new post at the avant guardian

This week's popOp installment is now available at the avant guardian, here.

A thousand pardons to interested readers: I am heading back up into the Swiss Alps for the next month to sit in classes at the European Graduate School. This is a pretty intensive time and I'm fairly certain that I will primarily be posting little things on FB and checking email.

I will be sure to transcribe my notes, as I did last year, for those of you that are interested.

Anywho.

This week's post is a brief thought on the meaning of the term "deliberate." Since my popOp posts have all been toward understanding the possibility of agency in a time when the subject has become questionable (what I call spectacular agency); this post continues to palpate the judgement. To judge is to think, to think is not a solitary action but is only possible when one has become questionable to oneself.

To deliberate is to evacuate a court room, or a stage, so as to reintroduce the fiction of truth. Discuss amongst yourselves.

new post at the avant guardian

I have a new popOp post over at the avant guardian. This week's post discusses that bizarre movie Southland Tales from Richard Kelly (the guy that directed Donnie Darko).

Southland Tales premiered in 2006 at Cannes and was roundly poo-pooed. It was reedited and released to a whopping 63 theatres at the end of 2007. Many critics were fond of calling it sophmoric and pretentious.

I'm saying it's awesome; doing exactly what Delezue & Guattari stated in Anti-Oedipus, "cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence."

the avant guardian: the smartest thing you read today.

new post at the avant guardian

this week's popOp installation continues the discussion of relational aesthetics.

if relational aesthetics, a mode of art production, can be understood to achieve political action it is only coherent if we explore what i am terming spectacular agency.

over the past six months i've been developing a discussion of spectaclism, a term that results from my reading of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Agamben's essay What Is an Apparatus? i'm hoping that in these discussions we are palpating a mode of sovereignty that is noncoercive in its relations with power.

enjoy!

new post at the avant guardian

in this week's popOp I discuss Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and desubjectification (remember that one?)

pictures and videos and a link to a radio station... a cornucopia of media consumption can be yours if only you would click on this link, right here.

New Post at the avant guardian

I've been rocking back and forth in a corner for the last couple of weeks as I consume the MSM news and now it's time to get off that trip and into something more real.

So, I share with you my thinking on the nature of the 24 hour news cycle, the need for a reconsideration of the difference between time and experience, how political agents become spectral (if Debord and Agamben are correct), and Rand Paul. I assume he goes by Rand (rather than Randal) because he really wants to drive home his libertarian views and these were sadly combined with that doofus Ayn Rand. Rand Paul: you're a jerk. Stop being such a weasel.

Enjoy popOp! it's the Real thing.

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

It's a magical time in the universe, again:

popOp springs eternal.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

Another Friday, another popOp.

This week we're looking at the beef between Fahamu Pecou and Fabian "Occasional Superstar" Williams, and also the continuing palpating of spectaclist economics.

holla!

Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've written a little sumpin'-sum at that place of internet jocularity we like to call The Avant Guardian.

There seems to be an arc developing in these pieces: something about social relations and how they've been shifting.

I thank you for your generosity in reading.

Also, many, many thanks to Tom Maxwell for turning me on to the two new blogs I've added over in the side bar there:

• A Journey Around My Skull
• BibliOdyssey

The strawman image here on our left is an illustration from "Za Lahko Noč" Ančka Gošnik-Godec (1964) which I found on A Journey Around My Skull.

Commodification of the Self

In preparation for tomorrow's essay at The Avant Guardian I'll share a little something I learned about.

Prior to the 14th century social stratification in Europe was of three forms: those who worked (the peasants), those who prayed (the clergy), and those who fought (the aristocracy). And this was all-good. For some reason I had this other image of the peasants as basically struggling for millenia just wishing they could shrug off the yoke of repression, getting burninated on by Trogdor. Now I have to revisit the image of the peasant as portrayed in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

All three categories were of a Great Chain of Being which was an attempt to understand how all the universe was, in essence, gradations of God. At the bottom of this ladder was the earth itself, which had only the property of existence, in the center was humanity (between the angels and the animals), and at the top was God. All of reality fit within a gradation of godliness. This would become undone, however, during the vicious cycle of famine, warfare, and plague that obliterated most of Western Europe. In the wake of lived apocalypse, people began seeking positive expression of God's existence, this pursuit of positive knowledge lead to the era now called the Enlightenment.

