Judith Butler, Day 2

Judith Butler taught a class entitled ETHICS AND POLITICS AFTER THE SUBJECT. The first half of the classes were focused on Hannah Arendt: performativity, politics, political theory (sovereignty, zionism), "Questions of Judgement." The last two classes were shared with Avital Ronell, Larry Rickels, and Giorgio Agamben.

Butler studied with Gadamer at the University of Heidelberg (where he was the successor to Jaspers, who moved to Switzerland in 1948). She earned a PhD in philosophy, but feels the term is problematic for her; she prefers interdisciplinarity.

This interdisciplinarity is shared with Hannah Arendt who was a: journalist, philosopher (a student of Heidegger along with Gadamer), public diplomat, and historian. We must accept that philosophy takes place in many places, journalism (as Eichmann in Jerusalem shows) is one of those places.

Responsibility and Judgement was written after EiJ, and in the wake of the anger that arose from the publication from it.

• This book is a collection of essays on moral theory that are responses to the Eichmann trial and the criticisms she received from her reporting on the trial
• Her last book (incomplete) Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy deals with the question of how one judges without precedent

What is judgement after all?

• We know that Eichmann failed to think, so this has something to do with judging.
  
• What are the abilities to judge when society is ruled by coercion?
• Arendt faults Eichmann for failing to perform freedom

Freedom only comes to be in its exercise, Eichmann failed to bring forward freedom and chose to maintain the coercion that was rampant within his society

• he remains responsible for what he did, one does not need to be a thinking being in order to be responsible
• his failure to think (given there is a normativity to thinking) is part of his crime (his crime is in part his failure to think)
• Thinking has a duality: I think in the company of myself (a position not dissimilar to Bakhtin); thinking implies the presence of others - alterity cannot be located in a singular other, this is a plural other

2 Large Problems:

1. the status of sovereignty - here we have an appeal to sovereign mind, but also calls for plurality
2. the relation between thinking and action (judgement is action) - thinking seems to require sociality

It seems thinking and action cannot be successfully separated

Judgement
What sort of action is this exactly? How'd she get from Eichmann to Kant's Third Critique?

• Arendt seems upset that Eichmann tried to invoke Kant in his defense (Eichmann stated he tried to live his life according to Kant's categorical imperative) and thus was not guilty for the murder of millions
• The object of beauty imposes upon the viewer such that the viewer must form structures by which to judge that which is being viewed
• Thus, the beautiful relies upon the historically-unprecedented

The unprecedented requires us to form new ways to judge, this is obvious also in the case of what is horrible and monstrous

Judgement is more in line with poiesis, a manner of making, than it is an instrument

The kind of judgement we are to make is dependent upon the context in which we encounter the unprecedented

If a radically-new condition arises, spontaneity is implicated in judging

• Eichmann was operating within a condition where the Law (established precedent) requires one to be criminal
• thus, we must enervate arguments about why it is necessary to break the Law
• This seems to be Arendt's anarchist moment, she's saying that there is neither universal nor natural Law;
  
• judgement is to bring Justice into being.

It is through the writing of her text that she enacts her judgement

There has to be a moral basis for condemning genocide and it cannot rest upon existing law

The Israeli courts didn't do a good job judging because Eichmann was tried in many ways as a substitute for all Nazis: is the trial of an individual man the right place to put on trial all those that supported Nazism?

Classically understood: if Eichmann is criminal, there must be evidence of criminal intent; all the psychologists find that he's "normal."

• but this shouldn't be the point - Eichmann is a new kind of person, one that requires a new kind of judgement

(EiJ, 52) Yet Eichmann's case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eicmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.

The need to deceive oneself, it seems, had become globalized within German society; Eichmann had a systematic mendacity.

• He wanted "to make peace with his former enemies," etc....
  
• This suggests that he was living in a reality which hampered his ability to think outside the confines of his lived experience.
• Judgement doesn't seem possible in a world where cliches are so ubiquitous; rather, we have some sort of speech act
• Arendt is fairly dispassionate in her writing about the trial, this upset many and she was incendiary in what she arrives at by taking the time to think about what is being said at the trial
• This is the Modernist moment: when the radically new requires a new response.

Arendt's beef with the Israeli court

• Eichmann was kidnapped
• the court never rose to the challenge of the unprecedented:
  

  (EiJ, 263) The court, however, never rose to the challenge of the unprecedented, not even in regard to the unprecedented nature of the origins of the Israel state, which certainly was closest to its heart and thought. Instead, it buried the proceedings under a flood of precedents - during the sessions of the first week of the trial, to which the first fifty-three sections of the judgement correspond - many of which sounded, at least to the layman's ear, like elaborate sophisms.
  

  
  
• At the trial there were survivors of the Holocaust present and the State made this into a public discourse about there stories, but what happens when there is this over-testimonial quality and producing an ex post facto legitimacy of Israel as the suffering of the Jewish people?
• The man was overwhelmed by the suffering of the procession of suffering witnesses, while it is sensible to establish a public record of these survivors, but is this the place for the trial of Eichmann or is this the showcasing for the public a display of suffering?

The lesson of the Holocaust might be that, "we were made stateless and no one else should be rendered stateless," or that there ought not to be restrictive notions of being a citizen.

Maybe the victims shouldn't be the judges of Eichmann - perhaps, if this is a crime against humanity then an international court should sit in judgement?

(EiJ, 269) Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgement; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it.

(EiJ, 272) Moreover, the argument that the crime against the Jewish people was first of all a crime against mankind, upon which the valid proposals for an international tribunal rested, stood in flagrant contradiction to the law under which Eichmann was tried. [...] For just as a murderer is prosecuted because he has violated the law of the community, and not because he has deprived the Smith family of its husband, father, and breadwinner, so these modern, state-employed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of mankind, and not because they killed millions of people. Nothing is more pernicious to understanding new crimes, or sands more in the way of the emergence of an international penal code that could take care of them, than the common illusion that the crime of murder and the crime of genocide are essentially the same, and that the latter therefore is "no new crime properly speaking." The point of the latter is that an altogether different order is broken and an altogether different community is violated. (emphasis added)

Then there is an interesting moment in the text where Arendt starts speaking for people (emphases added):
For the judges-

(EiJ, 277) And if it is true that "justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done," then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address the defendant in something like the following terms: ...."

For the judges speaking for Eichmann -

(EiJ, 278) You said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.

Then she (the judges) state the central argument of the book, intentionality is not enough or adequate for this new type of crime:

(EiJ, 279) Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

She introduces the notion that cohabitation is pre-consensual and that cohabitation is possible in other ways. She also suggests that to murder in genocide surrenders your presence in humanity:

(EiJ, 279) And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 2

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

We began class with a discussion of Ulmer's evening lecture.

Back to Psycho

Norman as TV: he switches between stations (personalities), he's not able to cross over except on the audio track.

A genealogical digression: the train as conveyor belt of neurosis

• the first case of male hysteria was at the time of the use of trains and this symbolizes something
• the term "psycho" became slang after WWI; Freud, et al. called it war neurosis or shell shock - wherein the soldier endures an uncanny doubling of the ego
• psychoanalysis became famous because it was the only treatment at that time that could get the soldiers back out on the frontlines
• Freud was first included into the U.S. military after they saw that the Nazis were also employing psychoanalytic ideas
• now we call it Post-Traumatic Disorder

The "slasher" genre develops the "splatter" phase which is more oral and features cannibalism, etc.

Night of the Living Dead 1968, Romero:

• A reference to "The Shower Scene" is made in this film
• there is this need to show what ghouls eat in this film (when the daughter eats the father in the basement, 83 minutes in)
• this is a critical moment in the development of the horror genre as it is the removal of the invisibility of violence in the genre

Interesting to note the role of the TV in this film: they refuse to go into the basement because they believe their relationship to media will keep them alive

The zombie attack is called an epidemic of mass murder, their told not to pay their respects to the dead

It must be remembered that this film is released in the wake of the murder of MLK, and perhaps this film suggests to us today that everyone is implicated in his murder as society functioning as itself had created these conditions

• we are those posses, wandering around taking pleasure in the wanton killing

Romero introduces the terror of survival - those that die in the film do so because they are not worthy of the future.

The Psycho effect: the murderer and the victim redefine life as surviving, the status of surviving is altered in various films

"The survivor is mankind's worst character," Canetti stated in his Crowds and Power.

• The command is a suspended death sentence
  
• commands are older than speech and originate in flight
  
• the herd in fleeing a predator is the first crowd formation
  
• and it is the origin of the sacrifice
• Judge Schreber is the ultimate survivor because he has absorbed all the energy of those that have died

Cannibal Killers
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974, Hooper
"The film you are about to see is true," as the trailer informs us, was a direct response to the Watergate as well as Vietnam War lies of the contemporary moment. Hooper was in many ways responding to the brutality of his times:

Some college kids - loosely liberal, returning to the sticks, from which they came

Taxidermy (a nod to Psycho?) gone wild.

The "Shower Scene" is alluded to here with the extreme close-up of the eye, she seems to be literally vivisected by the camera

Follow this link to view the ending

She is rescued by a truck, named Black Maria, which is the same name as Thomas Edison (the father of film)'s theater and lab.

What we are exposed to here is the economy of the recording of destruction.

The inspiration for Psycho was the true story of Ed Gein, he was also the inspiration for Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, as well as the inspiration for the Leatherface character in this film.
We were fully inside Ed Gein's home with this film.

This machine of destruction and recording (the whirring of the chainsaw as an allusion to the camera recording) is finally interrupted.

Her survival begs the question, this was alluded to in the trailer: Must we be chained to what we have seen?
What kind of work must we do to shake-off that impact?

The problem of the slaughterhouse is the problem of food and death.

[END OF CLASS]

Gregory Ulmer Evening Lecture

Gregory Ulmer gave an excellent lecture entitled "ON A TOOT"

The talk, if memory serves, was inspired by a lengthy meditation on the term Der Zug and culminated in a Eureka! moment when looking at a wooden train whistle. This whistle then featured prominently in the talk.

"If memory serves" is an important statement - as I am "friends" with Ulmer (on Facebook, and I look forward to becoming more friendly as we get to know one another), I am a bit embarrassed about the notes I have here. If you think what I present here is only so-so, I assure you this is entirely a reflection on me as a student and in no way is a proper introduction to Ulmer's thinking.

For a better introduction, see Ulmer's own site, or perhaps Michael Jarrett's pages

Der Zug means a lot of things: drawing, pulling, move, draught animal, railroad train, passage, drift of clouds...section, yoke of oxen, lineament, disposition, draught of a drink, rifling of a gun barrel..., trait... (just google the term)

Electracy : electronic devices :: literacy : texts

This talk about der zug: the trait as blues train whistle

Derrida's deconstructionism caught on, but his On Grammatology didn't.

• Grammatology is a social machine attempting to overcome technological determinism.
• Grammatology as a philosophy of techik
• We should keep to Bashō's motto: do not follow the master's footsteps but seek what they sought

Heuretics is the science of inventing the new

Today the situation is interesting: in Socrates' day he would ask his partners to define terms, that would be like us walking down into Saas-Fee and asking the locals to program our computers - it's just not in their skill set.

What was Aristotle's metaphysical insight? Entelechy. What was observed in the Real that suggested this?

