Constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. 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.
That is to say, I’ve installed the new version of WordPress. It’s possible that this will cause the site not to work properly, although it seems to be going smoothly so far. Also, those of you who have logins for the site will find the interface for writing posts slightly different, although it should be easy to figure out. This seems as good a time as any to remind everyone that, if you feel like writing posts here, just let me know.
Not my dirty brain
Great review of the new Girls Aloud CD, although I don’t think the overall interpretation of the album can quite be made to stick; I certainly hope not, as it trys to foist on the Girls an ideology much less radical than they’ve previously displayed. The problem running through the whole piece finally crystalizes in the conclusion:
Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as…sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty.
Which seems to be nothing so much as an invocation of a _true_ sex and a true love behind the simulacra provided by capitalism. But this essentializing move is disasterous, because the idea of a true love, a true sex, a true body, a use value beyond exchange value, is precisely what supports capitalism, the fantasy that allows it to keep going (unlike what your old-school Marxist would tell you, it is not in his declaration of the death of reality, but in his nostalgia for that reality, that Baudrillard is most clearly the ideologue of capital).
Similar questions, in the context of anti-essentialist feminism, have also been animating the splendid Bitch Lab recently. There’s also this recent article, ‘Pornography is a Left Issue’, which is curious in that it argues, as far as I can see, that pornography is not a left issue. The argument, that is, is that leftists should be opposed to pornography because porn work is exploitative; but of course all work is exploitative, and the only attempt to define the specificity of porn is:
In pornography, the stakes are even higher; what is being commodified is crucial to our sense of self. Whatever a person’s sexuality or views on sexuality, virtually everyone agrees it is an important aspect of our identity. In pornography, and in the sex industry more generally, sexuality is one more product to be packaged and sold.
This notion of the “importance” of sex then goes completely unexamined; which is unfortunate, because it allows a nominally feminist gloss on a classic position of patriarchy: women who have the right sort of sex are good, those who don’t are bad (although perhaps, poor victims of patriarchy, they can’t help it).
Perhaps sex is important in a different way. As Foucault put it, “sex is boring”; but, he immediately went on to say, discourse about sex is interesting. Or, to put it another way, sex is not important because it is naturally important, but because of the particular and entirely artificial position it occupies in contemporary ideology. This would also suggest an alternative to the rather sub-Chomsky notion of media criticism employed in the article above (porn companies make money out of sexist stereotypes? Who knew?). The point of a critique of the media (which can surely only be weakened by trying to isolate and fence off pornographic tropes) can’t be to point out the things in the media which are false; the problem is the way in which the media constructs the truth.
What I would like to see is a different sort of critique, which attempted to understand the methods used to construct truth so we could construct other truths, with more egalitarianism both in the methods and the outcomes. Such a critique would also relate to pornography in a somewhat different way: if porn is objectionable because it is so powerful in constructing a particular sort of domination, what can it tell us about the techniques for constructing non-domination?
Wishing you a subtractive Christmas, and a generic New Year
I’ve enjoyed a fine secular Christmas: my sisters and I cooked the turkey (along with some pikelets for Christmas tea), we all sat round opening presents, and later watched the Two Ronnies (an entirely inexplicable programme). And I wonder if k-punk is quite right to emphasize Christmas as an example of “decaffeinated belief.” Maybe we can identify two forms of secularism around Christmas. There’s the kind of multiculturalism k-punk, following Žižek, rightly attacks, in which everyone’s identity is “respected,” so long as they don’t break the rules and make anyone uncomfortable. So you get the “holidays,” a chain of equivalence of winter festivals Solstice=Yule=Christmas=Channukah=Kwanzaa. Hence the re-branding of specific Christmas traditions as “holiday” traditions (”holiday trees,” etc), which manages to be offensive to Christians and non-Christians alike.