As you may recall I've been discussing the aesthetics of personhood over at TAG: that "who I am" is is an accumulation of responses to traumatic events, that "who I am" is possibly an agglomeration of pieces of other examples of who I could be, and that a central component to the currently-developing economic relationship called spectaclism is the exploitation of a sense of dissolution in celebrity and anonymity.

Tomorrow we're going to extend that conversation a bit and discuss someone in this video:

The Militarization of Intellectual Capital in Spectaclist Economics

I'm in day two of a gnarly cold and am just laying in bed. Thanks to a good friend I have a movie to watch and thanks to Hulu I watched a great documentary, RiP! A Remix Manifesto.

Also, the Pentagon released it's budget for the next year and its Black Ops budget is around $56 billion. You can read a little about that here. Also, check out Trevor Paglen's books. Paglen was recently here in Atlanta for a talk sponsored by ART PAPERS (where I am interning).

While a documentary about copyright vs. copy left and this black budget may seem unrelated, I think that if you watch RiP you'll see that they're not so far removed at all.

As one former Clinton Administration discusses it, the U.S. in the 80s and 90s made a serious movement away from domestic manufacturing initiatives and changed its focus to developing intellectual capital in the country. The thinking was that the U.S. would outsource all of these manufacturing jobs overseas (where they'd be made cheaper - a boon to the owners of manufacturing interests, but a bane to the working poor of the U.S.), and with this movement overseas the U.S. work force would be reeducated so as to create things abstractly. For this to work, the developing nations where these manufacturing jobs went would have to adopt intellectual property rights like what the U.S. has today.

This black budget is primarily accounting for the most advanced research (intellectual capital) in the world; although it also is accounting for the cost of torturing suspected people that the U.S. has kidnapped (such as Omar Deghayes) as well. The militarization of intellectual capital is becoming a reality (check it out) and I suspect it is a symptom of a structural change that is the result of that shift from capitalism the way Marx described it to spectaclism today.

Thinking About Creativity

It's going to seem kinda weird, but almost all of my formal training on the nature of creativity to this point in my life has come from studying Classical Chinese philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism.

The title of this blog comes from my thinking about a Classical Confucian text, the 中庸 (Zhongyong) and my reception of that text in light of contemporary Continental philosophers. I'm specifically interested in the works from Roger Ames and David Hall.

Although I recognize that theirs is a somewhat specific and at times controversial project, I can't shake the feeling that even were their translations wholly wrong (which no one seems to say), what they have to say about the nature of humanity, living, the universe, etc. is what needs to be promoted today.

Today we have this amazing capability, broadly distribute, to create through the appropriation of others' work (the mash-up, DJing, etc.) in a manner that just wasn't possible thirty years ago. To this Ames & Hall have already written:

One must be creative to take full advantage of appropriated culture, both in shaping it for his own place and time, and in using it as a structure through which to realize his own possibilities. He must labor assiduously to acquire the culture transmitted from ancient times but must be able to take it a step further in maximizing the possibilities of the prevailing conditions....Thinking Through Confucius (48)

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) has written a bit about this appropriation activity in his book Rhythm Science where he states, "today, the voice you speak with may not be your own." An uncanny feeling, that I might not be who I state I am; to this Ames & Hall say:

The dynamic of becoming whole, construed aesthetically, is precisely what is meant by a creative process. It is thus that cheng (誠) is to be understood as creativity. Creativity involves both the realization of the focal self and of the field of events, the realization of both particular and context. Self-actualization is a focal process that draws upon an aggregate field of human experience. And the field and focus are reciprocally realized. Focusing the Familiar (32)

The problem of who I am and what is the nature of art are not so distant, it's been discussed and debated by Baudelaire, Breton, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, etc. The problem is this: if who we are is subject to capitalist economic relations, then everything we do, ultimately is a question of how to turn what we do into a commodity to be sold on the marketplace. Don't believe me? Then how do we account for the phrase, "I don't buy it," when we don't believe something? What aren't you buying? Is it that my sincerity is questioned?

