Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has passed away. It appears that Saturday night he stopped breathing. He was only 67.
If you haven't yet read, among many other things, his extraordinary essay on "The Echo of the Subject" (Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics), now would be one time to do so.
Via Mark Thwaite. Pierre Joris has more. Update: and Craig has a request.
Updated the third: A web page in memoriam.
An unrepentant bookstore browser–I am fascinated by the
variety of design contained within my preferred section. Given the predilections of the LS community, I thought I might offer the beginnings of an open-ended cultcrit/tHEORY/osophy bookdesign awards list; seeing as how something as inane and omnipresent as design can only be properly approached by something equally anodyne and saturated. Also, we like lists.
Fellow fetishists are encouraged to add their own accolades or critique as needed:
Lifetime achievement award for general excellence – Verso – pretty
much all good here, wo es war, Phronesis, cosmetically enhancing Baudrillard’s
late hackery (Screened Out, anyone?) …. but
Most notable exception to said excellence: The fauxtidian radical thinkers
series, I was really embarrassed when I saw this, luckily their selections have
been solid, and the second round wisely went Futuristic – still hideous, but less
offensive.
Most consistent offender: Continuum – esp. the 101 ‘impacts’ shit
with the block letters
Most unforgivable effort: Being and Event – Continuum – just a
massive disappointment – looks like an overwrought beach novel.
Janus award – Stanford –
(Archetypal ugly: LL's Typography – two colors locked in a gruesome
deathmatch, but who will win? My money is on ‘corpse grey’)
Most unfortunate redesign –
Best Use of Artificial Color: Zone
Books
Unclear on the Concept:
Most delightful exception to a largely comedic history: The October
series from MIT – not that that crowd would expect any less, but still, very
nice.
Most forgivably over-designed readers: Routledge
Most unforgivably over-dramatic readers: Blackwell
Most readable typeface: MIT, Stanford
Most absurdly small typeface:
Most elegant layout of text/chapters: MIT, Continuum
Box-of-chocolates typeface: Verso
What's the use of marching... again? Link: AlterNet: The Washington Iraq Peace March: A Protest to Be Proud of.
WASHINGTON, DC -- A dazzling sun beamed down on peace activists from around the countrywho gathered on the National Mall Saturday to demand an end to the Iraq War. Beneath this benevolent sky, the event read as much like a victory parade as a protest march. These were not the angry demonstrators who took to the streets of New York City in February 2003 in an attempt to avert a war, or the beaten-down and beleaguered ones who marched through US cities in March 2005 to protest US occupation of Iraq, or the slightly bedraggled group who last Spring tied US spending on the Iraq occupation to mismanagment of the crisis as they traced Hurricane Katrina's path in a three-state "March to New Orleans".
Estimates of the crowd size vary -- CNN put it at "tens of thousands" and event organizers insist nearly half a million showed, DC police declined to speculate -- one thing is certain: Today's marchers were as satisfied as cats who stole the cream, cats who were almost ... celebrating.
"Before, we were a minority marching to convince a majority that occupying Iraq was a terrible idea," says Hany Khalil, spokesperson for march organizers, United for Peace and Justice. "But today, for the first time we are out in force representing a majority of Americans who want us to get out of Iraq."
K-punk has a truly brilliant piece up about Children of Men. For one thing, he does a terrific job of decoding the squeamish-making situational conceit of the work - a world in which women can no longer have children - a conceit which of course sends us when we first hear about it almost automatically in all sort of directions that aren't really borne out by the film itself (anxiety about working women, anxiety about homosexuality, anxiety - a la Pat Buchanan et al - about the death of the "white race," etc...) K-punk's version is much more (aesthetico-ideologically) optimistic and truer to what we see on screen...
The third reason that Children of Men works is because of its take on cultural crisis. It's evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. (If the sterility were to be taken literally, the film would be no more than a requiem for what Lee Edelman calls 'reproductive futurism', entirely in line with mainstream culture's pathos of fertility.) For me, this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?
Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and repermutation. Could it be, that is to say, that there are no breaks, no 'shocks of the new' to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the 'weak messianic' hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?
I'm going to say more about this on my own site when I get a chance, but one of the (very basic) things that I loved about the film was that, despite the fact that human life itself is dwindling out, that these people are living in either the aftermath or the final stages of what looks to be the ultimate catastrophe, one which will surely culminate, within a few years, in the end of the human race, they go about their business - commuting to work, stopping for coffee, watching tv, etc. The film pounds us with the savage uncanniness of the thought of rejiggering our retirement accounts, redoing the kitchen, or, of course, seeing movies as the world ends around us...