But I’m not sure that, for most people in the UK at least, the secularism of Christmas is like that; the festival is not a celebration of identity whether in the full-blooded fundamentalist sense as the true identity, or in the decaffeinated multiculturalist sense of one identity among others. Christmas seems more like a purely excessive celebration, with Christianity simply the latest specific reason to be overcome. Most people no longer work in agriculture, but we continue to celebrate in winter: this isn’t a disavowed Solstice celebration, but a celebration _in spite of the irrelevance_ of solstice. Likewise, Christmas is not a disavowed celebration of the birth of Christ, but a celebration predicated on the irrelevance of Christianity. Practised in this way, Christmas would be the direct opposite of the multicultural “holidays” — an unbounded sum of negations, rather than a chain of identities.
That, at least, is what I hear when I listen to the Girls Aloud Christmas CD, which, and I don’t think this is a coincidence, contains no carols (and at least one track — ‘Not Tonight Santa’ — which really ought to make its way into the Christmas airplay heavy rotation).
Biopolitics
> The growing risks of poverty and social exclusion are not necessarily inherent and
> inevitable features of our society. They spring from two ‘malfunctioning’ institutions:
> the labour market and the family. … Behind these lines of analysis lurks my key
> hypothesis, namely that the household economy is _alpha and omega_ to an resolution
> of the main postindustrial dilemmas, perhaps the single most important ’social
> foundation’ of postindustrial economies.
>
>
— Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies
The interesting thing about reading political economy is that the positive categories used by social scientists are eerily similar to the critical concepts used by theorists. The ruling class are nothing if not honest, after all.
“Zombie movies about Bush’s ‘presidency’ are the kind of social realism art that I can get behind”
Anthrochica on Homecoming:
> What can I say? Except that it was the best thing ever. Few things are as satisfying as
> seeing your own deepest beliefs adapted for a pop culture medium and featuring
> zombies. I am going to tell you the plot because it’s not like I can ruin it, because
> it’s just the narrative of the first Bush “presidency,” I mean, I guess if you were
> hybernating from March 2003 through the electoral fiasco last year, beware of the
> “spoilers.” Other than that, it’s all Allegory, except that Ze Semiotic Collapse of Ze
> Zeitgeist pretty much ensures that allegory is verite now.
And she’s right, it’s pretty damn good. It’s interesting that the form of a horror film, in licensing a certain amount of gore, also appears to license a suprisingly long scene of Karl Rove’s head getting beaten to a pulp, and Anne Coulter getting shot in the back of the head.
Download it here.
Why not try at least pretending you don’t have Alastair Campbell’s hand shoved up your arse?
Hard to know which is more offensive about this article in today’s Guardian. The fucking lying spinning bullshit of the Social Attitudes Survey eagerly regurgitated by the Guardian, or the patronising contemptuous cack-handed way in which the spin has been executed.
> Tony Blair’s plans to benefit poorer families by expanding choice in education and
> health …
Oh, thank-you, John Carvel, for keeping me so well informed of Tony’s kind and generous plans to help poorer families by destroying the fucking welfare state.
Can the subaltern rock?
Shakira’s Oral Fixations from Colombia, Tatu’s Dangerous and Moving from Russia. In the past six months alone, we have two examples of artists from the semiperiphary selling soft-rock back to the metropole. Is this merely coincidence? Or is a materialist explanation required?
(Which reminds me that while we were hanging around the other day in the CS office swapping Spivak gossip, I forgot to mention this fine story of craziness)
T BERKELEY
> I had never understood why Socialism need imply the arraying of oneself
> in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the cultivation of flowing
> locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut of clothes.
>
> …
>
> I entertained scant sympathy for what I regarded as hygenic fads; and
> the emphasis with which the lady averred that she touched neither flesh
> nor alcohol, and felt that by this abstinence she was not “besotting her
> brain nor befouling her soul,” amused me much.
>
> …
>
> “It is you bourgeois socialists, with your talk of helping us, and your
> anxiety about using your property ‘to the best advantage,’ who are the
> ruin of every movement,” he said, addressing me in an uncompromising
> spirit. “What is wanted is enthusiasm, whole-hearted labour, and where
> that is, no thought is taken as to whether everything is being used to the
> best advantage. If you are prepared to enter the movement in this spirit,
> without any backward notion that you are conferring a favour upon
> anyone—for indeed the contrary is the case—well and good; but if not,
> you had better side with your own class and enjoy your privileges as long
> as the workers put up with you.”
