°Understanding, Denial
Seems like I started a stoush over at Lenin’s Tomb, which I saw little point in hanging around for. More on my reasons for not doing so below. But Alphonse took up the argument, and Jon has made some astute comments over at Posthegemony.
To which I might only add that cyberLenin’s insistence that there was no counter-insurgency in New Orleans tends to conceive insurgency only in the guise of its militarised-massified aspects, Red Army style. The absence of which means, according to that logic, the absence of insurgency - the reappearance of Lenin’s party-logic of the ’spontaneous versus organised’ distinction in the form of that endless deferral that Jon notes. But if the experiences talked about here and here suggest anything to me, it’s that a kind of insurgency did indeed take shape in the cramped (flooded) spaces of New Orleans.
And it’s here that the search for a particular form of insurgency (and the refusal to countenance the possibility that this might alter, or might not take forms that are virtuous (read: can’t be sold to a fictive middle class) or which are derived from the Revolutionary textbook) concurs with othering and, thereby, assumes the attitude of condescencion, as “understanding”.
But the reasons I decided not to pursue the argument over at Lenin’s Tomb are more simple, but they have a history. I don’t understand the dynamic of denial and personalised indignation-distraction, the ‘X is charming, or a Leftist, so therefore couldn’t possibly be racist’. Or, just ‘How dare you’.
It seems both creepy and absurd to me, and I’m so familiar with the dynamic by now it makes my skin crawl. But it’s one that seems intimately bound up with any discussion of racism (and perhaps gender comes into play as well). When the Australian Government released pictures to the media of children in the water and told journalists that their parents (undocumented boat arrivals) had thrown them in the ocean, the few journalists who meekly pointed out that the pictures showed nothing of the sort were rebuffed by Government ministers with ‘Are you questioning my honesty?!’ type tantrums. People on radio callback would ring in complaining that the journalist - when it was a woman - was being “agressive” toward the (male) Minister. As it went, this completely shut down any public debate for months, until it was discovered that the photos were indeed doctored, that the whole thing was a lie.
This dynamic has become a standard of Australian politics, maybe elsewhere too but I’m more familiar with it here. It infects what-passes-for-the-Left as well, this resort to personalised indignation as the closure of any difficult questions. Ghassan Hage talked briefly of the dynamic of denial in Paranoid Nationalism. As Hage notes in the Preface, there is nothing more hideously ironic than a world in which reality is so inverted that the denial of racism begin to sound like the only acceptable version of anti-racism; where, for instance, the Prime Minister feels inclined to declare himself more offended at the accusation that he is racist than at the racism of the concentration camps over which he presides.
There’s something about it I just don’t understand. Something I feel like I keep missing. Is it my lingering rationalism, itself irrational, which misses the stakes of enjoyment, as Zizek might say? Is it that part of me wants to hold fast to a notion of truth, of transparency of communication? Because whatever it is, I seem to stumble into affective economies for which I don’t have a map. But, perhaps I have a different map, a different sense of what’s at stake in such discussions. Who knows.
Addenda: A brief conversation with the beloved over coffeee, and I’m forced to admit to myself that my gestures of a failure of understanding is a lie. It’s not that I don’t understand such denials, in a cerebral kind of way; it’s that I don’t work off the same affective map.
Intellectually, I can grasp the continuity between the Government Minister and the Leftist, both of whom are willing to accept that it is possible (likely even) that people fleeing Afghanistand and Iraq would throw their children overboard, or that there are gangs of “young black men” roaming New Orleans raping children. And, thenceforth, the only difference between them turns on the dance between “understanding” and “justifying”.
But, I don’t grasp the affective economy at work here in anything but this cerebral kind of way. We went to hear Christos Tsiolkas talking about his new book, Dead Europe. And he said at one point, to an audience made up largely of anglo leftists, that he was a racist. He said that when you grow up with racism, with being racialised, you have to deal with the ways in which it gets inside your head, the way it makes you feel about others and, not least, about yourself. It reminded me, aside from the biographical commonplaces between Christos and myself, that this was a declaration I too made, to myself and to others, quite young. With that declaration comes not a patronising desire to “understand” the imaginary or actual violence of “young black men” that appeared in Lenin’s Tomb’s post, but anger at the easy - racist - figurations that underwrite the very presentations of such. So, I lie when I say I don’t understand what is going on in denials of racism. It makes me angry, is what. Chill out? No fucking way poseur.
I think the single strongest indicator of the awesome racism of the left, there is no other word for it, is that we are all talking about this as if it is the end of the world, but the world has been ending everyday for a long time, only mostly it happens elsewhere to people who don’t matter. Nicaragua was flattened by a storm orders of magnitude worse than this, over the last few years tens of thousands of people have died in storms in China and Africa is starting to look like the unsayable experiment of the The Man in the High Castle , only I don’t think Phillip K. Dick’s Nazis would have been so shameless to send Pilgeresque reporters to pull on our heartstrings. Do we have a sensation of panic about these things? No, I don’t think so. But in the US? I’ll admit it feels like a catastrophe. I was impressed with your posting of Benjamin earlier, that seems to me right.
What is particularly shocking about the nonsense at the site you linked above is the total irrelevance of the people affected by the storm for the purpose of the argument. The instant the thing becomes a ‘public calamity’ , it becomes res publica, the tragedy and struggle of the affected becomes the epiphenomenon of a calculation of efficient versus inefficient governmental functions and charitable dispensations, and it is foolish, to say the least, to allow one’s political geography to be limited by these coordinates. But that is exactly what happens there. A rape becomes significant as a quantum of bad policy. Looting is a failure of supply. Their reality, whatever it may be, is just incalculable, only the image figures. So there is no ‘insurgency’ - because the government says there was, and besides the people have no agency, they are the recipients of care or injustice. I went to see Land of the Dead with my friend the Self Acting Mule and he was amazed at how much it resembled NO; of course it does, the portrayal of the victims in the media is that they are empty vessels. That’s why any of their actions, any of their crimes, any of their transgressions take on this metaphysical aura. They are meant to be infantilized, sit there in a fit of orality and cry. Then we can judge the parents. That’s bad enough, but then we have this second bleaching where people look at the situation on the ground and then see if Bush’s ratings have gone up or down. Aside from the fact that it is hilarious to see the liberals hoping that God will save them from Bush, it is just astonishingly, comprehensively, decisively offensive.
Sorry to spam your blog, but when I start thinking about this, and then remember that this is an infinitesimal part of the total disaster, hell it makes me feel like picking up a brick and heading down to The Green.
TCO [September 9, 2005 @ 11:37 pm]
Me too.
az [September 10, 2005 @ 12:24 am]
it is one thing to critique positions when it is politically necessary, but what is the point in critiquing those at Lenin’s Tomb? Perhaps it is wrong to ask people to organise around singularities without too much in-fighting bitchiness? what is at stake, demonstrating the lax disursive capacity of ‘lenin’ or the collective response to Katrina damning the mofos who wouldn’t act when it was necessary? there is a distribution of relative evils across the world, why not focus on those that actually matter? are you angry about other shit or what? this is a purely pragmatic point, I agree with the overall jist of your position.
Glen [September 10, 2005 @ 12:25 am]
Dunno. I would have though the awesome racism of being upset with black people because they ruined a perfectly good Bush-looks-bad photo-op deserves to be heckled.
TCO [September 10, 2005 @ 9:35 am]
I’m glad you liked the catastrophe-apostrophe post, Thiago - I was wondering whether it might be infuriatingly obscure. But, actually, I wanted to return to it at some point soon, in light of the post above, but also Ben’s excellent post here, and an earlier post (or was it a comment) of yours on the London shooting.
Because I think there’s a step that might be worth making, beyond the ones we three have already made (among other things, of noting the continuity between an apparently affable racialisation and sovereign performances among Leftists). Maybe connecting that up to what Nate talks about as a visceral hatred of bosses - which is to say, to recall that racialisation is directed toward the body. But more than that, the thing that I’ve been troubling over is that once one takes this step of noting those continuities I mentioned above, doing so without reinscribing sovereignty (or indifference, assimilation, etc) means having to rework the very sense of how one responds to death, catastrophe, suffering. Hence niggling around the apostrophe.
Speaking of affective economies that I don’t have a map for, I’m not real sure what your investment or your point is here Glen, or why you’d even feel moved to comment.
You want to agree with the “gist of the argument” but also to tut-tut about “bitchiness” and “relative evils”. You want to defend “singularities” but, at the same time, to profer some universally-agreed upon rules of communication - the absence of “bitchiness” - and an (undeclared, but I think normative) consensus around a hierarchy of “evils” and (your sense of) “political necessity”? This isn’t “singularities” in any sense I’ve understood that concept, but ‘the public sphere’.
And if reading the above post hasn’t been sufficient to make you even mildly uneasy about your use of “bitchiness”, I’m not sure I can help you. I wonder, have you remarked in similar terms over at LT - I haven’t checked.
But before I do, a question: what kind of affective economy (or hierarchy of “evils”) sizes up a) “middle class” racist condescension parading as its inverse; b) my remarks about that being dodgy and hypocritical; c) cyberLenin’s knee-jerk accusation of “sanctimonious pillock”, d) comments on other blogs about this and e) the posting above - and decides that, of all these instances, here is where “bitchiness” (a transgression of communicative rules) has taken place and should be called out?
