I cite

Desiring desire

I've wondered for a while, wondering rather than reading since these days I read only what others want me to read and not what I want to read, if the injunction not to cede one's desire means never to satisfy it or never to give in to the lie of satisfaction. It's likely that this is not a news flash, yet another example of the way what is obvious somehow becomes clear or obvious in a different way, as if one hadn't really known it before.

Holding onto desire would be holding onto a fantasy, letting the fantasy inspire, letting it take one's breath away, provide the incitement to getting out of bed, the last hope before going to sleep. Such a holding on, though, is fragile, always at risk of misplaced attempts at realization, misplaced because they forsake desire by presuming that it can and should be satisfied rather than cherished. Zizek describes the becoming of horrific of realized desire at the end of the The Piano Teacher.

Read in terms of cherishing desire, of taking care not to cede it but to attend to it, nurture it, provoke it, the place of the Party is not to realize communism but a desire for it, to produce and inspire subjects who will seek it, knowing their limitation, their ignorance, but not fetishing this impossibility as either futility or relativism but rather as the necessary condition for their desire. 

The easy part: the desire is already there.

The hard part: people fear the name.

Perhaps trust in the people has to mean trust in the desire, not the fear that leads to its misnaming.

And there may well be good reasons to say yes to sacrifice

Blessed with two days to myself, I've found myself in the annual embrace of paper crafts. This coincides nicely with holiday decorating and not so nicely with end of term grading. I've also accompanied the paper projects with serious attention to a Christmas playlist. In this context, "serious" means combining the likely taste of a 14 year old boy ("Gary," by MC Lars) and 11 year old girl ("All I Want for Christmas is You," Olivia Olson), Paul (selections from "The Reindeer Room") with my own preferences (some are too sappy to mention; I'll leave it at the list would be fine for a "Grey's Anatomy" Christmas special).

At any rate, one of the selections on the list is "Joy to the World" (sung by American Idol runner-up, David Arculeta--folks can guess who that one is for). And, there is the meaningfully, over-wrought, intensely sung, "let earth receive her king." This resonates with a theme in the post-apocalyptic series of novels of the Change (S.M. Sterling), namely, the king is chosen as the sacrifice of those who choose him.

My sense of recent discussions of sovereignty is an emphasis on an other who is sacrificed or an other who can be killed but not sacrified. My recollection is that Zizek generally rejects sacrificial logics, particularly insofar as they are necessary guarantees of the Other constituted through the sacrifice. The Other comes into being through the sacrifices made in its name. Indeed, Zizek tends to praise those feminine figures who sacrifice the sacrifice.

But I worry that this rejection of sacrifice too easily fits in with that constellation of enjoyment and libertarianism characteristic of late neoliberalism. The left fell in with this as it decried any restrictions on freedom as repression--as if all forms of repression were the same, that is, all unjust and never necessary.

The rejection of repression has been an accompaniment of contemporary emphases on democracy. The result is a view of democracy compatible with neoliberalization (that is, communicative capitalism). This is democracy as each getting what he wants, going for what he wants, and viewing any limitation on this self-assertion as an illegitimate over-reaching of government (or its failure).

The problem, then, is that democracy has been morphed into a form of government without sacrifice, as if such a thing were possible at all. Agents, no longer subjects, are essentially objects that perserve (hence again the popularity of political theory for objects; they combine immanently, without sacrifice). Hardt and Negri's multitude, for example, flows and desires, but seems incapable of sacrifice--although the rights asserted at the end of Empire are only possible as statements of those principles for which sacrifice is necessary.

Comments on the necrosocial

I was re-reading The Necrosocial, an essay or polemic written in connection with the UC strike and occupation last week. I want to think about two aspects of the essay, not quite as a critique but more in an effort to push my own thinking. These two aspects involve shifting the terms from social death to death of the social and drive as a domain between the two deaths. I'll talk about the first aspect here and, I hope, discuss the second in a follow up post.

First, the essay describes the university as

a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated.

On the one hand, the discussion of social death incorporates Marxist ideas of dead, accumulated labor as well as from New Left critiques of the university's role in support the military-industrial-bureaucratic state machine. On the other, it includes a contemporary critique of identity categories (understood very broadly) as divisions enabling the division and domination of the people:

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.

This passage suggests a social life folded in on itself and intensified, amplified to the extent that the ever fragmented social dissolves in a multitude of singularities. These singularities are related through the slashes that separate them, as well as through the common acceptance of a dynamic of singularity, a becoming singular, becoming unique, to the point that absorbs and destroys in possibility of social relation, that is, relations that are not already contained in economies of profit and loss, domination and submission. The passage evokes the shift from disciplinary to control societies, suggesting thereby the ways that singularization itself functions as a mechanism of control as well as the ways that the university contributes to the maintenance and extension of control mechanisms as it repeats injunctions to identify and specify.

