Long Sunday

South Park Conservatives

It's official, The NRO thinks South Park's brand of facile clichéd PC-ridicule is "brilliant."  Then again, when the competition is Family Guy they may well be right.  Of course both shows only perform an endless thematization of the so-called "culture wars", that while posing as an elaborate attempt to have done with them, in the process only ends up naturalizing their walled horizons.  What could possibly be less interesting than a week of such TV?  You guessed it, a forced feud between the two.  To briefly channel Brad Delong, why oh why must we live in a world whose distinctive Americanization means to thrive on creating cheap and needless, cruel antagonisms?  Are we that bored?  (Whether you watch it or not, the idiot box may still be in your mind!)  Ah well, thank God for comedy.

Meanwhile the real real world spins on, waiting for something, growing heavier by the hour, and with only privileged few allowed the dying breath of speech  instead of being spoken for, and as already dead.  And yet who amongst us is not sans-papiers, and not only with names that do not fit?  As the product of necessary abstraction, and as condition for future hope, no less?

Digby remarks on the boomer generation, being uptight, crazy and reactionary, and agrees with Yglesias that it needs to chill, to a degree.  Meanwhile Paul Krugman becomes the latest to bait the administration's smears.  But if you only click one link, let it be The Measures Taken, on the reissue of Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Pleasure Steamers

I was reminded today of the English artist Stanley Spencer. I doubt he's well known outside of the UK: he was in some ways a very provincial figure. He lived almost his whole life in the small village in which he was born, Cookham-on-Thames, just to the West of London. And very many of his most famous paintings are of Cookham and its inhabitants, as he translates religious edict and prophecy into the vernacular of rural England.

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.

I would prefer not to bore you

(The following is a guest post by Brian Lamb, author of the weblog Abject Learning.)

If you've been following the symposium this far, it's unlikely I'm can offer you a distinctive analysis of Tronti.   I've really enjoyed and learned a lot from reading the posts and comments this week but my theory discourse skills, never my strength, are presently in a derelict state.  Yet I was drawn to make at least a tangential contribution to this process in part by the power of Bartleby, invoked by Jodi's Long Sunday post on Bartleby in Power which, as Jon notes, was a precursor to this symposium.

I harbour a long-time fascination with Melville's uncanny anti-hero--depending on when I've read the story it's struck me as a marvel of style (Melville writes a Poe story!), as an examination of writing itself, as a covert sci-fi representation of entropic forces dispersing human vitality into the void of cosmic heat-death, or a preview of how of most my favorite twentieth century fiction would eventually define itself.

And of course, there is the satire of capitalism in this "Story of Wall Street".   And Bartleby himself as a figure of refusal.  Though when I enjoy scenes of Bartleby generating chaos in the legal office my Marxist reading is more of the Groucho, Harpo and Chico variety...

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:

The new barbarians

Re-reading "The Strategy of Refusal," the verve, confidence, and daring of Tronti's formulations are striking.  What's established, then, in this and other early examples of Italian operaismo, is a style of intellectual engagement: brash, iconoclastic, sweeping, taking no prisoners. 

This is a style of writing that aspires to separate itself radically from all intellectual production hitherto, indeed from intellectuality as it has been traditionally conceived tout court.  No more "organic intellectuals" of the Gramscian inheritance; these are but parasites of the Communist party and the labour movement (16). 

Geertz and interpretation

I first read Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," itself published in 1973, in an interpretation seminar in the 90s. I benefitted a lot from this rereading, and here are a few points from it that struck me.

W(h)ither the Philosophy of Pop?

"Do you realize how ridiculous you must sound when you bring into the classroom, the place where should be taught universal truths, this [spluttering]…this rubbish. This is little more than a propoganda campaign for MTV. Pop caters to the lowest common denominator; the energy of pop is too often the testosterone-fueled energy of male adolescence; the languages of pop are impenetrable, ephemeral jargons; it locks into stereotypical patterns which relate purely to physiological artefacts and thus have no significance whatever to philosophy. Man will always have need of entertainment; this is not, however, philosophy; or even philosophically interesting. There is no philosophy, nor politics, in pop."
               -Grayson Darkling-Furniss 

"All art...is...essentailly poetry [Dichtung]"
                -Martin Heidegger

Having heard the phrases, "pop philosophy" or, "the philosophy of pop" resonate in certain corners of the 'sphere, having read this generous transcription by Robin; (from whence the quote above); or this post in particular by K-Punk (since followed up by many others); or, going even further back, this good interview by Infinite Thought...well here a mammoth post, with generous (but hopefully not ponderous!) excerpting from an article by Mark Greif follows...

Handmaids' Tales

Cardinal O’Connor’s comments today seem to me to raise some interesting issues, but also shed as much heat as light (apologies to Matt for the metaphor). So, after you’ve read it, my two pence worth. “Women demand tougher laws to curb abortions”. 1) Women are demanding this, and since they are the ones with authority on the issue, we have learned since the 1980s (rightly in my opinion) their newfound doubt (their conversion perhaps?) is, as the insinuation goes, that much more decisive. Thus the headline speaks for itself and seems to need no further justification. 2) The recommendation gleaned from the small group canvassed are not strictly speaking asking for a ‘curbing’ of abortions; the loaded term implies quantity rather than the real issue - time limit. 3) I know exactly what programme the Cardinal has been watching – I watched it myself. And whilst I marveled at the technology which can show us a grimacing foetus, I don’t think it changes the fundamentals of the issue in any more than a contingent, subjective way (and the programme itself was tendential in its use of a voice-over  to humanise a foetus; foetuses don’t speak, and it is somewhat irresponsible to suggest otherwise). 4) The key issue remains that the right to choose is more about the foreseen conditions of motherhood, of the situation - economic, social - in which a child is to be raised, and not the simple and Manichean issue of termination of a depersonalized versus a personalized entity. The Cardinal is looking within when he should be looking without.

The Televangelist and the Butcher of Beirut

On the January 5 edition of The 700 Club, host Pat Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent stroke was the result of Sharon's policy to dismantle settlements in the Gaza strip, which he claimed is "dividing God's land:"

I have said last year that Israel was entering into the most dangerous period of its entire existence as a nation. That is intensifying this year with the loss of Sharon. Sharon was personally a very likeable person. I am sad to see him in this condition. But I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, "divide my land." God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible, he says, "This is my land." And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, "No. This is mine." And the same thing -- I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead. And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God's land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America. God said, "This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone."