adbusters and the "existential divide"

I wasn't quite a charter subscriber to Adbusters, but fairly close to it. Maybe issue 10 or so, if memory serves. I cancelled about a year ago. While it has a certain connection to some of my perennial interests (see the name of my personal blog), I just started to feel increasingly out of touch with, what was it, the tone, the tonal politics, and the plain old politics of the magazine.

Here's part of a post salvaged from my old site, just about when I wrote Adbusters to cancel out:

I've always been unsettled - in the wrong way - by the approach to politics embraced by Adbusters and the like. Seems to me to be an infinitely foreseeable adaptation of left politics to the self-help, self-fulfillment culture that marks the current tidal mark of the American experiment. Marie Antoinette-ism... What the magazine prescribes for its readership is something other than politics, I think. At base, it's a strange sort of "lifestyle" magazine. It is full of stuff like this, from the current issue...

Here in rural Telemark, Norway, my husband and I have an ancient, 100-acre farm without a road, without electricity, without running water, without a computer or mobile telephone or washing machine or CD player or remote-control carrot-dicer... without corporate products, including Barbie dolls or Nike sneakers. We have a fjord-horse to do most of the heavy farm work (and so on...)

And a subscription to Adbusters, it would seem...

Anyway, they sell the magazine at the snazzy co-op where I buy my food, and the other day I bought a copy to see if anything has changed, either about the magazine or about me or both.

Nope.

Right from the first pages - which feature a "visual essay" by Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor - I found some material that I can only classify as disturbing, symptomatic, symptomatically disturbing. Here are a few snips:

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Tis the Season

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 – Meriden - crossed aesthetics so many times it  got pissed and moved onto cultural memory in the present.

(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 – Minnesota – the old THL was the gold standard, serious without being pompous, colorful without being garish, I was a huge fan. The newstuff is not terrible, but what, pray tell, was idea behind the cover for the Inoperative Community?

Best Use of Artificial Color: Zone Books

Unclear on the Concept: Routledge  Classics - still the most physically difficult to  read.

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: Minnesota, Continuum

Most elegant layout of text/chapters: MIT, Continuum

Box-of-chocolates typeface: Verso

the worst book you ever read

Here's material for a meme, no doubt: what was the worst book you ever read, and why?

A quick search around the web, however, turns up several lists of notoriously bad films (e.g. Wikipedia's "Films considered the worst ever"), and indeed there's an annual award for bad films, the Razzies, but I can't immediately find anything similar for fiction.

There is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award; and also the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, "wretched writers welcome." But nothing for entire books, so far as I can see.

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la rochefoucauld favorites

22
Philosophy triumphs easily over past, and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.

26
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily

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How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

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Fundamentalist Scum

Update:  First, read Qlipoth  (and in particular this).

Forgive me for momentarily lowering the tone around here, but anyone who at this point refuses to acknowledge the sinister parallels between the new-age mysticism of  "President" George Walker Bush and the ideology of what is popularly referred to by the signifier, "Bin Laden" or (self-)flatteringly romanticized as "Islamofascism," in the sense that both foreclose equally on any possible future, like all good metonymies, is quite possibly living with their head fundamentally up their own ass, walking in circles on the motherfucking moon.

There's a reason they call them wackos behind their backs, you know (it's a nicer, more comment-inviting word than scum, surely; wackos at least are monetarily useful).  The real scum are the scammers responsible for mass murder, the cozy fundamentalist terrorist metonymies, of course.

(Jon Stewart meanwhile, will of course continue his trivializing fun-poking at the  strangely lovable, pretend-populist Dumbo, whilst reserving the brunt of satirical cruelty for life-long activist Belafonte and socialist playboy Chavez.  But it'd sure be nice if there were a more courageous art for our sake out there.  All of which is to suggest, only, that art which succeeds in raising the very question of art perhaps cannot help but be the stuff of a desperately-needed more literate politics (cf. Benjamin).  How's that for snobby effete elitism?) 

The real reason for this post, before it went and got itself demurred, was this:  Seymour Hersh:  he still tells it like it is (via The Collective Lounge):

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poshlost'

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo–these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost' in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, mothmythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know..."

Or:

"A well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal and animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness"

–Vladimir Nabokov

King Kong.  Baudrillard.  Shopping Malls.  Disney Land.  MTV.  Dave Eggers. 

