°Reconciling one’s self
An extract from Mbembe’s “Passages to Freedom: The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in South Africa” (Public Culture, 20:1, 2008):
according to many former beneficiaries of past racial atrocities, reconciliation means that blacks should forget about South Africa’s fractured past and move on. It is argued that white youth in particular cannot be blamed for acts of racial discrimination committed long before they were born. Many whites have retreated to a comfortable position of personal nonculpability and are unwilling to tell the truth about past misdeeds. Born to positions of enormous social and economic advantage, they are reluctant to wash their hands of the privileges they accumulated over three and a half centuries. They have wholeheartedly espoused the promises of individualistic liberty, which they now oppose to the requisites of racial justice. Perhaps more than South African black citizens, they now believe in the liberal conservative ideology of the self-reliant and self-made subject and pretend that thirteen years after liberation, white racism can no longer be considered the most important cause of black poverty. Nor can it be held responsible any longer, they argue, for the troubling gaps in life chances between black South Africans and their white compatriots.9 Instead they maintain that once blacks have been granted equality before the law, no further action is needed. They also believe that racial disparities in South Africa today are either the result of the misguided policies of a corrupt and incompetent black government or simply a manifestation of the moral failure of individual blacks — those who do not work hard enough, do not go to school, do not live an ethical life, and do not know how to steer clear of crime, corruption, and illness.
I’m still reading the rest of the essay, but the contractarian, self-sufficient subject is a theme, no? From AU to SA …
Mbembe’s argument is very powerful and it seems a critical voice in South Africa at the moment, but I’m not sure of his vision of a future where race is irrelevant. I can’t see a time when South Africans do not identify with the traditions and cultures of their separate races. This doesn’t necessarily imply racism, as long as the life of a supra-racial national identity is sustained, even if only in sport.
Would it be interesting to develop a four-way conversation on this subject, between South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina (or Chile)? Where does ’sorry’ lead?
Kevin Murray [March 25, 2008 @ 11:52 pm]
the contractarian, self-sufficient subject is a theme, no?
yes, and i wonder, for SA, how much of it has to do with the encounter between that fleeting ideal of civic nationalism - here, carrying the burden of reconciling the past under the shifting sign of (historical) redress - with neoliberalism (although the latter concept seems to become more hollow with every invocation - maybe late modern forms of rule might be better alternative). At least that seems to be the case here, since the the principle pedegogical articulations of the people in this respect are given in the reworking of the nationalist discourse of the ANC, still heavily laden with tropes of the struggle against apartheid.
If you decommodify the mbembe essay, i’ll tell you what i think.
with respect to Mbembe more broadly…while he certainly is an independent voice, i don’t see a radical political vocation for anything he has said about South Africa.
dionysusstoned [March 26, 2008 @ 11:46 pm]
Just quickly for now -
Kevin - the future lasts a very long time - and I’m doubtful of my and anyone’s ability to see into it. But I agree that there’s a conversation to be had around issues of reconciliation and the ’sorry’.
Dionysus - here it is, liberated. I’ll come back to it anon - but maybe your thoughts?
s0metim3s [March 27, 2008 @ 12:59 pm]
thanks…i’ll look at it in the next few days.
although you will probably claim its unnecessary i will return the gift with something else
dionysusstoned [March 27, 2008 @ 3:33 pm]
No, d - then it wouldn’t be a gift.
s0metim3s [March 27, 2008 @ 4:04 pm]
The fine grain detail of the world aside, and overlooking a few textual knots I think you already managed to write about this essay here:
http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/03/01/dirty-hands/
influxus [March 28, 2008 @ 12:26 am]
I still haven’t got around to finishing reading Mbembe’s essay, and I don’t doubt you - but I have to say, it’s kind of wierd that you put it like this.
I just finished re-watching the first two episodes of BSG with others just now (I tend to inflict it on people, and happy to rewatch things while nursing a hangover).