Anyway, I think I must be too stupid to understand what you mean by “lax discursive capacities”, but BionicOctopus didn’t make a typo. They offered a perspective, littered with “bitchy” remarks about “twittering liberals” whom they insisted should “get a fucking analysis”. You think that expression of affect (anger) and of a politics is ok, but not mine here? Shall we discuss the normative force of ‘the public sphere’?
s0metim3s [September 10, 2005 @ 1:31 pm]
I’m not sure I can contribute much beyond what has already been said. But I think there is something fundamentally wrong with wanting people to organise around singularities or collective responses. Glen, I’m also interested to know what you mean by singularity — since, if you’re talking Deleuzian, Deleuze tends to refer to singularities as discontinuities, ruptures, rather than collective or uniform ‘responses’/discourses, mobilisations of feeling etc. In this sense I’d say the point where a phantasmic collectivised response to Katrina ruptures off into different (ahem) lines of flight, the creation of a space in which the (yes, necessary)critiques of dodgy equations of ‘young black males’ with barbarism is precisely a ’singularity’ — wouldn’t you?
az [September 10, 2005 @ 8:19 pm]
hmm, I am not sure if mey post came through?
Glen [September 10, 2005 @ 8:41 pm]
hmmm? posted it up on my blog cause it wouldn’t work here? odd…
Glen [September 10, 2005 @ 9:09 pm]
ok, no more spamming ‘where-has-my-comment-gone’ posts… lol…
yeah, az, I meant singularity specifically in the sense of being ’shared’ and derived from Negri’s conception of the ‘common’ (from Alma Venus):
“7b. In materialism, ethics grounds itself in the unlimited production of the common.
8. In materialism, the telos is the product of common existence. It is therefore not a preconstituted value, but a perpetually progressive production of the eternal, just as a child matures and becomes a man, or, similarly, that birth is followed by death once life has run its course. In the same way that the adult is not a value principle greater than the young boy, death is not the negation of the value of life. On the contrary, everything is eternal. I am here, and this is all: this and only this is the Dasein of the eternal.
8b. The common produced by the movement of man and his Umwelt is not a value but a destiny. However, the word ‘destiny” must be torn away both from the blindness of chance and from all possible predetermination; rather, it should be redefined in the constitutive perspective of the common. ‘Destiny” will refer to the whole of man’s actions, taken as a generic multitude, in which nothing is presupposed, except for the environmental conditions that man continually alters and that, insofar as they are modified, in turn effect communal existence. Ethically, ‘destiny” is the common name for ‘man’ inasmuch as he materially constructs himself.
8c. Starting with the destiny of the centaur (man fused with nature), man then reaches the destiny of the ‘homo-homo’ (man made through praxis), until he arrives at the destiny of the ‘man-machine’ (man transformed through production, artificially developing his being): these are his second, third, and nth natures. In each one of these stages, the common progressively takes on a different form, but not metaphysical, nor axiological, nor historicist, nor eschatological. The ‘centaur-being”, the ‘man-man being”, and the “man-machine being” are given as progressively as the progression of time leading from life until death.”
As a sidenote: The connection of ‘destiny’ and ‘ethics’ here reminds me of Deleuze’s seemingly glib line in _LoS_ that (paraphrasing) ‘ethics means being worthy of what happens to us’. The ‘happening’ is an event, and the ‘to happen’ is an event to come. Negri discusses ‘revolution’ as a biopolitical event later in the above essay. He distinguishes between the revolutionary acts of the necessary creativity of poverty (perhaps in ‘cramped spaces’ as Thoburn writes) and as an on-going process versus the idea of a total revolution event, or something like that; or, in condensed form, the difference between revolution as happening and revolution to come.
Why do you think there is something ‘fundamentally wrong with wanting people to organise around singularities or collective responses’?
Glen [September 10, 2005 @ 9:29 pm]
Response to s0metim3s
clarification of a comment I posted to s0metim3s blog
fuller's speed shop [September 10, 2005 @ 9:37 pm]
I’m hesistant to follow discussion to an abstracted philosophical ground, but maybe my answer about collectivities lies itself in a comment of Negri’s: “Some authors of postmodernity look for a possible opening in the margins… But the margin is a liminal transcendence — an immanence that is a quasi- transcendence, an ambiguous place in which materialist realism must comply with mysticism. Some endlessly play with this margin (Derrida); others fix on it as though the issue were to delicately take hold of the power of a negative that has been grasped at last (Agamben). Unless, in the anxiety of the expectation of the other (as we find in Levinas), this thinking of the common reeks of mysticism outright.”
