Carceraglio Returns to Seattle

Updates soon. Soon-ish.

A Meatloaf Concert on the TV, A Goldfish on the Floor

When I watched Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, I asked myself, why don't more people do that? Why don't more people go out that way, I mean, if they're going out that way anyways.

Well, it turns out they do, sort of.

Invitation to play that game that guy invented on his web site

The Trinketization blog quotes Adorno's Minima Moralia on the capacity for happiness. As Trinketization says Adorno says, "It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces...."

Elliptical as I'm being here (I hope), I spoke in Klartext there. My only profit on it is, I am cursed. Or pitied.

Trinketization's quotation led me back to Adorno, so I'll quote a different part of that same aphorism, "Invitation to the dance."

Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for happiness did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. [...] Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression...

And, further,

... a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and --inseparable from it--personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold of the life inside them, as if it did not have them firmly enough in its power from the outside.

Not that we're pessimists, Theodor and I. Adorno writes very movingly about happiness somewhere in Negative Dialectics. Wherever it is that he quotes that same parable about the kingdom of the messiah, which parable turns up in Bloch, in Benjamin, and in Agamben's The Coming Community.

Since this blog has gone all-quotations and no commentary, let me close by saying, you know who else has thought about happiness? Roger at Limited, Inc, and also Claire Colebrook. Colebrook wrote this great essay on happiness-through-the-ages (ages of philosophy), which was published in a slightly obscure journal of contemporary fiction called symploke. I look forward to the book version. I quote it in advance.

Im in ur jobz, making less money

"TutorVista employs 760 people,including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end.

Minor Notes

1. Blog-roll updated to include the correct address of Ads Without Products, instead of its old ghost address which is filled now with both ads and products. A w/out P noted the same NYT article I'd meant to write about: anthropologists as war consultants (Hearts and Minds).

2. Desertion is much on Carceraglio's mind of late. Carceraglio and friends may once have exaggerated desertion's virtues in certain derivative political pamphlets we wrote or claimed to have written. But we did not exaggerate by much:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary off balance. --Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude

Return of the Weird

K-Punk announces the reprise and continuation of the Weird Realists' conference, December 1 in London, with speakers China Miéville, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Noys, and Graham Harman.

The conference announcement asks, "What examples of the Weird can be found in fiction, film and science?"

Carceraglio proposes Melville's "The Encantadas":

Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

And:

On oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight.

Gone to St Charles Island, The Encantadas

Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru, which afforded him safe asylum in his calamity, watched every arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the Republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to royalty. Doubtless, he deemed the Republic but a miserable experiment which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American, but a permanent Riotocracy...

--Melville, "The Encantadas"

The 9/11 Claimant

I am fascinated by the 9/11 "claimant," though, to be fair to her, it is said that she never put in a claim for any survivors' payments; she claimed her due only in the form of presiding over a survivors' organization, giving tours of ground zero, and making speeches. It's as though the authorized version of the 9/11 trauma discourse had invented this woman.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

I think of Borges's The Tichborne Claimant, though they do not seem to share much. The Borges version is about the brash success of an impresario's putting forth the loutish, dim Tom Castro as long-lost baronet Roger Tichborne. It's the disidentity that seals the Tichborne Claimant's success, according to Borges:

If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle [the Tichborne Claimant's partner and mastermind] was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile's amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French.

This is not at all the 9/11 claimant's strategy. She has the resume of someone who worked in an important building, for an important company, on an important day:

She has told people that she is the daughter of a diplomat, and is described on the Survivors’ Network Web site as “a senior vice president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank.”

Biographical material circulated at a school where she was scheduled to speak listed her as a financial executive who had done work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Singapore and Holland for leading firms. She said that she had started out as a management consultant for Andersen Consulting.

****

As for her educational background, she has told people that she has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate business degree from Stanford, though officials at both universities said they could not find records of a student by her name.

****

“We had a long e-mail conversation over a two-month period, before we met, and shared our experiences,” Mr. Bogacz, who escaped from the north tower on 9/11, said in an interview. “The constellation of her experiencing the plane crash personally on the 78th floor and her fiancé’s being in the other tower and getting killed was just amazing.”

Nor did she neglect the detail of the kaiser's withered arm; her colleagues claim to have seen "the scars and marks on her arm that she said she suffered in the terrorist attack."

