The work of Britney in the age of mechanical reproduction
There’s something wonderfully generic about dance remixes of pop tunes. Any last romantic perceptions of the artist as Genius rigorously dismantled and reassembled into a kind of proletarian music (in the sense of a music without properties). Via Jessica (the popist’s objet petit a), here’s some marvellous examples: “I’m Not a Girl (Not Yet a Woman)” transformed from sincere Dido nonsense to a kind of robotic impersonation of funky house, and a sort of bargain-basement trance version of “Lucky.” That site also has a great electroclash-ish remix of “4ever” by The Veronicas (which was already brilliant enough in its nu-Max original).
Being reminded of “Lucky,” I downloaded the video, which is even better than I remember. Britney playing the role of an actress who is acting in a film who is looking at a reflection of herself in a mirror… I hope Žižek’s seen it, as it appears to be all about the Lacanian account of subjectivity. Perhaps Žižek can be persuaded to follow up his show on films with one on pop videos. And wasn’t watching The Perverts Guide to Cinema a strange experience? Someone with a strong foreign accent (Eastern European, no less), discussing a complex subject in detail with no re-enactments or reality TV trappings or other bullshit—I thought I’d been transported back to the ’70s.
Meanwhile: Britney Spears in the age of biological reproduction.
“Fools as dull as the heavy thud of a computer on the helmet of a riot cop”
Via No More Big Wheels, an incredible statement from a group calling themselves The Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile. Difficult to choose the best bits to quote, but here’s some of them:
By installing their police here, they offered the Sorbonne to all the dispossessed. At this hour when we are writing this the Sorbonne does not belong to the students anymore, it belongs to all those who, by the word or the cocktail, mean to defend it.
…
We are fighting against a law passed with a majority vote by a legitimate parliament. Our simple existence proves that the democratic principle of majority vote is questionable, it proves that the myth of the sovereignty of the general assembly can be usurped. It is part of our struggle to limit, as much as possible, the tyranny of the majority vote. … Once the vote has been cast for a strike until the withdrawal of the law for equal opportunity, the general assemblies should become a space of endless debate, a space for sharing experiences, ideas, and desires, a place where we constitute our strength, not a scene of petty power struggles and intrigues for swaying the decision.
…
They were wandering in anguish of the freedom offered but impossible to grasp, because it was not desired. A week later, after numerous occupations and confrontations with the police, their asserted impotence is finally giving place to an innocent taste for direct action. Pacifism finally becomes what it has never stopped being: a benign existential pathology.
…
We are referring to what did not happen in 68, the revolutionary turmoil that did not take place. By casting us in the past, some would like to extract us from the present situation and to make lose the strategic understanding of it. By treating 68 as a simple student movement, they would like to dismiss the still present menace of what 68 could have been, a savage general strike, a burst of a human strike.
…
The idea of democratically debating every day those who are against the strike on the renewal of the strike is absurd. The strike has never been a democratic practice, but a political accomplished fact, an immediate expropriation, a relationship of power. No one has ever voted the establishment of capitalism. Those who oppose the strike are de facto standing on the other side of the barricade, and the only exchange we could have with them is of insults, punches and rotten eggs. In the face of referendums set up to break the strike, the only thing to do is to abolish them by all means necessary.
…
We are the heirs of the failure of all the “social movements.�
…
None of the “social movements� of recent years has achieved in months of “struggle� what the insurgents of November discretely obtained in three weeks of riots – cuts to public assistance in the affected areas were suspended, funding for local programs was reinstated. All of this without making any demands. Demanding means defining your existence in the mutilating terms of those in power.
…
Even their marshals have a new role, and a new name: they are now the “action division� and are preparing to confront the police if they have to.
…
No one has the right to tell us that what we are doing is “illegitimate.� … Our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful.
The dangers of reading too much Chomsky
I find myself at Le Colonel Chabert’s site every now and then by following links from various people I like, but I’m always disatisfied with the analyses she offers, and I think k-punk articulates why with his snappy phrase, “moralizing liberal socialism.” I’m not sure k-punk’s ad hominems are necessary or indeed accurate, though. Surely the problem with LCC’s moralizing of capital isn’t that it allows her to position herself as a good capitalist; indeed, she tends towards the opposite, seeming to get a certain enjoyment out of her ability to assert her complicity with capitalism. Rather, the problem with construing capital in individual, moral terms is that it underestimates the difficulty not just of attacking capitalism but of even understanding it.
Moralizing critique goes hand-in-hand with Chomsky’s understanding of ideology as propoganga, in which “the facts” are simply knowable, and the role of criticism is to simply make them known against the distortions of the media. But, contra Chomsky and Chabert, ideology is not simple lies, rather it is ideology precisely because it has the power to dictate and create the facts. Chabert’s idea of keeping ones distance from ideology in order to study its distortions from a position of relative exteriority, then, is hopelessly optimistic.