And just before I went downstairs to do so, I’d been writing. This was the last sentence: “Reeling from the announcement of the ‘non-aggression’ treaty between Germany and the USSR in 1939, Benjamin wrote not of the geopolitical cynicism of this pact, nor of a certain instrumentalisation of diplomacy for the purpose of biding time (these aspects should not be discounted, but perhaps rethought accordingly), but of a profound, almost unthinkable complicity that the abbreviation of national socialism to nazism tends, to this day, to elide.” Referring to the “Theses on History”, of course, and a segue to a discussion of national socialism and labour … A long preamble to where I’m going, but I think you likely have a sense of it.
s0metim3s [March 28, 2008 @ 1:54 am]
eish! so i looked at the essay. i didn’t read it very closely as i found myself skipping over things. in fact its pretty boring as these things go.
Anyway i didn’t find myself disagree with anything he said, so much as its location.
Take the idea of transformation. Transformation narrative abound in SA. But its one of those words you have to be really careful about, being sure to always relate it back to the context in which it is mobilized. in truth, i don’t really get the sense that mbembe’s idea of transformation is that different from say Mbeki’s. i personally don’t use the term anymore, because like so many things touched by post apartheid nationalism, it usage only serves to reinforce the appropriation of the political history running through it. Ironically i once found myself being ‘disciplined’ for how i used the term. But that’s neither here nor there. We were talking about mbembe…i dunno. Of course its true that their is real opposition to the mainstream idea of “transformation” - which basically involves the deracialisation of civil society (read the middle class) - for large sections of the white community, that gets expressed in different ways. thing is, for me, the questions of race and redress (the latter is another of those words touched by post apartheid nationalism) run far deeper.
dionysusstoned [March 28, 2008 @ 5:12 am]
Indeed, it is a breathtakingly shallow concept of deracialisation that he ends up putting forth. He seems to, as I was suggesting in linking to s0metim3s’ analysis of that episode of BSG, read the legacy of apartheid as a problem of caste. Such that historical justice requires merely(!?) the disentangling of race and class and the lubrication of meritocracy. The episode and the essay even share almost the same “sentimental groaner” of a resolution.
And it is interesting, and obvious now that it arises, the way that elision you were writing about, s0metim3s, of national socialism to the almost proper noun of nazism, resembles in many ways the desire to think the histories of racial injustice under the too simple and internal to the nation readings of their proper names - Apartheid and the Stolen Generation.
influxus [March 28, 2008 @ 6:23 am]
hey influxus,
so i still haven’t read more than the introduction of on the post-colony yet, but i have read a few of mbembe’s essays and i really don’t get the attraction. for one the guy is deeply conservative. If someone like Fanon had seen two nationalism running along side each other, one whose trajectory was so devastatingly framed in the pitfalls of national consciousness, and another running out of that ‘occult zone of instability where the people dwell’, in mbembe these seem to take on very different proportions. To the latter belongs the path to national suicide that arrives under the sign of kind of messianic investment (think the xhosa cattle killings). The only hope then for, say a place like south africa, if it is avoid the path that leads to national suicide, is to embrace modernity under the signs democratization, civic nationalism, and ‘rule of law’ - being sure to avoid any kind of victim mentality (of course he doesn’t use that term). Personally i don’t buy either account and tend to take as my vocation the destruction of any politics that would solicit hegemony - pretty much ruling out an investment in any kind of nationalism.
dionysusstoned [March 28, 2008 @ 9:25 am]
also why necro not thanato?
but maybe this is not the place for that discussion?
dionysusstoned [March 28, 2008 @ 9:27 am]
Hey y’all - I’ve things to do for the day, but I’d like to come back to the discussion soon. The phrase that pops into mind is ‘public intellectual’ - as in, the affliction. But later …
s0metim3s [March 28, 2008 @ 12:35 pm]
My attraction to Mbembe stems from two of his essays, necropolitics and aesthetics of superfluity. Both of them published in the same journal as this piece. Looking at them against where he winds up in this piece it seems hard to recognise the same author. Although perhaps bearing superfluity in mind there is something deeply cynical about the use of “superfluous” in that final paragraph. And perhaps part of the affliction that s0metim3s mentions is the pressure to answer the “so what would you do, huh?” critique as here, unlike earlier, he prescribes, as you say, ‘embrac[ing] modernity under the signs democratization, civic nationalism, and ‘rule of law’’.
