Utility, Excess, Value, Waste
A real CFP this time. Please forward freely.
CRITICAL SENSE: A JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY
CALL FOR PAPERS SPRING 2006
Utility, Excess, Value, Waste:
Interrogating the Productive and the Unproductive
The difference between the productive and the unproductive vexes us in the most banal and daily ways: we use these terms to categorize not only our work, but also our social exchanges, our affective states, our political activities, our time itself. We do not merely “do” productive or unproductive things, we _feel_ productive or unproductive. We unconsciously attach a normative value to these descriptions of our daily activity and labor, attributing goodness, usefulness and meaning to productivity, and waste, laxity, and luxury to that which is unproductive.
For this special issue of Critical Sense we are interested in a variety of approaches to these concepts: work that rethinks productivity and its attending terms within the discourse of economy; work that translates the categories of the productive and the unproductive into other discursive contexts; and work that is critical of the concepts themselves. If these terms trace their origin to classic political economy–in which they may claim to be structural or descriptive rather than normative–they have become equally important to (and the objects of critique within) a range of other fields and discourses. We welcome a wide range of submissions that deal with this topic.
Questions or issues that might be relevant include:
* Productivity of the “symbolic work� of marketing and branding; role
of affective labor in production
* Feminist/gender theory critiques of the concepts of the productive and
unproductive; role of reproduction at the level of the family as well
as within ideological forms
* Adequacy or inadequacy of these terms to pre-colonial, colonial, or
neocolonial slavery and slave labor
* The value of the unproductive, that which cannot find equivalent,
which cannot produce economic value or be thought in its terms, that
which is excessive or beyond measure: the lazy, the ineffectual,
resistance and refusal
* “Non-productive� (and, indeed, non-economic) economies of gift and
sacrifice
* Relevance to the aesthetics of decadence, excess, or immoderation
* Relevance to/role within libidinal economies; productivity or
unproductiveness of drives, desires, repressive labor
* Relevance of productivity to the epistemological, cognitive, or
philosophical
* Productivity in politics: examining cults of efficiency or critiques
of mass or elite politics invoking the notions of efficiency,
expediency, waste, and/or unproductive activity
We also welcome book reviews on any topic within the orbit of political and cultural theory, whether related or unrelated to the issue’s theme. Papers should be no more than 30 pages; reviews, no more than 10. All submissions are due by JANUARY 31st, 2006 electronically to
criticalsense@lists.berkeley.edu.
Critical Sense is located online at http://criticalsense.berkeley.edu/.
Foucault as non Western Marxist
Foucault is often painted as an anti-Marxist, often for fairly poor reasons (see, for instance, this baffling passage where Barrett quotes Foucault calling for a “liberation” of Marx, and describing the importance of Marx for his own methodology, as evidence of Foucault’s _disagreement_ with Marx). Perhaps; but if you are going to emphasize Foucault’s “no-saying, _no-doing_” moment, it surely makes more sense to pick Freud as the target. The more I think about it (which admittedly is still not all that much thinking), the more of Foucault’s work I think can be read as an attack on Freud. Obviously, The Will to Knowledge, with its attack on “the repressive hypothesis”, but also the earlier and the later work:Madness and Civilization’s historization of normalization, Discipline and Punish’s emphasis on the production of interiority, or The Care of the Self’s account of self-fashioning; these are all examples of Foucault attacking what he calls “the California cult of the self,” built around the idea of a “true self,” which can be alienated or obscured but about which we must discover the truth. And, if we wanted to attach a name to this cult, wouldn’t that name be “Freud”?
(Incidentally, like Moll I recently read Civilization and Its Discontents for a class. Our professor commented that, while we’d been happy to take Marx, Bentham or Nietzsche on their own terms, we had been much more substantively critical of Freud. I wonder if this isn’t because Freud, unlike the previous authors, is almost a direct spokesperson for contemporary normalizing capital)
Which brings me back to my title; inasmuch as Foucault is an anti-Marxist, he is opposed particularly to certain strands of Western Marxism: the Freudian Marxism of the Frankfurt School, but also a similar kind of economic/hydraulic mode of thought that you find in, for instance, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. On the other hand, Foucault seems much more compatible with non-Western Marxism: he worked with Maoists in the GIP, and a number of his ideas are clearly similar to ideas previously put forward by Fanon (whose own relationship to Marxism wasn’t simple, of course).