Khôra - potential in the acorn, immanent in the material - the tree becomes what it already is says Aristotle

It's at the intersection of two semantic fields

Has philosophy been talking about anything other than what Aristotle was arguing with Plato? about khôra? Mary's womb was khôra, a place for the birth of God.

Whenever Heidegger says metaphysics, substitute literacy - this is what grammatology gives us.

Der Zug is an affect in music, the procession of tension and the progression of chords; Der Zug is the tension at the interlinking point between trains and its incumbent pulling

What are the political implications of Der Zug?

Judith Butler, Day 1

Judith Butler taught a class entitled ETHICS AND POLITICS AFTER THE SUBJECT. The first half of the classes were focused on Hannah Arendt: performativity, politics, political theory (sovereignty, zionism), "Questions of Judgement." The last two classes were shared with Avital Ronell, Larry Rickels, and Giorgio Agamben.

The rudiments of thinking, then. Arendt's biography and the biography of her thought:

• First publications were in the 1930s and focused on being a Jew in Germany; she fled to Paris and then New York City in response to the Nazis
• She was concerned with assimilation ("One does not escape Jewishness," she wrote), as well as modes of thinking, she wrote about jewish politics
• Always concerned with cultural zionism, believed in binationalism and saw it as a mistake that Israel would base its citizenship on religion
• Sought to separate the nation from the State and was against a homogeneous State

German Jewishness

• She was an intimate student of Heidegger - to understand her social theory we have to recognize that mitsein is insufficient, but the idea does continue in Arendt, who supplements his thinking and sees his thinking as a relationship between the subject and the world.
• She moves away from Dasein and expands mitsein

Hermann Cohen's essays (1890s) argue in favor of German-Jewish alliance and quarreled with Zionism because he did not see a need for a Jewish State because Jews belong to Germany

• He was mostly thinking in terms of Kant and was a key neo-Kantian thinker
• Benjamin and Arendt both read Cohen, what Arendt drew from Cohen was that the concept of nation had come to a fundamental crisis
• She advocated the development of a Jewish Army in Europe that would work in concert with other European armies; so in this sense there might be a Jewish nation, but it would be a European one - this might be similar to how the Romani have been talking - didn't want a polity but an army.
• There is, however, an intense geopolitical precondition in order for one to think in Arendt's terms, and it means accepting European sociality
• She was post-Liberal but not Marxist

What does it mean to be mitsein?
What is it to live?
What is it to judge?

Like Cohen, she accepts that the Jews should stay in Germany and sees the Jews as a nation, but it is a German nation.

• Her antipolitical Zionism is based on her belief that Europe is the proper place of Jewry.
• Jews from Arab traditions (Mizrahim), the Spanish Sephardim, both are clearly inferior to European Jews in her mind (we read this in the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem); she's clearly brutal about this
• By 1947 she's thinking that Israel should be a binational federation and was adamantly against the dislocation of the Palestinians

As you can imagine, this has made Arendt a problematic thinker for Israel, in fact, Eichmann in Jerusalem was only recently translated (2000) and The Origins Totalitarianism is still not translated into Hebrew (2009).

How essential is her social ontology? Can thinking occur alone or is it always in the company of others?

• Arendt distinguishes between the vita contemplativa (includes philosophy) and the vita activa
• Lacan, "the soliloquy is always already with another in mind"
• Derrida (at Levinas' funeral), "every gesture is always to the Other"

Am I an "I" if I am not already with an Other?

• is epistemology first a social ontology;
  
• my social condition is a necessary precondition for me to exist
• Plurality may have something tragic in her thinking as she presumes heterogeneity but she lives to preserve a certain geopolitical inscription

Eichmann's fatal mistake (what he must hang for at the end of EIJ) was to think that he would no longer live with Jews, homosexuals, communists, etc. and so no one should have to live with him

One of Arendt's strong contributions to political science is to insist that without sociality, thinking and political thinking are not possible

Plurality is not the same thing as pluralism:

• plurality is a constant fissuring of what seems identical
• a constant difference in these monolithic categories

She concerns herself with refugees and the stateless because there will always be people that are unwanted within the State

Hers is a differentiated social ontology

She sees political action as horizontal and is vehemently opposed to sovereign authority.

• there is an obligation to dismantle the idea of sovereignty
• Perhaps there are ways of collaborative authority?
• She's more a communaire than a communist

The action of judgement is crucial, the affective dimension -this is what Eichmann lacks, his lack of thinking is his central failure:

(EIJ, 25) The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do....This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as "normal".... (emphasis added)

(EIJ, 26) [T]he judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, "normal" person... could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. [...] Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all "normal persons," must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was "no exception within the Nazi regime." However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only "exceptions" could be expected to react "normally." This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.

In the above (EIJ, 26) we see that Arendt is not only reporting on the trial but also she is calling into question the very capacity for how we understand law. We are compelled to know question how Justice is possible, if it is possible, when the Laws which govern our laws are not Just.

• To object to these social conditions would mean that Eichmann would have to become the exception to the rule
• Arendt sees this as illustrative of an unprecedented character: someone that has never been to trial before, in the history of Law. We have entered into a new era.
• (EIJ, 47-48) "But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann's character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view."

(EIJ, 49) ...Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented cliches (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliche) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. [...] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Eichmann is speaking, but he's not communicating in the manner that Arendt would insist upon:

• the ability to think is dependent upon thinking
  
• to think is to think in terms of the Other
  
• there is no thinking without the Other

What we see in Eichmann is not subjectivity but a person that is evacuated of subjectivity

• We cannot understand this form of evil without recognizing that evil had become normalized in Nazi Germany

Then we open for discussion

How can we understand Heidegger's Nazism without situating Heidegger in terms of his relationships to Jaspers and Arendt?

• Those relationships are marked by asymmetry and nonreciprocity
  
• Fanon points to Jaspers when trying to develop an ethics of decolonialization
• Heidegger never gave Arendt the proper recognition for being a thinker

What is the relationship between duality and plurality?

• It seems she suggests the need for duality (you-me) in order to think, but we need a plurality (us-them) in order to act
• Deleuze would say that we need an ethics that is not at the center because judgement has been overdetermined
• It's that this bureaucratic regimentation has overcome our sense of ethical thinking, this is what has become problematic

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 1

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

The dominance of slasher/splatter films in the '80s is perhaps more indicative of trauma and therapeutic engagement with "The Shower Scene" but this Psycho effect is over.

• there can be the interminability of both therapy and film; the late '80s seemed to be the end of the Psycho effect.
• Benjamin's "surgical intervention" can be seen at Universal Studios where the shower scene is endlessly repeated such that the effect of that scene has been attenuated
• this has led to a mass preparedness in anticipation of the disaster with its incumbent energy

Perhaps the most horrible moment in the genre is the underrepresented: we turn to the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and we see nothing in that face.

Situating the Psycho

1. within the horror genre
2. within psychotherapy

With vampirism one encounters melancholic yearning, holding on to the dead, including unmournable deaths and being cut-off by the Oedipal

The Devil - the pre-Oedipal father or primitive Father - primarily this is a select-client relationship with the Devil. What does the client get from the Devil? They get the Father, but one becomes the child of an adopted, choice-marked Father.

• We can see the Devil-father as an absolute authority, not triangulating with the mother and the root of sexual difference
• The Devil is the only occult figure that doesn't grant immortal life (unlike the Vampire)
• This is because he celebrates finitude, it presupposes that it will be uninhibited - not stuck on this existence or attached.
• So the Client must substitute without stopping
• The Client gets quality time with the knowledge of a certain deadline in future

Freddy Krueger, a demonic figure, comes about at the rise of DNA testing, where it was first utilized in paternity suits; it's key moment at that time was when it was utilized in a British court case to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the father had abused his daughter.

• (The first use of DNA in this manner was proposed by Alec Jeffreys; Rickels has the story wrong: the first use of this technique was a paternity case, but there was no rape.)

The Psychopath is a completely tendentious term

• everywhere we have a sense that the "psycho" is untreatable
• the psychopath represents a failure of a whole tradition of interpretation that culminates in psychoanalysis

D.W. Winnicott has a reputation as being "psychoanalysis lite": being too agreeable

• He has reconstructed the psyche based on a belief that the "psycho" state is easily possible
• Early on he wouldn't treat adolescents, turning them over to incarceration, but he had a turning point wherein he noticed in antisocial children's behaviors a gesture for hope
• We shouldn't dismiss these bad behaviors as only that, but these are attempts made by the children to communicate a point:
  
• a signal of hope that illuminates the lost environment

What we have surrendered to the "psychopath" is precisely what the psychopath is looking for: ego-management, and this is cause for hope.

Quick etymology

• Hope - indoeuropean, has roots in hunting language; refers to startled hesitation where one rethinks the next move; the word in German hunting language (Jägerspache) refers to this hesitation
• Schauer - German; Horror, associated with the powerful storms from the North Sea

The horror genre has always this environment of survival, the best way to survive is to kill.

• The survivor is part of the psychopathic environment
• with each survivor, the scope of hope grows more and more

Delinquency as a Sign of Hope (Winnicott): to catch them as early as possible; the senselessness of the antisocial behaveior, pre-Winnicottian-intervention

• There is a break in good parenting, leading to confusion. Sometimes the parent will spoil the child (not always useful)
• from this antisocial behavior may appear and from this we can hope because the child is trying to find a way to reconcile
• Winnicott privileges the psychotic because the psychotic has protected his authentic self; given this, therapy can be used to recover

Because we're all doomed, good enough mothering always falls short, we're all antisocial and potentially psychopathic. His group therapy sessions mean that we can have these revisitings and we can work through it together.

Psycho, A. Hitchcock.

• There is something accusatory about the swooping camera in the beginning of the film.
• That this scene is in such a heavy-named town (Phoenix), we can easily imagine a slashed town where violence is hard to contain.
• She is the image of the mother turned around, to whom you show disrespect, "You make respectability sound disrespectful."
• The "Shower Scene" itself: the violence of having been eradicated so completely and quickly.

Does film mummify its subject? The stuffed birds in the parlor

• there is something about the film medium that destroys its subject in order to preserve it

[END OF CLASS]

Avital Ronell's Evening Lecture

Avital Ronell gave an evening lecture entitled Have I Been Destroyed? which is part of an on-going work on authority.

For Hannah Arendt, the disappearing of authority is a calamity, what follows in the evacuating of enmity is monstrous.

For Kojeve authority (God) is out because the loss of God means we cannot root ethics in transcendence.

• Authority is like an emergency supply in the absence of God
• Is authority replaceable?
• Questioning authority isn't enough, we must draw back authority

How does one know whether the University has not destroyed me?

Trauma is what structures you:

• Truth was once affiliated with ruin and the resolution of the traumatic
  
• We are more responsible for an untraceable cause than ever before with minimal signage and modest moral directives
• Nancy situates our moment at the moment of tragedy
• We'll consider the destiny of democracy in the loss of tragedy

How do we imbue meaning into "human dignity" post Kant?

• "I wobble in place without truth that is my only point"
• Kojeve insists authority is not about force, "it doesn't get down an' dirty," it supersedes force with a sovereign aloofness
• But Kojeve misses the violence of language (Lacan)

Where do we locate authority's domain? Kant removed it from people and offices because it would be abusive to leave authority there, so he relocated authority to Law.

Derrida sees Law as not docile but an internal relationship with violence and power

Psychoanalysis is crowded-out bu Kojeve, Freud is begrudgingly brought into political analysis:

• Kojeve brings out the pleasure of judging which troubles justice; it's become acute and sexual, the psyche is outfitted with a juridical [something...], thus all these tv dramas
• we can see Kant sent judgement to the aesthetic realm so as to make judging sexy

Modern politics is located in Martin Luther, who targets judgement:

• He was fearful of a libidinal abandon in judgement cutting into the field of authority both worldly and eternal
• Faith meant that one could judge for oneself in these times
• The problem for Luther and Calvin was that one could go as far as becoming a conscientious objector

The price of linking justice, judgement, and love are strictly constrained by Luther so as to avoid the whole system of worldly order:

• he thought there would be nothing but murder and bloodshed
• not everyone is able to judge but only those invested with the sovereignty of the sword (Arendt seems to also be afraid of everyone judging)
• peasants cannot be allowed to judge and mercy is neither here nor there; so, there is no reprieve from the authority
  
• there is a libidinal joy in judgement; as Kafka showed us, Luther's father was a total asshole and we're still paying for it.

There is the rush to/of judgement, in drug terms

Not only is there the enjoyment in judging, but we also put ourselves up for review because there is pleasure in being judged.

Why was the official prescription for the crisis in the banlieus from both Sarkozy and Royale to increase the paternal presence?

Arendt asked in '58, what is authority?

• traces it back to education and child-rearing
• this is where authority is seen as a natural prerequisite

Who invented authority? Plato in response to the murder of Socrates

For Kojeve, Japan was the future of the West

The Brothers Quay, Day 3

The Brothers Quay taught a class entitled ANIMATED FILM wherein we viewed a number of films, primarily from former soviet states.

They're not proud of it, but they did it: they made a few commercials for Monsanto's Roundup Weed Killer. We watched them, they were good.

They also made a commercial for Badoit, here.

They made a commercial for Murphy's beer as well, but I can't find a link.

We watched Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood:


We viewed Yuri Norstein's The Tale of Tales:


Why is it that dead-air is not allowed?

Is pathos a flattening-out whereas sadness has layers?

We watched their collaboration with Ralf Ralf, The Summit
not unlike Sigur Ros' ( ):

NOTE: the Brothers Quay had no part in the making of the above video.

The Brothers seek to split the text apart so as to allow movement through the image and not to be overwhelmed by the text, and sometimes to suspend it.

We viewed their Piano Tuner of Earthquakes:

which they say is an homage to Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel

They said of this, "We have a lot of reverence for the texts we use and we wonder if maybe as a secret revenge we hit the images hard, we explode the images."

We then watched Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge:


Following this with Borowczyk's adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's Rosalie:


Then we watched The Hedgehog and the Fog Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova:


[END OF CLASS]

The Brothers Quay, Evening Lecture

The Brothers were introduced by Siegfried Zielinski

We viewed sections of
Institute Benjamenta


Eurydice She, so Beloved (alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus):


Streets of Crocodiles:


Duet—Variations for the Convalescence of 'A'

and In Absentia (a collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, this was based on Robert Walser's The Pencil Fields)

Andre Habib has an excellent interview with the Brothers that we might want to enjoy, here.

The Brothers Quay, Day 2

The Brothers Quay taught a class entitled ANIMATED FILM wherein we viewed a number of films, primarily from former soviet states.

"The puppet is not dead, it's just still."

(This conversation reminds me of Graham Parkes' work on rock gardens. But it also reminds me of that William James essay What Makes a Life Significant? where he asks if it is not we who are the cold, dead, clods for not seeing.)

"Can the object hold that imagination, the stimmel which leads us to another plane? When we choose the elements... we're drawn to the organic... you realize there is an explosion of life, we're abducting the organic - we choose a palette like a painter."

We are suggested to look at Kleist's On a Marionette Theatre, should a marionette have human qualities? Also, The Uncanny Valley is mentioned, thus we must review Freud's The Uncanny as well as Jentsch's The Psychology of the Uncanny and of course Hoffmann's The Sandman.

We then viewed Jan Svenkmayer's A Game with Stones:


Your eyes aren't as fast as the stone. Stones can kiss as softly as people.

We then viewed Svankmayer's Historia Naturae:



We then began watching some films from Walerian Borowczyk,
Les Jeux des Anges (1/2):

(2/2):

and then Renaissance:


These films show just how significant the soundrtack is: the more ambiguous the image, the more present the soundtrack must be.

We then began viewing a section of their Institute Benjamenta (oddly enough, this scene is available at youtube):


In this scene they were hoping for a musicalization of space.

We then watched their adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, This Unnameable Little Broom:


To create a limitless space, sound and camera angles were used; but it was also limiting
Putting Gilgamesh on a tricycle or Enkidu flying were in part chosen because puppets fall down.

We watched Borowczyk's Une Collection Particulaire; and that was one of the most memorable experiences I had at EGS.

We followed that with the chase scene from Buster Keaton's Seven Chances:


We then watched Alexander Alexieff and Claire Parker's gorgeous Le Nez:
(1/2)

(2/2)


These are also the folks that created the opening sequence for Orson Welles' The Trial


How do they do it?


We then watched the last scene of Fred Astaire's The Band Wagon:


We also viewed some of Astaire and Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings (here is the trailer):


[END OF CLASS]

The Brothers Quay Day 1

The Brothers Quay taught a class entitled ANIMATED FILM wherein we viewed a number of films, primarily from former soviet states.

The chance encounter, from Andre Breton's statement, "Beauty as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table," this chance encounter is really central to their work. They love scavenging at local flea markets and are consistently struck by the manner in which objects are arranged; perhaps unconsciously so by the guy running the stall.

Working with puppets, like dance, is a matter of reading texts without vomiting-up dialogue.