Which brings me to the main thrust of k-punk’s post, which is a discussion of the Marxist understanding of the critique of religion. I mostly agree with what Mark says, but I’m not sure he pushes this far enough. He quotes Karatani, “Whether or not we believe in religion in the narrow sense, real capitalism puts us in a structure similar to that of the religious world,” but doesn’t explicitly draw what I think is the necessary conclusion: for Marx, the critique of religion (as of ideology more generally) is not premised on the belief that religion is false. This is precisely the idealist critique he attacks, and I worry that calling for “a ruthless demolition of commodity-theology” does not clearly distinguish idealist refutation from materialist critique.
The materialist critique does not assert that religion is false; indeed, it would be almost more accurate to say that the materialist critique shows that religion is true or, better, it shows in what sense religion is true, how religion arises from and so reflects material conditions. So a communist engagement with Islam would not reject Islam, but would involve figuring out how an Islamic vocabulary can articulate communist projects (and if this is not going to just be bad faith, we shouldn’t expect our own communism to come out of the encounter unchanged).
This is where we should locate a criticism of the SWP’s current engagement with Islam (and, before we begin to criticize, we need to remember that the SWP are one of the only left groups who even have a position here worth critcizing). If engagement with Muslims remains a matter of formal alliances between pre-constituted blocks (the Muslims here, the socialists there), there remains no position from which we could engage in a genuine critique of Islam. The choices in this case remain quietist endorsement or moralistic rejection of Islam, and neither is sufficient.
“A simplistic take on danceable garage rock that anyone could produce if they practiced enough”
Interesting to see the American take on the Arctic Monkeys. It contains the classic k-punk baiting line, “So, are they manufactured? Who gives a shit? What matters is the songs.” And the evocation of grim British life is silly, kind of patronizing, and innacurate. Surely “a world that exists after school discos and without the possibility of university or gainful employment” is more likely to be soundtracked by happy hardcore or terrible trance than by the Arctic Monkeys’ student indie. Still, when the article starts slagging them off, it starts making interesting points:
It’s an interesting tune, actually: a clumsy, repetitive “funk” instrumental that smacks of white kids who’ve had no contact with actual funk—or hip-hop or reggae or dancehall or R&B, for that matter—but who think they ought to be able to do something funky by repeating a riff with a backbeat for three minutes. It raises a question: What would the Arctic Monkeys sound like if they tapped into their locale beyond lyrics, if they took note of Sheffield’s long history of industrial and electronic experimentation?
Collective defense
In association with International Women’s Day, it’s also Blog Against Sexism Day. Not such a happy International Women’s Day here in the US, though, with the recent South Dakota law banning abortion with only the narrowest exemption if the woman’s life is in danger.
Back when I was an undergraduate, there was a bit of a controversy about the student union’s attempt to affiliate to the National Abortion Campaign. I wrote for the student paper, which meant I went along to pro-life meetings to report on them. It was interesting (by which I mean disturbing) to get a first-hand view of the mindset of the pro-lifers. The mawkish religiousity was unpleasant, while the enthusiasm on the part of the male pro-lifers was downright creepy (not to mention the website of one of these fuckers, who supported his anti-abortion position with statistics about the changing racial composition of Europe).
So perhaps one sort-of good thing about this recent law is that this fucked-up mindset is crawling out of the woodwork where we can get a good look at it; witness this sexist asshat whose nonsense was brought to my attention by anthrochica. Anthrochica also gets annoyed with men who are able to casually dismiss the limited reformism of the Democrats because they don’t have to deal with the consequences of the Republicans’ slightly (but, in cases like this, crucially) more reactionary politics. This got me thinking: obviously, for supposed anarchists to treat individual non-voting as some kind of positive political action is to fetishize the vote in a precisely non-anarchist way. But there’s more than that. Simply moving from individual non-participation to collective non-participation is not enough; regrettably, a sufficient anarchist position is more difficult still. Non-participation remains the politics of the privileged if it is not at the same time collective action to defend those who are under attack by the system we refure to participate in.
What would such collective action look like in this case? I’m not sure; I was vaguely hoping that an organization like the AMA (the nearest thing I’m aware of to a Doctors’ Union) would have the guts to unambiguously say it would defend doctors who performed abortions, but this doesn’t look likely. Here we have one possibility, which largely, to me at least, serves to makes it clear how big a challenge we are actually facing.
Against the pious excuse of ends
There’s a great deal to like in the Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror. I found particularly interesting the distinction he makes among different ways in which violence can be deployed. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the opposition to violence from the “beautiful soul” is similar to the one Zizek has been advancing recently, but I think Merleau-Ponty is clearer about a number of points on which Zizek is disappointingly vague.
