archive : s0metim3s

Baudrillard on the EU vote and the emergence of a democratic form of State terrorism. His remarks on the EU as a form of hostage-taking seem to have upset many. Come back Jean, all is forgiven.

[That should have been , You! - but I haven’t the font handy]

I do not entirely understand the recent inclination toward taking Badiou seriously. He is a bore - a Maoist, Leninist bore for all that.

He drones on about “victory” as if the Bolshevik revolution was indeed victorious in something more than just instating Bolshevism for a time - but thankfully no longer - as the horizon of communist politics.

His big project, which shapes all else, is to insist on the Leninist injunction that ‘theory’ answer the question of What Is To Be Done? He writes: “Our duty, supporting ourselves on Lenin’s work, is to reactivate in politics, against the morose obsession of our times, the very question of thought. To all those who claim to practice political philosophy, we ask: What is your critique of the existing world? What can you offer us that’s new? Of what are you the creator?” What could be more morose and not-at-all-new than this desire - oh, sorry, duty - to assume the role of the Philosopher-God-King?

His reading of Deleuze is kind of clever, but really, it only serves as a riposte to those who read Deleuze without actually reading Deleuze - but the cretinising mill of Cultural Studies does not exhaust philosophy (or Deleuze), even if it astutely shapes Badiou’s feel for an audience/market.

Badiou insists that differences should not be subsumed. Fine, but this is by no means the principle of decentralisation at work. Instead, it’s the Leninist principle (particularly notable amongst Trotskyists) of splitting as a virtue - a means to access some ‘universal truth’ through constant polemic and more-prole-than-thouness. A thousand flowers blooming, but all, apparently, flowers - competing for market share.

But I suspect the inclination to take Badiou seriously has much to do with a certain resonance of his theory of ‘the event’. For Badiou, this is little more than the exemplariness of the Bolsheviks, taken out for a stroll in somewhat more elegant prose than most Leninists are capable of. But, I think, for some the resonance lies in the experience of ‘events’, such as the anti-summit protests and similar. Yet, rather than wonder about the failure (and limits) of such ‘events’ - or indeed ‘the event’ - in breaking with politics as usual, ‘the event’ finds its reified, nostalgic iteration in Badiou and, hence, a readership. ‘Event’ is a poor cousing to the Situ notion of ‘the situation’, given that the latter retains a critique of the spectacular which girds Badiou’s event. But, more than this, Badiou’s ‘eventism’ rests on the notion of an unfolding of Truth and Universality, not the transformation of the micro-physics of power, the way bodies might move, differently and otherwise.

Badiou’s theory is, as I think he would admit, a metaphysics of revolution. And it’s here that Badiou is at his most dubious: there are a few priveliged intellects which have accessed the truth of Being by way of an exposure to the event. This is how the Big Subject of Revolution is formed. Let’s watch some fading footage of May 1968, or some other Big Event, and pass the incense. The priestly caste is making a comeback - or at least wanting to.

I’ll let Sergio Bologna have the last word. Although taken from a debate with Negri, it seems relevant, perhaps to a debate with both:

“Conflict as the moment of identity, as ‘the’ moment of constitution, of politics, of class constitution … this for me is a forced understanding. Amongst other things, this conception still attributes great value to visibility. The ‘other’, in order to be such, must be visible, manifest, and the more clamorous the conflict, the greater the identity it confers … This is the back door through which the traditional logic of politics is returned to play. I prefer the image of beams eaten from within by termites, I prefer a non-visible, non-spectacular path, the idea of the silent growth of a body that is foreign to the sort of visibility that leaves you hostage to the universe of mediation.”

Ethica Anthropofagon, by Aleksandar Prokopiev

1. Always be hungry! Then you’ll become like each other.

2. Treat him or her like a pancake. Smear with honey, cherry jam, peanut butter, chocolate. Taste as s/he wants to be tasted.

3. Give him or her a little metal box, decorated with your initials, containing your index finger without a ring or your ear with an earring. S/he will be enormously satisfied by this gesture, as if you’d given the last rose or a new time-travel machine.

4. Be gourmands. In every mouthful find something of yourself. Chew sincerely and you become necessary to each other.

5. Imagine! Searching for food really is as exciting as eating. Be falcon and chick, wolf and lamb, lioness and stag. The role of prey will change with the weather: when it’s hot you’ll be the victim; when it’s rainy, s/he will be.