The virtue of the term “sincerity” is that it describes a commitment to one's creative purposes, a solemn affirmation of one's self-actualization....Since all selves are constituted by relationships, integrity means being trustworthy and true in one's associations....integrity is the ground from which self and other arise together to maximize benefit. It is not what you are, but how well and how productively they are able to fare in their synergistic alliances. Focusing the Familiar (33)

The world changes and we must respond, but what is typically neglected in that response to change is the creativity necessary to change with the times.

Not only is change an integral characteristic of things, but real creativity is a condition of this continuing transformative process. That is, our immediate experience is composed of fluid, porous events that entail both persistence and the spontaneous emergence of novelty, both continuity and disjunction. In this evolving order, there is at once familiar rhythm to life, and the newness of each moment. Dao De Jing (16)

This cosmic unfolding is not “cyclical” in the sense of reversability and replication but is rather a continuing spiral that is always coming back upon itself and yet is ever new. Dao De Jing (28)

Who we are, fundamentally, is a creative event:  

Cheng (誠) [creativity], then, is the extending of the specifically human activity of actualizing genuine personhood from man himself to all constituents in the process of existence. Thinking Through Confucius (58)

Wolfgang Schirmacher calls this "artificial life."

Last Night a DJ Saved my Life

Here's an oldy-maybe-goody. I found this while I was poking around for something else. I recently mentioned the pivotal role of the VCR in our shift from the kind of capitalism that Marx wrote about to the spectacular economy (spectaclism) that Guy Debord wrote about. Girl Talk's Night Ripper, while certainly not the announcement of this shift, has been the best example of this shift.

That album continues to be an inspiration. Some dance albums date themselves, get tossed out, then reappropriated by the kids twenty years later (please, please, please: not all of you hipsters should be wearing skinny acid wash jeans, this is the lesson that your twenties will instill in you). But some dance albums tap into something...more. Now, a few years earlier there had been the Avalanches' Since I Left You, which is also an amazing album, and also chock-full of samples. But having a bunch of samples, that's not so unique. De La Soul was having problems with this when I was a kid.

In his book, Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller (you might also know him as DJ Spooky) states, “Rhythm Science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy….” A very significant distinction is made here by Miller about the nature of virtue. The DJ is the music presented and in so being is able to bypass “the notion of ‘critic’ as an ‘authority’ who controls narrative, and to create a new role that’s resonant….”

This is a call for a re-sounding (in the nautical sense, plumbing the depths) of the individual-as-performer, very much a Deleuzean rhizomatic self, where the constant unraveling of the layers of who we think we are reveals no core self, no kernel of me-ness, only a constellation of relations. If this attempt at bypassing control (or creation) of the narrative others experience is going to work Miller’s rhythm science requires the understanding that, “Music like hip-hop and electronica is theatre – it’s about how people live the sounds they hear.” This is the distinction between being an authority and being authoritative and it is this distinction which forced the American Congress to discuss just what to do about Girl Talk and how to control culture by extension.

What was really amazing about Night Ripper was that it collapsed all of the music of my life, Boston from when I was a kid, Nirvana from my adolescence, and all the snap and crunk from when I was working in a restaurant kitchen. Everything all together all at once. It was so intoxicating. It was around this time that I saw Graham Parkes present his video essay on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This was my introduction to the flâneur.

