archive : s0metim3s

Here’s the abstract for the oikopolitics piece:

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so – by this time, as his signature rhetoricity – by evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable “sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the accounting of the household – and the oikos, in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in the trammeling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

A couple of paragraphs of an essay - “Oikopolitics, and Storms” - I just hit send on last night. On Fordism and post-Fordism, the coincidence of financial and climatic crises, environmental audits, war and more - but in a more specific sense an argument about why it might be better to think these and other questions through the wider, more complex lens of oikopolitics along with the more narrow (though purportedly neutral) concepts of biopolitics, affect or labour.

Giorgione’s pastoral has come to be known as “The Tempest”, though also as “the little landscape on canvas with the storm, with the gypsy and soldier”.

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.

In response to offblog queries - ok, I was being a little obscure in the most recent post on Lucretius, the series of which are here. So, let me put a blunter point on it.

Some wandering notes. In Machiavelli and Us, but also elsewhere, Althusser combines Lucretius’s understandings of the clinamen, chance, repulsion and combination with that of Machiavelli’s argument that the Prince must ’seize fortuna by the hair at the right moment’, thereby realising (as Illuminati will put it) “all of its virtù-potenza“.

And yet, reading back through Lucretius, it is possible to find a fairly persistent critique of precisely this masculined, war-like - or perhaps, better: warlordist - characterisation of virtù. I will have to chase down Pamela Gordon’s “Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex” in The Roman Gaze, which seems to discuss this at some length. But for the moment, some remarks on – and meanderings around - De Rerum Natura.

(via)

If Machiavelli suggests that the Prince, in order to grasp his fortune, needs to be half-man, half-beast (centaur), what, then, to make of the robot fortune-teller?