archive : s0metim3s

There are a few people I would have like to have seen speak, but missed. One of them was Lauren Berlant in Melbourne. By all accounts wonderful. Another was Saskia Sassen, who I’ve heard/seen before, but to see her talk about now “[h]aving a significant Starbucks presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess.” “This mess”, presumably, implying the current calamities around banking and finance.

It might be various chemicals, one of them being quite a high coffee intake on my part, but I find that sentence a little obscure. Or, maybe not obscure enough. Which is perhaps another way of putting: without shame, or at the very least without much sense of it.

There aren’t many Starbucks around here. Somehow, I manage to remain highly-caffeinated. And shamelessly so. So, I find her segue to the firm (a very specific firm, the exemplary) a little obscure. In any case, this ‘turn toward Protestantism’ - savings and demand management - isn’t exactly recent. Nor the resurgences of the theologico-political. One could recall other moments of ‘belt tightening’ during the “recession we had to have” (Hawke/Keating), maybe. Or go further back to the 1930s (the camps, the war and the New Deal) or, futher still (and so to the enclosures, the ‘civil wars’ and the signing of the Magna Carta) or, much more recently, from Mabo to the Outstation Movements to the ‘Intervention’ and its attachment to normfare … There are other texts, like Battlestar Galactica, the shift between volumes II and III of Marx’s Capital, Carnivale - all of them notebooks, really.

There are a couple of questions that come in here, for me. The first is about the decision, the decision about the exemplar, sure - but also what is it that unfolds or cannot from that point. Which is to say, the meme - but, also, its attachments, that which makes it ‘take hold’, as Althusser defined ‘facticity’. That is, something so obvious as to require no explanation.

Postfordism. What is it about this word that requires explanation? What is it about Fordism that remains, however postal?

There’s a sense in which these calls for re-regulation are, I would have thought, obviously terrifying. Strange, to me. These recourses to authentic, and normal, chemical states don’t really accord with my world, and I doubt they really do to anyone’s. One would have to assume - and know - Nature (or Reason, depending on one’s fancy) rather than the histories, recorded or not, through which something becomes second nature (agriculture and the architecture of eating included here) to assume a normal state.

And where does the onus of shame fall in the exemplary denigration of Starbuck’s? Those who drink there, work there, own it? (Footnote: there’s a game in this country called the the ‘latte-drinking put-down’. It is widely believed to have something to do with class. It does. But also race, and gender - aspects which for some reason get taken out of the mix to such an extent that to be without shame in one’s appreciation of a fine coffee - and those who make it - assumes a particular delight, and one that often gets lost in the translation.)

I very much doubt the puritans will have their day. Maybe a few years, in electoral terms, but I seriously doubt that’s where the action is. These things are not without significance, but watching how and why they ripple out is the interesting thing. How do such things acquire a facticity?

What does all this imply for the much-touted, if fleeting, calls for an alliance between (highly-caffeinated) ‘brain workers’ and those who work in Starbuck’s (or any retail, hospitality, care work, driving, etc for that matter). And just maybe the lines between these two are not all that clear at certain points, with due respect to those who like their politics figural. Which I guess I don’t, and not simply because one of the more interesting things to have happened in this country is the taxidrivers’ strike, which cut across that brain/body distinction so entrenched in excurses on cognitive labour, not to mention a figural politics as such.

More interestingly, what does all this tell me about the instance of political decision? What is it that swings us - me, you, I - from precariousness into the disposition of precor? And what is being entreated, elicited?

And, as closely as I look, there is a failure in the logical structure of arguments about a return to re-regulation, about bad fictive, inauthentic, unproductive capital … I mean, I can’t remember when there was an authentically deregulatory moment, let alone a good, authentic version of capital, insofar as these motifs might describe an experience that stretched, without tensions and splices, from ‘brainworkers’ to ‘chainworkers’, let alone any other way of figuring the problematic. Acquiring some amplification through calls to submit to the code of Savings & Loans, it all comes over kind of creepy. And, just a little bit ironic - which would be interesting, were it not cynical but playful instead.

Creepier if read alongside straightedge texts like Benjamin Noys’ “‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’ - Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism” (via M), like I needed another reason to dislike Badiou. My sense of creepiness could also have something to do with a recent conversation about ‘culling mutant populations’ and ‘there being a war on’ in a setting which makes me wonder, again, about the swirling (Lucretian) connections between the cellular and cosmology. And, not least, what is at stake in this preoccupation with processes of selection stripped of any reference to surplus. That is, not simply the segmentations but also the declarations of ‘non-value’, whether this be metaphorised and practiced upon as the ‘mutant cell’, ‘garbage’, those who cannot decide … I wonder, also, about the ways in which the ‘half-caste’ was that which was evaded in all (or that which I saw, anyway) talk of ‘The Apology’ by the then-newly-elected Chairman Rudd.

The other question is, of course, how does a politics of hope play out - one more time (Rudd, Blair, Keating, Hawke, et al), with feeling. And whether it can. I played the wet blanket tonight, over Obama election drinks. I did, however, wear pinstripes. It seemed the thing to do, and celebratory too, I thought, though in a different way. And went home and read some bastard’s rant on the election (via A). I’ll even forgive them the anti-caffeine spin, because it remarks not on some thesis of ‘globalisation’, but on the contrary, on a deep and abiding connections between a particular firm, the familial and democracy, and its globalisation, its saturation of the horizon of what is possible. And maybe I’ve answered my question about how something ‘takes hold’.