Collapse Is Back and Bigger Than Ever

Collapse Volume III will be available in a matter of days (mid-October, but order now; they only print 1,000). It will contain a collection of articles under the heading "Unknown Deleuze." Collapse III will not contribute to the literature that gathers Deleuze's scattered remarks on a particular topic (all those unimaginatively titled compendia: Deleuze and... Music, Film, Automobiles....). Nope; it's nothing like those. Collapse III aims to "clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?"

And Collapse III contains two newly translated articles by Deleuze, plus a transcription of the recent Speculative Realism conference. And besides, the Collapse volumes are beautiful objects.

Krapp's Last Semester

Unlike the prisoner, the graduate student cannot say "you only do two days" (the day you matriculate and the day you ex-matriculate).

[I intended here a skein of apercus, citations, the odd link or two, an incautious confession. How much more often I used to post, and with more reading to report on, when I was "on the outside."]

Camps

NPR on a post-Katrina trailer park: "according to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi's parks are 79 times higher than the national average." (from NPR, by way of Husunzi)

New York Times on workers' camps outside Dubai (via Amitava Kumar).


Subtopia on inflatable tent camps and the detention market.




If Carceraglio's books weren't all packed away, maybe there'd be some more thought in this post, or anyway some citations. Not least, from Antoine Volodine's novel Dondog.

To Mars

Carceraglio makes ready to move to Colorado, a place Carceraglio has never seen but imagines thus:

"...[Philip K.] Dick's Mars is the prototype of his characteristic desert of misery, in which the most dismal features of a provincial 1950s Amercia are unremittingly reproduced and perpetuated against a backdrop of ecological sterility and the intensive use of low-yield technology."
--Frederic Jameson, "The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism," in The Novel, Volume 2, Forms and Themes.

Or thus:

Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damietta and Mount Casius old,
Where whole armies have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
--Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II.

Coconut School

From Kenneth Koch's "A la Coconut School"

Oh, to go back to the Schools
With all that we know today!
The teachers we thought were such fools!
The hours and hours of play!
On était un peu ridicule
And went riding about on a mule
With a pleasure undreamed-of today
Bonheur aujourd'hui même pas revé!

[carceraglio thanks Martin Browning for pointing out this poem]

*

From Matthew Stadler's Reading Notes to "Don't Take Any Jobs," describing a writing class he taught in his apartment:

We drank, ate, and played a lot of games. Class made us happy. The other thing we did was read together. But we never read our own work. “Workshop critiques”—submitting your own work for critique by the group—had only ever confused me, disastrously so in graduate school, where the workshop was full of articulate, educated people who knew a thousand ways to describe failure. I think great writing is, de facto, indefensible. It’s great because the writing is its own only argument—nothing further can be said to explain the pleasure it brings. Throw that kind of meat in front of a pack of hungry wolves, and the results will be predictable. Instead, we read great work by other people and marveled at their successes. We read closely, desirously, word by word, trying to understand how the writing we admired did what it did to us.

I marshaled these citations to write something about graduate school, but I'm not sure what that something is.

Here Goes

JM Coetzee's novella The Vietnam Project begins with an epigraph by Herman Kahn:

"Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots visibly exhilarated by successful napalm bombing runs on Viet-Cong targets, react with horror and disgust. Yet, it is unreasonable to expect the U.S. Government to obtain pilots who are so appalled by the damage they may be doing that they cannot carry out their missions or become excessively depressed or guilt-ridden."

In Zoo, Robinson Devor's & Charles Mudede's new film, the late "Mr. Hands" emerges occasionally as just such a guilt-ridden character.

Mr. Hands was an aircraft engineer at Boeing; the quasi-documentary Zoo suggests he worked on an ultra-secret military project. Mr. Hands (the name was his chat-room pseudonym) was also a "zoophile" who died in consequence of one his sexual encounters with a horse.

In the film, an interview with Chalmers Johnson plays on the radio as Mr. Hands drives to his rural trysting place. The secret that few in the audience are likely to share with Mr Hands--having sex with animals--doubles for the secret nearly everyone in the audience does share with him: complicity with the war in Iraq. (A war that is still a secret, even though everyone knows about it; since the "end" of the war, "the United States has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq." The war in Iraq presents the paradox of the public secret.)

This structure of the secret is there, but to read Zoo in this way leaves out some things. Who was it who said that In Cold Blood begins with the murderers' boast that they put the Clutter family's brains on the walls, and that the tension of reading In Cold Blood derives from waiting to see that horrible scene -- from waiting for what you know is coming.

