Long Sunday

When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

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.

refinery and rapport

"It occurs to me," Peter de Bolla writes in Art Matters, "that closing one's eyes the better to see is no bad thing" (52). Later, de Bolla will suggest we "close our ears" the better to hear (81). Aesthetic appreciation cannot be reduced to a single sense: it must be affective; it must be tactile. Indeed, the aesthetic is here defined precisely as an affective response to a work of art. And art? Art is any object that provokes such affect, since "the quality of being 'art' lies not, in any sense susceptible of description or analysis, in the object but in the response it elicits" (18).

Learning to Love Again

In a previous discussion, Angela pointed to the comments of Wendy Brown.  Though I am not very familiar with her work, I found this great interview where she discusses the current state of leftist political projects.  What I found particularly intriguing was her treatment of "leftist melancholia," particularly as it relates to finding a "productive way of coming to terms with what we are all losing, and with what must be put into play as the affirmative prospects of those loses, or the affirmation that comes from that loss."

Timothy Rayner: "... It seems to me that the problem of the left at the moment is like the problem of the person who has lost the one who gave them a future, has lost that sense of future and has to learn how to love again. How does the left learn to love again, to rediscover another future?

Nation's Snowmen March Against Global Warming

With the current heated discussion regarding the difference between "symbolic politics" and "conventional politics" proper, I was reminded of the following fake news item from the Onion.  The Onion is very good at mimicking the sound and feel of how "real news" is presented for our consumption. What seems relevant for our purposes is how the notion of "protesting" is presented as absolutely ridiculous.  The suggestion seems to be that people march and complain for just about anything, with the obligatory appearance by Jesse Jackson added for good measure.  While I generally enjoy the humor (and do not take the Onion too seriously), it does seem to reflect a certain general attitude about politics, particularly of what now may be described as largely "symbolic" expressions of resistance.

difference without apologies

It's a well-worn argument to suggest that the Left (whatever exactly that is) should spend more time learning from the Right (ditto), taking a few leaves out of the books of Reagan, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush, the Republican Party, Harper, what or whomever have you...

Discriminating Tolerance

I have to thank Mark Kaplan for his recent link to a tribute for Herbert Marcuse.  Though he was celebrated by the New Left of the 1960's, he is someone whose work is largely ignored today.  What  I always admired about Marcuse was his forthright critique of both Stalinism and Capitalism, his intolerance of liberal tolerance, and his willingness to take political stands.  His prose style is that of the old German masters (of course he was a student of Heidegger), his analyses meticulously layed out in classic dialectical fashion.  Perhaps most unique was his ability to bring the tools of the early Heidegger (Being and Time) to bear on his readings of Marx and Hegel.  Though he is not alone in this attempt (Kojeve, Lacan, Derrida) his ability to transform this influence into specific political insight was remarkable. 

Public? Yes, please!

What is a public?  Jodi Dean lucidly suggests that since calls for the 'public' are voiced, well, in a pre-existing public, such calls are mostly political interventions for a certain kind of public, i.e., one more amenable to one's own orientation.  We might say, then, that these calls for a public are disengenuous, not actually concerned with achieving a true public.  (One can obviously place in this context Republican calls for a less `liberal biased' PBS.)

What, then, is a true public?  Is it the pre-existing public that allows for various factions to fight within it for their particular definition of a public?  The set that exists before the battle to hegemonize its definition and practice?  Does a true public only pre-exist the hegemonizing of the set through the rise of the master-signifier?

Or can we say that, only with the right master-signifier, the right political order, the true public actually comes into being? 

A true public is one without pigeon-holing, where one doesn't automatically place oneself in five seconds of speech.  It's one where you don't know what I am going to say next.  It's where I am not merely offering pre-digested soundbites.  Most of the blogosphere then has nothing to do with this true public; partisan hackery is but more TV (which is precisely why the TV networks can so easily report on this sector of the blogosphere), as are the endless ruminations on what one fed one's cat today.

The true public goes beyond your surprise at my words, my positioning.  I must be surprised myself.  As in the decisive act that overwhelms you, that preempts one's understanding of one's own actions, here I must myself be surprised by what comes from my `pen'.  Only after the fact, upon the establishment of a new order, can I come to understand what I have done.

But then the question is: does the new order in fact get created here, in this part of the blogosphere?  What could that mean?  No, yes, maybe new orders are constantly being tested.  We're playing at being vanishing mediators.  But playing with an enormous sense of responsibility, for the Other.  So maybe, then, Long Sunday is both the `true public' before the hegemonization of the very term 'public', and the Just `public' after the right hegemonization. 

Having it both ways?  Ah, the life of a vanishing mediator...

Zizek writes, in a sort of parallel:

The "political" dimension is... doubly inscribed: it is a moment of the social Whole, one among its sub-systems, and the very terrain in which the fate of the Whole is decided - in which the new Pact is designed and concluded.  (For they know not what they do, 193)