Behold your future executioners
On and off over the past month I’ve been reading A Girl Among the Anarchists, which is an entertaining book and available online, as well. It’s the fictional memoir of a young woman involved in the anarchist movement in London in the late 19th century. It has some flaws, which are easy enough to discount as artifacts of the time it was produced; some racial stereotypes (jovial Irishmen, oleagenous Jews) which aren’t directly derogratory but somewhat offensive, and a description of somebody as a misogynist as if that were simply an amusing character trait. But those can overlooked easily enough, and what I liked about the book was how similar 19th century anarchism seems to be to the contemporary variant. The anecdotes in the book are amusing and disturbingly familiar: working late writing propaganda; everyone’s excited when the Italians turn up singing their revolutionary songs (although not “Bella Ciao” in 1903, of course); wanted comrades have to be smuggled out of town without alerting the police; etc.
And although the postanarchists will rightly attack this for essentialist individualism, this description is not so far away from network organization (and I’m a big fan of the word “revolutionists”):
Why, the very strength of our party lies in the fact that it has not what you are pleased to call an organisation. Organisations are only a means for intriguers and rogues to climb to power on the shoulders of their fellow-men; and at best only serve to trammel initiative and enterprise. With us every individual enjoys complete liberty of action. This of course does not mean to say that several individuals may not unite to attain some common object, as is shown by our groups which are scattered all over the globe. But each group is autonomous, and within the group each individual is his own law. Such an arrangement, besides being right in principle, offers great practical advantages in our war against society, and renders it impossible for governments to stamp us out. Again, as to our lack of programme, if a clear grasp of principle and of the ultimate aim to be attained is meant, it is wrong to say we have no programme, but, if you mean a set of rules and formulas, why, what are they after all but a means of sterilising ideas? Men and their surroundings are unceasingly undergoing modification and change, and one of the chief defects of all governments and parties hitherto has been that men have had to adapt themselves to their programmes, instead of their programmes to themselves. We make no statement as to specific object: each comrade has his own, and goes for it without considering it necessary to proclaim the fact to the whole world. Now you ask me how you could help this movement or what you could do, and I have no hesitation in saying, much. Every revolution requires revolutionists.
(Regrettably, this line from the character Kosinski also rings true: “I fear he is developing a failing common to many of you English Anarchists; he is becoming something of a crank. He talked to me a lot about vegetarianism and such matters.”)
Reading the book also encouraged me to begin look at the history of British anarchism, and there’s some interesting stuff there. It turns out Lucy Parsons (the Chicago anarchist and author of the memorable exhortation, “now is the time for every dirty lousy tramp to arm himself with a revolver or a knife and lie in wait outside the palaces of the rich and shoot or stab them as they come out”; and of the title of this post) visited London on a number of occassions. Anarchist practice also seems to have involved the creation of spaces for mass confrontation with the forces of law and order, for example:
This East End movement, like Reclaim the Streets a century on, would frequently invade the West End’s spaces of privilege. In London in 1886, the year of the Haymarket events, a warm summer and an economic recession led to many unemployed “roughs” sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St. James’ Park. “Agitation” among them by members of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) gained much support and a winter of confrontations between the police and militants ensued. In August and again in October of 1887, the SDF called mass demonstrations in the Square. The October rally, with speeches from SDFers and the raising of a black flag, led to police hostility; when a second procession entered the Square behind a red flag, they were charged by the police with many arrests. As a result, the police banned meetings in the Square. A protest demonstration against this, on November 13 1887, came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mounted police and soldiers charged the marchers. The following Sunday, there was a disorganized attempt to retake the Square; the police hospitalized many and killed one man. The casualty, a bystander named Alfred Linnel, became a working class martyr; his funeral attracted 200,000 marchers, a sea of red flags, and some green banners of Irish freedom and yellow pennants of the radical clubs. Two weeks later, there was a second death from injuries sustained on Bloody Sunday, that of William Cunner, an unemployed Deptford painter.
Shades of Class War and J18, for those of us whose historical memory only goes back 20 years. That description comes from a very interesting-looking little book (I haven’t read it all yet) called The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin (available online; part 2; part 3).
The quiet Americans are not the problem
While k-punk was writing about the ‘reality-based community’, I was reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I read it many years ago, but I’d forgotten how good it is. It’s often portrayed as being a book about the conflict between realism and idealism; with realism, on this conventional interpretation, declared the winner. Zadie (”Call her Zadie”) Smith, in her interesting introduction to the edition I was reading, ultimately comes to this conclusion. She praises Greene as “the greatest journalist there ever was,” because “he defends us with details, and the details fight the good fight against big, featureless, impersonal ideas like Pyle’s.”
