I cite

"Time-wars" by Mark Fisher

From Gonzo Circus (English version circulating on nettime).

 Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given only a year more to live. To survive any longer, they must earn extra time. The decadent rich have centuries of empty time available to fritter away, while the poor are always only days or hours away from death. In Time is, in effect, the first science fiction film about precarity – a condition that describes an existential precidament as much as it refers to a particular way of organising work.

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precarity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms.

For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.” (30) Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters, but “[w]hat’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”

It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication  technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking – of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved? 

The new freedom of living in decline

I sometimes find myself sad about the decline of the United States. Not for our decline in military power--this seems all too strong and all too readily deployed whether premptively or covertly. And not for our global economic decline--although I worry that our weakness here will amplify our already excessive and irrational militarism. No, my sadness--which is probably more akin to a kind of nostalgia or mourning--involves the end of the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy wrapped up in the American experiment. 

Personal and political freedom, the equal liberty to change and determine one's plan of life, and the understanding of politics as a practice and process for the collective determination of the conditions under which one would carry out one's life plan--these are powerful ideals. They are so powerful as to provide a benchmark for judgment, for assessing whether the country was on track, was living up to what it announced as its purpose. These were ideals that could be mobilized in struggles against slavery and the subordination of women and for free and equal public education, fair wages, safe working conditions, and a social safety net.

Without a Soviet Union to keep us in line, to make us want to live up to our ideals (indeed, even need to in light of the geo-political cold war for the hearts and minds of people around the world), we quickly reverted to our basest selves, to the individualistic, aquisitive, exploitative, myopic country we have always also been. The truth of the US constitution now appears as our core value of inequality: some are worth less than others, 3/5ths of a person.

We've never gotten beyond the legacy of chattel slavery. We express it differently--with prisons, impoverishment, policing, and the occluding power of exceptions. We proceed as if some deserved to die on the streets, to scrape by in hopeless service to the better off (I am struck by the way that the ongoing economic crisis--which is nothing less than capitalism's business as usual--is a process of proletarianization; people who had owned small shops and worked in white-collar jobs become massage therapists and nail techs, attending to the bodies of those whose privilege remains). 

Sometimes we forget slavery's economic dimension: the 3/5ths rule marked not only rules of representation for the benefit of the South but also engraved economic inequality in the constitution. It was always rooted in exploitation. The game was always rigged. Some would own and others would be owned, whether as body, future, or soul.

For a while, the ideals could provide leverage against the truth. Not any more. The truth won out. The ideals were never meant for everyone--just for some. 

And maybe living in decline makes it all the easier to recognize the truth rather than be deluded by the sense that the ideals could win or, in their US political form, had won in principle if not yet in practice. Maybe this is another way of recognizing the decline of symbolic efficiency--we don't believe that the politicians who say the words believe them anymore. They don't believe for us and we don't believe through them.

This is our opening into the freedom of communism--the actuality of collectively building and realizing equal liberty.

Commonalities - A New Series from Fordham University Press - timothy c campbell

Commonalities - A New Series from Fordham University Press

Is there any concern more pressing today than thinking what it means to have in common? From debates on biotechnology and shared gene pools, to the relation between the digital commons and public culture, to political and theological genealogies of the common and community, to the fraying European Community, one of the most decisive questions for contemporary life concerns what having and being in common entails. Why? When did the common become a question and not a declaration? The reasons are many. Certainly, the Fall of the Berlin Wall discredited the account Communism had provided of the common. A number of works written in the wake of Communism’s collapse also helped open the common to philosophical investigation: works from Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roberto Esposito, among others. One effect of their readings was to have made clearer the profound influence a certain language of sovereignty and the law enjoys over how we understand collective life. Where does that leave the political thought of the common today? Some continue to tell themselves the heart-warming story in which a return to communal life might still be possible and desired. Others sense the end of community, which often becomes the prelude to a hand-wringing Messianism. And then there are others who glimpse in the present moment an opportunity for thought; who believe that we are on the cusp of new modes of being-in-common. The name we will want to give these possibilities for imagining future common forms is “Commonalities.” Where the common and community are concepts, “commonalities” captures the dynamism of the relations that make up both; the relation of the common not only to subjects and individuals but to other living entities as well as objects. Where perspectives on the common and community are largely indebted to what has been called “political theology,” the perspective provided by “commonalities” is political in the sense that it concerns itself primarily with emerging forms of being together and having together. Not surprisingly, in “commonalities” communication moves to the center but not the protected and ultimately unsatisfying communication that so dominates interactions today. Rather communication among “commonalities” resembles a contamination of approaches and perspectives that leads to new modes of being. Where before there was always and only the common and its privileged form, the community, now a horizon for thought becomes available that is capable of accounting for immanent (and possibly common) singularities. “Commonalities” names a research project in which the common becomes a mode of investigating and writing the political: a way of creating collectively that discloses the immanent singularities that characterize the contemporary moment. The series, Commonalities, registers such a moment for thinking the political across the common. Featuring works that take up the question and the promise of the common ecumenically, Commonalities is not limited to any one philosophical tradition. Rather it spotlights the forms that the common assumes in a number of disciplines and traditions: in greater attention to the importance of relationality and interdependence; in biopolitical research; and in  ongoing critiques of all forms of the common thought merely as instances of political theology. In a word the series is addressed tothose interested in imagining possible worlds held in common. Titles soon to be appearing: Kevin Attell, Agamben and Deconstruction Remo Bodei, The Life of Things Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire  Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical Roberto Esposito, Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality Or Why Leave a Trace Maurizio Ferraris, "Where are You?" Ontology of the Cellular Phone Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité. Fragments, franchises

