notebookeleven

This is an old Real audio radio programme I made.  I’ve been thinking of doing some more work with sound and so dug this out and had a listen and I still find it interesting, so it has an audience of 1 at least ;-)

Blu19 real audio file (right click to save-as)

If anyone can convert it to an MP3 then that would be cool (I don’t have an app on my machine and am not about to buy one just for this one task) – you can upload files to the anonymous FTP server at razorsmile.org if you do happen to convert it…

Larvalsubjects has an interesting post on Marx in the academy over here which has generated a lively discussion in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of agency has risen to the fore again.  This is still something I find disturbing, something I’m not really able to get a grip on fully, since I tend to understand the problem of agency as responding to something like a desire to answer the question ‘what difference can I make?’.  "Where’s the agency", someone might ask, "in these economic analyses of desire (D&G) or capital (Marx)?  Isn’t it all just a huge machine in which I am nothing?  And if it is a big machine, how did this machine produce it’s own auto-critique?  Isn’t it really the break, the rupture (of the subject), that we need to theorise?  Isn’t consciousness really the most important fact in reality since it is inexplicable by reality?   Me, I’m important, surely – doesn’t my analysis do anything, offer anything – don’t I have the answers, or at least the right to produce answers or the possibility of finding them?"  I’m inclined to dismiss these questions out of hand as the whining desire of a resentiment-filled petit-bourgeois who thinks they’re ‘in charge of their life’ in the first place  but have to recognise that at least some of the charge invested in this response is disproportionate and perhaps related to the other peculiar investments I find myself bound to (revolution, majik, sex).

One of the things that I thin I agree with larval about is that the emphasis of thinkers such as Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere and Zizek seems to be inverse to that of Marx – "Don’t these positions [Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek] postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production?" larval asks. 

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Notes on revolutionary Marxism

The central tenets.

(beginning from the ‘Founding Statement’ of the Trotskyist group ‘Permanent Revolution’ to be found online at http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=779, accessed 15.11.07)

1. Belief in communism, “using Karl Marx’s rough guide to communism – from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his (or her) need – as its starting point”.

2. Belief in revolution – violent revolution – because (a) the state will defend its interests and (b) wholesale change is necessary (radical break) rather than reform.

3. Belief in the working class as the ‘agent of change’ – the only revolutionary class.

4. Belief in the need for a revolutionary, internationalist party.

5. Lineage – tradition (Paris Commune; Marxist wing of 1^st International; Left wing of 2^nd International, the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxembourg rather than the Mensheviks; 3^rd International (first four congresses) before Stalinisation onset; 4^th International – then debate.

6. The need to continue to develop a program “in the light of experience, the supreme criterion of human reason”. (Empiricism) It is on the basis of this programmatic development that further distinctions are then made (i.e.; the decline or ‘degeneration’ of the 4^th International – in the case of PR this involves classifying the ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ (USFI) as having ‘collapsed into opportunism).

This takes us up to point 6 of the ‘founding statement’, which consists of 14 points in all. The following 8 points all, to one degree or another, mark the analytical differences that then form the necessary conditions for the new move (the founding of a new group).

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The first three elements in Fear and Trembling are the ‘preface’, the ‘attunement’ and the ‘exordium’. In the preface Kierkegaard makes an almost direct, if somewhat ironic and sarcastic, appeal to the audience, an audience beyond his contemporaries. The tone ranges from a side-swipe at those who would be reading him, an almost arrogant assumption that he will be read, to a hubristic tragedy in which no matter who reads him he is to be misunderstood. It’s amusing to read these rather brash lines and there is a lightness that we read into him which might be less kindly if he were to be taken seriously. From the beginning Kierkegaard makes the reader of FT feel as though they are in the midst of someone who says a little too much for their own good, whose passion is as readable as their words. Moreoever, he does so in the mode of doubt. He makes us doubt this ‘Silentio’ from the start. He seems a little smug, a little too perfect and yet he also seems to be standing up against that mob, that crowd of dumbskulls, that queue we find ourselves in for no reason.

The attunement is far more beautiful a piece of writing, the beginning of the beauty of FT. The preface might mark its opening philosophical moment, though even then we might instead want to mark this point in the lines of the epigraph. It is the epigraph that signposts the issue or method of indirect communication with which FT is entwined. Here, in the short moment during which Tarquin slices off the heads of the poppy flowers whilst walking with the messenger, we find the idea that a story can have two drastically different meanings. The messenger might recount the story of his walk with Tarquin and gain nothing of its murderous intent, merely report accurately and verbatim – a true representation – what happened. Tarquins son might understand something different, moreover he might understand the truth of the message hidden under the representation.

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This excellent example of the way categories or names prescribe our way of conceiving or thinking through problem came through the nettime email list recently.

On 29/09/2007, Thijs wrote:

> “[…] In contrast to most post-modern nation states, Islamic  fundamentalism offers the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn.”

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that words like “fundamentalism” and “terrorism” offer the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn: the ability to lump together a wide range of social phenomena that they don’t understand under a few convenient labels taken from American and European history, such as American Protestant fundamentalism and the French revolutionary Terror of the 1790s.

Here are some possible alternatives (which I’m sure could be improved):

Al Qaeda: Salafi nationalist guerilla network

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: Sunni reformist party

Hamas: Sunni Palestinian nationalist party and militia

Hizballah: Shia Lebanese nationalist party and militia

Two things leap out of this sort of classification: the need to know something about Islam in order to know what the Arabic words mean, and the need to take nationalism seriously as a force that motivates opposition movements.

Ben

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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.)
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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.
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There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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One of my favourite pieces by Burroughs is the short Ah Pook discussion of time, death, control and the ‘ugly american’. I showed it to my Introduction to Philosophy class this week, at the start of the lecture, then came across it again on Muli Koppell’s blog ‘Methods and Black Squares‘ blog. The brief film animation that is famously associated with this Burroughs piece is below, though it misses out (at least in this version) Bryon Gysin’s all purpose nuclear bedtime story from the end, which I’ve previously heard attached to Ah Pook as a kind of coda.

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