But, to it’s credit, I don’t think the book can be reduced to this rather conservative (not to say trite) point. It’s a mistake to see the story as detailing a simple binary opposition between Pyle and Fowler. Pyle is an idealist and an abstracter, certainly, forever substituting the messy details of the present for an imagined, perfect, future, and Fowler attacks him for it:
> ‘I suppose you’ll offer her a deep freeze and a car for herself and the newest
> television set and…’
>
> ‘And children,’ he said.
>
> ‘Bright young American citizens ready to testify.’
But Fowler is an idealist in his own way, too. He likewise thinks in terms of imagined futures, and just because his imaginings are negative shouldn’t make us think they are any more ‘realistic’.
> ‘We’ve made it,’ Pyle said, and even in my pain I wondered what we’d made:
> for me, old age, an editor’s chair, loneliness; and as for him, I know now
> that he spoke prematurely.
Furthermore Fowler, for all his claims to be a dispassionate, direct observer, is well aware that ‘realism’ is just the name for a particular sort of idealism, an abstraction using the ready-to-hand categories of ‘direct experience’:
> Up the street came the lovely flat figures — the white silk trousers, the long
> tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh. I watched them
> with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions for ever.
Besides which, the whole premise of the book is that Fowler _is_ engaged. Setting up a binary opposition between Fowler and Pyle writes Phuong out of the picture; tellingly, I think. Fowler and Pyle both idealize and orientalize Phuong, of course; but Pyle’s idealization elides her agency, while Fowler’s orientalization also hints at a proper understanding of _independence_, perhaps the closest the book gets to an anti-colonial perspective:
> ‘She’s a human being, Pyle. She’s capable of deciding.’
>
> ‘On faked evidence. And a child at that.’
>
> ‘She’s no child. She’s tougher than you’ll ever be. Do you know the kind of
> polish that doesn’t take scratches? That’s Phuong. She can survive a dozen
> of us. She’ll get old, that’s all.’
(Of course, the rest of this speech is orientalization of a straightforwardly racist sort). Phuong represents a Third Force, as it were, in opposition to the naive idealism of Pyle and the cynical idealism of Fowler which presents itself as realism. Greene gets little further than merely showing the possibility of such a subject-position, but that is itself not insignificant. Particularly today, when it is tempting to draw direct analogies between events in the book and in the news, it is valuable to be reminded that, if we are to combat our modern-day Pyle’s, a commitment to ‘reality’ is not going to be sufficient.
Third prize
… in the ‘Nature’ category at Burneston and Carthorpe Village Show:
Being in the countryside for a while means I got a chance to enter this picture in the afformentioned village show. It does, though, mean I’ve mostly been doing nothing and so, as a consequence, haven’t had anything to post about here. I have been reading Being and Nothingness, which I’m enjoying a great deal, but I’m not really sure what I want to say about it yet.
I’ve also been re-reading Neal Stephenson’s 
Cryptonomicon. It’s mostly just confirmed my original impressions of the book: that the central idea (that matter is data, and vice-versa) is very well drawn throughout the book, but it’s way too fucking long. Some of the length can be excused, as the incidental details which stuff the book are interesting minatures of the overall idea. Not all of them, though: did a section in which a character demonstrates the ability to read a computer screen by radio surveillance, and ends up accidentally spying on a a friend of his writing a soft-porn story have to be illustrated with _all six pages_ of the story? I would have thought not.
I did notice something else, though, which probably explains some of my irritation with the book, and understanding that makes me think slightly higher of Stephenson’s skills. The annoying thing is that the book is told almost entirely from a nerd’s point-of-view. What’s interesting, though, is that in the three main strands of the book we inhabit the consciousness of three different _sorts_ of nerd: there’s the science-fiction/fantasy geek, hacker Randy; stunted adolescent, US Marine Bobby Shaftoe; and borderline-autistic maths genius Lawrence. Clearly, then, the towering nerdiness of the book is an intentional effect carefully orchestrated by the author. Over the course of 800 or so pages, though, it’s a lot like being trapped with a bunch of Chemistry students.
The book is apparently the prequel to a trilogy about the origins of capitalism. I’m not sure it’s encouraging, then, that it seems to end with some kind of nonsense about re-establishing the gold standard.
Unplaced in the ‘Water’ category:
Four legs good, world-wide revolution of the proletariat better
For some time, I’ve been maintianing something that it is pretty patently untrue, namely that 1984 isn’t about the USSR so much as it is about the totalitarian dangers of capitalist liberal democracies. As I say, probably not really true, but an interesting way of looking at the book. Particularly the later parts of the book where the action moves to questions of objectivity seem uneccesarily sophisticated as a critique of the blunt propoganda of Stalinism, but perhaps more appropriate to what Badiou calls the ‘regime of opinion’.