Something similar occurs in Zoo (another work of high-art reportage)--perhaps to its detriment. The film teasingly, gleefully shows and does not show the man-and-horse sex act. Darkness keeps falling, the zoophiles keep swooning into heavy-lidded sleep, barn doors shut and the screen goes black. In one scene, the police screen an impounded DVD for the barn's owners, who never dreamed such goings-on were going on in their barn. As the sex scene unfolds out of our sight, we hear lots of grunting and straining, we see the opera buffa reactions of the nauseated barn-owner and his weeping wife, and then we do see a few seconds of tape. Unless my imagination merely supplied the footage, having repeatedly been promised it in so many fades-to-black.

***

Post-script: One of Hermann Kahn's RAND papers, Ten Common Pitfalls [of Military Planning], gives Kahn's own theory of sexuality. "Modelism," page 12: "In the illustration we see a young man dancing with a dummy. He is either desperate or guilty of Modelism. ... It may or may not be desirable for a young man to construct his love life around fantasies, but the mature heterosexual male wants a girl! There really is 'nothing like a dame.'"

Final post-script: this Coetzee essay, which I think I got from Ads without Products.

Interview with Alain Badiou

From Diana George and Nic Veroli, Carceraglio received this previously unpublished interview with Alain Badiou.

Alain Badiou gave this interview when he attended the "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" conference at University of Washington, in February, 2006. The interview was commissioned by a Seattle newspaper; the first few answers address readers who might not know Badiou's work.

___________________________________

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

That was the beginning, the subjective beginning. In the political field, the correlation with ideologies --Marxism, Cultural Revolution, Maoism and so on -- is subordinate to the subjective conviction that you have to do politics directly, to organize, to be with others, to find a way for principles to exist practically.

Q: What is your idea of fidelity?

Badiou: That's already contained in the first answer. For me, fidelity is fidelity to great events which are constitutive of my political subjectivity. And perhaps there is also something much older, because during the war my father was in the Resistance against the Nazis. Naturally, during the war, he did not say anything about it to me; it was a matter of life and death. But just after the war, I learned that he had been a resistant, that he was really in that experience of resistance against the Nazis. So my fidelity is also a fidelity to my father. At the beginning of that war, very few were in the resistance; after two or three years, there were more. It is the same lesson, if you like, this lesson from my father.

Generally speaking, my fidelity is to two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences. Not only the event of May 68 as such, but also its consequences. Fidelity is a practical matter; you have to organize something, to do something. This is the reality of fidelity.

Q: You've said that there has been a rupture, that the entire question of politics is currently in great obscurity. Also, you have written that we must think a politics without party. After the saturation of the class-party experiment, what next?

Badiou: I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, "It's finished." And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity.

Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity.

For my generation, it's a choice between saying, on the one hand, "Nothing is possible today in the political field; the reactionary tendency is too strong." That's the position of many people in France today; it's the negative interpretation of saturation.

When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it's finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events-- like the events in South America today-- you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that "from outside, you can see something you don't see from inside," that's merely a rule by which to find something new.

Q: If I can press you further about the something new: After the saturation of party politics, what now?

Badiou: If the answer to that were clear, the discussion would be finished, too. You have to find that out; it's not so clear. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field -- not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find -- with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts -- the new synthesis.

I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.

The situation today is also similar to 19th century in the brutality of capitalism today. It's not absolutely new; capitalism was of a terrible brutality in the 19th century in England, with the laws against the poor and so on. Today, there's something violent and cynical in capitalism, very much like the capitalism of the 19th century. In the 20th century, capitalism was limited by revolutionary action.

Today, the capitalists have no fear of anything. They are in the stage of primitive accumulation, and there is a real brutality to the situation. That's why I think the work today is to find a new synthesis, a new form of organization, like our predecessors of the 19th century. Our grandfathers, if you will, rather than our fathers in the political field.

Q: I'd like to ask about the current global situation and of the relationship of the US to that situation. Is the US simply a privileged node in a network of global sovereignty (as Hardt and Negri argue) or is the US playing the role of a traditional imperialist power in Lenin's sense?

Badiou: I don't completely agree with Negri. It's a very complex theoretical discussion, but, in a few words, I think Negri's perception is too systemic. Empire is a system, finally. Negri's conviction is always that within the system there are also resources for something new on the side of revolutionary politics, or politics of emancipation. There is always in Negri the conviction that the strength of capitalism is also the creativity of the multitude. Two faces of the same phenomenon: the oppressive face and, on the other side, the emancipatory, in something like a unity. Not exactly a dialectical unity in the Hegelian sense, but still a unity. So there is no necessity of an event in Negri, because there's something structural in the movement of emancipation.