Benjamin didn't originate the flâneur, he appropriated it form Baudelaire. I like that word, appropriate. Baudelaire's world wasn't Benjamin's world, and so Benjamin had to make flâneur appropriate to his context. Where Baudelaire's flâneur was beginning to sense that art had yet to understand the city, Benjamin's flâneur was much more like how we see the revolutionary avant-garde of the 20th century: his flâneur was not simply a botanist of the city sidewalk, Benjamin's flâneur was stirring the stew - very actively critiquing and experimenting with the aesthetic experience.

Baudelaire described the perfect flâneur as one “[who] is like a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, or a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with each one of its movements represents the multiplicity of life and the dynamic grace of all life’s elements.” As such, we experience through his film overlap and superimposition of all that has happened in this place, all at once. The effect is a delirium of being human in humanity. This is precisely the effect produced by Girl Talk’s album. Where the success of Benjamin's Arcades lies in its investigation of place-ness, Girl Talk’s album is successful by its investigation of time. Being a DJ, a rhythm scientist, is all about time-ing.

Nietzsche in his preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “This book should have sung.” This is what a good DJ is about – reading the crowd for the right tune to play next, the right context in which to insert another influence, and this is what a good philosopher does. The self-overcoming of nihilism may make the most sense in DJ culture, because a good DJ understands that playing the same track over and again, or simply going through what has been deemed au courant is equally as crushing to the party.

The DJ, to be the proper rhythm scientist, must be an authoritative performer rather than the authority figure. What kind of fun is the party if the person running the show is a cop? The DJ must learn something about overcoming the nihilism that comes with being 24 hour party people - to quote a recent Chemical Brothers song, "the pills won't save you now." Night Ripper is such a danceable album for the same reason that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra must dance: the self-overcoming of nihilism is best expressed in the affirmatory act of dance; that is, to will something eternally is to affirm all that has lead to this point, not simply to repeat ad infinitum. To successfully DJ one must note that distinction. The endless repetition of the same is the history of authoritarianism; the collapse of the history as only passing (the opening of today to those that are to come) is the way of the authoritative performer. Music is the ideal manner in which to transmit this truth.

The performance of this music is not only the performance of notes on a scale, but an opening to a discussion of what is worth transmitting in culture and this is made manifest by the virtuoso’s act (a virtuous action). Music performance bears a significant truth by being true to those that have come before and this musical truth continues to be truth-full if it is performed in a manner that can be trusted by those to come. This musical truth is the same truth of culture. The real absurdity of the current entertainment regime is their insistence that culture can be, like wind in a bag, controlled by their agents.

The Commodification of Memory or Learning the Appropriate Use of Appropriation

It's a fascinating question, what are the politics of touch in spectacular economic relations? A touch here seems to mean the use of photographs of people, when we edit the photograph (to, say, make it a profile picture on Facebook), are we committing some form of violence? The Department of Biological Flow asks in the final, "dear you, did i engage this particular politics of touch based on prior flesh relation?"

I have it on good authority that a certain Edward Cullen living in the Cascadia region stated that the human memory is like a sieve. So...yeah, prior flesh arrangements have to be invoked for this sort of kinetic extension.

This is probably because we've entered a new phase of economic development, something that Michael Hardt had mentioned at his evening lecture last summer. Marx saw a shift from renting (with serfs doing the bidding of the land owner), to broad ownership/entrepreneurialism (I am Capital, and So Can You!), and now a seeming hybrid of these two modes.

As evidence of this shifting mode, what Guy Debord called the spectaclist economy, consider the current Intellectual Property rights debacle. In part this cannot occur without the concomitant rise of multinational corporations. In order for these to promulgate there has to be the transmission of certain basic ground rules: this factory needs to be filled with employees, those employees need to use these machines with these techniques, etc. So this was a question of cultural pedagogy. You gotta teach the people that are getting there clocks cleaned how to operate within this context. To this end there has been a somewhat one-sided transmission of what is called entertainment.