Yesterday, I found an old school book of mine from when we read Animal Farm, clearly an even worse book on the USSR, never rising above the stupidest propoganda. My 16-year old self wrote this summary:
> Although Napolean [the pig-Stalin] is now as bad as Jones [the farmer-Tsar], he has
> manipulated the animals so they don’t rebel. There is also a feeling that it is their own fault,
> and that Napoleon is still ‘one of them’, so is better than Jones.
Isn’t this just what k-punk has noted, that the supposed revolutionaries of the ’60s are, because they can still trade on their position as an ‘alternative’, now a much stronger establishment than the old guard they once fought? Animal Farm, too, works better as an attack on capitalist democracy, and shows us that the problem is not just that the ex-New Left have _given up_ on socialism. Depressingly, Blair’s soft neo-liberalism is in part the success of ’60s leftism, as well as its betrayal. What we need, then, is not a revitalised New Left, but an other left that opposes the new forms capitalism has learnt from the struggles of the ’60s.
Talking of ex-New Leftists, this piece by Nick Cohen is an excellent example of the authoritarianism of the regime of opinion, supported, as Badiou says, by a consensual definition of evil. Actually, it’s such a perfect, ludicrous example I’m slightly worried I’m misreading it. He does say, right, that BBC reporters would be _more_ credible if they started referring to people as ‘enemies of all humanity’?
“Like those natural nuclear reactors they found in Africa, only more so”
On my way to and from Berkeley, I read Ken MacLeod’s latest book, Newton’s Wake. Although it maybe doesn’t have the superficial charms of his earlier books (the leftist transpotter element, you might call it), it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. In part, perhaps, because it returns to some of his earlier preoccupations (artificial intelligence, extropians vs. humanists), but from a slightly different angle. The background of the book seems like an excellent metaphor for our current political situation (since 1917, or 1989) — cast adrift in a world once inhabited by giants, scavenging among their sometimes seductive, sometimes deadly detritus (I suspect Ken would consider the copy of Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism Geo gave me would be an example of both, but more of that later). Apart from which, it includes at least one spectacular image:
> A woman with long silver hair leaned against an outward overhang of the window-wall, palms and forehed pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Her face too was silver, as though coated with aluminium powder.
>
> ‘Morag Higgins,’ she introduced herself, shaking hands and smiling. Teeth like steel. She sat down and helped herself to the single malt.
>
> ‘Last mission I was on, I wandered off on my own.’ She tossed her silver hair back; it made a hissing noise as it settled. ‘I got … infected. Optic-nerve hack, absolute classic, should never have fallen for … Anyway. Then it makes me open up, some kind of needle gets in, right. Hours later I wander back sounding very strange. Team leader … she blows my fucking head off. End of story. Except it isn’t. Whatever it was had taken a back-up of me and stored it outside my head. Which it also had a memory of.’ She tapped her face with the glass. It rang. ‘_This_ grows back. It’s a crawling mass of steel nanobots.’
The time I wasn’t reading Newton’s wake I was mostly watching two terrible films, Are we there yet? (Ice Cube as a hip batchelor on a journey with his girlfriend’s children) and In good company. The bizarre thing about both films was that although actually made recently, they make much more sense if you imagine them being made 10-15 years ago, particularly In good company, which is based on the topical ideas that management consultancy is bullshit and ‘downsizing’ is, like, bad for the people who get fired. It’s wierd to see a film made in 2004 in which characters express surprise that they no longer have a job for life (besides which, is there a more horrifying idea than a corporate life sentence? Our campaigns against precarious employment should not be campaigns for more secure _employment_).
Good and bad, good and evil
I’m been reading some terrifyingly bad books recently. First up was Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which is really hilariously rubbish. The argument proceeds via vague resemblances between theorists, like one of my terrible undergraduate essays, except it goes on for about a million pages or something. High-minded, wooden-headed discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche, all directed to the most banal of conclusions. In a similar ‘reactionary bollocks’ vein, I also read a paper that attempted the audacious task of combining Samuel P. Huntington and Jean-Luc Nancy, with predictably hilarious consequences. Still, it did suggest that Nancy’s The inoperative community might be worth reading. Nancy also has a couple of books on Hegel I’d like to read, one of which only because its title is One of Hegel’s Bon Mots.
And I have also been reading some good books — Agamben’s State of exception, which I read in a hurry (a tip: don’t try reading in a Camridge college library when students are doing exams, unless you like overhearing overwrought discussions about the difficulty of neoclassical economics), but which I’m reasonably sure is very good. The chapter on Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of emergency, sovereignty and revolutionary violence is certainly bloody brilliant. Also Badiou’s book on Deleuze, which features anecdotes about Badiou sending a Maoist brigade to disrupt Deleuze’s classes in 1968, and interesting material on what precisely is at stake for Badiou in his rejection of totality. I may post more on that, if I get round to it.