I don't see the situation that way; it's not my conviction. It's not possible to discuss this precisely here and now, because it's too technical. But one consequence for Negri is that the great question in the political field is the question of the movement. Movements are certainly of great importance. But the real question today is not the relation between the movement and the state. The real question is, what is the new form of organization after the party? More generally, what is a new political discipline?

People who have nothing--no power, no money, no media--have only their discipline as a possibility of strength. Marxism and Leninism defined a first form of popular discipline, which was trade unions and party. There were many differences, but finally that was the form of popular discipline, and the possibility of real action. And today we cannot hope that this form will continue. The real situation is that we have no discipline in the popular camp, and so we have a great weakness. In fact the best situations today are ones where the state is not really in the hands of the reactionaries, for example, the situation of Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not a complete change of the situation; it's a chance, a local chance, nothing more. It's something, but it's not the solution. The solution of the problem in the long term will be the invention of a new form of immanent discipline in the popular camp. That will be the end of the long weakness of the popular camp after the success-- but also the failure-- of the form of the party.

Q: Philosophy has a long history of alternately including and then excluding mathematics. You, almost alone among your contemporaries, include it. You have also stated that your aim is a new articulation of politics and mathematics. Apart from any biographical, contingent factors that might explain your own relationship to mathematics, what's mathematics got to do with politics today? Why do you see a hope today for, as you've said, "a new articulation of politics and mathematics"?

Badiou: The political question of the new discipline is also, philosophically, the question of a new logic. The question of a new logic is always also the question of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Because mathematics is the paradigm of deduction, of formal rationality; not of empirical rationality, not of concrete rationality, but the paradigm of formal rationality. During the phase of party politics, the logical paradigm was the Hegelian dialectic; it was the theory of contradiction. During the entire development of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, the theory of contradiction was the heart of the logical framework. In my conviction, that is also finished. For the same reason as for the party, dialectical logic in the Hegelian sense is saturated today. We can no longer simply use the paradigm of contradiction. Naturally, there are contradictions; it's not a question of fact. But for the definition of a new discipline, we cannot directly use the logic of contradiction; we have to find another paradigm.

Mathematics is not the paradigm itself for me, but it's the possibility of finding a new logical paradigm in the political field, and finally in all fields of new human experiences.

(As you may know, Marx himself was very interested in mathematics. There are long manuscripts by Marx about the differential calculus and so on; it was something he studied for himself.)

In the search for the new logical paradigm, we have something to learn from mathematics. So my use of mathematics is not only a family obligation or a Platonist imitation; it's a real necessity.

Q: In a recent issue of the journal Positions, in an essay on your post-Maoism, Bruno Bosteels quotes you as having written, "Maoism, in the end, has been the proof for me that in the actual space of effective politics, and not just in political philosophy, a close knot could be tied between the most uncompromising formalism and the most radical subjectivism." But in your own philosophy, this knot seems to be looser. It is the uncompromising formalism that comes through in your philosophy.

Badiou: I think the discussion with Bruno Bosteels is about the distinction between philosophy and politics. Radical subjectivity is a matter of politics; when I speak of Maoism, I speak of politics. Philosophy is not politics, which may not be clear to Bosteels, or to some others. Naturally, philosophical formalism--to use that word-- can help to open some possibilities in the political field. But it is not the political solution; the political solution is never found inside the philosophical framework. So I agree, in the philosophical field, we can find a formalism adequate to radical subjectivity. But we cannot find radical subjectivity itself there, because radical subjectivity is a matter of action, of engagement; it's a matter of politics, finally.

The question of Maoism, of radicality, is a political one. In the philosophical field, we have to find the conceptual framework--the formalism, if you like--which is a disposition of thinking that is adequate to the possibility of a radical subjectivity. So philosophy is more or less in the situation of compatibility with politics, but it is never a substitute for politics. There is no unity between philosophy and politics; instead, there is something like compatibility between philosophical formalism and radical subjectivity. I think that in Bosteels' interpretation there is something like a circulation between politics and philosophy, which is not exactly my vision of the correlation of the two.

A word on the expression "post-Maoism": My interpretation of post-Maoism is that Maoism is the name of the last experience within the framework of classical Leninism. Maoism is not the same as Leninism; it's a creative development, but it's the last form of revolutionary politics, the last attempt in the field of revolutionary politics. After that, the framework itself is saturated. If we have something like post-Maoism, it's because Maoism itself is the saturation of the field. We can interpret the work of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, that's all very interesting, but we cannot forget that it's also the end of something, much more than a beginning. But an end is also something new. It's the beginning of the end, the newness of the end. After that, though, the field is saturated. And so post-Maoism is something very important. We are in something like post-Marxism, post-Leninism.