On some level one cannot help but recognize the sheer dominance of these forces.   Speaking generally, they are the air we breath.  This does not mean that they are natural.  Liberals (the politicians, not the ideals of any philosophy - which for many reasons, such as Capitalism, do not exist) would have more nuanced cooking shows, a slightly better quality of life for slightly more people for a slightly longer time.  A stronger, more gentle war on various emotional states.  Their prospects, of course, hinge on a fundamental delusion of sorts – namely a world where conservatives (at their current stage on the several-decades-developing road to fascism) simply do not exist.  Indeed, much of the liberal delusion consists of an elaborate maintainence of this snobbery.*  (And, to be fair, much of the conservative machine depends on exploiting the resentment springing from this impression.)  Those are all familiar enough complaints, to be sure.  And like everywhere, such generalizations are perhaps only useful up to a certain point.

If it is even worth mentioning (and I'm not convinced it is), this realm is nevertheless where a stupid film like Team America hits hardest.   
It "hits" in the sense that it literally performs a kind of violence on its audience (a violence for which we have very few words, yet – apart from the usual phrases, "beating over the head," "insulting the intelligence," "forced to consume," etc.)  Lenny Bruce's form of satire comes to mind (and yet, is it funny?  Really?).  That it panders equally to liberals and conservatives is perhaps worthy of a chuckle.  It's also of somewhat Zizekian topicality, in fact.  I wonder if he's seen it.  But to mistake this film for a "critique" of anything would surely be going too far (again recalling a certain Zizek). 

Having so warned against generalizations, I will now proceed to generalize.  I do think there is some wisdom in making an effort not to speak of the banal, or at least to do so carefully, and not in a manner that treats it with any more dignity than that with which it may handle us.

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Reflections on Culture, Empire, and Decadence

From a comment at UFO Breakfast Recipients:

I have hard time differentiating between [dying cultures and dying empires], at least in the US. There is no culture here on a national level, not outside the mid-Atlantic accented, corporate packaged $25,000 smile, the b-mod routines of the workplaces. The haughty affectations of the faculty lounge are not qualitatively different from the banal glurge wisdom mouthed in sports bars. The vampiric logic is the same in both places. They all do that thing with the eyes, where they cock their head a little on the side to catch the glint from the overhead lights. You are wrong by virtue of disagreeing with them, but therapy can help you. You must accept the common ground or suffer.

Link

If such a thing can be quantified, the degree to which conformity, and not competence, guarantees an individual's success is probably an excellent index of the objective decay of an organization or culture. The disquieting point raised here is the extent to which oppositional culture, simply because it is embedded in a larger decaying system, replicates this fault. Adorno makes a similar point in the closing sentences of “The Health Unto Death” in Minima Moralia.

Nixon is supposed to have said, “we are all Keynesians now,” and that may have marked the beginning of the decline of Keynesianism in the US. Maybe, despite our best efforts not to be such, American intellectuals, salaried or not, are all Straussians now. The distance between the exoteric meaning Straussians proper use to hide their intentions and Lakoffian frames isn't as great as either party would care to admit. And in a time of objective decay, nothing is more banal than an attempt to be individual by penning a feuilleton decrying the ubiquity of conformity.

A Commonplace Prosperity

Hawthorne, in the Preface to The Marble Faun:

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

As Hawthorne assuredly knew well, the narrative deficit at home, the plotlessness of "commonplace prosperity" is only ever an index of a surplus of narrative elsewhere, off stage, geographically or perceptually. He wrote the Preface in 1859... So many shadows and stories minding the fields...

France knew the story of storylessness back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Flaubert chronicled Emma Bovary's empty hours. Britain knew it in the later half of the century, until, as always happens, the barbarians are at the gate, the hermetic platitude of the prosperous everyday crumbles into alienation, cancerous self-awareness, and collapse.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an inversion of the storyless status-quo, where the void afflicts the jungle, and the romance (the romance of the bills due for love and what we do to pay them) comes home to roost. The exact inversion of Austen, where entre les lignes we find Jamaica. In the Congo, it's romance at home that seeps up through the cracks...

I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

I've been watching the new series Rome on HBO. ("Nineteen hundred years ago -- the other day...") After initial disappointment, the show is getting a little bit better each week. But one central aspect I wish was angled differently: rather than the perspective of the soldiers returning home from JC's campaigns in Gaul - we see the home that is about to be altered irrevocably from the perspective of the bearers of change - I wish wish wish they had started with the stuffy affluence of the home, the slaves tending the gardens, the children with their greek tutor (also a slave), and the eddying of time in general just before the levee comes down...

As Hawthorne concludes the paragraph cited above:

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow.