Long Sunday

Multi-culti

An excerpt from George Caffentzis's "Acts of God and Enclosures in New Orleans" (Mute, 2:2):

the contemporary model for managing the working class in disasters is increasingly warfare. Workers in a disaster are increasingly being turned first into right-less beings and then, when they resist, they become the ‘enemy’. In this logic, the refugee quickly turns into the terrorist. [...]

The US military and not Katrina performed the role required in every enclosure: the violent force that separated and continues to separate workers from their community of support and subsistence. True, the soldiers and sailors did save some New Orleanians from the floods at first, but their major long-term role is to be the bailiffs of the enclosures. For the object of the New Orleans enclosures is the opposite of the local ruling class’s goal in the 1927 flood. Instead of fixing black workers to the soil (a plan which ultimately failed, since many of them fled north in the 1930s), the aim now is to remove en masse a black working class population that was ‘too expensive’ and antagonistic to reproduce on site and scatter them throughout the South, further undermining already low wage levels there by intensifying the competition between documented black citizens and undocumented Hispanic immigrants at the bottom of the labour market.

From Mute's Dis-Integrating Multiculturalism edition, of which there are other articles of interest, including Benedict Seymour's "Free Speech as Shibboleth: On the Danish Cartoons", Mathew Hyland's "Proud Scum - The Spectre of the Ingrate", Eric Krebbers' "From Forced Multiculturalism to Forced Integration", and more.

Haditha Friedman

Lest it need be said, Haditha is not an abberation.  Only let's remember too, the folks who helped–and were paid handsomely–to put us there.  If one only ever reads five things about Thomas Friedman, hack, let four of them be these.      

Update:  Crooked Timber has taken the "hackery" meme and run so, you could also go there  (after clicking the links below, of course!).

Discovery (The Social II)

(Second in a series of short thoughts.)

The discovery of society introduces a radical break into history.  It is co-extensive with the destruction of what Michel Foucault calls the 'classic episteme' and the birth of the 'modern episteme'; "it is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge."  Foucault's periodization of the break suggests certain problems -- problems that are common to his entire school limiting 'the social' primarily to statistical regularities and, in the case of Donzelot, 'the policing of families' through 'social work'.  On the one hand, 'society' had been mobilized as a term designating what we might want to call a club or association; that is, a group formed between the 'public' and the 'private' for specific purposes.  In this way, The Royal Society, founded in 1660 stands out as a marker of a new use of the word.  Yet, for these natural scientists, 'society' had as of yet to be discovered.  What remains certain, however, is that by 1748, when Charles Louis de Secondat (the Baron de Montesquieu) published The Spirit of the Laws that 'society' had been discovered in the epynomous concept.  And, certainly, by 1789 it was taken for granted that society was an object of action; that is, it could both act -- society could make demands -- and, on the other hand, it could be acted upon -- society could have demands made against it.

The Social

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher.  (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?)  Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families".  While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse".  This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal.  For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society.  Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis.  Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private.  Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates.  All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law.  Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.

Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say.  To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.

Mike Davis: slums and refusal

In Planet of Slums Mike Davis writes:

the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their marginality within global capitalism.

The book, an extension of Davis's earlier New Left Review article, documents the horrors of a world with over 900 million slum dwellers, the world wrought by neoliberalism. As I read it, the book also puts the so-called war in terror in sharp relief as a new global class war, one fought to protect the way of life of those who can afford cars, gas, movies, water, reasonably secure housing.

2 Questions on Tronti

This symposium has been my first exposure to Tronti. I've benefitted from the posts and comments that have appeared thus far.

Most interesting to me is Tronti's insistence on the party, on a form for political action that corresponds to mass passivity at the level of production. On the one hand, refusal (passivity) is necessary to deprive capital of what it needs to control. On the other, the constitution of the party as a political actor is necessary in order to break the hold of the capitalist state. The party then is another space, a political alternative, a new site which does not issue demands but which receives or responds to those of capitalists. So, it seems as if his strategy involves an economic and a political logic, one that separates productivity from struggles and claims, and that establishes a specific task fitting for each.

All I can add at this point are two questions.

Assimilate or Die

TN: Look, I think that we’re dealing with very different characters, but Mitterand and Chirac, a Republican and a Monarchist, had both understood perfectly what was going to happen. Like them, the French elites, especially if we consider the great contribution given by sociology to French administration, were perfectly aware of the explosive dynamics developing in the banlieues: but what could they do? They too were overwhelmed by this neo-liberal wave, which exacerbates conflicts and revolts, and has hindered any possibility for them to control the transformation.

JI: Sorry, but this means that politicians are excused in advance, if it’s always the fault of neo-liberal dynamics.

TN: Of course not. I’m only saying that the revolts are the expression of the incapacity for neo-liberalism to turn itself into state policy. I’m not speaking only of leadership, but of the capacity of the state to exercise governance, that is, to put itself in permanent contact with the movements. This was a capacity that Fordism, with all its evils, had.

Bring Out Your Dead

The hurricane porn enjoying Katrina has, in part, circled around dead bodies. Bloated corpses floating in flood water. Blanketed bodies in wheelchairs. Rows of the dead found in a hospital chapel and a nursing home. Bodies gnawed on by animals. A town turned into a morgue blocked from view, from the gaze of the press.  A preoccupation with counting the dead, a preoccupation that seeks to reassure itself of its sovereign authority by reducing accountability to quantification, a matter of counting.

Tripping over these bodies, even rightwing pundits of cable news find themselves off-message, criticizing any and all governmental authorities including the federal. With Katrina the object of so many obscenities, why does the presence of the dead body on the street become a particular locus of anxiety?

$4 a gallon

Like a cartoon character still running windmills, oblivious on air, suspended before the fall, “America...is over,” or so claims a recent article penned by Michael Ventura (via).  I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some of the meatiest parts:

Debating the future/a future d'Europe

There have been several lively discussions recently (see for example, somewhat shamelessly, here, here, here, here or here) regarding the immanent vote in France on whether or not to ratify the European constitution as currently structured.  Is a "yes" vote an immediately despicable but ultimately necessary gesture?  Intellectual figures far and wide seem to be calling for the “courage” and “strength” to vote “yes,” but significant enough doubts have been raised, among a remarkably diligent and conscientious public (ah, if only we had such a thing here!), as to make the likelihood of a majority “no” vote in France very strong.  The issue seems to be one of either compromising with a neoliberal “free” market wet dream for the sake of "progress" and meaningful competition with the U.S., versus taking an active stand for something better, more just, more wary of the disaster that is unchecked privatization, perhaps more democratic and yet to come (which is not to say, of course, inevitable).  Needless to say the corporate press, even in France, seems to be rolling over itself in a mad rush to grant space to luminaries, writers and philosophers of all stripes who fervently oppose the “no” vote, yet rarely if ever do these public intellectuals address the concerns of what appears to be the majority of French citizens.  Just what are Habermas, Grass, Kluge, and Baudrillard thinking?