Merleau-Ponty begins by emphasizing the omnipresence of violence: “communism does not invent violence but finds it already institutionalized” (1), in the institutions he will later identify as “colonization, unemployment, and wages” (103). Already, he marks a space between his own position and that which would simply identify violence as necessary to achieve certain goals. For Merleau-Ponty, it is not even possible to decide whether or not a certain goal justifies or does not jutify the use of violence, as we are implicated in violence right from the start, and cannot simply choose not to use it. He identifies the danger in believing that violence might be simply instrumental:
The most serious threat to civilization is not to kill a man because of his ideas … but to do so without recognizing it or saying so, and to hide revolutionary justice behind the mask of the penal code. For, by hiding violence one grows accustomed to it and makes an institution of it. On the other hand, if one gives violence its name and if one uses it, as the revolutionaries always did, without pleasure, there remains a chance of driving it out of history. (34)
Merleau-Ponty’s reference here is to the Stalinist use of violence, but his characterization also seems relevant to the contemporary use of Just War Theory (particularly in reference to humanitarian intervention). Today’s wars are justified using a kind of counterfactual logic that hides violence behind the mask of good intentions: a just war would be one which did not target civilians, for example, and this is then held to justify actual wars, despite the fact that there has never been a war in which civilians were not targetted.
Still, at this point Merleau-Ponty comes close to endorsing another form in which violence can be masked, when he tells us that revolutionaries used violence “without pleasure,” and, he implies, they did so for the purpose of “driving it out of history.” The problem here comes if the lack of pleasure in violence is taken to be a justification in itself for the use of violence. When the use of violence is treated as an unpleasant but necessary means to a good end, this very unpleasantness tends to be taken as in index to the justness of the end. An acute example of this is the rhetoric of Tony Blair, who continuously presents his willingness to make “hard choices” as in itself an argument for the rightness of these choices.
However, Merleau-Ponty later makes it clear that he is aware of this problem, which he calls “the pious excuse of ‘ends’” (127). He goes further, and rejects the categories of means and ends entirely:
The Marxist does not live with his eyes fixed on a transcendent future, forgiving deplorable tactics in the name of ultimate ends and absolving himself on account of his good intentions; he is the only one who denies himself such recourse. (128)
He thus comes to the conclusion: “the means is nothing but the end—the power of the proletariat—in historical form” (128). This, I think, is the only basis on which we can think political violence without falling into bad faith. The challenge is to think a form of violence which is both means and end, which is an integral part of a political project which can be accepted for its own sake. It is at this point that Merleau-Ponty fails us, because he does not (except for a brief remark about the impossibility of facing violence, 2) provide us with a phenomenology of violence, that is, an account of the internal effects on political subjects of emplying revolutionary violence.
Here we can turn to Fanon, who, in The Wretched of the Earth, gives us an account of a violence which is not simply a means to an end. For Fanon, the experience of revolutionary violence is the “irreparable gesture” (62) which allows for the formation of a revolutionary subject:
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)
In this connection of violence with subjectivity, Fanon draws together two threads which are only implicitly connected by Merleau-Ponty; the use of violence that is inherent in political action, and the implacable opposition that defines political subjectivity.
(Humanism and Terror’s discussion of Koestler also contains a few lines which seem remarkably appropriate to today’s pious “left.” How about, “for fear of having to forgive, he prefers not to understand”? Or the pleasingly bitchy: “Kostler’s essays exhibit a ’round-trip’ style similar to that of many former Communists—but annoying to others. After all, we do not have to atone for the sins of Koestler’s youth.”)
Where are they now?
Whatever happened to Boom, the S Club 7 of 2-step? And what happened to Brighton based boyband three-piece JAMmed? They had a remarkable gimmick of naming themselves after their initials (I forget what ‘J’ and ‘M’ were actually called; I did wonder if Aaron from V was the same Aaron, it’s very hard to tell boyband members apart). They were even getting props from Simon Fanshawe, yet they vanished without a trace. Perhaps Julie Burchill sabotaged their career.
My favorite Foucauldian
Underneath your clothes, there’s an endless story
— Shakira
This is probably a fairly obvious point, but not one I’ve seen developed anywhere. One of the ways in which Agamben follows Foucault (and one of the places it’s useful to keep Foucault in mind if one doesn’t want to reduce Agamben to liberal platitudes) is the idea of the body as always wrapped up in discourse. Of course, this plays out slightly differently in Agamben, where the biological body, ζωη, is specifically an effect of politics, however, they both share a rejection of biology, which I think is important in understanding the scattered hints in Agamben about how we might remedy the disaster created by the exclusion of the biological body from politics; it certainly won’t be by re-including the biological in politics (I imagine if I had read The Open, I might have more to say about this).
This post inspired by Shakira – “Hips Don’t Lie” [MP3], which also features some remarkably ill advised lines from Wyclef: “refugees run the seas ’cause we own our own boats.” Erm, not so much, surely.
Taking leave of the past gaily
Benjamin after a comment of Marx’s:
Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy.
— The Arcades Project, N5a,2
When did the 20th Century die? I was thinking in the early ’90s, with the end of the Cold War; put perhaps it was earlier, in 1968, with the death of the final attempt to redeem Marxism-Leninism (is there any mileage in an analysis of contemporary Leninist groups as undead?), which would make the 20th Century very short indeed. Or perhaps the US administration’s current imperial adventures are the death-throes of the 20th century, which means the century will probably run for an even 100 years. In any case, it’s difficult to see any gaiety here. Can we identify anyone enacting the death of the 20th Century in comedy?
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.