They will never give it away for free
With new protests against the fees and cuts being made to Higher Education planned for this Wednesday on what’s being called ‘Day X’ (more information here) it’s necessary to avoid getting drowned in the new slave consensus. The ‘cuts’, the ‘deficit’ and the whole new way in which economics is being organised are presented as obvious, necessary, inevitable. They are no such thing. There are always options. There are realities that we can imagine but these realities must be fought for, both physically and mentally. We must dream and demonstrate the new reality. The only other option is to let the new ‘common sense’ drown us. They will never give it away for free, it has always had to be taken from them by force. This time will be no different. Prepare to fight now. It’s the students and universities at the moment, it will be your hospitals, schools and homes next…and soon.
We’re all pretty fucked…It’s not just cuts in education and upping the fees that’s the problem. The problem is that the cuts in general mean we’re all pretty fucked. Whether you’re a student in a F.E college or University, whether you’re a working single-mum, whether you’re self-employed, whether you’re unemployed, whether you’re working a precarious temp job, whether you working a good job in the public sector. The depth of the cuts means most people are going to become worse-off.There are differing trains of thought that link the cuts to ‘The Crisis’ or ‘The Deficit’ or ‘The Tories’ but for many there is a much more simple truth – it’s just called ‘Life as normal’. The rich have been getting successively richer in this country and the poor have been getting poorer. If the cuts are setting out to re-float a busted economy of over-inflated debt and speculation by taking more and more from the poorer section of the population, well, it’s just more of the same for most people. Poverty, crap jobs, insecurity, health problems – well, that’s just how we’ve been living anyway. But do you feel like politicians will sort it out for you? Do you feel like if you keep your head down and work hard, you’ll be okay? Do you feel scared? Had enough of that shit yet?”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2010/11//468269.pdf
http://anticuts.org.uk/
http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/
Notes on Heidegger – ITM (polemos, deinon and the gathering of distinction)
“war is the father of all and the king of all, and it has shown some as gods and others as human beings, made some slaves and others free” (Heraclitus, Fragment 53) – it is also worth noting something similar is said in Fragment 80, though this is not mentioned by Heidegger.
Heideggers’ translation takes this seemingly socio-political statement and reads it in terms of his central problematic of emergence and appearance. “Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as free” (ITM 471)
The war, the polemos, Heidegger contends, cannot be a mere socio-political fact since this is merely a human fact and it is necessary for the polemos under question to be prior to the human. To ‘show some as gods and others as human beings’ the polemos to which Heraclitus directs us “must hold sway before everything divine and human” (ibid). Polemos is not mere human war, it is the distinguishing event that brings forth the human as distinct from the divine. Polemos is thus also not mere divine conflict but prior to the divine as much as it is prior to the human. Polemos is the ground of immortal mortality.
Read the rest of this entry »
To call life itself just or unjust, to conceive life as samsara or suffering, is to judge life and to do so from outside life, from some position which is the ground of a judgement. To encounter life, respond to it, is inevitable and not all responses are equal, this much is inevitable. Too often, however, this encounter and response is thought of as a judgement. To not judge does not mean to not respond or that any response is as good as any other. There are different responses in life, different lives if you like – or different types of life. Life produces its own end, life drives itself to death but in the encounter with death there is another space of response, this time one that shows us the two fundamental ways of response, affirmation and negation, more life or never ending death.
How am I to think of life? The philosopher must ask this question. They must, moreover, continue to ask this question and to encounter the force of this question with responses – the philosopher must not simply ask an idle question but encounter the problem of the question, the problem the question arises from, responding with thought, with emotion, with passion, with action. Encounter and response constitute the activity of thought and living, though too often this dynamic to-and-fro is congealed, by the social, into regulated habits, pre-formed responses such as the response of the subject, ‘I think…’. Living is a poor name for the habits and habitats of the human. We are all, inevitably, products of the social, products of the inhuman and yet we are not inevitably condemned to remain nothing but product, commodity, object. It is not a matter of striving to become a subject since the subject is that which is subservient, the subject of the monarch. Rather it is a matter of striving for monarchy itself, becoming a crown within life but not a ruler, judge or controller. Crowned anarchy, this is the watchword, a monarch of creation, a singular moment that adds to the abundance of singular moments. In more traditional terms, this is the assumption of an imperative to autonomy, the self (auto) lawmaking (nomos) reality.
I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar). Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.