Think of the dystopian works that share this stance: 1984 and the cafeteria talk, Josef K. thinking about his missed breakfast at the opening of The Trial, etc...
One does wonder about the economic organization of this imagined world. Certainly it's not our system - can't be. Uncreative destruction without growth, hyper-full employment, hyper-inflation geometrically beyond Weimar precedent. There's no sign in the movie of what has happened on this score, save for the fact that we see no one - save for the coffeehouse people, presumably - who isn't a public servant.... And there are ration books...
If it is socialism, it is of course a stripe of national socialism. But what do we make of a fantasy of a socialism that can only arrive by natural dictat, after the real end of history, just before the end of mankind itself?
9/11, of course, wasn't the end of the world in any sense, no matter what anyone wanted us to believe then or wants us to believe now. But I do distinctly recall as I shuffled around Brooklyn Heights that day, a sense that something strange in just these terms was afoot. On the one hand, there was a palpable if tacit giddiness that seemed to stem from the idea that there'd be no more work that day, tomorrow, maybe even the whole week. People I ran into coming home early from work were excited to be off, if also horrified. A snow day, as it were, for the entire city. (It is controversial to register this ambivalence, of course - remember the recent dustup about Thomas Hoepker's photograph?) Something else to think about, something to do other than paper shuffling or service work, or studying etc. On the other hand and at the same time, I am quite sure that many of us, just days or hours or minutes or even seconds after the climactic scene, were thinking "but what about that work that I have to do." I know for a fact that an acquaintance of mine, despite being aware in a general way of what was going on, continued to work at his dissertation chapter in the university library, tapping away as the whole world freaked out.
Just before the first tower fell and I was forced by the cloud of dust to head home, I remember making deals with myself about just how much time I could give myself for this sort of thing. I was reading for my oral exams at the time - I think I decided that I would take that day off but no more. In the end, I started reading again on September 13. Or maybe it was the night of the 12th.
Long story short, I think our fantasies and fears about catastrophe, dystopia, and the end of the world have quite a lot to do with somewhat banal anxieties and ambivalence about the work that we do, the conditions under which we work, and the possibility that our work situations might one day change. But I'll say a bit more about this soon.
Anyway, more later. But do go read K-punk on this - I'm not saying here anything he hasn't said far more penetratingly and eloquently. It's a brilliant post...
Just something from an old interview, also bearing on the fantastic discussion following Alain's earlier post:
Is there any way for an author to regulate, in advance, the range of possible interpretations?
J.D.: If you expect an answer in the form of a "yes or no", I would say no. But if you give me more time, I would be more hesitant. I would say that a philosopher or writer should try of course, to be responsible for what he writes as far as possible. For instance, one must be very careful politically, and try, not so much to control, but to foresee all possible consequences some people might draw from what you write. Thats an obligation - to try to analyse and foresee everything. But its absolutely impossible. You cant control everything because once a certain work, or a certain sentence, or a certain set of discourses are published, when the trace is traced, it goes beyond your reach, beyond your control, and in a different context, it can be exploited, displaced, used beyond what you meant. And this is the question I asked about Nietzsche since you mention him. Of course, there was an abusive interpretation of Nietzsche by the Nazis. No doubt, Nietzsche didnt want that, it is sure. But, nevertheless, how can we account for the fact that the only philosopher or thinker that was referred to as a predecessor by the Nazis was Nietzsche? So there must be in Nietzsches discourse, something which was in affinity with the Nazis, and you can say this and try to analyse this possibility without of course, concluding that Nietzsche himself was a Nazi, or that everything in Nietzsche was in affinity with the Nazis. But we have to account for the fact that there was a lineage, there was some genealogy. So, we are all exposed to this - I am sure that some people could draw reactive or reactionary or right-wing conservative positions from what I say. I struggle, I do my best to prevent this, but I know that I cant control it. People could take a sentence and use it...let us take the example of what I was telling you this afternoon: of course, I am in favour of, let us say, the development of idioms, the differences in language so as to resist the hegemony or the monopoly of language. But I immediately added to this statement that I was also opposed to nationalism. That is, to the nationalistic reappropriation of this desire for difference. Now, maybe someone can say, "well, youre in favour of divisions against a universal language, then we would use your discourse in favour of nationalism or reactionary linguistic violence" and so on and so forth. So, I cant control this. I can only do my best, just adding a sentence to my first sentence, and to go on speaking trying to neutralize the misunderstandings. But you cant control everything, and the fact that you cannot control everything doesn't mean simply that youre a finite being and a limited person. It has to do with the structure of language, the structure of the trace. As soon as you trace something, the trace becomes independent of its source - thats the structure of the trace. The trace becomes independent of its origin, and as soon as the trace is traced, it escapes. You cannot control the fate of the book totally. I cant control the future of this interview (laughter)...You record it, but then youll re-write it, re-frame it, build a new context, and perhaps, my sentence will sound different. So, I trust you but I know that it is impossible to control the publication of everything I say.