That's why, when you go to the developing world, kids are wearing "Coke Is It!" t-shirts and can quote Ice-T songs, and have copies of Jungle Fever (but still on VHS). There seems to have been a slow ebbing of the hegemony of Hollywood, not to say that it's isn't still critically important in the world. But as further evidence, consider the soft power push of Japan. Over the past three decades Japan has become the second largest economy (but now China has overtaken them, last year) in the world and subsequently has the second largest entertainment industry in the world. Subsequently, Japanese entertainment has become de rigeur for the youth in a way that I think most did not anticipate in the U.S.
(By the way, the photo on the left here is from an article in Foreign Policy by Carolyn O'Hara and it's pretty amazing.)

The key moment for this "Turning Japanese" phase was the battle over VCRs. VCR technology was pioneered by the Japanese (Thomas P. Kasulis has a great story on how the Japanese engineers were able to accomplish what the U.S. could not). Broadcast television in the late 70s and early 80s did not want the VCR available to the U.S. public, (in no small part, I'm sure, enhanced with xenophobia and racism, but also) because then people would no longer be locked into leasing their attention to the tv at the times that TV advertisers have promised their sponsors. The VCR would be a serious abrogation of this power that broadcasters had (the control of the spectacular). Of course the VCR was allowed to develop in the media ecosystem, but not without being appropriated in such a way as to benefit TV as much as possible.

Today we must consider the Internet in the same manner. There is the faux-problem of piracy and similarly today we've got the faux-problem of the Great Fire Wall of China. The Olympics in Beijing in 2008 made it clear that the West was more than happy to include China in the Game (and what was that most popular trope from that most spectacular of the spectaclist economic relations that in the U.S. we call hip hop? oh yeah, "don't hate the player, hate the Game.") The real problem, as we see today with Google, was not access to information, but rather that the established Internet authorities needed to have the access to the market. It should be no surprise that at the same time when Baidu (the indigenous Google) signals the ability to overwhelm Google, the Internet is now going to be available in languages that are not based on the Roman alphabet. While there might be high-wire-type espionage involved in Google v. China; we have another example of the spectaclist economy in the acquisition of Friendster. Remember Friendster? Yeah, it's huge in Southeast Asia, apparently.

The commodification of your memory. This is the problem with piracy and with social media. As the spectaclist economy develops we will continue to delineate what is the appropriate use of appropriation. Perhaps we have a precursor in the French language and the practice of vergonha? While in France this led to near-linguicide, the same won't be true for digital piracy. The Internet requires this free transmission, not because "content is king" but because the Internet sine qua non, as Debord stated it, "The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification [....] it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness [....] the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation."

A Look at the New York Times

Tonight we had an excellent meeting of the Poncey-Highlands Readgin Group where we discussed our readings of Breton's first "Manifesto of Surrealism" as well as the first chapter of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

We can see a moment from the Debord text played-out today in the New York Times' "Most Popular" section. In the article "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" we read that business students need

to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions. [...]Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”

Reading I can't help but think of Debord's line in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. " And then further in §26, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world." You might have an MBA, but you're still going to have your clock cleaned by those that exploit the rest of us.

Also, I'd like to address something in another article in today's NYT, this time in another article "Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected."

In this article we learn that Africans are being illegally trafficked into Italy so as to work in the orchards, picking fruit. This is a job seen as beneath the average Italian today, according to the article. Apparently an undisclosable number of immigrants have been picked up by the Italian Authorities and sent to detention centers. The situation for these immigrants, according to human rights workers in Italy is not dissimilar from slavery and these Italian Authorities have been using bull dozers to raze the encampments where these "semi-slaves" lived.

The article breezily then reports, "It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave."

I can answer that for you: they were forced.

Anytime the phrase "semi-slavery" is used to describe the lives of those at the bottom of an economic system and bulldozers are employed to raze these semi-slaves' "encampments" - that means the entire society there is blatantly using coercive maneuvers to get what they want. Those Africans have the two forms of freedom Marx outlined in Capital, vol. 1: they are free to use their bodies' abilities to labor and so enter, freely, contracts to sell their labor-capacity; but, they are also free of control of the conditions under which they will labor.

Just sayin'.