We then watched a documentary about their film De Artificiali Perspectiva (this link will show it to you) which discusses anamorphosis. There was some discussion about Holbein's The Ambassadors, which utilizes anamorphosis with great success.

(Not from class, but I find it relevant to introduce here: Holbein's The Body of Christ in the Tomb is also a significant painting, particularly in trying to understand the existential dilemma that has accompanied Modernity. Dostoevsky features this painting prominently in his novel The Idiot. It is said that Dostoevsky was so fascinated by the painting that his wife had to pull him away from it for fear it might induce an epileptic fit in him. The painting seems to illustrate quite well the nonconvergence of metaphysics and our lived experience: there is Christ, simply, stupidly, dead - no suggestion of resurrection whatsoever.)

We then followed-up their film with Medvedkin's Happiness. We then viewed Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik, a documetary about Medvedkin and the bizarro history that for three generations of Russian filmmakers was rediscovered again and again.

"The surreal cannot be bought off the shelf; surrealism sought to enrich reality, to expand our reality to something wondrous."

Elia Suleiman (Evening Lecture)

Elia Suleiman, for his evening lecture, gave us the rare chance to view his newest film The Time That Remains. As he put it, "fresh out the oven, it just came from Cannes."



This film is not a "political" film in the sense that it insists on someone (or some group) being right or wrong. It is a film that is largely biographical, based on the letters of Suleiman's father starting in 1948 (when Israel became a nation). This is the story of a Palestinian Israeli family, but it is very much Seuliman's family and belongs perhaps more to films such as The Royal Tennenbaums in terms of its humor.

And it is a humorous film; how can any serious treatment of a family not be seriously funny?

"This is the first time I adopted the period of 1948; it is very much my father's story," as Suleiman told us after the film. "To avoid the presumption, or arrogance, of knowing what I was filming I had to stay very close to the texts," his father's letters, "because I do not know what it was like to live during that time."

This film is absolutely stunning in its love and its eye for the beauty of being alive; even when we wish we were dead (or that everyone else was dead).

I cannot recommend this film highly enough.

Michael Hardt, Day 3

Hardt taught a class entitled "POLITICAL ACTIVISM: MULTIPLICITY & EMPIRE" where we read through three texts: Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (both written by Deleuze & Guattari), and Empire (written by Hardt and Antonio Negri).

This was the final day with Hardt (we were in class with Hardt from 10am until 7pm for two days and from 10am until 11pm on one day)

Day three we discuss his collaborations with Antonio Negri.

Tony's biography:
Born in 1933, trained in Political Science, State Theory; he brags that he was the youngest Italian political science professor; "He was a precocious young scholar."

The central figure for Negri's early political activity was Mario Tronti

• They were concerned with the potential autonomy from capital and from the Party: "operaismo" where the workers themselves can produce their own subjectivity
• Fall of 1969 - potere operaio (the workers' party), very hierarchical, but it wasn't obvious who the leader was and in 1973 the group dissolved itself because it wasn't doing the work it had set out to do
• May of '68, the Italians say, lasted 10 years in Italy, but not in the same way as it was in Paris: the early '70s were marked by a growing clandestine fascist terrorist movement, thus in response was developed a clandestine leftist terrorist group, The Red Brigade

Two symbolic poles of the mid-70s:

Red Brigade | Autonomia
clandestine | open
violent | sometimes violent
centralized | decentralized

The Red Brigade was really focused on the spectacle; Negri was very visible in the organizing of Autonomia

There was an explosion of creativity in Bologna in 1977, but when the Red Brigade kidnapped the Prime Minister in '78 this all ended.

• The Red Brigade saw the State as fascist and their only response could be armed struggle, so they assassinated the PM
• The government in response passed Emergency Laws: the thinking was, "take away the water and the fish will die"
• The context in which these leftist groups operated was criminalized, thus 6,000 people were arrested, including Antonio Negri
• The law was such that these people could be held in prison for 2 years without charge and 4 years without trial; so Negri spent some time in prison

Italian law states that no politician can be held in prison for political actions so Negri was elected to Parliament

• In protest to this, the Parliament went on strike to reinstate Negri's sentence
• Negri escaped to France
• For a time, Negri lived with Felix Guattari; he adopted the pseudonym Antoin Guattari

Hardt and Negri met in Paris in 1987.

• Negri returned to Italy in '97 in part because the laws governing professors in France are such that one must retire at the age of 65
• Also, there was talk at that time in Italy of reconciliation and amnesty for the '70s
• Negri went to prison for 2 years
• Then 2 years where he could work during the day outside the prison but had to sleep in prison each night
• Then 2 years of house arrest

Rather than liberation of work (from the bourgeoisie to the workers) the push within Autonomia was to liberate workers from work.

Michael Hardt,
born 1960; friends with Brian Massumi, who was friends with Guattari and so Hardt was able to meet Negri in Paris.

Empire
Hardt and Negri set out to structure Empire in some interesting ways, for example each chapter would be 30 pages, end in italics, and section 1.1 would be related to section 4.1

Imperialism is no longer effective in describing or discussing the current global order. A new form of sovereignty is being generated and perhaps also a new form of power.

Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy - Polybius said that Rome was all three of these; Hardt and Negri wanted to refer to this composite nature when using their term Empire

Globalization has two non-communicating alternatives:

1. nation-states are important and are in control (and should be in control)
2. transnational entities are here and thus negate the need for the nation-state

Capitalists can't rule themselves, they need a nation-state to help contain the fire. If there is global capitalism, where no nation-state can act in the interest of global capital, then what is the form of sovereignty to be?

There is no center, there is no outside of world order today

• rather than a world system with policed boundaries (fixed identities) there is hierarchy, yes, but within a boundlessness
• Analyzing what would be the completed form of what we see today, not unlike Marx in his time

What are the political consequences of the presented analysis?