It is the necro not the thanato that provokes me. Based on my naive assumption that Mbembe took up necropolitics(/power) because Agamben was already using thanatopolitics to talk about something else. In that necropolitics supplements, not supplants, Foucault’s unclosed work on biopolitics by concentrating on the techniques of disposability rooted in the colony that make that disposal productive. Rather than seeing the thanatopolitical as the acceleration or extreme result of biopolitics, necropolitics takes up the figure of the disposable, the superfluous as one engineered by a parallel, but interchangeable set of techniques. And it is in the interchange of these techniques and their populations through the discourse of historical injury that we keep finding the contractable subject.
influxus [March 28, 2008 @ 4:47 pm]
influxus,
yes, i think you’re right. For me, mbembe’s necropolitics gives the theory of sovereignty back to Foucault’s right to kill, but still affirming (ala agamben) the folly of the methodological separation of biopolitics and sovereignty…and perhaps in this sense “supplements, not supplants, Foucault’s unclosed work on biopolitics”. In this respect however some things still trouble me.
First, what is at stake in running the right to kill together with the state of exception (where the distinction between right and fact becomes difficult)?
Second, are we, under the banner of necropolitics, suggesting a separate foundation for ‘circulating the risks of death’ kind of biopolitics, from that of the making live biopolitics - thus enabling a politico-ethical indifference with respect to the latter, beyond what measures should be deployed.
so i read the superfluity some time back, but thinking about apartheid here, and indeed to an extent the post apartheid, i wonder to what extent the identification of a superfluous population - or its “engineer[ing] by a parallel, but interchangeable set of techniques” - is itself functional to the identification that other political body in the name of whose health the state governs - hence reaffirming for me a passage from the biopolitical to the thantopolitical.
but i don’t know this stuff as well as you guys, so please feel free to tell me i am talking shit. But finally, on the public intellectual thing…it strikes me hat this is not a popular piece but one published in an academic journal. But even if this is the product of mbembe’s public intellectual persona, it seems to me that than the guys tactical stance habitually sucks, and very much reaffirms the political trajectory of mbeki’s nationalism (which for me is ironic in so far as it is precisely mbeki’s vision of deracialisation [read mbembe’s transformation], and the governmental challenges it frames, in which are given a superfluous subject “engineered by a parallel, but interchangeable set of techniques.”). Anyway, my interest in this stuff relates precisely to set of tactical concerns, and i tend to think that these kinds of public positions are crucially important…even in understanding the broader work of a author
dionysusstoned [March 28, 2008 @ 7:18 pm]
—Second, are we, under the banner of necropolitics, suggesting a separate foundation for ‘circulating the risks of death’ kind of biopolitics, from that of the making live biopolitics - thus enabling a politico-ethical indifference with respect to the latter, beyond what measures should be deployed.—
this sentence is clumsy, as is much of the above formulation. But maybe you will look past my improper deployment of the idea biopolitics, and see the question i’m struggling to articulate - in the above, perhaps switch biopolitics with sovereignty.
still, much of this is proably my not understanding this stuff so you guys need not feel the need to explain this stuff to me…and i am planning on going back to all of this…but yes, all of it is still confusing for me…so very confusing.
dionysusstoned [March 28, 2008 @ 8:49 pm]
I seriously doubt I have any greater knowledge of, or eloquence with, this stuff than you. The jarring of expression and thought seems to arise ‘cause we moved to (I started it) discussing this stuff like a model that can be separated from the world.
I like your question about the separation of necro & bio producing a kind of indifference in respect to the biopolitical. It seems to link into Mbembe’s habitual suckage at tactics. The sense I get of what you mean is that if we can look at the spaces of the world as being divided between the necropolitical and the biopolitical, from this vantage the one thing we can say is that it must be preferable to be subject to the space of biopolitics than subject to the necropolitical, so there is a kind of ethical imperative, whatever we may think of the techniques of biopolitics to ferry people from the one to the other. From excluded death to governed life, bearing in mind that governance entails limit, regulation and calculus, so the ferrying from excluded to fostered can only occur at the rate optimised by biopolitics, otherwise the (supposedly) clear distinction between the two spaces is imperiled. This dichotomy, then, rebuilds into the critique the very limits we might want to critique. In that there is always the demand that something must be done, and if critique fails to challenge either that demand or the sense of what is possible to do then it becomes complicit with the command it critiques.
