archive : s0metim3s

The beloved and I went and saw Mysterious Skin, screening at the Melbourne Film Fest, the other day. Family First (aka Assemblies of God - born-again mecantilists) and the Australian Family Association (Opus Dei type Catholics) are currently seeking to have the film banned.

… which is the motto of today. Obviously, I got bored with the layout. Less obviously, I’m procrastinating. Lots of things to fix, still. But if there are problems I haven’t spotted …

Those looking for an online copy of Nic Thoburn’s book after the sad demise of Endpage can read it at the Libertarian Communist Library, here. Actually, there’s a whole heap on the site: Sergio Bologna, Mario Tronti, whole books by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and much much more. Including Mario Mieli’s classic 1977 piece, “Towards a Gay Communism” - very wrong at times but also, by turns, very sharp and laugh out loud funny.

Oh, and Thiago has finally put up his piece on interest rate subjectivity - definitely worth a read.

On MetaMute, “Make Representation History” - on the protests around the G8, by Hari Kunzru, ELAM and Mute.

And an interesting piece by John Barker on the intellectual warriors of the anglosphere, “Armchair Spartans and The Spectre of Decadence”. It covers a lot of ground, and all worth reading, but the discussion of wars-by-proxy fought by ‘green card soldiers’ is particularly interesting:

The recruitment of mercenary soldiers has traditionally been seen as an absolute indicator of decadence, the decline of classical Athens for example, or the Carthaginians cited by Steinbeck. The armchair Spartans are all big fans of Israel (Sparta in a sea of chaos, of dangerous and inferior peoples), of its militarism and its citizen army. The USA has had to do it differently, partly perhaps because they have chosen to imprison so many young Afro-Americans rather than recruit them. Instead they have turned on the one hand to a whole host of private military companies

Hunting down the otherly-complexioned.

While I preoccupy myself with other writings, go read Thiago on the diffusion of interest rate subjectivity throughout the unions in AU. (Related: Werner Bonefeld’s “The Politics of Debt”.) And an article by Pete on the slated changes to employment laws in AU. [Some background to the peculiar disposition of unions in AU]

In the “Postscipt to the Societies of Control”, Deleuze remarked that “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” Well, he was quite wrong to assume that discipline and control can be so easily distinguished, I think. The enclosures have acquired the flexibility of zones; control is, more often than not, experienced as the enclosure of a seemingly interminable present. Nevertheless, the force of these remarks remain:

Finishing off Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch for a review whose deadline is approaching faster than I’d hoped. But perhaps, if I have the time and inclination, something longer on epoche, subjectivity and historiography. Because aside from Federici’s account of the witch-hunts, the enclosures, the bloody legislation, the persistence of ‘primitive accumulation’, her critique of marxoid progressivism - all of which I’m more than sympathetic to and for that reason, for me at least, it will make for an uninteresting review -, I can’t seem to shake the voice of Walter Benjamin in the wings (he isn’t as far as I can tell, referenced by Federici). But there he is, whispering, or is it intoning: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Because it seems to me that this is exactly what Federici is doing.