N.P.: But there is an implicit faith, an implicit relationship...
J.D.: Its a matter of faith, of good faith, but its faith, its faith...
The site we all know and love, marxists.org, is under serious, life-threatening attack, possibly - seemingly - directed by the Chinese Government.
In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.
While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.
While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.
Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.
As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our colocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.
At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.
The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.
Now, look. I'll admit to something of a fascination with the PRC. Veteran blogtypes even know the long form of my pseudo-handle. I am fully aware of the human-rights abuses, of the not-actually existing socialism of the place. I've been there, I've seen it with my own eyes. But seriously, if this is true, forget it, forget my half-affection, the grain of salt with which I read all the western critiques of the place. I'm going to burn the fucking Little Red Book I bought there. I am going to forget semi-plans to figure out the viability of attending the Beijing Olympics. My university has a bigtime exchange agreement with several universities in China; I was just today looking at the brochures, thinking about taking part. No more!!!! Marxists.org is one of the good things in the world. What someone else might call a "category killer" of the left internet - I use it on an almost daily basis as just about everything is there.
Seriously, you've driven me to it:
From sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, a brilliant piece that explores prospects and dangers of Chavez via das Rote Wien and its architecture:
For all the bourgeois media's myth-making of him as some sort of semi-literate caudillo, the policies of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela seem to have some historical affinity with the rather ambiguous experiment in 'municipal socialism' made in Vienna between 1918 and 1934, an oasis of Socialism in a desert of Catholicism and Conservatism: however curious it might be curious to imagine Chavez and Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer or Rudolf Hilferding meeting up in a Viennese coffee house. In Victor Serge's peerless Memoirs of a Revolutionary (which I will write about more fully when someone tags me with a 'what are your 5 favourite books' meme) there's some wonderful passages where this professional revolutionary winds up in Red Vienna with fellow Comintern refugees like George Lukacs and Gramsci, enjoying the political largesse in a decidedly comfortable seeming Social Democracy: 'playing for time, building workers' flats and enjoying sweet music in every cafe down to the smallest".
Here's what this poor guy Scott Shane in the New York Times writes today about waterboarding; original article here:
Some of those C.I.A. prisoners were interrogated using techniques far harsher than anything approved in earlier wars, including waterboarding, a simulated drowning that many human rights advocates believe crossed the line into torture.
But surely it's not just human rights advocates who can claim the honor of describing waterboarding as torture! Doesn't Scott Shane also think it is torture? If an American or Israeli soldier were subjected to waterboarding as a way to extract information about an upcoming military operation, wouldn't we say that soldier was being tortured? Can anyone imagine a New York Times reporter writing up a story about an American or Israeli soldier being waterboarded for information about an upcoming military offensive, and saying "some human rights advocates believe waterboarding is a form of torture"?
Conclusion: the harmful effects of this "war on terror" are only beginning to be felt. And: I feel sorry for Scott Shane, who has lost the ability to describe waterboarding as torture, and instead assigns that position to some interest group.
Gabriel Josipovici on Borges, Poe, the novel, Kierkegaard, Wallace Stevens...:
It may be that Borges’ mode of writing is not such as to engage fully with politics and history, like that of Sartre and Malraux; yet I would suggest that despite this his central contrast of the melancholy and resigned translator and the idealist world of Tlön is more deeply political than Sartre and Malraux could ever be, and that it helps to bring out something that is often overlooked in studies of literary Modernism: that to write about politics without recognising the complicity of forms of writing with the formation of political consciousness is to betray the cause one thinks one is serving, and that writers like Eliot, Stevens, Beckett and Borges may in the end be better guides to the times than Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Silone and the rest...…
Actually, I think my favorite sentence is this:
...But there’s this deplorable confusion in that modern times have incorporated ‘actuality’ into logic and then, in distraction, forgotten that ‘actuality’ in logic is still only a ‘thought actuality’, i.e. it is possibility.
Thoughts anyone? Certainly a must-read essay. (Also via RSB, readers may be interested in the new journal, Affinities: "a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.")
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