If this is somewhere near the sense of your question then, yup, there is a lot in that Mbembe paper that does tend towards wanting to read necropolitics and biopolitics as discrete and largely operative in different spaces, when the techniques for dividing space and bodies from each other should be part of the analysis. I’m not interested in defending Mbembe, the man or the author.
Regarding the intervention and that quote s0metim3s extracted from Mbembe (in the post), there is a strategy around the self-sufficient contractable subject of relegating the past to history, perhaps more accurately to a pre-history, where colonialism, war, disease flow into each other, cyclical and indistinguishable from natural catastrophe. (The quote Ange put up sometime last year from Duttmann on the Aids epidemic, where he draws on Hegel and Sontag is apt.) My sense of this is that the history of the successful state is the history of its socialisation of risk, where for events to become part of that history they must enter into a state’s actuarial framework, as reforms or events that reconfigure the calculus. While Mbembe identifies and attacks the racist hypocrisy of using this perspective to deny an attempt to actuarialise apartheid, he does so only to reaffirm politics as a system of implementing the current best alogorithm for this calculation…
Excuse abrupt end to this comment, I was sort of heading towards trying to think about necropolitics as supplementing not biopolitics in History of Sex and SMBD, but the way F fleshes it in Security Territory & Population hence the risk stuff. But I found the melinda cooper s0metim3s linked to and my heads a little to full to make much sense.
Besides I read the PW stuff on the Two Economies and to be honest I’d rather think/talk off that than the abstract notions. Given that, does it count as littering if I end up posting what amounts to rough notes in your comments?
influxus [March 30, 2008 @ 1:44 pm]
D’s stuff on the two economies is excellent. More please. I really liked the discussion of the filtering occurring in SA’s water privatisation schemes between the “won’t pay” and “can’t pay”.
My initial sense is to think this in relation to various workarounds being trialled on the internets (eg, the NIN release) - not because there is an analogy to be made, but because it situates the question not as shitty-things-that-happen-to-us but more firmly as how are various powers attempting to reign in an already-existing penchant for experimentation, reprisal, escape. That’s why the normative is so significant a battleground.
It’s also part of the reason why I think the gesture of public intellectuality is redundant, so often inclines toward the hegemonial. And why the alter-hegemonial is the most ineffective of approaches. Tactics, in this context, is strategy. This is not the time when strategy, construed as repetition (which is also, in another sense, norm and detainment) of tactics, would serve us.
“Littering” here? Not at all. Scribble away.
s0metim3s [March 31, 2008 @ 12:24 am]
hey influxus
—I seriously doubt I have any greater knowledge of, or eloquence with, this stuff than you.—
No, you do. for sure. But it won’t always be that way. For not only am i planning on working really hard at mastering this shit, but i am planning to rob you of everything you know;)
but ja, i agree… there is no need to talk about these issues in the abstract…
—Besides I read the PW stuff on the Two Economies and to be honest I’d rather think/talk off that than the abstract notions. Given that, does it count as littering if I end up posting what amounts to rough notes in your comments?—
You kidding right? Of course you SHOULD post “what amounts to rough notes”. That’s what the PW is there for. And please be critical, ruthless even. I am more interested in knowing what doesn’t make sense, what i get wrong or have misunderstood…even if i enjoy hearing that i am on the right track.
s0metim3s, thanks for the encouragement. indeed the part of the argument i am building towards relates explicitly to ‘hegemonial/alter-hegemonial’ and maybe even the trying to think of another way being political. but i am a long way off from that.
dionysusstoned [March 31, 2008 @ 12:58 am]
so among the more pretentious elements included in the outline of my MA thesis is an exordium. Something i am meant to explicitly confront here is my relationship to the intellectual - whether s/he be organic, universal or simply public. Since you have given sanction to litter and scribble, i thought i’d pass this into the discussion to demonstrate the folly your generosity;). but since it is not unrelated to your comment, and since what i like about blogging is its potential for writing in common, maybe posting something long won’t be too bad. If not you welcome to delete it or simply not read it
Background and disclaimer: So i am writing the exordium slowly, and mostly when i’m avoiding doing real work. If the the actual thesis is pretty much what you would would expect an MA to be (although its starting to look like a very long MA), the exordium attaches itself to a more romantic image of my intellectual life. the writing here is meant to beautiful rather than merely precise. It a hard one because my failures in this respect just reinforce the pretentiousness of such an exercise. However, having already invested something of myself in the idea, i would rather not have to give it up.