Place Holder Post

I've made a resolution this year to post something on the blog here everyday. So far so good.

Tonight, I'm a little compressed for time as I am also writing-up a piece for another blog, The Avant Guardian.

So, I will simply leave a little taste for you; a quote from Hal Foster's “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996.

In a sense Breton and Bataille were both right, at least about each other. Often Breton and company did act like juvenile victims who provoked the paternal law as if to ensure that it was still there-at best in a neurotic plea for punishment, at worst in a paranoid demand for order. And this Icarian pose is again assumed by contemporary artists who are almost too eager to talk dirty in the museum, almost too ready to be tweaked by Hilton Kramer or spanked by Jesse Helms. On the other hand, the Bataillean ideal-to opt for the smelly shoe over the beautiful picture, to be fixed in perversion or stuck in abjection-is also adopted by contemporary artists discontent not only with the refinements of sublimation but with the displacements of desire. Is this, then, the option that abject art offers us-Oedipal naughtiness or infantile perversion? To act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent? (118)

This seems to fit-in nicely with this week's consideration of the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

Society of the Spectacle: Toward the Postmodern

My long-time buddy, Ryland Johnson, was kind enough to respond to my recent posting on Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 and what follows here is a reply to him.

Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland

Thanks for reading, Ryland.

There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.

First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!

As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.

This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.

As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.

At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.

One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.

So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.

A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.

But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.

(Economic) Notes on Society of the Spectacle

So let's finish-up the first chapter, ね？

We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.

1. Debord here is announcing this new term he calls "the spectacle." This is important to keep in mind because the temptation is there to misconstrue the term. Thus we would read this text as Debord as making value judgements, something to the effect of him saying contemporary society is simply being spectacular and indulgent. What he seems to be doing in this first chapter is defining terms. Thus, when he states, in §21, "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." he is not describing either religion as illusory in a pejorative sense nor that the process that has led to this contemporary social arrangement that he earlier defined as "the spectacle" (in §4, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Or also in §24, "the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of 'mass media' which are its most glaring superficial manifestation....")
   
2. Debord seems to be building from the presupposition that the reader has also read Marx's Capital, vol. 1 at a minimum. Over and over again we get definitions and phrases lifted from Capital.
   

I think it's important to mention this because Marx's book was an attempt to analyze and explain a new social reality whose, though it has been developing over centuries, functioning continues to be mysterious.

In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.

With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?

This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."

Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. (§17)

What are the symptoms of this new arrangement of social relations? Not simply advertisements for the commodities of capitalism, but advertisements as something more than suggestions. Advertisements as rules:

I think that Žižek has spoken about this in several places, this injunction to, Enjoy!" Debord puts it this way in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible." This echoes a theme in §6 where the we are told that the spectacle is "the affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corrolary consumption." For an elaboration on this affirmation of the choice already made, consider George Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society. Here's a great site for all your McDonaldization needs.

§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."

For this proletariatization to be possible, the consummation of the process of rationalization must occur. Once every task had been made automated and efficiency achieved, the worker would be liberated from the workplace, free from toiling in exploitative environments. With no employees to exploit, the managers would be liberated as well. Lefebvre, in an excellent interview discussing the origins of the Situationists, states that his Critique of Everyday Life was inspired by a science-fiction story wherein all the humans have killed themselves because they have nothing to do after the robots took over their work, leaving dogs to exploit the robots. Debord finds this liberation from work suspect:

[T]his inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. [...] Thus the present "liberation from
labor," the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. §27

§s29-34 reiterate, once more, the alienation inherent in capitalist production. But where Marx saw it as perverse, this freeing of the serfs to enter contracts, but free from the ability to control the means of production; Debord repeatedly emphasizes that today nobody is free from the spectaclist economy:

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. §26

Further still, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production." §32 The chapter ends with simple statement, "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." §34 

(remember this show on A&E? Oh, yeah there was that show on Discovery also) 

Is this how we arrived at the current economic crisis? One of the principle causes of the current meltdown of global capital is that the American real estate market tanked. This, then meant that all that value that Wall Street had created in the last few years immediately evaporated. How? Value, as Marx stated in Capital (1867), is manifested socially-necessary labor-time. You get enough of these suburbanites buying these properties and mistaking the menu for the meal, and, poof....

