dialectics at a standstill: bruce sterling as exemplary public intellectual, circa now

The current configuration of the fields of journalism, academia, and publishing - plus the advent of the blogsphere - have produced in turn a new configuration of public intellectualism. There's something of a long tail effect at work - there are probably more PIs listened to by fewer than any time in history. All manner of blogpundits, evangelists, and visionaries abound.

One of these (actually, he's officially the Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in California) is Bruce Sterling, who has recently produced his very own youtubed guide to Belgrade:

Let me clip in what I think is the key passage here:

OK. so bear around the corner of the street, and this Tito-era workers housing building with its crumbling substandard concrete, we have what's basically an ideological declaration here: business, technology, communication. You notice it doesn't seem to be actually selling much of anything, it's more like a placard for the 21st century way of life. Just a layer, a thin layer, on top of an older building. But it is this layer, this thin layer, that actually allows me to live within this particular city and earn a living here... via internet. Oh but what kind of person am I? Well, you know, look at my clothing. Look at my possessions. Business, technology, communication. What are these objects, actually attached to my body. This one in particular, wireless communication, completely changes people's physical relationship to the city grid. In order to assemble my crew here on this street corner, we had to make about 30 different wireless phone calls just this morning and this afternoon. And yet, thanks to wireless communication, this is it. Thanks to the internet, that's what allows me to be here.

Dear Christ. So, let's consult the scorecard. The public housing of the old regime sucked, sure, but now there's, what, a weird placard and Sterling with a fucking cellphone. For a proper celebration to ensue, you'd think we'd catch sight of all the fabulous new housing for the underclasses since the arrival of the free market chez Belgrade. After all, one guesses that there still are, like, people living in the crumbling workers housing building. Just as the failure of the American welfare state doesn't mean that no one has to live in towering projects, it's just that the idea of building new residences for the working class has been abandoned.

I suppose it does change "people's relationship to the city grid" to have a well-paid speculative fiction writer cum freelance consultant strolling the streets of your city, making 30 calls a day on his phone, escorted by a movie crew. The rise of communism. The death of Tito. The fall of the Wall. The arrival of Bruce Sterling in your city. It all makes sense now, no?

More seriously: the illogic of the paragraph I've typed in speaks to the strange situation of the nearly-depoliticized public intellectual in 2007. The past, its utopian politics, are recognized and then derided. Guffaw, guffaw. But when the part of the paragraph arrives when you're meant to explain why you're smiling and carrying on, the part about the world actually being a better place now that the nasty specter of communism has slinked back into the grave, you simply stare into the face of your cellphone, or flip it out for all to admire. You register the amazingness of the fact that you're actually here, wherever you are: a post-communist city that still bears the scares of US bombing, or a Pizza Hut in Bangalore, or the Department of Defense media center in the green zone, wherever. Your voice rises, you get excited, but there's nothing to show but a civic-boosterist information economy poster splayed across the face of a Worker's Residence, gutted into condos.

In short, the past and its potentialities are everywhere confronted, but only to be at once disowned with a shrug....

ASSI, BILLIORAY, FERRAT, BABICK, Edouard MOREAU, C. DUPONT, VARLIN, BOURSIER, MORTIER, GOUHIER, LAVALETTE, Fr. JOURDE, ROUSSEAU, Ch. LULLIER, BLANCHET, J. GROLLARD, BARROUD, H. GERESME, FABRE, POUGERET.

As a footnote to yesterday's contribution to the Being and Event Reading Group of The Weblog, a translation of a short passage from Alain Badiou's La Commune de Paris: Une déclaration politique sur la politique:

Everything depends, therefore, on the consequences. But let us note that there is no transcendental consequence more powerful than the appearance of something that did not exist. That is how the day March 18, 1871 places in the center of a political turmoil a collection of unknown workers, unrecognized even by the specialists of the revolution, by those old "forty-eighters" that will unfortunately hinder the Commune with their ineffective disputes about words. Let us return to the first proclamation of March 19 by the Central Committee, the organism directly responsible for the insurrection of the eighteenth. "May Paris and France together lay down the foundation for a republic acclaimed in all ways, the only government that will forever close the era of invasions and civil wars." Who signs this political declaration without precedent? Twenty people, three-quarters of whom belong to the proletarians defined and constituted solely by circumstance. The newspaper of the government has every reason to ask: "Who are the members of this Committee? Are they communists, bonapartists or Prussians?" Here the unshakeable motive of the "foreign agents" can already be seen. In reality the result of the event is that for the first time the inexistent workers are carried into a temporarily maximal, political existence.

