! I was also watching an amazing documentary about Fidel Castro on PBS. It turns out he was marked for evil from an early age.
Which brings me to the new Thesis You Should Write. Prison Break (torrents) is an odd program. It’s structured at all points to be as reassuring as possible: at one point, a flashback was inserted _in the middle of a speech_ so that the flashback ended with the character saying a line he then immediately repeated in the present day. As Geo pointed out, the contemporary practice of revealing the plot in the ‘next week on…’ section of the show likewise has the effect of avoiding any possible uncertainty; the cliffhanger has been replaced with the teaser so that you know what you are getting and will be comforted when it arrives. But _at the same time_ as being Foucauldian in it’s form, its content is also as Foucauldian as fuck: the main character _has tattooed a map of the prison on to himself_.
Comparative politics
> A political situation is always singular; it is never repeated. Therefore, political writings —
> directives or commands — are justified inasmuch as they inscribe, not a repitition, but, on the
> contrary, the _unrepeatable_. When the content of a political statement is a repitition, the
> statement is rhetorical and empty. It does not form part of a thinking.
>
— Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’
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Got a feeling it’s a mixed-up sign
> The most common innovation is to give an unwonted meaning to an expression already in
> use. That method is simple, quick, and easy. No learning is needed to make use of it, and
> ignorance itself can make it easier. But it involved great dangers for the language. In thus
> giving double meanings to one word, democratic peoples often make both the old and the
> new signification ambiguous.
>
>
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ‘How American Democracy Has Modified the English Language’
> The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within the
> form of a book that new writings — literary or theoretical — allow themselves to be, for
> better or worse, encased… Beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread
> past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading
> occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of
> writing.
>
>
— Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
> Constant
> revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
> everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
> All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
> opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
> All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
> face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
>
>
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
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Also on point
> “We must go out and find them behind the veil where they hide themselved and in the
> houses where the men keep them out of sight.” The dominant administration solemnly
> undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered… It
> described the immense possibilites of woman, unfortunately transformed by the Algerian
> man into an inert, demonetized, indeed dehumanized object. The behaviour of the Algerian
> was very firmly denounced and described as medieval and barbaric. With infinite science,
> a blanket indictment against the “sadistic and vampirish” Algerian attitude toward women
> was prepared and drawn up.
>
>
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
Presumably Foucault had read Fanon. Certainly, among other things, A Dying Colonialism is a deeply insightful analysis of power/knowledge.
I hadn’t read any Fanon before, so I was unaware of his incredible analysis of the attempts by the colonial administration to prevent Algerian women from wearing the veil, which is, for obvious reasons, massively relevant right now. I’ve given up being disappointed in the British press’s coverage of this issue, but ideally this context would have been mentioned back when the French government was busy outlawing the hijab. How do those Socialist and Communist deputies who voted for the ban manage to call themselves ‘left’ without bursting out laughing at their own absurd hypocrisy? (This is as good a time as any to mention Badiou’s excellent article on the hijab law).
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“We are proud to serve the government in this time of crisis by recovering valuable resources from the wreckage of this deadly storm”
The Onion on New Orleans, on point.
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