Who are the Cornishmen of America?
I’m not sure if this is a Cornish opinion or not — it seems pretty obvious to me. Webster’s spelling reforms (and this probably generalizes to all phonetic spelling reforms) render language less consistent, and make correct spelling harder, than the etymological (or is it morphological?) approach of British English.
(I think the answer to the question in the title may be “Wisconsinites,” but I could be wrong).
Anyone for a sweepstake on when he’ll mention “running dogs”?
Surprisingly Maoist turn of phrase from Cheney:
Vice President Cheney yesterday accused critics of engaging in “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.”
This brings up an interesting point about neo-conservatism, though. I can almost imagine Cheney attacking “running dogs of…” Well, that’s the problem: running dogs of _what_? Obviously the old Maoist classics aren’t going to work; “running dogs of capitalism,” “the bourgeoisie,” “reaction” (let alone “yanqui imperialism”), would all be the wrong targets; but what exactly _is_ the enemy against which neoconservatism defines itself?
k-punk, on France, mentions the discourse of inevitability employed by capitalist ideology. However, maybe we need to introduce an extra detail into this analysis. Unlike Thatcher’s claim that There Is No Alternative (a modernist position of a sort, in that it posited the inevitability of progress, albeit ‘progress’ only on capital’s terms), the Third Way claims precisely to _be_ the alternative (and thus is postmodernist; rather than asserting what the future will be, it simply abolishes the future by claiming to instantiate it).
And this is the strategy of the neo-cons — permanent revolutionaries of a revolution they know to have no content. It’s common to accuse the neo-cons of inventing an enemy to take the place of the USSR after the Cold War, but I think they’re cleverer than that. Rather than create a new enemy, they have retained the form of revolutionary politics but stubbornly refused to give it any substance; thus, any group can be given the role of enemy indifferently and opportunisticly, despite the fact that “everyone knows” they are not the real enemy at which the revolution is aimed. I think this may go some way to explaining the strange alliance between the neo-cons, New Labor, and the washed-up ex-Marxists of the pro-war left.
Zee-to-the-izek
A newish article, though needless to say the arguments are not so new. Still quality, though. On the hijab:
The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the
standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil: acceptable
if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or
family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal
choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging
to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality.
In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality
of the choice itself: it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a
veil that effectively chooses a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal
democracies, people who maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a
subordinate position: their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal
choice, but the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them—a
matter of substantial belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’.
Plainly, the ‘subject of free choice’, in the ‘tolerant’, multicultural
sense, can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of
being uprooted from one’s particular life-world.
It seems to me this opens up the space from which Fanon’s discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism takes off. And on the ideology of human rights:
It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
violence. Rony Brauman, who co-ordinated aid to Sarajevo, has demonstrated
how the very presentation of the crisis there as ‘humanitarian’, the very
recasting of a political-military conflict into humanitarian terms, was
sustained by an eminently political choice—basically, to take the Serb side
in the conflict. The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in
Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, Brauman argues, thus
disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. [9]
From this particular insight we may problematize, at a general level, the
ostensibly depoliticized politics of human rights as the ideology of
military interventionism serving specific economico-political ends. As Wendy
Brown has suggested apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the
innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defence of the individual
against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture,
state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations
or instantiations of collective power against individuals. [10]
However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who intervene
on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they oppose? Do
they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they stand in
opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear that the
us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms of ending the
suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by hard-headed
politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate idea of the
political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’ was to be delivered
to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism, insertion into the
global market economy, etc. The purely humanitarian, anti-political politics
of merely preventing suffering thus amounts to an implicit prohibition on
elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation.
