Partisanship, polemics and politics

Hello, Long Sunday!  The editors have kindly invited me to post here on an occasional basis.  I maintain the Foucaultblog, an ongoing experiment to see whether it is possible to create a space where one does not already know the answers to questions and pose already as an expert.  I welcome your comments either here on back at the entry on Foucaultblog.

Is it possible to be honestly partisan?

We hear a lot of talk these days about the need for bipartisanship (I'm thinking of statements coming out of Capitol Hill), and in light of the poll findings I posted yesterday about American's distrust of political bias in the university, you might be justified in concluding that the source of the problem is partisanship.

Foucault famously observed that he preferred "problematizations, not polemics" and defined the former:

Problematization doesn't mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 257.

So are problematizations and partisanship compatible? One might initially think not.

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Profile uncertain

Well, since Genet has been looking over Long Sunday of late (by which I mean the picture, fleetingly taking the place of the banner graphic above), here is the the short text eventually published as the first piece in Genet’s L’Ennemi Déclaré: Textes et Entretiens:

J.G. seeks, or is searching for, or would like to discover, never to uncover him, the delicious enemy, quite disarmed, whose equilibrium is unstable, profile uncertain, face inadmissible, the enemy broken by a breath of air, the already humiliated slave, ready to throw himself out the window at the least sign, the defeated enemy: blind, deaf, mute. With no arms, no legs, no stomach, no heart, no sex, no head, all told a complete enemy, already bearing all the marks of my bestiality that now need never be used (too lazy anyway). I want the total enemy, with immeasurable and spontaneous hatred for me, but also the subjugated enemy, defeated by me before he even knows me. Not to be reconciled with me, in any case. No friends. Above all, no friends: a declared enemy, but not a tortured one. Clean, faultless. What are his colors? From a green as tender as a cherry to an effervescent violet. His size? Between the two of us, he presents himself to me man to man. No friends. I seek an inadequate enemy, one who comes to capitulate. I will come at him with all that I can muster: whacks, slaps, kicks, I will feed him to starving foxes, make him eat English food, attend the House of Lords, be received at Buckingham Palace, fuck Prince Phillip, and be fucked by him, live for a month in London, dress like me, sleep in place of me, live in place of me: I seek the declared enemy.

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Schmitt, at a tangent

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.

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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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Latest Salvos

Lindsay Waters strikes again, four years ago (there's also a nice article on Perec).   I say, if you cannot beat 'em, join 'em.   The shame-faced and guilty decades-long Theory-pusher makes amends at last.   And why not?

(Update:  It's been brought to my attention that these two posts may be riding a little hard on Lindsay Waters, so for something a bit less snarky-popular and more philosophical perhaps, why not read this review by Steven Shaviro, from May of 2004.)

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A Contest

Mr J. Alva Scruggs, current proprietor of UFO Breakfast Recipients, has over the course of his long career on the internets assembled numerous specimens of crackpot argumentation and distilled them to their intoxicatingly risible essences.  His latest discovery:

It's not that you're inherently incapable of realizing you're wrong. I am, after all, a humanist. It's that you're unaware that you're being willfully inherently incapable of realizing you're not right, a condition I've explored at some length for your edification.

I invite our contributors and readers to find fully fleshed out examples of this schema.  To allow time for this search (and to let me get some sleep) comments for this post will be closed after 11:30AM EST/ 4:30PM GMT.  The person who provides the best example will win...something.  I'm tired.  Happy hunting, everyone.

Comments are now closed. Since nobody bothered to respond, nobody gets the prize, which was this handsome knife:

(You have no idea how good it felt doing that Kripke's lousy book. I may buy another copy just to destroy it again.)

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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Dogmatism

I've been struck this week (and, it could easily have been any other) by currents of dogmatism. Dogmatism most dramatically appears in mainstream politics. So, we've had the nomination of Aito, a bone thrown to right wing domatists. And, finally the Democrats got some backbone and put the Senate in closed session. (I realize that this sentence reinforces the myth that the Democrats are in some way an opposition party.)

We expect dogmatism in the blogosphere. So, I won't link to the usual suspects but consider the less usual, generally more nuanced and thoughtful bloggers who have of late urged a kind of dogmatism in the name of  thinking and ethics.  Scott and Matt (in the comment thread), in different way, have urged dogmatism for the sake of intellectual seriousness, the former, and ethical responsibility, the latter. Scott, writes:

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Causing Cancer: It's the Military-Industrial, Stupid

In a comment to this post, mvp Alain writes: 

Or the social justice and peace movements of the 60's presented an opportunity for genuine realignment but failed in the face of a massive counter-reaction of the establishment. The contemporary celebration of their failure is perhaps a symptom of that loss?