Q: Some people on the left argue for direct democracy as a response to global neoliberalism, sometimes under the heading of a Spinozist concept of 'multitude' and sometimes under the heading of anarchism. But you seem quite critical of democracy. Can you explain your critique of democracy?

Badiou: The question of democracy has two parts. The first one is the question of the form of the state. That's the classical, contemporary definition. There are governments, and you have to say which ones are democratic, which ones despotic, and so on. That is the common definition, the definition of Bush, and also of the majority today, finally. Democracy in this first sense is a form of the state, with elections and so on.

The second possible definition of democracy is what is really democracy within politics, in action. Hardt and Negri's concept on this point is that democracy is the creativity of the movement. It's a vitalist concept: democracy is the spontaneity and the creative capacity of the movement. Ultimately, Negri's concept remains inside the classical opposition of movement and state.

We have on the one side the definition of democracy as a form of the state, and on the other, democracy as an immanent determination of the collective movement. But I think the classical opposition of state and movement is saturated. We cannot simply oppose state oppression or the oppressive system, with, on the other side, the creativity of the movement. That's an old concept, not a new one. We have to find a new concept of democracy, one that is outside the opposition of formal democracy (which is democracy as form of state) and concrete democracy (which is the democracy of the popular movement). Negri remains inside this classical opposition, while using other names: Empire for state, multitude for movement. But new names are not new things.

Q: I'd like to ask about the politics of identity, which can be summed up in the thesis that for every oppression there must be a resistance by the group which is being oppressed--otherwise the oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc...) will remain unaddressed--this politics of identity is something you are quite critical of.

Badiou: The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group.

Commemorating Terror




"Recently I had a dream that capitalism invented terror to force the state to protect it better. Very funny, isn't it?" --Policeman in Fassbinder's The Third Generation.

read the rest

Try to recognize the dotted line. And kiss it.

This blog is signed up to participate in the porn symposium instigated by Infinite Thought. I have no entry written yet.

As a placeholder, and to link to The Measures Taken's sexpol essay "I Still Dream of Orgonon," I offer a link to this sexpol cinema in-the-making: Oakie Treadwell's Maggots and Men.

Donate early and often to Treadwell's film.

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War Theory

As I write this, the US Air Force's Blue Angels airshow is being rehearsed in the sky over the University district. Thanks, Petrodollar-Weapondollar Coalition! That's entertainment!

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pour l’élimination du malheur

In the category of sentences/novels I wish I'd written: Antoine Volodine's Dondog.

In the following passge, Dondog has just left "the camps"; he may or may not be dead. In a block of flats-built-upon-flats, where the streets have become a warren of connecting sky-tunnels, he is questioning an old woman about a certain Jessie Loo. The old woman says, 'Do you know this Jessie Loo?' Dondog says 'No.' Then, Dondog explains:

"Mois, je ne la connaissais pas, mais ma grand-mère, oui, dit-il. Il y a très longtemps. Dans les années trente. Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses. Elles faisaient partie de la même unité. La vie et les camps ont les séparées, mais un jour ma grand-mère m’a dit qu’elle avait revu Jessie Loo en rève, et qu’elle m’avait vu, moi aussi, tel que je serais à la fin de mon existence, au sortir des camps. Dans son rève, Jessie Loo habitait dans la Cité et elle avait toujours ses pouvoirs de chamane. Et elle m’aidait à retrouver la mémoire et à..." [Dondog stops speaking just then.*

I love something I see in Volodine’s work, which I may be wrong about, but I think there is something delicate about the irony with which he treats "the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness." It stops short of satire, and is not without sympathy for the project. Dondog's grandmother is not Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House, improving Africa while neglecting her own children. Both projects go awry--saving Africa, eliminating unhappiness--but there’s more pathos to the failure in Volodine's texts. As though someone, let's say Volodine, wished it could succeed.

I wonder if it's a tone that’s possible in America. Think of Frederic Tuten's wonderful Tintin in the New World: "Signor Settembrini... edits the renowned, but of limited circulation, Review of Human Suffering..." The world-improvers Tintin runs into are fools, and they are dilettantes. –-Or compare Dondog to Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis: however much sympathy you might feel for Portis's bungling templars, you can't possibly wish to live in their Atlantean age, could they bring it about.