And on violence:
The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the
standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instrument
of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation. [7] The
‘irrational’ brutality of violence is thus aufgehoben, ‘sublated’ in the
strict Hegelian sense, reduced to a particular ‘stain’ that contributes to
the overall harmony of historical progress. The 20th century confronted us
with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political forces, others
generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in
this way. Their instrumentalization into the tools of the Cunning of Reason
is not only ethically unacceptable but also theoretically wrong, ideological
in the strongest sense of the term. In his close reading of Marx, Balibar
nonetheless discerns an oscillation between this teleological
‘conversion-theory’ of violence, and a much more interesting notion of
history as an open-ended process of antagonistic struggles, whose final
‘positive’ outcome is not guaranteed by any encompassing historical
necessity.
Balibar argues that, for necessary structural reasons, Marxism is unable to
think the excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrative of
historical Progress. More specifically, it cannot provide an adequate theory
of fascism and Stalinism and their ‘extreme’ outcomes, Shoah and Gulag. Our
task is therefore twofold: to deploy a theory of historical violence as
something which cannot be instrumentalized by any political agent, which
threatens to engulf this agent itself in a self-destructive vicious cycle;
and also to pose the question of how to turn the revolutionary process
itself into a civilizing force.
And finally, Jodi Dean makes a fine point about Hardt and Negri’s optimism and Gramscian pessimism as two sides of the same coin (with Žižek and Benjamin providing the necessary alternative).
“Time to form a rebel alliance and slay Goliath”
In the comments, a guy with the remarkable name of Solid Stalin disses me for hating on UK hip-hop. And he has a point; I’ve been listening to some Klashnekoff recently, who is fucking great, a million miles away from the Old School nonsense that seemed to dominate the UK rap scene when I last checked it out (or maybe that was just the Cambridge rap scene?). Check out ‘Freedom Fighters’ in particular.
Conscious grime, meanwhile, courtesy of DJ Lioness, G Double E with ‘Harmony’ (about 15 minutes in). That set has also has a couple of cracking tracks from DaVinChe; I particularly like the hardcore-esque flourishes on ‘Pryin’. Speaking of which, it’s good to see Ruff Sqwad keeping an old happy hardcore tradition alive with their remix of ‘Died in your arms tonight’ (via).
You know, I swear when I was in town today I heard someone with Drinking Bear as their ringtone, but that surely can’t be true?
strangely Lacanian
someone i know has bought a gift for a friend’s baby toddler: “toe-tappers rocket-star booties.” these, apparently, are shoes for a kid, but no ordinary shoes. besides being shaped like rockets, these are moreover lacanian shoes.
evidently, “the crinkle paper encourages self-discovery.” is this some sort of warped lacanian mirror-stage, where the child identifies itself in the crinkle paper? what kind of kid identifies with crinkle-paper, rather than a statue, standing tall, which belies her own lack of motor skills? the crinkle paper says little about the child’s capacities, and i fail to see where the identification comes in.
incidentally, a web site sheds some light on the question, though not in a particularly encouraging way: it apparently has something to do with babies “discovering their feet.”
“Let’s build a squadron of dirigibles in Lenin’s name!”
My parents have been visiting this past week, and (as you perhaps might expect from a visit to Berkeley), it’s been all Mao all the time. First, we stopped in at the Red-Color News Soldier exhibit at the Journalism School while I was showing my parents round campus. The photos really are all stunning, particularly when displayed at full poster size.
A few days later, we went to Stanford and stopped in at Revolutionary Tides: The art of the political poster 1914-1989 (unfortunately, the website requires Flash). It’s a very interesting exhibition, focussing on the ways in which masses and crowds have been represented in graphic art. There was a great range of posters; the usual suspects of Russia, China (although fewer than I would have liked), as well as Nazi Germany and wartime posters from the West; but also the Spanish and Iranian revolutions, for instance, which I’ve seen very little of.