via sites.google.com

New York City, in “test,” denies housing aid to the poor

Advocates for the homeless have protested the recent decision of the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to experiment on the city’s poor by conducting what is essentially a randomized trial on the effect of denying emergency housing assistance to those in danger of homelessness.

The New York experiment involves the city’s Homebase program, a very modest effort involving the annual expenditure of $23 million for job training, counseling and emergency funds that has been given to several thousand families each year since it began in 2004, with the aim of helping them to stay in their homes.

The Bloomberg administration, comparing its actions to the testing of new drug treatments, denied this emergency help to 200 of the 400 families applying to Homebase between June and August of this year. Those denied help were referred to other agencies.

Homeless advocates pointed to the fact that the city had earlier boasted that the Homebase program was a great success, one that had prevented homelessness in 90 percent of those who received assistance.

The real aim of the study was made clear in a statement by Seth Diamond, the commissioner of the city’s Homeless Services Department, quoted in the New York Times. By Diamond’s logic, the 90 percent who benefited by the Homebase program might be resourceful enough to have succeeded without it. Diamond acknowledged that his agency had to cut $20 million from its current budget, and that federal money for the program was expiring in 2012.

In other words, the city’s “experiment” is designed to justify and rationalize cuts in the meager housing assistance program that was established when Wall Street was booming and that can no longer be tolerated by the wealthy elite that runs New York. As most New Yorkers are well aware, the $23 million cost of the Homebase program is equivalent to perhaps one-tenth of one percent of the billions that will be handed out in Wall Street bonuses at the end of this year.

Despite this obscene inequality, city officials defend their “study” with a straight face as a good-faith effort to help the poor. “This is about putting emotions aside,” Diamond stated. “When you’re making decisions about millions of dollars and thousands of people’s lives, you have to do this on data, and that is what this is about.”

Some local politicians have denounced the city’s study. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs of its most vulnerable,” said the Manhattan borough president. The Democratic-controlled City Council is holding a hearing on the subject of the study. None of the Democrats who have objected to it, however, has even mentioned the urgent need of a massive multi-billion dollar jobs program and other measures to meet the needs of the army of the unemployed and poorly paid.

Nor is this a matter of some special policy of the Bloomberg administration. The federal department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), under the Obama administration, is in the midst of a study of 10 cities and counties around the country, involving up to 3,000 families. The federal officials, in this randomized study, are “testing” the relative merits of housing subsidies, placing the poor in homes, or keeping them in homeless shelters. Again, as should be obvious, this “experiment” includes no option that provides decent jobs and living standards for any of these workers who are either homeless or threatened with homelessness.

A whole academic industry of sorts has been built up in prestigious universities to come up with scientific-sounding arguments that explain that social programs are neither needed nor particularly effective. The Times quotes one professor at the University of Pennsylvania who praised the New York City study because it would show whether eviction-prevention programs work. “There’s no doubt you can find poor people in need, but there’s not evidence tha

t people who get this program’s help would end up homeless without it,” said Professor Dennis Culhane, in another expression of a 21^st century “let them eat cake” outlook. Culhane is a paid consultant to both HUD and the Bloomberg administration.

There is one more parallel, even if not exact and on the same level, that comes to mind in connection with the experiment based on denying emergency aid to the poor. That is the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment that took place between 1932 and 1972, when thousands of poor African-Americans in Alabama were denied treatment for the disease, even after penicillin had shown its efficacy, as part of a study of the effects of untreated syphilis. The deepening crisis of the capitalist system is clearly creating the conditions for the return of this kind of scandalous mistreatment.

via www.wsws.org

K-punk: Fear and misery in neoliberal Britain (excerpt)

Excerpt from an amazing post at K-punk. Read the whole thing.