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.

Continue reading “How No Can You Go?”

The beginnings of some-thing

American students and immigrant workers also take to the streets today.  Let's call this an open thread on all things protest, borders, employment, class and immigration, world-wide.

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Strategy of Refusal of Strategy

(The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, author of the weblog fugitive ethical.)

What is being refused in Tronti’s “The Strategy of The Refusal”?

"What is generally known as class consciousness is, for us, nothing other that the moment of organization, the function of the party, the problem of tactics – the channels which must carry the strategic plane through to a point of practical breakthrough. And at the level of pure strategy there is no doubt that this point is provided by the very advanced moment in which this hypothesis of struggle becomes reality: the working class refusal to present demands to capital… in the final event, this means depriving capital of its content, of the class relationship which is its basis."

Putting aside the specifics of Tronti’s account of class consciousness for a moment, it is certainly evident that this is a departure from the traditional understanding of the term. But this should not surprise us; Tronti warns at the outset that it might be worthwhile "to confound Hegel's dialectic a bit," by asserting that the working class is a class for itself before it is a class against capital. He is clear that this is a departure not simply from Hegel, but from Marx as well.

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Class and Subalternity

(The following is a guest post by George Ciccariello-Maher, occasional contributor to the illustrious Wrong Side of Capitalism.)

In thinking about Tronti's essay as well as other work I'm presently doing on hegemony, I found myself puzzling over a statement by Jon Beasley-Murray on the Marxist notion of class. Since Jon is joining us here, and since Tronti’s essay deals directly the questions involved, this is the ideal forum in which to raise the question. In his essay “On Posthegemony” (2003), Jon writes: “Here Marx was wrong: the history of all hitherto existing societies is less the history of class struggle than, at a still more primordial level, it is the history of the struggle to produce class.” This statement is part of a defense of the concept of the multitude as the operative concept in a posthegemonic period, and I would like to discuss briefly how Tronti responds to the same critique but does so within an understanding of class.

The radical character of Tronti’s position on class (and its fundamental proximity, I argue elsewhere, to that of Sorel) emerges most clearly in his markedly non-orthodox discussion of the class-in-itself (Klasse an Sich) versus the class-for-itself (Klasse für Sich). It is perhaps worthwhile to begin by noting that, even for Marx, the so-called “class-in-itself” cannot be reduced to pure objectivity, and we see this even in its alternative formulation as a “class against capital,” a class determined differentially vis-à-vis its enemy:

This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (The Poverty of Philosophy). [This sentiment is echoed in The 18^th Brumaire as well as The German Ideology.]

Here, we see that the organic link between an oppositionally-defined class and its homogenization through struggle is already clearly present in Marx’s formulation. My point is less to defend Marx than to emphasize an ambiguity in the Marxist formulation, in which, in Jon’s words, we could see “the struggle to produce class” as intimately linked with class itself. In a passage that is so crucial as to be worth quoting at length, Tronti seizes upon this differential character of Marx’s definition to catapult himself beyond it:

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Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

What would one have said, in 1976, about Tronti’s essay and the future it forecast? Here is my tendentious and unfair opinion: one of the things one could have forecast is that, as the privileged site of production became less and less like a nineteenth century factory, the term 'factory' would experience a metaphorical creep. And that this creep would disguise the increasing blurring of the analytic distinction between production and consumption, and thus miss what distinguishes the Keynesian period from its predecessors.

Let’s illustrate this with a little story. When Tonti writes: “… capital reach[ing] a high level of development it no longer limits itself to guaranteeing collaboration of the workers - i.e. the active extraction of living labour within the dead mechanism of its stabilisation - some-thing which it so badly needs. At significant points it now makes a transition, to the point of expressing its objective needs through the subjective demands of the workers, ” I imagine he was not thinking of the embodiment of that demand in union pensions. But, indeed, in the forties, fifties, sixties and the seventies, a lot of money flowed into union pensions (I am talking about the U.S.), and that money did a lot of things. I’m not talking about the most colorful things, like the way Teamster pension funds built Las Vegas. I’m talking about your standard pension investments in equities in general. In the eighties, those funds – to the disappointment of the new breed of body snatching Randians, eager to take down the traditional enterprise structures and replace them with a new structure dedicated to the proposition that an enterprise is an aphid, and the upper management is a super-ant – were mobilized by the traditional managers of capitalist enterprises against the LBO merchants. Schwab and Thomas, in a review of Union pension investment patterns published in Michigan Law Review, Feb 98, were much more prescient about labor and its place in influencing the internal composition of the capitalist enterprise than Tronti was in 1976:

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Moral Laziness (i)

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, freelancer, Texan, dry humorist and author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

Lately, I’ve been pondering Lev Shestov's  essay  (Update:  cache here) about Tolstoy, "The Last Judgment", in trying to understand the changes – the movement from mildmannered literatus to crazed anti-American -- that I’ve undergone over the last five years.