The juxtaposition of these very different historical moments could, of course, carry the standard liberal pronouncement that all mass movements are bad (as with the SF Chronicle’s outstandingly superficial review, all the more annoying as the critic seems to think he’s saying something incredibly clever, rather than parroting the party line of contemporary capitalism). But while there was an element of that, the general thrust of the exhibit rather seemed to be interested in analyzing the masses as a central figure of modern politics, which had to be reckoned with by any form of political organization, although the figure could be mobilized in many different ways. Particularly interesting was the discussion of various anatomical metonyms (the fist or the mouth of the masses). I thought of Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the flesh of the multitude, and I wondered how we might represent that ‘crowd without organs’ in our own political agitation.
I’ve also discovered a site of Russian posters, many of which are marvellous. My favorites so far are probably this futurist one, and these images of technology (one including Lenin).
Due to ludicrous technology
We have a box in our kitchen which plays music via the power of wireless internet. Because of this, I’ve been listening to The Postal Service a fair bit while cooking. They’re pretty good, a little bit like a cross between Bearsuit and The Flaming Lips. Add to that a random MP3 playing of Arab Strap’s ‘The Shy Retirer’, and a purposeful tracking down of some Camera Obscura, and it occours to me to wonder if featuring trumpets is a sure sign of a good indie record? I mean, given indie’s awesome capacity for making bad records, I assume there must be _some_ bad records with trumpets on them, but I can’t think of any.
The year was 1920…
… and it was a dark and stormy night. The lightning flashed and the rain lashed the mysterious old house where Nikola Tesla was putting the finishing touches to his greatest invention, the tele-time-ceiver. Surpassing even his triumphant detection of extra-terrestrial radio signals, his new device would allow him to pierce the very veil of time itself! The final screw was connected, the final wire tightened; the mad genius flipped the final contact and the machine hummed into life. Slowly, as vast energies accumulated within the apparatus, it began to pick up signals never yet broadcast; the rumbles of war in 1939; of revolution in 1968. As it approached the limits of its powers, the signals began to be overcome by interference. Tesla halted the machine at the year 2005, and gazed at the flickering, disjointed images of another age. As he stared, rapt in wonder, an idea formed in his head; he grabbed pen and paper and began to write: not scientific invention this time, but _a movie script_.
That, at least, is how I like to imagine the script of Shopgirl coming about. It’s an odd film; clearly set in the present day, but just as clearly animated by an archaic sensibility. Sometimes, this just leads to surface incoherence. Steve Martin is humorously unaware of what ‘jerk chicken’ is, presumably demonstrating that he is an old man, out of touch with the wild food habits of the modern age. But a few scenes later, we see Martin deftly wielding chopsticks, as suave, cosmopolitan dot-com millionaire. More seriously, it makes it difficult to figure out the narrative: are we supposed to take seriously the broad strokes that delineate Claire Danes’s character (Mirabelle) as A Lonely Young Woman (she sleeps alone in a double bed; she has a cat)? Shouldn’t we be more troubled than the film appears to be by the power relations in her relationship with rich old Steve Martin? I’m not saying the film has to forthrightly condemn old men shagging young women; but the _assumption_ that seems to be implicit, that his is an appropriate mode of courtship, seems like it should have been untenable for about 50 years.
There’s also the strangely unsure tone of the film. There’s a lot of broad comedy around Claire Danes’s other suitor (and I mean BBC sitcom broad, that is to say, unfunny); are similarly uncomfortable moments in her relationship with Martin also supposed to be funny? It seems not. How, then, to understand the resolution of the film, in which Jeremy’s transformation by yoga self-help tapes makes him a suitable partner for Mirabelle in contrast to Ray (Martin’s character)? Though “resolution” is a slightly odd word to use of the end of a film which entirely lacks narrative momentum. That lack is not necessarily a problem — In The Mood For Love is the same, and I love it in part _for_ that — but there seems no obvious reason other than the plot for this film to exist at all.
Still, anthrochica liked it, so maybe I’m missing something. And Claire Danes is both an excellent actor and consistently wears lovely clothes throughout, so the film’s not a total waste of time.