Agamben Strikes

From: this.

"Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision."
Giorgio Agamben

"There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard–así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded— the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. This is our gothic— we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless.

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard?

In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.

We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education!

When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own.

The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice."

Sanctioned Propaganda

Amazon.co.uk's current bestseller in the politics section is The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5. The publisher's description is as follows:

"To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian, the first time any of the world’s leading intelligence or security services has taken such a step. The Defence of the Realm, the book which results, is an unprecedented publication. It reveals the precise role of the Service in twentieth-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909 to root out ‘the spies of the Kaiser’ up to its present role in countering Islamic terrorism."

A formal question should probably be raised at this point: you have a secretive, (probably) violent State repressive apparatus. You want information thereon; who do you ask for it? Surely you want the unofficial history, or "the history they don't want you to know." Granted you run the gambit of conspiracy cranks, but still, you'll also get the things which haven't been redacted. "Ooh I can't wait for 'Bush presidency: the official account' when it comes out. For the sake of objectivity we need Cheney's account of his own monstrosity." By the same measure, the last people to ask about MI5 are basically MI5. There might be a morbid curiosity to it, like reading Mein Kampf to learn about Hitler, but any conflation of "official history" with "actual history" should probably be avoided, as should any notion of "precise role." In the future, maybe Tony Blair's biography will give us some "unprecedented" information about his "precise role" in the run-up to Iraq. It can go on the book shelf with the MI5 book and "Enron: Our Story."

You Can't Spell "Industrial" Without "Revolution"

From the Independent:

'In recent months, British power companies have said they will build at least six new generation plants to produce 1,200 megawatts of energy, most by burning woodchips. The country's demand for wood will increase more than sevenfold. MGT Power, which is creating a new waste-to-energy plant at Ince in Cheshire and a new woodchip-fired power plant at Teesport near Middlesbrough, then another in North Shields, will be using chips from North and South America. It said it will use crops planted specifically for use as fuel, examples being eucalyptus, pine, willow and poplar. A company statement insisted that it "will never procure fuels that contribute to the loss of areas of protected habitat or areas of high ecological value".

One of the new plants – the world's largest – is now being built at Port Talbot in South Wales, and by 2012 it will supply over half Wales's one million homes, and, claim its owners, Prenergy, displace 3.5 million tons of CO2 emissions a year that would have been produced by older power stations.'

The Indy reports all this as if biomass competition with foodstuffs is new. The last time this happened was the mid-eighteenth century. Back at the dawning of the industrial revolution biomass along with water power were the preponderant energy sources in Britain. But the early capitlaists ran into a catch which is familiar to our situation today; whilst GCSE history books teach us that Henry VIII cut down all the trees to build his flotilla, in actuality wood and charcoal continued to be produced in sizeable quantities in Britain for many years. After the Great Fire of London in 1666 the capital was rebuilt in bricks -a technology imported from Holland -due largely to a lack of native trees with which to build that many timber-frame structures. There was also a lack of large (ie old) trees with which to produce the massive beams needed for the spans required; Britain therefore imported wood from Norway and Sweden.

Nevertheless, forestry was still huge business, just not for building. Biomass crops needed to be quick growing and easily harvested -the opposite of timber crops. In the mid C18th as manufacturing (that is the conglomeration of handicrafts under the auspices of capitalists) was burgeoning into industrial production which required machinery with power sources. Many factories were in zones throughout the countryside at locations with good head waters to turn their mill wheels. Cities, however, had the advantage of good transport, communications and concentrated labour pools (creating competition among workers, driving down wages). Biomass was able to be easily transported to these urban zones, however its production came into close conflict with food production. As biomass fuel production increased so did the prices of food stuffs; this increased the wages which needed to be paid to workers and so cancelled out many advantages of consolidated capitalistic production.

A power source which was abundant, easily transportable and did not compete with food was needed, and so capitalists began to utilise coal. The Durham coal field was huge, the lumps of carbon could be taken anywhere and coming from below ground it did not disturb the agriculture which happened above.

