Long Sunday

International Slugfest

Holy Shit.  Time to visit Nairn's most necessary corrective once again, I guess.

A tad more serious than Thomas Friedman

Charles Maier at OpenDemocracy:

There are conversions … and conversions.  Saul was thrown from the saddle, blinded, dressed down by God and had to refashion his whole life.  Vision returned only when he was prepared to take a new name and to champion the accessible message of love against the stern exclusivist covenant he had hitherto defended with prosecutorial zeal. Still, no pain no gain.  No scary loss of sight, no realisation he had earlier been morally blind.  Francis Fukuyama's conversion in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy is a more conditional one.  He has had to wipe the desert dust from his Ray-bans; he hasn't had to lose his sight [....]

History itself remains intoxicating; and that, I fear, undermines Fukuyama's vision.  We may also aspire to reach a plateau, but a significant number of us live for the transcendent moments of self-dissolution into a larger cause.  Calling the impulse romantic, "acting out", or juvenile psychodrama will not remove the longing.   No one can say that Fukuyama is wrong.  But history goes on for a long time. It still seems a bit early to say he's right.

(Yes, "history" certainly does go back aways.  Whether it continues may be another question.  In the interest of debate, is there no one still reading Fukayama who also seriously questions whether (neo)liberalism may have a future, and for very long?   Speaking of ontological security-blankets, and so on.   A symposium via the decline.)

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.

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.

O Bailan Todos o No Bailan Nadie

Crossposted from Posthegemony, as this bears, dare I say it, on some earlier discussions concerning politics, performativity, and the New Left. But I'll let others draw whatever morals or conclusions they will.

I've mentioned Douglas Oliver's Diagram Poems (1979) before, following a discussion of Deleuze's concept of the diagram. And I remember somewhere, sometime reading an essay about, or simply mentioning, these poems--I had thought that it was in Marshall Blonsky's On Signs, but no. Then Oliver came up again in a conversation last year with my friend Carol Watts. So I felt I should track this book down.

More Light

I don’t have any disputes with Simon Schama’s sardonic piece in today’s paper apart from his rather cursory take on the Enlightenment. It confirms a misgiving I had on watching the episode from his History of Britain which deals with British responses to the French Revolution. The Jacobins, says Schama, “hadn’t read the Rough Guide to Revolution,” didn’t have our twentieth century hindsight that all revolutions either install a new tyranny or like Cronus devour their own children. An antidote to Schama’s seemingly Frankfurterisch take on the Enlightenment is to be found in a recent essay by Stephen Bronner. Now the only dispute I have with Bronner is the left-liberal politics he draws from his analysis. I suppose no one can be all right all of the time.

From Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1824)

“I had the great advantage” said he, “of being born at a time when the greatest events which agitated the world occurred, and such have continued to occur during my long life; so that I am a living witness of the Seven Years’ war, of the separation of America from England, of the French Revolution, and of the whole Napoleon era, with the downfall of that hero, and the events which followed. Thus I have attained results and insight impossible to those who are born now and must learn these things from books which they will not understand. What the next years will bring I cannot predict; but I fear we shall not soon have repose. It is not given to the world to be contented; the great are not such that there will be no abuse of power; the masses not such that, in hope of gradual improvement, they will be content with a moderate condition.”

Our own paltry epitaph: that we lived through two Gulf wars, the ‘special relationship’ of America with England, the capitalist revolutions in the East, the Bush era, without downfall. And our philosophical insights correspondingly meagre. This much ties us to the Goethezeit, though: the perennial abuse of power and the discontent of the masses.

Victory Columns

With the defeat of the French, world history seemed to be safely interred in its glorious grave, and this column was the funerary stele.

—Walter Benjamin, from “Victory Column,” Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Every middle class child believes without knowing it, feels in his new run-faster sneakers, that history is concluded in a permanent present, puffily insulated and Kodachromatically saturated, an increasingly knowable now sustained and guaranteed by the whole general shape of things, of rooms and homes and yards and cars uncaused, given, just there, a form-fitted and climate-controlled arc of infinity in every hammock, sleeping bag, leaf pile, hay-bale fort, couch-cushion fort, screen porch, tree house, and coat closet. So a kid can believe that history is over: there were dinosaurs, there were knights and dragons, there were Nazis; now there’s Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, and color TV.

Historical Enlightenment

"The nation must know the universal on which its ethical life is based and before which the particular vanishes away, and it must therefore know the determinations which underlie its justice and religion… This spiritual self-consciousness is the nation’s supreme achievement… All this is the work of the spirit, which knows how to bring the un-reflected – i.e. the merely factual – to the point of reflecting on itself. It thereby becomes conscious to some degree of the limitation of such determinate things as belief, trust, and custom, so that the consciousness now has reasons for renouncing the latter and the laws which they impose. This is indeed the inevitable result of any search for reasons." Hegel from the Philosophy of World History