One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents. “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59). He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze. “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)
I gave a paper at the Manchester Metropolitan University conference on ‘Deleuze and the event’ that was held earlier this year and the organisers have videoed all the papers, a practice they have had for a while now as part of their online journal A/V. A dvd came through the post this morning with copies of all the papers in video format, which is cool since I can now see those papers I missed on the day. Here is my own paper (in mov format) – and here on iPo in mp4 format. These are ‘direct download’ links, so right click and save-as or do whatever it is you do on your system. You can view a streaming versions here. Comments of course welcome.
Some rather peculiar argument has broken out amongst some of the radical philosopher types in the blogosphere, apparently kicked off, in part at least, by the comments of a blogger called ’k-punk’ (which you can read here – k-punk’s trackbacks don’t seem to work but the page is there). Larval Subjects has a kind of round-up and commentary and there’s some other stuff over at various other blogs. All a little odd and I’m not sure I really know exactly how important the argument is (it intrigued me enough to read through it all but when I came to thinking about it everything seemed a little too ’personalistic’ – then again, that’s kind of the problem the conversation encounters and shows. No doubt it will do it’s work in the unconscious as I think.) Read the rest of this entry »
The task of the revolutionary is indeed to be violent, but also to avoid the type of violence that is, in fact, merely an impotent passage à l’acte. Slavoj Zizek | Interview | Divine Violence and Liberated Territories | SOFT TARGETS Journal
The task of the revolutionary is indeed to be violent, but also to avoid the type of violence that is, in fact, merely an impotent passage à l’acte.
Slavoj Zizek | Interview | Divine Violence and Liberated Territories | SOFT TARGETS Journal
I’m not an enormous fan of Zizek to be honest, though I find it interesting that he is facing this question of violence, politics and the act. Here, this curious double-handed way of somehow making the violent rational or understandable is found in the ’indeed…but also’ move of the rhetoric, such that it appears like ’we can all accept that the revolution will involve violence but let’s not allow meaningless violence or violence without the right meaning into our validation of the revolutionary act’. The strange reality of violence is found, however, less in this ’right meaning’ but in the potency of the violence, in the potency of the force of condensation of singularities. Zizek talks in the interview linked to above about the ideas of a ’divine’ violence (citing Walter Benjamin) or a moment of institution that institutes whilst being an exception to that which is instituted (citing Schmitt) but this all and Zizek’s own position itself seems to somehow still be part of a discourse of legitimating violence, even if this takes the route of somehow legitimating its illegitimacy in some curious dance of the paradoxical.
This becomes clearer as Zizek marks his own territory, alongside that rather strange new phenomenon of hailing Badiou as the new theoretician of the left. Zizek says “I agree with what Badiou said in the recent interview with you published in Il Manifesto: “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” This is why I like to mockingly designate myself “Left-fascist” or whatever!” What exactly is it that ’those who have nothing’ have nothing of? Presumably something like power. Read the rest of this entry »
(Working notes, not likely to be accurate but part of the process of working through various thoughts as I continue writing – comments welcome if they bear this in mind.)
It is clear for anyone reading Kant that the priority of principles is central to his thinking. It is the clash between principles and experience which motivates the whole problem of the first Critique, we are told in the opening paragraphs of the ’Preface to the First Edition’(1). The nature of human reason is the problematic tension deriving from the combination of the rational principles and the sensuous experiences that constitute actual thinking. The sensuous experiences ’insure’ the ’truth and sufficiency’ of the principles – not, however, their production. The force of questioning which produces principles as answers or solutions soon finds that it goes far beyond, in its questioning, any solution we might propose. The force of questioning overwhelms the capacity to produce a testable solution. Of course, we might produce what appears as a solution, some abstract untestable principle that offers us a sense of solution to a problem but any real solution principle must needs be capable of being tested to be accepted or ’insured’ against falsehood. It is experience that is the testing ground and thus anything that is in principle beyond experience is untestable. The classic tension of the Kantian system is found in the fact that we can ask unanswerable questions.
Of course, this is not simply a Kantian tension. The very idea of an unanswerable question is, whilst peculiar in itself, something we find at various points within philosophy – for example, there is a strange resonance between the way in which Kant establishes the key productive problem of his transcendental philosophy and the way the verificationists would rule out of court any talk of God or Soul, even though they soon fell foul of the reflective moment which revealed the unverifiable dogmatism of their own central principle. This, perhaps, is not so surprising given the shared model of philosophy as a practice of giving answers which both Kant and the Verificationists possessed. The scandal of a discipline of reason that cannot provide final and definitive answers can be imputed as a motivation to Ayer as easily as Kant. Read the rest of this entry »
(A slightly delayed note on the second Series due to preparations for the Volcanic Lines conference we held last week on Kant and Deleuze, a report of which is over here).
One of the most fascinating lines here in this Series is the following: "For this reason the stoics can oppose destiny and necessity" (LOS:6). A footnote follows which refers to Cicero’s De Fato. A comparison with the Epicureans immediately follows this.
What is crucial, at this point, is the way in which it is the causal relation, the cause-effect couple, which prompts these claims about the conceptualisation of necessity within the Stoics and Epicureans. The reference to Cicero is a peculiarity. I am currently reading Kant’s Logic at the same time as Deleuze’s LOS and a comment Kant makes there about Cicero offers a curious complication to Deleuze’s account. Kant claims that "Cicero was in speculative philosophy a disciple of Plato, in morality a Stoic" (Logic: Introduction, S4; 35). The complication in reading Deleuze seems to be that he is advanced as an example of the Stoic account of necessity, yet precisely in line with Kant’s characterization of him as a ’Stoic in morality’. It is not a logical account of necessity that Deleuze is focussing on, though in later sections he will refer to a notion of ’modality’, but rather the moral dimension of necessity which is tangled into the concept of ’destiny’. We might want to ask whether Deleuze too, like Cicero, might be classed as a Platonic in speculation and a Stoic in morality. There seem at least some who might want to assert just such a claim, at least in part – Badiou, for example, seems to claim a level of Platonism can be found within Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual / actual distinction.
What happens in this 2nd Series of LOS, however, is a kind of philosophical-historical conceptual topography. Deleuze brings to the foreground the concept of the ’event’ which is plainly of central importance to the whole project of LOS. In the first Series he had indicated the role of the ’depth’ of ’mad becoming’ that was incapable of being contained within a model of knowledge. The motor force of the problematic relation to identity is found in what Deleuze names there as the ’paradox of infinite identity’ which is caused by a di-directionality of couples such as cause-effect (LOS:2). The name, that which "is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir", is that which is lost in Alice’s adventures in the realm of becoming. The name is lost within the event and yet the event is communicated through language. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the first in a series of posts, initiated by the suggestions of Evan Duq in his blog ‘Working on concepts‘. I’m in the throes of some intensive writing practice over the summer as I try to get the first draft of my new book into shape and currently am working on a paper for the ‘Strange Encounters: Kant and Deleuze’ conference we’re organising at Greenwich…so throwing LOS into the mix should be good.
I’m using the Athlone 1990 edition and all references are to that unless otherwise stated. Whilst this is a re-reading (in my case) of LOS I am going to approach it to a large extent as though it were a fresh reading…inevitably this will be slightly distorted by the existing annotations in the text but what I want to note is that these are reading notes rather than sustained critical commentary. Certain comments are inevitably going to be extremely tenuous and at times plain wrong…the freedom to be wrong, however, is part of the nature of the internet and why students quoting texts and online commentaries should remember caveat emptor!
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LOS begins with a rather short and sweet preface that takes on a quite traditional role of introducing the text rather than philosophically positioning the reader in regard to the text. The first thing of note is the reference to ‘modern reader’ and a set of elements to be found within Lewis Carroll that would ‘please’ such a modern reader. The elements seem to refer to structuralist type aspects of form, as well as aspects of a psychoanalytic interest (children’s books “or, rather, books for little girls” and an explicit mention of “a profound psychoanalytic content“). Who, then, is the ‘modern reader’? Someone embedded within a psychoanalytic practice of reading? Someone embedded, moreoever, in a specifically structuralist psychoanalytic reading, ie; a Lacanian? Is the suggestion – perhaps – that Deleuze is presenting a text which should be of profound interest to the Lacanian reader and as such a common ground of discussion or theoretical concept creation? It seems likely, at least at the moment, that this is the case. If so this suggests a certain ‘audience’ for LOS – viz, the Lacanian reader, but an audience that needs to attend to something usually forgotten. “Over and above the immediate pleasure” Deleuze says (and I would want to check the French edition here to see whether jouissance is the specific term at work in this sentence) “there is something else” in the work of Carroll, that being the play of sense and nonsense. This “connection between language” (one form of sense) “and the unconscious” is readily present, Deleuze says, but he then indicates again the ‘something else’ he wants to bring to attention, “what else is this marriage connected with” (xiii). Read the rest of this entry »