The point: the question the exordium sets out to answer is, “Am i an intellectual, and if so, what kind of intellectual am I?”. Of course the question is a silly one, and its more of a rhetorical strategy that allows me to develop three threads that, it is hoped, will converge with the figure i argue captures the somewhat romantic ideal my intellectual work aspires to. It is also meant to be a muted fuck you to the academy.
The first thread: the first thread runs out of a piece of text i dropped into my first bit of PT. But for context here it is again:
“In 2002, when Johannesburg water first began installing prepaid meters in Orange Farm, a member of the community, armed with a tin of rest paint and a brush, painted ‘Destroy the Meter Enjoy the Water’ on a pipe that would be used in the new system. The pipe was buried, commodified water flowing ignorantly through it; but the slogan didn’t die. A few months later an insurgent retraced the letters on the side of a container. Two years later it has become the battle cry of the Phiri concerned residents committee – born out of the resistance to pre-paid water in Soweto.” (Ngwane and Veriava, 2004; p130)
“Be reasonable” is the refrain of power confronted with the demand. But ‘reason’ is not here (or anywhere else) the indifferent application of thought, but is instead, the designation of field of rationality that the demand must be made subordinate to if is to be allowed to circulate. The antagonistic kernel of ‘Destroy the Meter Enjoy the Water’ is precisely its refusal to ‘be reasonable’. It is a demand only in so far as it solicits a response from the state, yet the latter is only a contingent condition of is claim. It embraces the same insurgent spirit of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) protester who scrawled across a flimsy piece of cardboard the words “Give Us or We Take”. It is with these ‘unreasonable’ acts of ‘everyday rebellion’ that the ideas collected here begin.
the quote is actually from something that i wrote with a friend, and marks my first attempt at writing about the issues taken up in this thesis (however from a very different location) - that is water and nonpayment. The original piece was itself something of a negotiation, since, in spite of working in the same movement since 2000, my friend and i are from avery different political traditions. Anyway, although i don’t make it explicit, the first thread basically takes aim at the position that we developed there - which essentially frames an approach that sees a political strategy articulated through the dialectical play of local tactical engagements. And in the end we present the politics of ‘destroy the meter enjoy the water’ as ‘maturing’ into a strategic perspective which ultimately is not very different from the language and practice of the Left. In the exordium, through a a discussion of the “Destroy the Meter Enjoy the Water” slogan and the LPM protestors “give us or we take”, i try to say something else. The argument that develops focuses on the question of violence and takes up Benjamin’s remarks in a Critique of Violence, and agamben’s discussion on this essay - but shaped by my own history of defeat in various tactical engagements. Both slogans have a place in unfolding of my politics and indeed i own respective t-shirts that proudly display my embrace of each. In the exordium however, i suggest that not only does the ‘give us or we take’ slogan rehearse the logic of the strike (ala benjamin), but the “us” in ‘give us or we take’ underlines a subject that can always be recaptured and brought back into the orbit of the state. Destroy the meter enjoy the water, i argue CAN be different in that not only does it defer the representation of a subject (as for instance in the name of some person or group deserving water), but the absence of a conjunction between the the destroy part and the enjoy part allows us to START THINKING about what a politics of pure means might look like. It is a difficult argument and there are many theoretical questions i still need to find an answer for, but, if nothing else, it might serve to demonstrate something about the questions i am thinking about…if not settling on their answers. Anyway beyond the place of the slogans in the unfolding of my own politics, they are more of a way of my talking about these questions
the second thread: this relates to thing about being reasonable. although the phrase “field of rationality” is clumsy, wrong and needs to change, what i had in mind here is tyranny of the alternative. So when we meet with the state officials as part of this or that campaign and they ask, “okay, so what do you want”, the response to a demand like ‘free water’, or ‘no school fees’, is usually something like “be reasonable”. And indeed, as we engage with the state on these terms our demands increasingly come to assume something of the rationality implied in their appeal for us to “be reasonable”. Of course one can win things this way… we can say we want 10kl and not 6kl, or even show them how they can reframe their tariff model so that it wouldn’t be an imposition on their resources, etc. Or we can appeal to the ethical ground they found their interventions on. So we might show, in order for basic reproduction, people must have a more that 50 liters of water a day, showing that even the UN acknowledges this when they the make water allocations to refugees living in camps (this argument has in fact been made). The point here is to show that what is at stake in “being reasonable” is precisely the passage that leads back to the sovereign field. And indeed what much of the broader project tries to show is how much more effective we are doing something else, and our potential when ‘being unreasonable’…hence drawing us back into the first thread.
