archive : s0metim3s

Lots of commentary on the French referendum vote. The Curmudgeon says a bravo to “blocking the bad”. Matt over at Long Sunday on the “pseudo-democratic abberation” and asks whether the far left is up for the fight. Ronda Hauber argues that the ‘no’ vote was a rejection of Europe As Market. Then there are those who take as given that the expansion and integration of Europe will lead to a better world.

Which brings me to two quibbles.

Well, it seems a small majority of voters in France did not feel sufficiently persuaded and cast a ‘no’ vote against the treaty. I’m going to go out on a limb here and argue that it’s not despite the arguments put by Habermas, Beck and Negri that the referendum failed. It’s because those arguments were put, in the way they were, by the people who put them. It was the (Malcolm Turnbull) kiss of death.

Habermas and various others, such as Gunter Grass, appealed to a high modernism: “Do all you can to prevent France from betraying progress!” Ulrich Beck effused that “Europe may even become a beacon of freedom in a turbulent world.” Negri talked in similar terms of progress and (without quite using that word) enlightenment. So, when you get right down to it, this has little to do with the specific clauses of the treaty just voted on (no one really talked about these as Virilio noted), and everything to do with their desires to be cast in the role of ‘public intellectuals’ and all its glorious corrolaries such as ‘the public sphere’ and so on.

I’ve been leafing through Kant of late, for another essay, and wondering about this passage from the Critique of Pure Reason:

“Without the control of criticism reason is, as it were, in a state of nature, and can only establish its claims and assertions by war. Criticism, on the contrary, deciding all questions according to the fundamental laws of its own institution, secures to us the peace of law and order, and enables us to discuss all differences in the more tranquil manner of a legal process.”

It’s interesting for its argument about the conditions under which Reason becomes, is, force. I suppose one could read this as a Kantian - liberal - explanation of the state of emergency: the absence of critique (the absence of a critical media, or ‘public sphere’ or ‘critical intellectuals’) as the conditions under which democracy becomes inoperative, and so forth. But one could also read this as the working premise of those above who argued for a ‘yes’ vote. With the idea of the EU cast in the role of Critique. The idea of the EU, which is to say, various critical intellectuals in search of a public - feeling left out of the loop, hankering after the apparently non-violent tranquility of legal process and (global) law and order.

Which reminds me: here’s an article condemning Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude on the basis of being ‘too pomo’ and not sufficiently outlining what a new form of global governance might be like. The reviewer is quite wrong. They aren’t really very ‘pomo’ at all, although it’s anyone’s guess what North Americans imagine that term to mean. And they do outline what model of global governance is preferable. Well, it’s the EU, of course.

“Since you must admit that there is nothing outside the universe, it can have no limit and is accordingly without end or measure. […] the boundary cannot stand firm anywhere, and final escape from this conclusion is precluded by the limitless possibility of running away from it.” - Lucretius (c.99-55 bc), De Rerum Natura - Book I (trans. RF Latham, Penguin, 1952, pp. 55-6). A different translation here, in part: “does compel that thou concede the all spreads everywhere, owning no confines”. And further along: “the chance for further flight prolongs forever the flight itself.”

I got an email a couple or so weeks ago from someone who’d read my article in Mute, but found it, as they put it, “difficult to digest”, and wanted me to suggest other things to read on the topic of precarity. Around the same time, Danny Butt remarked elsewhere on, as he termed it, the consumptive dynamics that accompanies the discussion of ‘precarity’. And in the middle of this, I came across Adbusters’ most recent ‘Big Idea’ forum on, yes, ‘precarity’. Adbusters, of course, being the quintessential propagators of a consumerism - hip niche-market - posing as politics.

That said, here are a few articles that are worth reading and not simply digesting for the purposes of the being-seen-to-be-in or the forming-of the niche market:

Anonymous, ‘Is Precarity Enough?’
Werner Bonefeld, The Politics of Debt
The discussion paper from the Frassanito Network, which I posted here (scroll down some).
Franco Berardi’s article is also worth a look, if you can read German or Italian.

I’m sure there are others - I’ll add as I can recall. Not to mentioned the numerous studies on intermittent, casualised work, or simply changes to labour markets and so on, which don’t use the term ‘precarity’. Then, of course, there’s the whole philosophical discussion on precariousness, little of which discusses this in relation to work, but much of which turns on the question of the foundation of politics or, rather: the non-foundation of politics. But that makes it all that much more difficult to digest, I suppose. Bon apetitit.