We act as if the bio-fuels crisis which increased food prices a couple of years ago was some new and terrible monster; now with wood-chip power stations the same crisis is re-surfacing, but this exact same dynamic was the one which itself helped spawn the industrial revolution. We are, technically speaking, on familiar ground for capitalism; the problem is that the profit motive which causes the exapansionary problems in the first instance also has a tendency to obscure its tracks. When looking for the next quick buck why would these energy companies consider proto-industrial history when they could just write a pamphlet and other marketing bumph about how they have the next greatest commodity ever? This is, after all, what their types expend most of their energy doing: talking themseleves up. If only we could power light bulbs and fridges off marketer's hot air our energy problems would be solved

Legal sex and a Good Question, Plus Berlusconi Naked Again

I had a little feedback last time I posted a picture of Berlusconi naked, it went something along the lines of "don't do it again." Unfortunately Žižek has raised a good point to do with the Italian's nudity:

"You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean?"

British Nationalists and Democracy

Steve Richards proclaims the BNP to be enemies of democracy; may I ask where its friends are? Parliament?

Review: Slavoj Žižek "First as Tragedy,Then as Farce"

The intellectual composting of the entire world continues with another Žižek release: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. This isn't one of his "sustained," or philosophical books as were In Defence of Lost Cases, Parallax View or the seminal Sublime Object of Ideology. Instead this is what would probably be termed a "political intervention." Žižek has never shied away from politics, be it at home in Slovenia, or in the EU and America; indeed, embarrassingly to many of the commentariat, he often manages to churn out prescient journalism and reflections about subjects which local writers can only flail at. So it was with Thatcherism, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently Italian politics and the Iranian elections.

Žižek's engagement is not difficult to understand: these are interesting times, and he seems to have a mind which feeds off scandal and intrigue. It will thus come as no surprise that this latest release continues this run, taking on what has become termed the "Credit Crunch," but fusing it with various other concerns uncle Slavoj has had over the past year. For those who witnessed his showing at the SWP's Marxism 2009 conference Žižek's stance in the book will be familiar: he variously advocates a Bartleby politics, a sustained critique of the nation-State-capital triad and a "re-imagining" of communism. He warns us not to fall into the trap of impotent action which serves only reinforce the status quo, in other words, he continues his war against the liberal-Left as the ultimate legitimisers of the Right. Žižek's critique of the Left from the Left is engaged immediately with his now infamous joke about rape... For those who don't get it or don't like it, you're advised to skip page 6.

Like his other recent political "pamphlet," Violence, this latest release is a concise distillation of the various re-occurring themes in Žižek's work, but, unlike that book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is less bricolage, and may well be as close to a Žižekian manifesto as we will ever come -replete with self-references, cut-and-paste passages and even a footnote pointing us to Wikipedia. The book is broken into two sections, the first ostensibly re-asserts ideology as the pre-eminent problematic with which we are dealing, even though depression appears "economically determined". The second section picks up the theme Žižek has been debating over the last year or so in various lectures around London: communist possibilities and revolutionary potential.

This books marks the end of any apologism for Žižek about communism, indeed, after several years of noting that the Left must embrace it's troubled past, Stalinist warts and all, we are here enjoined to end Leftist guilt once and for all. Žižek is sick of ruminating on purges and gulags. Instead it is the capitalists and their apologists who need to begin explaining themselves. He suggests the field of politics does not revolve around how communism appears to us here, at the end of history, but how our circumstances appear to the eternal idea of communism. This point, maintained similarly by Badiou and Karatani among others, points us in the direction of once again asserting communism as the currently missing dynamic in global politics. Various thinkers have offered their input into quite what form this assertion takes: David Harvey wants us to join new social movements; Badiou advocates the self-organisation and Jacobinism of French migrant groups; Karatani wants us to join local exchange trading schemes; they all demand a political subjectivity which ruthlessly critiques capital, the State and the nation.

Žižek has been notably silent on his fellow's advocacies, and did bring upon himself Simon Critchley's riposte that he is a magician with a hat, but no rabbit. Here Žižek is clearly trying to give us what rabbit he can, but it is a diffuse one: we are told to drop historical determinations of communism, and do it afresh for our times, but we are also told the present needs a swift dose of Jacobin-Leninism. The part-of-no part is upheld as a site of communist solidarity, but note this is not the proletariat, it seems to be the "no-papers" as they call them in France: illegal migrants (plus slum dwellers and the dispossessed at large); however we can no longer afford to be "subversive" from the stance of the part-of-no-part because as has been well established, capital is its own subversion, and thrives thereon.