>
> It was what I had all along instinctively felt. Private property was, after
> all, but the outcome of theft, and there can be no virtue in restoring
> what we have come by unrighteously.
>
>
— Isabel Meredith, A Girl Among the Anarchists
Humanitarian intervention in Abu Ghraib
Great piece on Hitchens, which might be profitably read alongside this vicious article on George Orwell. I’m not an unqualified admirer of Orwell by any means, but even I think Dolan is too harsh. Still, he’s absolutely right on Orwell’s imperialism; and this line (describing Orwell on the Burmese) seems particularly relevant:
> Occupation seems to be a lark for them, a chance to indulge their
> caddish habit of cheating at sport.
This is the core of the condemnation of the Iraqi resistance: they’re terrorists, they don’t obey the laws of war. Well, fuck the laws of war. Just war theory has always been an alibi for imperialism. It’s no accident that it began to be seriously elaborated in the 16th century, by Spanish scholastics seeking to justify the occupation of the Americas. It’s a species of casuistry, taking on the structure of counterfactual justification identified by Bat. The laws of war forbid the targetting of civilians; this is then held to justify actual wars, despite the fact that there has never been a war in which civilians have _not_ been targetted.
This is the logic which sustains instrumental justification for war. When the use of violence is treated as an unpleasant but necessary means to a good end, the unpleasantness tends to get elided in favor of the justness of the end; or, as with Tony Blair, the willingness to make “hard choices” is taken to be in itself an argument for the rightness of these choices. Which makes me think that there’s actually no surprise in the apparently paradoxical conjunction of the rise of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and the ongoing normalization of torture. Torture is perhaps the clearest example of the instrumental use of violence, and so, far from being opposed to humanitarian intervention, torture represents its truth.
Max Weber, Nazi?
I’ve been reading Weber’s two ‘vocations’ essays recently; there’s some interesting stuff there, but also some very disturbing tendencies. In his argument against an engaged scholarship, says that the scientist can only draw out the logical consequences of particular commitments, never provide any answer to the question, “what shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?” a question which he immediately assimilates to, “which of the warring gods shall we serve?” This religious dimension is important, because it allows him to contrast the scientist to “a prophet or savior,” who “can give the answers.” Shades of Heidegger’s rectoral address, perhaps?
To substantiate the connection to Naziism (particularly as expressed by Heidegger), we can look at the politics essay. Weber argues for an ideal-type of the politician as a “sober hero,” a responsible, cautious political actor who is nevertheless passionately devoted to a cause. Weber does not specify a particular cause. Any cause will do, or, rather, the ’cause’ here is a structural role the content of which, of necessity, cannot be filled in. Why is this? Well, it may relate to the role played by the sober hero in securing politics in the face of rationalization and bureaucracy. If the content of the cause were specified, it would be calculable and so subject to the realm of bureaucracy. The empty space left by the undetermined cause keeps open the political determination of ends, makes politics more than a simple matter of technocratic rationality.
What does this mean, though, when added to the theory of the sober hero? Or, to put it another way, what does the sober hero actually _do_? Weber is clear that there is no way back from our disenchanted bureaucratic-capitalist world, and so the sober hero cannot rescue politics by actually replacing administration with politics. All the sober hero can offer is a kind of redemption of politics. Perhaps a Christ-like redemption. But perhaps, rather, a Fuhrer like redemption: the sober hero redeems by being the one sovereign political moment, vanishing and point-like within the system of bureaucracy.
What’s interesting here is the similarity and difference to a conception of politics like Badiou’s. Both share a desire to defend politics in the face of administration; but Weber seems only able to construe this political moment in a single individual, rather than in a collectivity. Isn’t this precisely the moment where both the fascist and the populist danger arise: when an individual (whether that individual be a single person or a hypostasized unitary people) is substituted for the open collectivity which provides the genericity which makes this incalculable, non-administrative, politics possible?