Six years ago:

In the office of the occupational therapist.

You are being asked to prove that you are mentally fit.

Because - as the Human Resources manager kindly pointed out - you have suffered from stress in the past. (The thought flashes through your mind - not that they cared when you were suffering.) But now people are concerned.

The anger that you’ve been showing towards management can only be a sign that you are unwell. A little unbalanced.

Don’t worry. No-one is attacking you. We’re all here to help.

You say to the occupational therapist:

If I say management is conspiring against me will that prove I am mad?

Now:

Stepping over the vomit, you remember too late: only a fool would go out into a provincial English town centre late in the evening. It’s night of the living dead out here.

Screams that sound like they come from the Dante-damned. And that’s just from the people who are enjoying themselves.

The lurching zombie threat of violence simmering.

Try not to catch anyone’s eye.

When you go by Accident and Emergency, you see all the walking wounded, and some who are not walking. All the casualties of the UK’s many happy hours.
You remember a doctor saying that twenty years ago, the night shift was so boring that the medics would engage in wheelchair races with one another. Not any more. Not with all the knives, gun crime, fights, alcohol-related accidents, stomach pumps…

And all the superbugs breeding in the wards….

You reach home, switch on the TV. Emollient patrician voices crying crocodile tears. Public services to be massively cut back. 30%, 40%.
A new age of austerity.

Aristocrats and millionaires telling us: we’ve all got to do our bit.

We’re all in this together.

Gut feeling

I'm surprised by how often I encounter appeals to our guts. The instructor in my yoga class repeatedly invokes intuition, guts, a knowledge deeper and truer than reflection. A group of women yesterday (celebrating a daughter's onset of menses) frequently appealed to something like a body truth, again, a knowledge surpassing the intellect.

These local appeals to the gut resonate with a strong theme on the contemporary right: the grizzly mama's who know it in their gut, George W. Bush's similar gut knowledge. The latter instance, in particular, exemplifies the potential for the gut to err. But such gut mistakes are rarely acknowledged. What we know with our gut, perhaps like earlier epoch's common sense, is supposedly the truth that can counter, correct, and guide our mistaken intellects.

In the 70s, appeals to embodied feeling, a truth beyond the intellect, were important for feminist critiques of the academy. They exposed (while reinforcing) the operation of the binary of thinking and feeling in so-called Western thought. Of course, feminists weren't the only ones to engage in this critique of the intellectuals; movements against racism and class-based elitism also rightly brought out not only the privileged position of intellectuals but the way this privileged produced site-specific thinking, speaking, and understanding.

I think that in our current setting the gut is appealing as a source of truth because of the decline of symbolic efficiency. From the massive distrust of financial, governmental, and media institutions, to the uncertainty regarding meaning, fact, and resonance in multiple contexts, most of us are uncertain about what to think--is our food laced with chemicals that are killing us? is the planet facing changes that will radically alter human life? Unclear about meaning, folks look for what is real and they locate what is real in their guts.

A challenge for communists is finding ways to validate some gut feelings while at the same time providing techniques for critically assessing these feelings without asserting intellectual superiority. In our hypermediated environments, our enclaves, our malls, our desperation, in these setting our guts can go wrong (no wonder we are obese). Just like overdosing on sugar and fat can distort our guts, so can overdosing on ideology distort our perception (case in point, my unfortunate repetition of drug war rhetoric here). Guts can be wrong.

Negri at the Commonalities conference

Antonio Negri conference video (English / Italian)

Posted on September 25, 2010 by commonconf

Part 1 of 4

Antonio Negri: \"The Italian Break\"

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

Contemporary Italian Thought: Schedule for Cornell Conference (next weekend)

Friday, September 24th, B-09 Sage Hall (Johnson Business School)

8:30 – 9:00 Coffee & Breakfast, Atrium, Sage Hall
9:00 – 9:15 Welcoming Remarks
Richard Klein (Chair, Romance Studies)
Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)

9:15 – 10:45 Presentation 1
Speaker: Antonio Negri, “The Italian Break: Production versus Development”
[via video conference]
Respondent: Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University)
Moderator: Lorenzo Fabbri (Cornell University)

10:45 – 11:15 Coffee, Atrium, Sage Hall

11:15 – 12:45 Presentation 2
Speaker: Remo Bodei, “Goodbye to Community: Exile and Separation”
Respondent: Mabel Berezin (Cornell University)
Moderator: Paolo Matteucci (Dalhousie University)