6. Improve appearances! Use lace, velvet, silk or mohair: inspired by the refinement of French hedonists. Their deepest drive is to bring together spring water and ripe cheese; decay and pink skin fresh from the bath. The smell of incense could be as brutal as a god biting into an over-ripe pear.

7. Make jokes! Write a suicide note and put it in an envelope. Next, ravenously eat a miniature marzipan replica of yourself (or it could be made of jelly or blancmange). Then, nonchalantly, rip open the envelope and read your testament: “I donate my body and soul to culinary progress.”

8. Romance dies on an empty stomach. But to be stuffed is banal, makes you lethargic and punctures fantasies. Every day tickle your appetite but never overfill your stomach. Always be hungry!

Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers on why ‘Fortress Europe’ is an imprecise diagram. Accurate, as it goes but not quite Mezzadra or Balibar, imo.

A very nice, thoughtful piece by Tom Roberts, Laboured Enthusiasm, asks - among other things - whether an economy based on beleif can admit doubt. He also makes the point that it’s not so much that market forces drain enthusiasm, but that the collective productions of the amateur economy of enthusiasts transforms “into atomised fields of financial competition”. But i’m left asking the question of what remains indigestible in all this, which is not simply reducible to the antitheses of ‘collective’ versus ‘atomised’. Because, surely, belief is that which binds ‘collective expressions of enthusiasm’ to ‘atomised competition’. Without the former, there would be no delivery of a niche market for the latter. Jason Read’s answer to ‘What is indigestible?’ goes something like: ‘that which exceeds the conditions of production’. I would have liked Roberts to have explored something of those ‘doubts’. Then again, this has me thinking of Sloterdjik’s Critique of Cynical Reason And, also, wondering whether it’s possible to talk about an excess of belief, or as Zizek might say: the potential subversiveness of taking people (or a politics) ‘at their word’.

The second Fadaiat - Arabic for ‘through spaces’ - is on soon, June 20-25. Beautifully described as a political, artistic and technological laboratory, it takes place in Tanger (Spain) and Tarifa (Morocco), on the border between Europe and Africa. Organised by a loose coalition of groups such as the Frassanito Network, D-A-S-H, kein.org, and Hackitectura, it focusses on freedom of movement (of people and knowledge), cartography and [a theme I’m still mulling over the implications of] biosyndicalism. More here.

Also, Borderhack 2005, on the US-Mexican border between August 5-7. I think, the fifth Borderhack event.

Grace Jones, b. May 19. From The Biblical Tales of the Goddess: “It is clear that not enough people are aware of the Gay Goddess that is Grace Jones. She is without a doubt the most feminine man alive.”

But the queer Jones is only half the story, and for that reason, misses something important: “Jones’ bold and often confrontational dress and performance style played with and disrupted primitivist myths about black sexuality. In collaboration with artists like Jean-Paul Goude and Keith Haring, Jones transformed her body into medley characters, many of which satirized a primitivist reading of the black female body. The multiple personas of Grace Jones ranged widely from overly sexualized dance performances in which she donned a gorilla or tiger suit to very masculinized self-representations. For these performances Jones would appear with a crew cut in a tailored men’s suit. Both these modes of representation in Jones’ work, as hyper-sexualized animal and instances of cross-dressing have been related to Josephine Baker’s performances, more specifically, her “jungle” performances in banana and tusk skirts and the famous photographs of Baker in a top hat and tuxedo.” Marlene Dietrich, perhaps, but definitely Josephine Baker. And, of course, the gorilla suit is a particular mainstay of subversive cabaret - such as the sharp cut of Cabaret’s ‘If You Could See Her Through My Eyes’ number.

Slave to the Rhythm, (From the Island Life album, 1985)

Work all day, as men who know,
Wheels must turn to keep, to keep the flow,
Build on up, don’t break the chain,
Sparks will fly, when the whistle blows,
Never stop the action,
Keep it up, keep it up,
Work to the rhythm,
Live to the rhythm,
Love to the rhythm,
Slave to the rhythm,
Axe to wood, in ancient time,
Man machine, power line,
Fires burn, heart beats strong,
Sing out loud, the chain gang song.