• If the U.S. is still the imperialist ruler, then we should respond in some obvious ways: wars of liberation, support Iraqi resistance, etc.
• But these don't seem to be the solutions to the problems, do they?

Agamben's State of Exception: the power is transcendent and transcendental

• Empire sees power on a transcendental
• How we read power dictates how we respond

Today we have a breakdown in the fixed temporality:

• at Google, for example, it is less clear when you are at work and when you are at recreation
• likewise at the bottom of the economy it is unclear because during the day you are a server and at night you are the night guard for a mall, etc.

Three approaches to Multitude

Political - in contrast to "The People" (as a function of unity);

• the crowd, the mass, these are multiplicities, but they are indifferent.
  
• Multitude contains singularities, that which is always different.
  
• The mass, the mob, these are passive and need to be lead
• the multitude can rule and lead itself

Economic - rethinking the working class

• Multitude as a class definition, this seeks to define where and how the working class produces

The Party - has classically been centered with an agenda

• Multitude is without a central agenda nor structure
• Seattle '99 was a point of recognition: media were confused by the heterogeneity of the activists; this multiplicity was nonetheless able to organize

Is it possible for the multitude to act in common? This is the challenge to Multitude

• the William Morris epigraph, at the beginning of Empire, is there to illustrate the prevailing feeling of the times: that we cannot imagine an order outside that which we have:
• "Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under a another name."

The cycle of struggle, how do political movements communicate?

(This is from the discussion at this point):
Bakhtin said that if we want to understand an object we must throw ourselves into it and we will understand what it is by its resistance to our advances.
Twitter creates an ambient awareness, but it asks, "What are you doing now?" when the question should be, "What should be done?"
Is it as D&G propose, that we are several? Is it the case that individual multiplicity? What composes the multitude?
D&G would say this makes the multiplicity of multiplicity

What is the continuity between Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and Empire?

• One continuity: recognizing that decoding does result in suffering and a lack of power
• That's not to say that we don't tell everyone to stay in their right place

BwO seems to develop through AO & ATP

• First, in its opposition to desiring machines, it's antiproductive
• in ATP develops a necessary context in which desiring machines can produce a question of better and worse BwO's

How is democracy possible? There has to be a transformation of the people's capacity to realize their gift:

(Empire, 216) It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing these "normal" modes of life, don't despair - realize your gift!)

What would an example of a molecular movement that made a molar difference?

It's not either...or...: hydrogen and oxygen make a fire but also make water

[END OF CLASS]

Michael Hardt, Day 2 Evening Lecture UPDATE 1.10.2009

UPDATED to include video of Hardt's lecture:

Integral to the EGS curriculum are the evening lectures, which are mandatory for the students to attend.

Michael Hardt presented the first lecture of the August session, "The Common in Communism."

Hardt and Negri wrote Empire, then Multitude, and The Common will be their newest book.

The economic crisis of 2008 has similarities to talking about ecologic change: a time for revisiting Capitalism is under way or is inevitable.

Clarifying: neither public not private properties but the Common in communism. This talk is a critique of property.

To abandon the terms of freedom, democracy, etc. would upset people and ignore the work of those that have dedicated themselves to these projects over the last centuries.

How, and what, people produce and how production is organized has changed.

Marx's Relation to Private Property

• there is a distinction made between mobile property and immobile property
• this distinction marks the bourgeoisie of the mid-19th century
• there is at this time a movement from rent (collector) to profit (capitalist investor)
• Marx foresaw that all aspects of society will have to adapt to the qualities of industrial production

Industry today has to intellectualize and so there is now this movement to "immaterial" production and today's struggle is between exclusive and shared property

The notion of scarcity is no longer germane to talking about immaterial property (copyright, say)

Today we might argue that scientific production (like internet production) really requires open access to production of the past

• The more the Common is corralled, the more production is inhibited

The battle between private property against the Common is the mark of globalization:

• On the one hand there is the rise of privatizing extractive industries, a neoliberal mode of relating to Nature
• On the other hand we have the artificial Common. To privatize this is problematic but it nonetheless continues.

Piracy of biological knowledge is not correct because real pirates take something more noble: real property

• Today there is a shift back to rent rather than profit: this is what copyright does
• Finance is relative rent not absolute rent

Christian Marazzi: the so-called Real Economy is just as fictional as the finance economy is.

What would it mean to say an object is ours not only when it is in our hands?

• the positive content of communism is the positive expression of new thinking, new hearing, etc.

Production not only creates objects for the subjects but also produces subjects for the objects:

• Anthropogenetic production (Marazzi) - producing man; Hardt would call this biopolitical produciton
• Capital vol. 1: All of capitalist production are for the production of forms of social life

Foucault "Remarks on Marx"

• cautions against humanism in "man produces man" he sees it as the destruction of who we are and the creation of something other

Capital, in other words, is producing its own grave diggers

• The task at hand is to organize these conditions

Openness as a problematic when trying to organize
(Note to self: couldn't we think of 無爲 (wu wei)? As it says in the Dao, "the sage does nothing and in doing nothing, nothing is left undone.")

Michael Hardt, Day 2 (2/2)

Hardt taught a class entitled "POLITICAL ACTIVISM: MULTIPLICITY & EMPIRE" where we read through three texts: Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (both written by Deleuze & Guattari), and Empire (written by Hardt and Antonio Negri).

A great way to supplement my notes is to use the notes he has posted on his site at Duke University.

This was a particularly informative class and so I've had to divide the notes into two postings; I do this only because I want to post notes once a day until I've posted all the notes and day 2 took me a long time to type.

Part 1 of Day 2 can be found here.