I’ve also just finished re-reading Ken MacLeod’s Engines of light series, which is better than I thought (and I already liked it a lot when I first read it). I prefer the first two books to the last, as the final book seems to rush to cover too many events; in places it felt like the _Foundation_ books, in which Asimov has to deal with a thousand years of history via the medium ten-thousand word short stories. But this acceleration of pace may well be intentional, given that one of the themes of the series is the time-dilating effects of travelling at the speed of light, which makes years of history pass instantaneously, rendering the history of class struggle an obvious empirical truth. Also:
> “No matter what the gods do that should make people angry, it only makes them more
> afraid. Cringing bastards… No offence.”
>
> “None taken,” said Salasso. “I despise them myself. Even millions of years after
> something much worse than genocide was comitted against my people, they still regard
> the gods as good and theicide as the ultimate sin.”
>
>
Ken Macleod, Engine city.
And:
> We who are summoned by the void, we who intervene so as to decide the undecidible,
> we who are sustained by the indiscernible truth, we who are finite fragments of that
> infinity which will come to establish that there is nothing more true than the indifferent
> and the generic, we who dwell in the vicinity of that indistinction in which all reality
> dissolves, we, throws of the dice for a nameless star — we are greater than the sacred,
> we are greater than all gods, and we are so here and now, already and forever.
>
>
Alain Badiou, Une soirée philosophique.
Chavez just gets better and better
> The Venezuelan government has printed one million free copies of Don Quixote to mark the
> book’s 400th anniversary.
>
> …
>
> He called on everyone to “feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who went out to
> undo injustices and fix the world”.
>
> “To some extent, we are followers of Quixote,” he told viewers of his Hello President TV show.
Splendid news.
Surely, the revolution is now at hand
Infinite thought has been reading Superman: Red Son. However, she doesn’t mention my favourite thing about the book, which is that it was originally promoted not on its high concept,’What if Superman were a communist?’, but on the spookily simple premise, ‘What if Superman had landed on Earth _twelve hours later_?’ It’s a slightly disturbing, but also incredibly exciting, reminder that, yes, the history of the twentieth century _was_ contingent.
The mind is the idea of the body
I’ve been reading various interesting books recently. I picked up a cheap copy of Laclau’s Emancipation(s), with its crazy post-modern punctuation and crazier post-marxist politics. I’m briefly comparing the Laclau-Mouffe position on hegemony to Badiou’s concept of the situation in something I’m writing; but Laclaus’s position turns out to be more interesting than I remembered, which makes me think that a sustained confrontation between him and Badiou could be worthwhile (particularly on the particularity/universality stuff). I’m not sure what Laclau’s up to these days; the early-nineties rush to liberalism now looks almost incomprehensibly dated.
Even more dated than the Manchester cyberpunk of Jeff Noon’s Vurt. Vurt is a take on an idea that a lot of cyberpunk worked with (most notably, Neal Stephenson — although his best treatment comes in the non-cyberpunk Cryptonomicon), that there is at bottom _no distinction_ between matter and information. Noon dramatises this with a set of overlapping metaphors around virtual reality/psychadelics/psychics/transhumans which combine to create an impressively precarious sense of what physical reality is supposed to be.
Which, paradoxically, is a very materialist position to be in, and I’m pleased to see that’s the position Damasio is taking in Looking for Spinoza. I haven’t got that far through it as I’ve been reading it in my lunch break at work (although for improved epater les bourgeois effect, I might switch to reading Geo’s spare copy of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Obviously I’m very impressed that he _had_ a spare copy). It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Badiou stuff (as undercurrent points out); I wonder if there’s an affinity between Damasio and Badiou in that they use a generalised reflexivity (bodies referring to bodies in Damasio, sets of sets in Badiou) to accomplish in a materialist fashion what was once thought to require transcendence. That is to say, matter is information, the mind is the body.
Bond’s pants
> Bond had always disliked pyjamas and had slept naked until in Hong Kong he had come across
> the perfect compromise. This was a pyjama-coat that came almost down to the knees. It had no
> buttons, but there was a loose belt round the waist. The sleeves were wide and short, ending
> just above the elbows. The result was cool and comfortable.
It’s common to complain about the Bond films for being unfaithful to the darkness of the books. But this misses the point that Bond’s introspection and self-doubt only makes sense in the context of the stories’ fundamental ludicrousness. The ridiculousness of the films is entirely faithful to the books. In fact, the later films are _most_ faithful, because in the books, this insanity is _not the result of running out of steam_. The quote above comes from the _first_ book, Casino Royale, which is also all about beating a spy at baccarat to embarrass him into retiring.