the third thread: this, the final thread, is in fact what the discussion begins with in actual exordium. the intellectual. this is how i frame it there:
Superficially, this is a thesis about the rutted paths of municipal restructuring under South Africa’s transition to democracy, and the specific instance of Johannesburg Water’s Operation Gcin’amanzi through which the state owned utility company installed thousands of prepaid water meters thought Soweto with the ostensible premise of ‘empowering’ Sowetan’s to ‘own their consumption’. Such a prosaic object however provides slim justification for such an exaggerated rhetorical gesture as perhaps an exordium is. After all, ‘it’s just a MA’, and unlikely to circulate beyond the critical gaze of those tasked with ensuring that the appropriate standard is maintained in my passage through the formal stages of intellectual development. But as I began to think about how to write up this thesis, still struggling to find a way to bring together the different threads I wanted to talk about, the idea of an exordium - initially playfully entertained then dismissed as fanciful if not pretentious – started to grow on me. What I wanted to say – all the stuff about post apartheid municipal policy, the rhythms of community struggles, or even the character of our transition - lacked location in the context of an institutional indifference to the source of our present problematic, or rather, seemed dislocated within the ‘reasonable’ frame and conventions of academic writing or what is expected of a student in the preparation of a MA thesis. An exordium seemed like a good idea, less to establish my credibility for the sake of a hypothetical audience, than to establish the credibility of the current work in the political trajectory of a hypothetical intellectual…precisely because ‘it’s just an MA’.
The enduring outcome of the present work will of course follow from its pedagogic function. “I have come here to learn” is the ironic reply of the delinquent student to his teacher’s rhetorical question. Indeed, but learn what? And from whom?…and once he’s done “what will he do with all his learning?”. There’s the rub.
In answer to these questions i outline my complaint against the different breeds of intellectual, but one in particular:
The conventional answer for a hypothetical intellectual of a particular breeding is, “the class”. He will learn about the (working) class, their relationship to other classes, their victories and defeats on the floor of modernity and the perpetual ossiciliation of their fortunes through the cycles of capitalist development. And he will learn all this from the class, by studying them, from their abstract appearance in the ledgers of capital to their material circumstances in the living present; he will learn from their (organic) intellectuals, conscientiously making sure he understands the classics and being sure to situate his own work within the debates and themes of this intellectual tradition. Finally, he will give himself over with singular determination - indenturing his ‘intellect’ and pen - to the identification and pursuit of the objective interests of the class. An admirable vocation to be sure.
so i basically go through all these debates about the place of the intellectual in society, and then, drawing on the first two threads i argue that as things turn out, i’m probably not an intellectual at all. Instead my romantic image of my intellectual work is that of a klipgooier. In south africa klipgooiers - which means stone throwers - are what the ‘dangerous youth’ that once made the townships ‘ungovernable’ under aparthied (this was of course under a state of emergency) were called. this is how i frame it there:
The figure of the klipgooier is marked by a deep ambiguity within the mythologies of the liberation movement; carrying the signs of both heroism and tragedy, s/he is at once the vanguard of the masses and its (intellectual) limit. That seditious figure, the ‘young lion’ – a David figure meeting his Goliath with nothing but his body and the weapons of the earth – would come to be (re)imagined on the horizon of a new south Africa as the bitter excess of an almost redeemed past – the “ungovernable” of our present. Like a ‘dog of war’ in peacetime, the klipgooier is said to have no place in the rhythms of a (new) nation and this thing they call ‘the modern economy’. Denied a place in the grand procession they call progress s/he is said to be a ‘lost’ generation…and yet, like the bearer of a secret pact with history, immanent to that occult zone of instability Benjamin called the ‘here and now’, s/he is with us.