The Surrealists Won Their Revolution, and We Slept Right Through It

The difficulty with reading the “Manifesto of Surrealism” is in remembering that to write in this way, to think these things was to verge on revolution. In 1924. Surrealism in the popular imagination conjures images of Dali maybe, perhaps a Duchamp readymade (probably not), but it's an art movement when it's remembered. Not political action, that's not really what surrealism was about, right?

But, y'know, you read the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” full of gusto, vim and vigor, and the calling-out of soft-ass-bustas. That's what Breton's “Manifesto” did – he called Dostoevsky a chump. He quotes Crime and Punishment and sets it up with,

[T]he purely informative style....[T]he descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared...he tries to make me agree with him about cliches....(7)

But you know, read Nadja, read “Manifesto of Surrealism.” It's tediocrity. Why?

'Cause the surrealists won, their revolution was a stunning success.

The pioneering of automatic writing that Breton lionized, it's everywhere. This glossolalia that Breton induced in 1924 was the ground conditions for the Internet to occur. Breton's first surrealist manifesto begins with the assessment that the conditions of living in Modern times has become stultifying and a stupid proof of Marx's alienation of humanity (which is the result of the capitalist mode of production).

Breton sees the problem as a profound lack of imagination in the everyday dealings of human interaction. Perhaps, if, when we arrived at work in the factory, we halted the assembly line (composed of one routine movement codified and reiterated ad infinitum, thus and ossified - the nightmare of the Eternal Return), and instead of doing our preassigned tasks (over and over and over again), what if instead of cars being assembled with steering wheels they were instead given a fish? Imagine what the downstream effects would be if people had to re-imagine their relationships to the world, all the time!?

Breton's surrealist project is to align what he hopes Freud will find in psychoanalyzing dreams with the transformation of society in Marx and communism;

When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? […] Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? […] From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination, when, by means yet to be determined, we succeed in recording the contents of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a discipline of memory spanning generations [….] I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going....(12-4)

The other day I pointed out that Guy Debord, in his Society of the Spectacle, puts Breton and the surrealists squarely in his cross hairs for this faith in the saving powers of sleep.

Here's some wild speculation on my part. Breton makes four reflections in his manifesto. First, his theory that dreams are continuous. Second, dreams are just as reliable (as in real) as lucidity. In the third he seems to be describing Evercrack, World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or...(you name it), the MMORPG ecosystem:

The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference.

Perhaps even more interestingly, the Surrealist revolution's victory is indicated with 4chan and the Pirate Bay, "You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless." (14)

"You are nameless."

Here is a photo of the group Anonymous, apparently taken during their battle with the Church of Scientology (see their video declaration of war below).

4chan, some call it the asshole of the internet, is also responsible for most of the memes that preoccupy netizens, such as Lolcatz and the ever-fun Rickrolling (see the Encyclopedia Dramatica for more on that).

"The ease of everything is priceless."

The Pirate Bay, although perhaps the imprisonment of its founders may spell the end of this site, they are the avant-garde of the copy left movement. Wildly popular, the Pirate Party now has two seats in the European Union's Parliament.

Of course, were the Pirate Bay to cease to be, there has nonetheless been a cultural shift, at least in terms of the music industry. It's historically been the case that the music industry has not been kind to its musicians. Consider Little Richard, the father of rock n' roll, who received half a penny for every album he sold. Better still, read how Steve Albini (the man) broke it down for us in his excellent, "The Problem With Music" over at negativland (also awesome).

The "Manifesto of Surrealism", Nadja, these surrealist texts are hard to read today, in large part, because their written in such a familiar style: it's like wandering into livejournal in 2002. All that stream of conscience stuff, all that free association, makes me scream for a reasonable copy editor.