Antimimesis (Becomings)
"One of the main problems of natural history was to conceptualize the relationships between animals." In this section D&G discuss their beef with analogy. As we may have noticed earlier in these notes, D&G are against representation and in this section we get an expanded argument from them outlining their call against representation.

If I understand correctly, their problem with representation is that representation requires an original, something that has a fixed identity; to accept the notion of an original that can be re-presented is to accept also that what first appeared has not changed. Once we begin accepting representation as a mode of understanding the world it seems a short step then accept fascist representation?
So here we have a rejection of relations among animals as their function in a structure:

(ATP, 233-4) [Natural history] is very different in this respect from later evolutionism, which defined itself in terms of genealogy....[a]s we know, evolutionism would arrive at the idea an evolution that does not necessarily operate by filiation. But it was unavoidable that it begin with the genealogical motif. ...[B]ecause natural history is concerned primarily with the sum and value of differences, it can conceive of progressions and regressions, continuities and major breaks, but not an evolution in the strict sense, in other words, the possibility of a descent the degrees of modification of which depend on external conditions. Natural history can only think in terms of relationships (between A and B), not in terms of production (from A to x).

The ability for change to occur within a subject is not possible within the natural history paradigm because relationships understood in this way are based upon an externalized, transcendental Ideal-type such that A resembles B, B resembles C, etc. D&G call these comparisons series: "In the case of a series, I say a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.; all these terms conform in varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series." (ATP, 234)

D&G then point out the two forms of analogy that are employed, between popular analogy, "gills are to breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air;" and royal analogy, "...the heart is to gills as the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]..." (ATP, 234)

• The first example requires imagination, they say, "one has to take branchings in the series into account, fill in the apparent ruptures, ward off false resemblances and graduate true ones...." (ATP, 234)
• "The second form of analogy is considered royal because it requires instead all the resources of understanding (entendement), in order to define equivalent relations by discovering, on the one hand, the independent variables that can be combined to form a structure and, on the other hand, the correlates that entail one another within each structure." (ATP, 234)
• With both cases Nature is conceived as mimesis. If I understand correctly, it's not that mimicry as such is always a negative, rather, D&G are arguing against the objectivity of this mimetic quality that has transcended from the medieval theological notions of the Great Chain of Being to Jung and Levi-Strauss' arguments for a structural understanding of the symbol (they point to Levi-Strauss' work on totems, pg. 236)

If not mimesis, then?

• the painted bird (it is not like something) doesn't represent a bird, it is a bird in the same way that a bird is a bird-becoming, just as this painting is a line-becoming-a-bird.
• So, this is a leveling-out where there is not a hierarchy between original and copy

The question becomes: to what extent will this attack on representation in art also apply to an attack on political representation (such that representation keeps us from democratic functioning)?

All this talk about becomings has me thinking about Whitehead's Process Philosophy; Hardt tells us that Deleuze is a big fan of Whitehead.

The challenge of constitution or composition distinguishes ATP form AO

Chapters 12 and 13 were originally published as a treatise on nomadology.

What do Deleuze and Guattari mean by the State and War Machine?

"War is politics by another means," Clausewitz

D&G (as well as Foucault) invert the above statement, "Politics is war by another means."

• Each state is a redundancy among the stratification
• The overcoding of the despot is the resonance among the segmentations
  

  (NOTE: we were given three handouts which somewhat help to situate this talk about overcoding the despot; it also facilitates understanding the three syntheses. I will try to find a copy online as I vaguely recall seeing this a year ago)
  

  
  

War Machine

• The primary figure of the war machine is the nomad; it is characterized by smooth space, whereas despotic machines are characterized by striated space.
  
• What do we mean by smooth? They reference the desert and the steppe:
  

  (ATP, 384) Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the forest, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being "between" also means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it, oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a communicational role; or, on the contrary, it means that it turns against them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a noncommunicating role force or a force of divergence like a "wedge" digging in. The nomads turn first against the forest and the mountain dwellers, then descend upon the farmers.
  

  
  
• War is not the object of the war machine, it is the result of the encounter between nomad and State:
  

  (ATP, 416-7) [A]sking if war is the object of the war machine. ...[W]e have seen that the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement within this space, and corresponding composition of people: this is its sole and veritable positive objects (nomos). Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form.
  

  
  

• The State must always seek to stop the nomad:
  

  (ATP, 385-6) One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from the nomads.
  

  
  
• State is not against migration, they are all about regulating it.

The first half of chapter 12 insists on the differences between State and war machine
The second half of chapter 12 distinguishes the relationship between State and nomad

Proposition XIV
Here we have the means by which the war machine is appropriated by the State.

• States today are organized by a world order,
  
• There is no global State that rules the war machine
• Rather, there is a smooth global empire:
  

  (ATP, 461) It is an absurdity to postulate a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions. No one is even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply. Similarly, the States are affected by all kinds of coefficients of uncertainty and unpredictability. ...But that is just one more reason to make a connection between politics and axiomatics. For in science an axiomatic is not at all transcendent, autonomous, and decision-making power opposed to experimentation and intuition.
  

  
  
• The enemy is not another State, but the Whichever Enemy (l'enemie quelle qu'ont)
  

This is an anticipatory text which sees that borders are lessening, there is a smoothing of the world order:

globalization = smoothing | states = striation

• Previously the State deployed the war machine but now the war machine deploys the State: a violence that is coded as peace
• The war machine needs an enemy but there is no fixity of the enemy, thus: Osama, Saddam, Noriega, etc. They are simply place holders.

[END OF DAY 2]

Class Notes Intermission: Good Reads

Here are some links that have good reads:

• An Oral History of the Bush White House (Thanks, Jill!)
• The Grapes of Wrath Revisited
  
• Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA (Thanks, Terry!) - this one answers the necessary Dispensationalist question: after the Rapture, what happens to my pet?