The death of the social in societies of control thus follows directly from the 'intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices; (Empire 23). Normalizing, though, should be understood in terms of norms of idenfitication and separation, injunctions to become unique.

Under in terms of the normalization of uniqueness in the society of control (a commodified, reified uniqueness that condemns newly formed and fragile individuals to isolation in a multitude of singularities, a kind of isolation radically different from the alienation criticized in the 50s and 60s), the university as a factory of meaning separate from reality makes a kind of sense. But I don't think that the primary problem at stake in the death of social is the production of the illusion that meaning and reality are separated. In fact, this is where the analysis in "The Necrosocial" begins to miss its target (and, in fact, in the later paragraphs of the essay, make this point: "Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning."). The meaning of the university is reality; the values of the machine constitute reality. Reality is the problem--and our failure to remake it into what it could or should mean.

I can put this differently, drawing--to no one's surprise, from Zizek's recent injunctions to think: part of the contemporary challenge is breaking the absorption of meaning into neoliberal capitalist reality, waking up from the dream that low taxes and beanie babies are the road to happiness, disconnecting from the illusion that efficiency measures and competition access the world we want rather than providing the language of our capture. The challenge is separating meaning from this reality in order to make a new one. Some separations are better than others.

Manola Antonioli: Guattari's Relevance

"Crisis" and "Recovery"

Among the recurrent themes in these pages, one finds a critique - more relevant now than ever - of the perpetual "crisis" discourse which has become a tremendous instrument of "governance" and "normalization." Already in the introduction, Guattari reminds us that the "crises" (the multiple crises that capitalist societies unceasingly experience among which the one we are living through today is but the latest) are not inescapable inevitabilities, but the direct consequence of the economic order, supported by capitalist political strategies on a planetary scale. Consequently, we never stop "mistaking the effect for the cause" and justifying political arbitrages by the harsh necessities of an economy that is now escaping all governmental control, by pretending to forget that deregulation of the economy and the financial sector on a global level was made possible only by the prerequisite political choices. In this way, everything is implemented so as to present the crisis to us as an "obvious apodictic Fact:" "Unemployment, poverty rain down on humanity like Biblical plagues. Under these conditions, one can no longer conceive of any but a single - with a few variants - possible economic policy in response to the sole conceivable description of economic policy." (p. 56)

The specter of the crisis (the power of which is increased tenfold in the biopolitical domain today by the media one-upsmanship over mutant viruses and pandemics that threaten us from all sides) is associated with the myth of "emergence from the tunnel," of the "great recovery," the precursors of which are unceasingly detected in order to mask the irreversible character of the situation. That's how one aims at obscuring and warding off the necessity for a radical change in economic policy, for an in-depth transformation of social subjectivity that would be in a position to confront the continual acceleration of techno-scientific revolution without leading to ever more mutilating and paralyzing effects. For a long time, according to Guattari, the crisis has no longer been a transitory phase destined to lead to a miraculous "recovery," but the sign of a radical malfunction in the mechanisms managing production and wealth flows: "Even the most narrow-minded economists are discovering with amazement a sort of madness to these systems and feel the urgency of alternative solutions." (p. 131)

via www.truthout.org

If democracy is to come...

If democracy isn't here but is to come, then preparations are in order.

What kind?

First, acknowledgement of non-democracy. It's not here and now, so what is here and now should not be defended as democratic but rejected as non-democratic.

Second, insofar as democracy is not here and now, pretenses to democracy, here and now, are distractions, fantasies, efforts to displace the intrusion of the Real of non-democracy. They are lures into thinking that we are already democrats.

Third, democracy requires the production of democratic subjects. But this isn't a project of democracy (which would presume democracy here and now). It's a project for democracy. Don't pretend there is a 'we' capable of ruling itself (a multitude of singularities might be productive, but it isn't self-governing).

Fourth, the production of democratic subjects is a challenge; if it has been done before, it has only been achieved temporarily. The production is neither certain, secure, nor robust. There are lots of glitches and faux democrats out there on the market.

Fifth, part of the challenge is knowing what is necessary for a project or form of life that doesn't exist and when it has has been fragile. Some possible ways to produce democratic subjects:

--rule and be ruled in turn: being ruled is as important as ruling; in practice, this means frequent changes in position (to enable people to learn new skills in ruling and being ruled as much as to prevent the not yet democratic from doing really major damage);

--censorship: the not-yet-democratic too easily mistake their opinions for opinions that matter; if there are limits on what can be said, the not-yet-democratic have barriers to protest, battles to fight; they can learn from experience what is worth fighting for; they can start to desire something like democracy;

--installation of a lack: the not-yet-democratic will remain not-yet until they desire democracy; this desire has to be cultivated, installed, instigated.

From occupied UC Berkeley: The Necrosocial

The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning.  As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death.  Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity.  A  ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property).  Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future.  Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands.

Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether that of Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’

But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place.  With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context.  As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential.  And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter.  The university gladly permits precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities.  A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism.  And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls.

There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth.  The university is a graveyard–así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded— the immiserated, the inca

via anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com

the dust of collapsed towers

Progressive media focuses on Republicans--Sarah Palin's idiocy, the inanities of the party's non-position.

Popular culture highlights the end of the world, total destruction, complete annihilation, destruction of the planet.

Democrats focus on their opponents--not on what they support or offer.

And worst of all: those of us on the left wallow in our failure, our passivity, our masochistic enjoyment of 150 years of failure. We take heart from activists, from those who continue to try and hope and organize. But, we don't believe them. Our actions show what we believe--Sarah Palin in/and 2012. Same difference.

And why do we do this?

We enjoy devastation, the end, the spectacle. We became trapped in the circuits of its repetition, the repetition of failures. We enjoy it. We get off on it. The pain makes us feel alive in our passivity and deadness and hopelessness. At least by imagining zombies we have something from which to escape, and no responsibility to take--other than run, run, run.

Normal men do not know that everything is possible

Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

k-punk: Towards a new orthodoxy

I was thrilled to discover the following remarks on Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies over at K-punk. Mark makes some of the points more strongly and clearly than I do--I'm glad I read them tonight so I can repeat them tomorrow during an interview with Pacifica Radio

Reading Jodi Dean's excellent book on democracy and communicative capitalism, I was put in mind of Momus's recent remarks about blogging (as cited by Simon here). "Sure," Momus wrote, "Click Opera has been a sort of karate course, and its comment facility has taught me to be more dialectical and -- above all -- the skill set of prolepsis, of anticipating reader objections. But is a more moderate, accessible and dialectical me really what the world needs? Doesn't the world need an immoderate, outrageous and concentrated me, just laying out things that only I could think, no matter how wrong they may be?" For me, the answer is clear - I certainly don't want writers who "respond to criticisms", who patiently deal with "feedback", no matter how hostile and uncomprehending. I want writers who have the courage to pursue their own lines. What's interesting, I suppose, is the libidinal impulses at work in those who don't want that - who would rather have a writer spending their time on discussion boards and in comments boxes defending themselves, nuancing their position into innocuous irrelevance, or effectively abandoning it altogether in the name of some vacuous commitment to "debate".

Nothing illustrates the debilitating fit between "democracy" and "communicative capitalism" that Jodi analyses so well than this demand. Jodi's claim is that there is a necessary, not merely contingent, connection between the communicative landscape of Web 2.0 and the neocon and neoliberal right. (Note how grey vampires and trolls willl automatically appeal to the democtratic "right to be heard" the moment they feel that attention will be snatched away from; note how they will always describe those who are no longer paying them attention as totalitarians.) Jodi identifies an assymetry in the right and left approaches to democracy in the era of web 2.0: the right uses democratic openness to advance clear, divisive positions; the left appeals to the openness first, so that it becomes identified with openness as such rather than a set of determinate policies. Incidentally, what I liked about Nick's presentation at Militant Dysphoria, which met with a certain amount of British can't-do-ism, a good introduction to the UK for Nick I guess, was the crispness and clarity of its tactical suggestions - there's a punkish demystification at work here, as well as the echoes of management consultancy that Dominic heard: here's how things have changed, now let's change things ourselves.

Instead of skulking in the margins, celebrating "disruption", "diversity" and the instability of meaning (poststructuralist habits that the left finds it hard to kick), what the left needs now is the confidence and courage to plan, to impose a new orthodoxy in the way that the right did. I'm sympathetic to the argument that one can't completely transpose the methods that capital and neoliberalism used onto leftist struggle, because capital had resources and vested interests on its side which are not at the disposal of the left now. But one can overstate this: ultimately, Nick Land's view that capital is an "artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources" is closer to the mark than the view that capital had everything stacked in its favour from the start. Capitalism's agents were a revolutionary class which had to dismantle feudalism, undermine the authority of the Church, and challenge pratically every vested interest before they could succeed. Two important things that come out of reading Andy Beckett's book on the 70s are (1) how much was against neoliberalism then and (2) how hard the neoliberals had to plan and work in order to get their vision realised (with the Grunwick strikebreaking campaign a foretaste of everything that would be thrown at the miners). The left should leave behind "spontaneity" along with all the other relics of 68, which weigh so heavily on the brains of would-be militants. The alternative is not Stalinism, even if it might involve elements of conspiratorialism (how could any effective political strategy not involve some element of this?); and it will certainly entail a disciplined withdrawal from particular communicative circuits. What is certain is that it is imperative to escape the binaries that "democratic" communicative capitalism has imposed on our thinking.

via k-punk.abstractdynamics.org