Okay, let’s talk about the margin. The margin is always the problem, which I interpret to mean, difference is always the problem. Negri desires the ‘creation of a common subjectivity’. I’m here to tell him that I don’t want to be part of a common subjectivity, thanks very much. (And also that ‘materialist teleology’ reeks just as much of mysticism, if not more, than the guff about the margin.) Because the power relations of a ‘common’ as political form often, if not always, dictate that difference be sacrificed for the survival of the collective as such. So politics becomes a boring mission to stick together come what may, rather than to be open to rupture, difference, disagreement, the impossibility of a shared subjectivity.
(This is a sidenote, but I think there’s a difference between the ‘commons’ as shared spatiality that doesn’t reference identity and what Negri’s speaking of as common here.)
It’s no coincidence that these pesky differences often surface as problematics of racism, sexism, homophobia in a context where the collective political agenda is supposedly ‘against’ discrimination/imperialism. “But I’m anti-racist!” scream the leninists. “It says right here on Page 31, Paragraph 7f of our Constitution!” If the difference — between the word as Constitution and the lived practice — is made apparent, collectivity falls apart. Far better to engage in political forms where differences are respected as engines of politics itself.
az [September 11, 2005 @ 12:22 pm]
Ok, Glen. The question was what you understand “singularity” to mean, such that it becomes possible for this concept to imply, for you, both rules of communication between “singularities” and a hierarchy of “evils” and an understanding of “political necessity” across them.
And, might I add, to do so in such a way that this hierarchy of “evils” and your understanding of political necessity assumes the task of saying that people on the Left should not be called on their racism because there is a higher Cause to which “we” must all be devoted. One that does not include calling people on their racism, because doing so threatens the otherwise harmonious organisation of who “we” are, or even interrogating what this Cause (in the absence of posing such questions) really amounts to.
The question wasn’t about how Negri is attempting to rejig a grand narrative, but I can understand why that might appeal, in view of your unwillingness to interrogate who “we” are. If you had offered some remarks about “singularity”, you might have had to grapple with words like ‘irreducibility’ or ‘incommunicability’ - or, maybe, just difference - which is why I suspect you decided to not to. Pesky it is, this difference thing.
I’ll head over to your blog to respond to the rest when I have a moment.
Btw, the comments sometimes get sent to moderation - as even my previous one was - for reasons I can’t yet work out. It could be a word, or length, or something else.
s0metim3s [September 11, 2005 @ 1:58 pm]
s0metim3s you wrote:
“One that does not include calling people on their racism, because doing so threatens the otherwise harmonious organisation of who “we” are”
I have never disagreed with the calling of racism. The difference at stake doesn’t worry me, because the constellations of difference that worry me will not be the same as anyone else’s. It is not a question of the ‘we’ and an ‘identity’, but the productivity of such identifications (if made - explicitly or not) and the outcomes of critique.
There is no unifying (overcoding) _signifier_ of ‘Left’ at work here; at least, I wasn’t assuming there was. We organise ourselves through every enunciative act (blogging in this case). One comment critique seems to be the epitome of ‘dialogue’ One critical comment on a ‘nothing’ blog somewhere (my blog, lol!) is going to do sfa, but lots that resonate together will. Or, to put it another way, the important dimension of LT’s post, I thought, was its fury. It was a furious post. There is not enough rage in politics. Your post also had a lot of anger. I was just imagining a way to combine, in this case, the angry. Surely, in general, we can experiment with ‘tipping points’ and scales of consistency in the way we self-organise. I certainly do not mean this as striving to produce fantasies of perfect counter-hegemonic organisations of critique. Perhaps that is a naive sentiment?
az, I don’t know what else to say. We have encountered a differend of some description. What is at stake in the refusal of the common and the maintaining such differences? If capital can territorialise every difference and, for example, thrives on a differentiated ‘land’ (so you rent your stratified and overcoded identity back, so to speak), then is it a question paying the rent or finding/creating a ‘new earth’?
Glen [September 11, 2005 @ 6:05 pm]
… is Visceral Hatred?
Angela brought up the idea of visceral hatred for bosses, as something I’d said before.
I do have a deep-seated hate for bosses. My partner and I got into a big argument once about a friend who works in management. Our friend once was telling …
What in the hell ... [September 11, 2005 @ 7:00 pm]
Glen, if you read my insistence that you reflect on the “we” as an insistence of mine on identity, you are - what can I say - off on a frolic of your own. Among other things.
Some light relief.
s0metim3s [September 11, 2005 @ 10:58 pm]