12:45 – 2:00 Lunch

2:00 – 3:30 Presentation 3
Speaker: Ida Dominijanni, “Wounds of the Common”
Respondent: Andrea Righi (University of Puerto Rico)
Moderator : Rhiannon Welch (Franklin and Marshall)

3:30 – 4:00 Coffee Break, Atrium Sage Hall

4:00 – 5:30 Presentation 4
Speaker: Cesare Casarino, “Universalisms of the Common”
Respondent: Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
Moderator : Patricia Keller (Cornell University)

Saturday, September 24, 2010, B-09 Sage Hall
8:30 – 9:00 Coffee, Atrium, Sage Hall

9:00 – 10:30 Presentation 5
Speaker: Roberto Esposito, “Community and Violence”
Respondent: Laurent Dubreuil (Cornell University)
Moderator : Alberto Moreiras (Texas A&M University)

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee

11:00 – 12:30 Presentation 6
Speaker: Franco Berardi (“Bifo”), “Autonomy as Cultural Paradigm:
From the Context of Late Modern Expansion to the Present Context of Exhaustion”
Respondent: Karen Pinkus (Cornell University)
Moderator : Stefano Giannini (Syracuse University)

12:30 – 1:30 Lunch

1:30 – 3:00 Presentation 7
Speaker: Michael Hardt, “Pasolini Discovers Love Outside”
Respondent: Kevin Attell (Cornell University)
Moderator : Richard Barney (University at Albany, SUNY)

3:00 – 3:30 Coffee

3:30 – 5:00 Conference Roundtable with Karen Pinkus (Cornell University), Alberto Moreiras (Texas A&M), and Timothy Murray (Director, Society for the Humanities)

5:30 – 7:00 Reception – A.D. White House

Krisis: Journal for contemporary philosophy (new issue)

I have an article in the new issue of Krisis (2010, number 2)

Jodi Dean, Drive as the structure of biopolitics

Cornell Conference on Contemporary Italian Political Thought

Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Contemporary Italian Political Thought

a diacritics conference at Cornell, September 24-25

• Franco (“Bifo”) Berardi
• Remo Bodei, “Goodbye to Community:  Exile and Separation”
• Cesare Casarino, “Universalisms of the Common”
• Ida Dominijanni, “Wounds of the Common”
• Roberto Esposito, “Community and Violence”
• Michael Hardt, “Pasolini Discovers Love Outside”
• Antonio Negri (via video conference)

Respondents to include: Kevin Attell, Mabel Berezin, Bruno Bosteels, Laurent Dubreuil, Karen Pinkus, and Andrea Righi (and me).

---

Over the last decade contemporary Italian thought has enjoyed enormous intellectual and editorial success in the United States. The work of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri writing with Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Adriana Cavarero, and more recently Roberto Esposito and Rosi Braidotti, have placed Italian thought at the heart of current debates on topics as wide-ranging as bioengineering, globalization, and feminism. In ways that recall the success of French poststructuralism in the 1980s, Italian thought today appears increasingly to be setting the terms of both philosophical and political debates in this country. Yet such success raises a number of questions, in particular about the very features of Italian philosophical tradition that might account for such a result. In other words, if asked to sketch the principal features of Italian thought that join together philosophers as different as Cavarero, Agamben, and Negri, how might one reply? What is it that separates Italian thought from other philosophical traditions, and what might account for its importance today? As Negri asks, where does the Italian difference lie?

Although there are many possible responses, one undeniable feature linking some of the most powerful exponents of contemporary Italian thought is the decisive weight afforded the notion of the “common.” Certainly, Giorgio Agamben’s quasi-manifesto The Coming Community from 1994 merits attention, as does Hardt and Negri’s theorization of the coming together of commonality and singularity in the figure of the multitude in Empire and Multitude. So too does the “common” run through Adriana Cavarero’s reading of “horrorism” in terms of the body politic, Paolo Virno’s emphasis on the shared capacities of labor, Rosi Braidotti’s displacement of communal bonds in favor of a Deleuzian nomadology, and more recently Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the reciprocal relation between community and immunity. One common ground (though clearly not the only one) of recent Italian philosophical iterations will be found in a shared orientation towards reconceptualizing the common.

It is in this context that the diacritics conference “Commonalities: Contemporary Italian Thought and Theorizing the Common” will take place. Organized as a series of individual interventions by some of the leading figures of contemporary Italian thought, with responses from American critics, the conference will provide not only a moment to reflect upon the roots of Italian thought today, but also an occasion to ask after future iterations of Italian thought, and to pose more specific questions about genealogies of the common across a centuries-long history of the Italian peninsula.

The conference will take place at Cornell University under the auspices of the journal diacritics. For further information, please contact Timothy Campbell (tcc9@cornell.edu).