archive : s0metim3s

Three texts - as is obvious, written at the same time (August-September 2007), and which unwrap as an onion might: “Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony” (in the new Sarai Reader: Frontiers as a pdf, though there’s also a hardcopy of the edition); “The Failure of Political Theology” (a review of Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and Forrest Hylton’s, Evil Hour in Colombia) at metamute; and “The Materialisation of Race in Multiculture”, in darkmatter’s new edition, Race/Matter. The last of these is the most pithy, but they neverthless form something of a trilogy, written as they were under the shock of the Intervention.

[Pocket’s remix of Kristin Hersh’s Slippershell, just because I’m enjoying that combination of squishynote earcandy and guitar/voice earbleed right now. It’s a compelling mix. Northsea’s remix is kind of ok, but doesn’t push it, really. And the flakeout remix is, well, a soporific.]

Some of the talk given at SydneyU earlier this year, and posted in light of current ‘events’.

First, it’s not surprising that the emergence of a so-called global activism was accompanied by debates about activism as such. Much of this turns around the crisis which Brett alluded to earlier: the refinement of ‘crowd control’ techniques that involve massive and often pre-emptive repression, movements increasingly constrained by barricades, designated protest zones, lockdowns and ever-more severe controls on migration during such events. But these are, let’s say, the external conditions of that crisis; whereas the crisis of activism itself runs much deeper. Because activism too has its borders, and the shape of these are not all that different from those more famously exercised upon it. Though it’s important to note that the specific techniques and levels of force do differ, the contours of those limits are remarkably similar.

Here’s a few things worth reading: an interview with Sergio Bologna, on freelance work, and what he terms the propaganda around ‘knowledge workers’, among other things. Also from Springerin, an interview with Paolo Virno, on ‘immaterial labour’, postfordism, etc. And in MetaMute, Stewart Home on Copenhagen, the ‘creative class’ and demoradical Europa.

The latest edition of SubStance (36:1) significantly extends the essays from (post-)Operaismo translated into English. Extracts and/or comments in due time, and ask, preferably for specific ones, if you can’t access.

–Christian Marazzi’s “Rules for the Incommensurable”
– Virno’s “On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor”
– Negri’s “Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes”
– Franco Berardi’s, “Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination” and “Schizo-Economy”
– Lazarrato’s “Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur” and “The Revolutions of Capitalism”
– Antonella Corsani’s, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism”

Also, in the latest edition of Postmodern Culture, a video (and audio) of a conversation between Spivak and Butler, “A Dialogue on Global States, 6 May 2006″.

Paolo Virno’s “About Exodus” (trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room, n.21, 2005):

Among the different ways in which Marx described the crisis of capital accumulation (overproduction, the law of diminishing returns, etc.), there is one that goes largely unrecognized: the workers’ desertion of the factory.

Following on from recent posts, and to grasp something of the particularity of Virno’s concept of the ‘frontier’, and perhaps also the Spaghetti Western, re-reading Althusser’s “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza”, from Montag and Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza. An extract:

I came to Machiavelli by means of a word, ceaselessly repeated, of Marx’s, saying that capitalism was born from the “encounter between the man with money and free laborers,” free, that is, stripped of everything, of their means of labor, of their abodes and their families, in the great appropriation of the English countrysides (this was his preferred example). Encounter: Again a ‘casus,’ a ‘case,’ a factual accident without origin, cause or end.

An excerpt from one of Paolo Virno’s articles, on exodus,