*This is the sentence I wish I'd written, the one in bold: "They were friends, they were together in the struggle for the elimination of unhappiness. They interrogated the enemies of the people and they shamanned together. Stuff like that."

Rhapsodes

[What follows is not clear. It's too technical-sounding, and I garble Colebrook's lucid argument. Maybe it will come out clear when transmitted on the Internet. Like that moment in The Crying of Lot 49 where a man interviewing the heroine Oedipa Maas says "Thank you, Mrs. Edna Mosh," and then assures Oedipa "it'll come out OK on the air."]

In the the April 2006 issue of Actual-Virtual Claire Colebrook lectures on the secret. How far Deleuze criticism has come, that someone should speak so lucidly about the positivity of the literary in Deleuze and Guattari, instead of rhapsodizing about rhizomes. Colebrook talks about the positivity of secrecy in two chapters or plateaus of the 1000 Plateaus: "Three Novellas" and the "Becoming-Animal." She contrasts a mode of reading that asserts "we are already in an order of signification, such that we always necessarily ask, what is the secret?" or such that we always fantasize that the Other has (or is) the secret. --She contrasts that mode of reading, which she assigns to Butler, Zizek, and Felman, with a Deleuzian mode. In the "Three Novellas" chapter, D&G say that in the novella "something has happened," whereas in the tale we want to know "what is going to happen." Just so, the literary text in general is one that says that there is secrecy. Not: what is the secret, but just, "there is secrecy." She traces this out in a discussion of Henry James's What Masie Knew in the "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Anmial" chapter of 1,000 Plateaus.--more below.

In another lecture in that same issue of Actual-Virtual, Ray Brassier wrestles down the "perversion of Kant & subversion of Bergson" that is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, to ask, in the end:

For what has Deleuze's unyoking of difference from the fourfold shackles of representation achieved, if these diverging channels of actualization and ontological differentiation remain tethered to what Kant would have called a merely rhapsodic catalogue of factultative distinctions on the one hand, and, an equally rhapsodic enumeration of the different senses of being on the other?. ... If Being is going to be differentiated, then the point is to show that these differences are necessary, they're not merely arbitrarily generated on the basis of empirical distinctions. ... If Being is said in a single and same sense of everything that is, and that of which it is said differs, what is the status of these modal differences in everything that is?

Oh, I started citing too soon. He goes on to say that Deleuze uses Bergson to synthesize Spinoza and Kant, and that Bergson's method of intuition ends up being sort of flimsy to occupy this keystone space. ... I sort of fall behind the level of Brassier's discussion here.

(I return to a hobbyhorse of mine, rather than discuss Brassier) -- In Deleuze's perversion of Kant, Deleuze puts Kantian critique out of work. Reason in Kant's first critique has something like a schematism ("the idea of reason is an analogon of the schema of sensibility" A 664, B 692); reason's proper job (in the speculative interest) is demanding unity of principles in the understanding's objects. In the perverted Kant of Difference and Repetition there is still something like a schematism (a sub-representational, sub-understanding emergence of differences: "the agents of differenciation are the spatio-temporal dynamisms which act within or beneath [the understanding], like a hidden art" (D&R, p 218). Now that Ideas don't have to bother with keeping house for the understanding, they are free to incite everything, every faculty, not just thought, to its transcendent exercise.

Is there a place where Colebrook's investigation and Brassier's the hobbyhorse could be made to converge? Colebrook speaks of "the molecularization of the secret," the multiplication and dispersal of secrecy: that is, in context of Colebrook's lecture and D&G's book, Henry James's multiplication of the "imperceptible perception of the secret" in What Maisie Knew. Is there not also a "molecularization of the secret" in Difference and Repetition-- the "hidden art" (the secret) of this quasi-schematism is dispersed, multiplied, in the "dream or drama" of the Ideas:

"For if the dynamism is external to concepts-- and, as such, a schema--it is internal to Ideas --and, as such, a drama or dream.
......................................................
Dramatisation takes place under the critical eye of the savant as much as it does in the head of the dreamer. It acts below the sphere of concepts and the representations subsumed by them." (D&R p 218).

Just as the novella says "that there is secrecy," Deleuze's Difference and Repetition says "there is a hidden art," and is singularly untroubled by that hidden-ness. It does not compel Deleuze to critique, to the winnowing down of reason's fancies. It's an unemployment of reason's proper employment; a new sense to the phrase, in D&G's Kafka book, "Criticism is completely useless."

I remain at the pre-critical level of rhapsodizing about Deleuze's wildness.