Being a person who likes to have names for things (who even, clownishly, likes the names better than the things), I think my discontent is all about moral laziness. Or, to put it another way: it is all about the moral laziness that seems to have flowed from the liberal order that I’ve always preferred, my whole life long.

I should say right away that I don’t take laziness to be the opposite of busyness. Quite the contrary – the perpetual scheduling self stands in the same relationship to moral laziness as the prison bars stand to the prisoner: they don’t make the prisoner, but they don’t allow the prisoner an option to be anything else. 

Shestov’s essay begins like this:

Aristotle says somewhere that every one has his own particular world in his dreams, while in his waking state he lives in a world common to all. This statement is the basis, not only of Aristotle's philosophy, but also of all positive scientific philosophy, before and after him. Common sense also looks upon this as an indisputable truth.

The remark about worlds sets up Shestov’s theme, which is that Tolstoy’s career can be looked at as a conversion from a man who is quite happy with the world he shares in common with others to the torn world in which such commonalities escape him. In other words, he moves from a man who has a brilliant sense for the ordo et connexio rerum, as Shestov puts it, to a man who doesn’t, and has to make it all up.

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The Punchline

Cross-posted from my Live Journal.

An old joke about academia:

Q: “Why are battles in academia so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

At first it seems like a non-sequitur, which means it's not so much funny as silly. But if you think about it, the punchline is true by itself: rewards in academia are quite small.  The salaries are lower than they are in industry; the apprenticeship period (not only the tortures of graduate school, but the poorly paid non-tenured posts that follow) is especially long and difficult; the list goes on and on.  Then the real humor of the joke hits.  It expresses a bitter truth in a terse, relevatory way.  Imagine you've gotten lost in the woods in the prime of your life and you've gotten stuck in a fetid swamp or bog along with other similar unfortunates: after years of struggling against them just to keep from being drowned, you manage to find some tiny patch of land on which you might actually sit and rest.  Think you can take it without a bloody struggle?  Of course not.  Think you can keep it without resorting to dreadful violence?  By this time, your sensibilities will be so coarsened that you probably look forward to such battles.

Believe it or not, I'm not trying to impugn the academic enterprise as a whole (although I probably should) or the young people who want to join its ranks.  The earnest supplicants often don't know what they're getting into (see Dorothea Salo's ‘Straight Talk about Graduate School’ and her harrowing ‘A Tale of Graduate School Burnout’ for details) and every sufficiently advanced society needs intellectuals, and academia is the institution entrusted with producing them, although it generally turns out blinkered, socially inept specialists in micro-disciplines.  Society needs those people too, but the two types shouldn't be confused.  Instead, I want to raise the question: why are the rewards so small?  I don't have an answer, and taking on the question seriously could be a lifetime's work.  But now that I've got the question in your mind, here's a variation on the first joke:

Q: “Why are battles on what passes for the opposition in America so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

And the question again: why are the rewards so small?  My suspicion: the major organ of oppositional politics in America, the Democratic party, is absolutely committed to being the minority party.

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The Neoliberal Imagination in Prep School Novels

Well we don't exactly claim to be on the cusp of anything here, when we get around to claiming anything at all, but in this our (well, let's be honest:  my) quest to be the n+1 groupie par excellence, Crooked Pins has lately been providing ample competition.  In the spirit of generosity, and because I concur with the general sentiment that the article in question is yet another "must-read," particularly for parents and students about to embark on the country club experience that is Ivy League college, I recommend you take a look.  In the spirit of cyber-communism, I'll even provide another exclusive excerpt, available only to subscribers (you really ought to be one) below the fold.  But you could also start with the abbreviated version here (may require bugmenot.com).

And really, their comments thread over there is a bit tired (debating the conservative right's moral authority on race issues by bringing up senator Byrd and the KKK has got to be the most over-used talking-point-that-refuses-to-die EVER, and I suspect we can do better.  The real issue is class warfare, for fuck's sake.)

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Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

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