The question is thus a territorial one: quite literally where is the space from which to re-assert the communist ideal? As Žižek asks rather than answers, how to "subtract" ourselves from the situation in a way which at once gives space to think and act, which violently disturbs the existing order, and which shows the complicity of perceived opposites in that order?

Perhaps a concrete answer could be proposed: don't simply give Nick Griffin a few minutes on the BBC, let him debate and agree with Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg! Lets put them all one a panel discussing immigration, and lets put some Daily Mail journalists onto that panel. The ambiguous apex is, of course, when they all come up with the same matrix of deportations and internment camps as the cure to the "immigrant question," will the populace see that as de-legitimising the mainstream or legitimising Griffin? Probably both at once. And this is the difficult task: waging the propaganda war which will force people to understand what they are seeing. This is a task which Žižek has little hope for; as he notes, the working class is not completely wrong in seeing migrant workers partly as scabs, reducing their own "native" bargaining power. Žižek suggests that getting worker's populism at large to see capital as the true enemy would be a Real political Event. But in Britain at least, the construction worker's strikes, with their openness to the SWP over the last year, and the anti-EU stance (because it was the EU which allowed the importation of Portugese workers usurping British ones) surely appeal to an in-part correct identification of friends and enemies.

When industrialists and the progressive State want borders to drop (creating larger, and thus cheaper labour and commodity markets) whilst the subject of the Left -workers -wants territorial and national restrictionism, there is a fine line to walk. That which ostensibly separated socialism from national socialism was the formers adherence to "cosmopolitanism" (with political ramifications which can not be overstated) but this cosmopolitanism itself has become, in material if not spirit, a crux of liberal capitalism.

This is the reason Žižek drops the idea of socialism itself. He posits the future as a battle not between capitalism and socialism, but as one between socialism (or social-democracy, or China's social-authoritarian capitalism) and communism. Even if Cameron, Brown, Clegg et al are offering cuts, the softening of Sarkozy's neo-liberalism, Obama's stuttering attempts to engage social democracy in America, Japan and Greece's elections of "Leftist" governments, seem to all support Žižek's assertion.

But this dynamic has been an "unknown known" for a very long time on the Left: does Das Kapital's middle section on the working day, with its reliance on government sources, and its story of shifting worker-capitalist alliances, not bear absolute testament to this fact? We know that capitalists are structurally idiotic: the laws of coercive competition will always push them to parasitise off the populace, kill off their workers and rape the environment. As the working day chapter of Das Kapital shows, it is progressive struggles themselves which have stabilised capitalism, and allowed its continuance. This enmeshment of State and capital, "public and private," seen most recently in bailouts, is the pragmatist-socialist assertion against free-marketeering. It is this "two-sides-of-the-coinness," as so often, which pushes Žižek to assert communism more strongly than he ever previously has.

But as he says: "more than a solution to the problems we are facing today, communism is the name of a problem: a name for the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and-state framework, a task for which no quick formula is at hand" (129).

This being a manifesto, what, then, is the upshot of all this? What ought we to now rush into the streets to do? Let us recall the hard sell Marx and Engels wrote in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, because it is worth noting that document was as much about explanation and recruitment as it was theorising and providing a handy academic source. Programmatically they required:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. (Manifesto, 20-21)

Several things jump out: firstly that the bourgeois State has ostensibly met all of these demands, but essentially in order that it does not have to meet the first one: an alternative notion of private-public property. Another thing that jumps out is the very concrete nature of the text. These battles were all fought and, and most were won in capitalist countries (although what exactly has been won must be asked); in addition is is quite clear what various Soviet policies owed to the Marx-Engels programme. As a manifesto Marx's works because it tells us what to think and what we need; this might sound horrendous to generations weaned on fear of totalitarianism, and every day enjoined to create their (unique) identities through consumer choices, but in Das Kapital Marx would later talk of "industrial pathology," that is, the way in which everyday life tends to busy us and blind us to thought and analysis. With the wife, kids, and boss breathing down my neck what time do I have for theorising and gaining class consciousness?

As a manifesto then, Žižek's falls a little short. We have no list of demands; we have no advocacy of one thing or another, other than communism, which is (as stated above) not actually an answer but the name of the problem which must confront capitalism. Having said this, Žižek does tell us in part what to do:

He approvingly cites Ghandi's mantra: "be the change you wish to see in the world" (which coincidentally Oxfam has written on a fridge magnet). Žižek also promotes a mentalité which is argued to be key to action and thought: we must assume that the worst is our fate. We must think from the future as if the worst has come to pass, and consider what interventions we would make in order to change this fate; in this way, ironically, our free act to intervene in history must, argues Žižek, be premised precisely on our future circumscribed free will. This may sound a little strange, but its targets are clear: hopeful Fabian solutions (like Al Gore's to environmental disaster) and wild, impotent flails such as the anti-Iraq War protests back in 2002-2003 (which were then cited by Bush and Blair as examples of the freedom and democracy they were trying to spread).

Critchley will be unhappy to have no rabbit from Žižek's hat, but compared to his earlier writings we can at least glimpse a pair of ears. Whether defensible or not, Žižek has said for a long time that it is not up to philosophers to come up with answers; conveniently he is a politician when posing questions and a philosopher when asked for answers. But what could on the one hand be read, as it is by Critchley, as ultimately empty posturing, could be read on the other hand as a very trusting injunction: do as you please, but do it carefully and with thought. Many on the Left are taken aback that Žižek's main tirades are against the Left, of which he counts himself as being; they are then even more frustrated when, having deconstructed their positions and actions, he posits nothing in replacement. Maybe this is, though, precisely the point. Žižek is a polemicist, yes, but he is categorically not an authoritarian (as anybody who has seen him deal with a silly question after a presentation will attest). Žižek appears not to particularly be galvanising us into action, but to be galvanising us into thought. If Marx's target was the industrial, then Žižek's is the pathology. Žižek would probably not care if we joined a new social movement, began a LETS group, organised a protest or turned our house into a commune; what he would care about is that we thought it all through: that we looked at it from the future of a terrible fate and decided, yes, that is the intervention I must make.

Brave New World

On 13th October the BBC's Horizon series approached the topic of alcohol consumption and addiction. The health and social consequences of the the drug's use were outlined, and several reasonably interesting investigative elements were shown...

But then the presenter, addiction expert John Marsden, met up with a "colleague" who was developing a designer drug which essentially produced the effects of alcohol, without the side effects, and it did it reversibly (that is, with an antidote). Marsden tried the three pills, and endorsed them as preferable to having a drink.

Their creator dreams of a world in which we pop three pills instead of downing eight pints.

Didn't Aldous Huxley basically invent this drug, and call it Soma? Or at least he borrowed from the Indian name for the ambrosia of the gods, and then transferred it into a dystopia where stress, anxiety, or equally the desire for enjoyment are met with the injunction: take your Soma!

There is a kind of duel social function already at work with alcohol: it follows the trend which many animals exhibit of self-medication. What alcohol is medicating is, of course, the interesting question. But alongside that are the various social and cultural associations which alcohol has. The fact that within those associations alcohol has the ability to both enhance and destroy them is one of its key attributes; the technical description for this is "having too much to drink."

In other words you may drink to relax, but you ironically must equally be on guard that you don't drink too much and wake up in a compromised situation.

If you can have all the positive effects of the drug, with none of the negative ones, then what dynamic does this introduce? In essence this is what Huxley explores; granted the story appears to be about a Fordist society meeting "primitives," but actually it is about authenticity through the haze of a cure-all.

The ironic thing is that most Western middle-classes already inhabit a zone not dissimilar to Huxley's brave new world: prescriptions for anti-depressants are through the roof, and with the break-down of Leftist politics plus the stagnation of social movement we essentially accept an ossified caste system. Drugs already reconcile us to this situation, be they alcohol or valium. We don't yet breed the different castes in bottles, but we do breed them in ghettos, and other countries. Indeed, China currently is the designated breeding zone for workers who will provide all our cheap goods.

The question must arise, why then do we need another "designer" drug to further stupefy ourselves? Why is unaltered perception so problematic? Is this really a pharmacological problematic?