leaving aside the excesses of an over active fantasy life, i would rather be a klipgooier - an intellectual work that is not about soliciting hegemony, but fashioning ideas into bricks with which to smash it.
so ja, that’s where i am going on the whole public intellectual affliction thing.
dionysusstoned [March 31, 2008 @ 4:21 am]
The Collected Werke are good for throwing. Heavy, thick, often come in hardback … Particularly those Progress Press editions. Which is also to say I agree with influxus about Mbembe - only the (alter-)canonical can ultimately benefit from the turning around proper names.
s0metim3s [April 1, 2008 @ 8:21 pm]
hey s0metim3s,
so i get the sense that we agreeing about most of these issues. or rather, not disagreeing. i still don’t get the ‘proper names thing’, but i think i have a sense of where you going with it.
I also made may way through the BSG post, first when influxus posted the link in relation to mbembe article, and then again two nights ago. Its a little difficult ‘cause i have only watched a few episodes of the first season and don’t really understand who is who yet. but i really liked influxus and your discussion, which i think has a strong resonance with some of the stuff i have been struggling with, especially as it relates to local debates here around race and class.
anyway, i just wanted to thank both infuxus and yourself, since you guys are really helping me on a number of levels.
it might be of interest also for you to know that my induction into the broad theoretical universe i am currently attempting to navigate was partly motivated by my attempts at understanding what you were on about (or rather the figure i associated with the email account carrying the name s0metim3s) …and not on this blog either. In fact it started way back, on an email list, many years ago.
dionysusstoned [April 3, 2008 @ 1:38 pm]
d, you are very sweet. I’m often taken to task for being obscure, disinterested in pedagogy … but I always think that this ‘obscurity’ means translation and interpretation happens in more overt and responsible ways than it would if the prose had that faux clarity going on. Which, in a nutshell, means that readers become/are writers. It’s been a challenge to think about how not to be a public intellectual - so, your remarks are for me high praise indeed.
Btw, since we’re going back and forth from BSG - speaking of a certain anti-Star Trek eschatology that the last season promised - I couldn’t resist grinning at the “hope is the last thing we need” remark in the teaser for the next episode. … and then there’s the whole natural catastrophe thing going on, no doubt along the lines discussed in these comments … [ps. non-fake tornt links appreciated.]
s0metim3s [April 3, 2008 @ 3:07 pm]
And that remark sounds like it is in the voice of Lampkin, who I hoped would be back, if only for his endearing mode of making theft into care.
Just because the thematics are there, an anecdote. Perhaps what follows sounds overly dramatic, but the language of migration and contract is already part of telecommunications field.
I am about to lose internet for a while. I am moving ISP as I don’t like my current ISP’s solution to the always-almost-about-to-be litigious war on intellectual property violations:
http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/79-MIPI.html
Basically, if they receive an infringement notice, they shut off your net access until you promise to get in contact with the agency who sent the notice and resolve it with them. All nicely automated. In that link above their response to criticism of this strategy: “I doubt any reasonable person would have a problem with it.”
Then I discover that, despite this ISP’s claim to participate in the newish system that allows easy migration from one ADSL2 supplier to another without disconnection, I can’t move where I want because they have bundled the internet with the phone. So, an application to emigrate will be denied because it attempts to de-couple the contract for the internet from the phone. So I must disconnect my internet and change phone suppliers before I can immigrate to the ISP I want. With the final caveat that the main national phone company has woven into the contract on their cheapest plan the promise that you will not use the spare frequencies on that phone line for anything but connecting internet through them.
influxus [April 4, 2008 @ 12:14 am]
Lampkin it is.
It’s been interesting to what extent the ISP’s have become the point of control in much of this stuff - I hear of experiments further afield in AU in that regard. An interesting bit of subcontracting-extraterritorialisation.
s0metim3s [April 4, 2008 @ 1:19 am]