I think it's safe to say that the true extent of this counter-reaction or conservative backlash, from the criminal "justice" system/prison boom to the military-industrial complex to the semi-covert militarization of space...has yet to be fully appreciated, and most likely will not be for some time yet.  Once again, Christian Parenti has made a start.  But there is an environmental component to this story that the rhetorical fog of permanent "war" threatens to obscure.

Namely, that perhaps the fallout from World War II represents not a moral so much as an environmental paradigm shift.   

Polluting as we go, the chances of getting some form of cancer are now 1-in-2 for men, and 1-in-3 for women. 

But no need to worry about pollution, no need to worry about building up resistances to antibiotics in the water, or rapidly deteriorating immune systems on an unprecedented global scale.  The pink ribbons are here to stay.  Breast Cancer Awareness Month was founded by Imperial Chemical (which retains the rights to veto all material), so we're not about to hear any talk of organochlorines from them, only perennial scolding of women to "eat better, get more exercise, and lose weight."  It's all a problem of diet, you see.  Not to mention that treating cancer is something of a business these days.  It's a racket, some might say.  Corporations save money polluting at will, then chanting "early detection is the best protection" and then treating you with all sorts of expensive chemicals, many of which in turn are known to cause other forms of cancer as "side effects".  Nothing at all to do with military-industrial environment priorities, this racket.  I mean, as the would-be President with *the best* environmental record in the Senate recently so eloquently and so very forcefully argued during the debates...no wait.

nb.  But then I'm not saying anything here really that Jim Hightower wasn't already saying back in 1998. More here.

Theory, Having Just Begun

Actually I've been enjoying the quality of discussion at both the Holbo and Bérubé empires this week very much, even if the premise and primary target (which is to say the target of the Theory's Empire book––something in its conception at least not entirely unmarked by genre, perhaps, and let's just note again here how the words "French Theory" (or indeed just "theory") were always something of a uniquely Anglo invention*)...even if the general target of this book (the "anthology of dissent" currently receiving so much attention) may never have been in much dispute.  Most literature professors (at least at the undergrad level, and perhaps beyond) who "do theory" exclusively in the Anglo world, do so poorly.  Sure, I guess.  (But are they really an "empire" now? How innocent is this irony really?)  While the ones who do it well, well...they do it without you even knowing what they're up to!

Let's face it, anybody blindly championing "theory" at this stage as a panacea be-all and end-all, pat diagnostic device, pathway to tenure, carte blanche license to avoid the text entirely, or name-drop and cite without the slightest concern for context, logic, or verifiability, seemingly overwhelmed by TEOTOB...this anybody really knows very little about theory, truth be told.  Indeed, this anybody might be living in a cave, oblivious to the current trends of the academic job market, for that matter, or the semi(barely)-covert assault on all things "PC" and "liberal" in cultural studies, literature departments, and so on, as the corporatization (and scientification) of our beloved universities progresses daily.

Anyone else have any thoughts?  We're supposed to be the resent-nik Zizekians, remember!

What do you think, is "doing theory" not one of those faux pas right up there with proclaiming oneself to be "postmodern" (as in, it's just not, you know, something one does, if one wishes also to be taken seriously)?  I put it to the world.

Update:  There's an interesting post up at Savage Minds about this whole book "event" thing, by the by. Update: And quite a bit more...

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Semi-homemade cooking grows out of the barrel of a gun

Writing is my greatest pleasure when it comes to production, but with the reign (or perhaps I should say the irresistible temptation) of the computer, it's not particularly a tactile pleasure. When it comes to sensuous productive enjoyment, it's cooking for me. Now I am a rank amateur, knowing little about chemistry and disdaining cookbooks—indeed, one of these boorish reactionaries who thinks you can cook with a free intelligence, without sullying your brain with theory! (Don't worry, I harbor no similar illusions about reading/writing.)

On weekends, I watch the Food Network. My favorite show is called something like Home Cooking with Paula Dean, a sassy white-haired fat southern lady who puts a few sticks of butter in everything.

(During the commercials was one for the army: a young man playing pool with dad, insisting that he was only joining the reserves, that they'd train him locally until they needed him, that he wanted to be part of something greater. The ad ended with text encouring parents to “help them grow.” Damn you, selfish parents! How dare you keep your children to yourselves when we need them as precious ingredients in our savory home-cooked dish of war! But yeah, they'll train him locally till they need him, then when he's scattered across a sidewalk in a city he's helping to demolish, they'll zip him into a bag and throw him away and then lie to his parents though they were so selfless, so willing to contribute him. Man, fuck all these fuckers.)

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$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:

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