H gives a brief rundown on the recent arrests of five people involved in the campaigns against Italy’s internment camps. Another article here: ‘The Borders of Democracy’. A StateWatch article gives a good outline of the laws regarding ’subversive association’.

Biosyndicalism - or biosindicalismo - has been travelling around a little of late in euro circles, emerging principally in Spanish discussions around that other recent meme, ‘precarity’.

Textwise, there’s a short article by Andrea Fumagalli, ‘European Precariat Biosyndicalismo’ at Interactivist, which Nate translated from the Spanish [orig. here]. There’s also ‘’Precarious Ideas On Biosyndicalism’, also in Spanish, and which Nate has indicated he’ll be translating soonish. The word also appears in the upcoming Fadaiat callout, and as part of a seminar with Precarias a la Deriva. With my limited Spanish, the latter provides perhaps the most detail, but even here, not so much.

As far as my Spanish will allow, for Precarias a la Deriva the word is meant to indicate an “overcoming of previous the union form and and first steps of a tool of struggle that as yet does not have a name, but that starts off and is located against the precarisation of existence.” Moreover, it is an attempt to locate a common plane for a myriad of experiences and organisational tools: such as “the absence of collective rights”, non-firm-specific struggles, mobile strike funds, and so forth.

In many ways, I think the concept suffers from the same problems as does the use of ‘precarity’. But more specifically: a search for the commonplace, without once pondering the question of whether arriving at a commonplace is in fact a condition of struggle or whether it indicates, as I think it does, a politics of nostalgia and loss formed against the presumption of the Fordist themes of homogeneity and collectivity as both exemplary and necessary. For instance, when, in the entire history of capitalism, have ‘collective rights’ actually been present, as something other than the result of national, gendered and racialised representations through which the collective was then able to posit itself as, often by force, collective? It is not a question here of insisting on a fuller, more adequate and additive, representational form (corporatism or pluralism), but of moving beyond the desire for representation that, in its effects, functions as a substitute for organisation.

In this sense, it would seem important to cleave those aspects of the discussion around biosyndicalism - such as mobile strike funds, non-firm specific strategies, and so on - from nostalgia and the desire for a commonplace in which plenitude will be attained. Werner Hamacher’s discussion of National Socialism is worth considering here, particularly given the implicit productivism that pervades the theme of “all life is work” coupled with the themes of loss and plenitude. Where is the desire for escape? Also worth thinking about more is Sergio Bologna’s discussion of the IWW in ‘Class Composition and the Theory of the Party”, where he discusses the way the IWW transformed mobility into a vector of organisation, the ‘hobo agitator’.

Why the persistent fear of contintency, the fear of an ‘absence’? Why not a precarious politics, a contingent form of organisation? Why not a toolbox of tactics and strategies which do not require the foundationalism of representational politics to be put to use? For the moment, the discussions around biosyndicalism seems to me to reproduce the insight that ‘all life is work’, rather than offer a way out.

Things I read today, as I well and truly enter procrastination mode, resisting having to write a review of a book that I find annoying - and bewilderingly awful at times. The Curmudgeon writes about the two Patties, Smith and Hearst - the way hearing a song, or watching a doco triggers a cascade of memories and reflections on the passage of time. Zainab Bawa on the promenade. Jamie King feels the pulse of the blogosphere as it becomes apparent that a national ID card has been passed into law in the US. Scott McLemee on the most photographed philosopher in history - found via Pas au-dela. A really dumb ‘critique’ of John Holloway’s book by M. Junaid Alam, found via Projekt Subaltern. [As Poulantzas would say, ‘It’s the form of the state, not the personnel, stupid.’] But the review is already overdue so, finally, I make myself read something ‘relevant’, or at least something which will make me enjoy the writing even if I don’t like the book. I start off by re-reading parts of Derek Sayer’s The Violence of Abstraction, which is kind of, remotely, relevant - if one happened to be heading down a path away from the book review at hand. But then, knowing this is not working, I turn to Ranciere’s On the Shore of Politics - not at all relevant, but it makes me approach the prospect of writing as something other than duty, work. Maybe that’ll work, make work not seem quite like work. I am obviously lacking in the necessary enthusiasm here.