archive : s0metim3s

The demography of time and the times

In writing of the history of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici remarks: “my stay in Nigeria did not allow me to forget this work”—which is to say, the work that she and Leopoldina Fortunati had done for a previous book, Il Grande Calibano (1984). “I had buried my papers in the cellar, not expecting that I should need them for some time” (2004:9). Yet in the midst of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the officially designated ‘War Against Indiscipline’ that were devastating the poor in much of the world, she felt that her work on Il Calibano “took on a new meaning”. Further along, Federici writes: “Today, these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least) things of the past—or as Marx put it in the Grundrisse—’historical preconditions’ of capitalist development, to be overcome by more mature forms of capitalism. But the essential similarity between these phenomena and the phase of globalisation that we are witnessing tells us otherwise” (2004:82). […]

[You can read the rest of the review in the next edition of Ephemera. Thanks for the comments both here and via email.]

Finishing off Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch for a review whose deadline is approaching faster than I’d hoped. But perhaps, if I have the time and inclination, something longer on epoche, subjectivity and historiography. Because aside from Federici’s account of the witch-hunts, the enclosures, the bloody legislation, the persistence of ‘primitive accumulation’, her critique of marxoid progressivism - all of which I’m more than sympathetic to and for that reason, for me at least, it will make for an uninteresting review -, I can’t seem to shake the voice of Walter Benjamin in the wings (he isn’t as far as I can tell, referenced by Federici). But there he is, whispering, or is it intoning: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Because it seems to me that this is exactly what Federici is doing.

Things I read today, as I well and truly enter procrastination mode, resisting having to write a review of a book that I find annoying - and bewilderingly awful at times. The Curmudgeon writes about the two Patties, Smith and Hearst - the way hearing a song, or watching a doco triggers a cascade of memories and reflections on the passage of time. Zainab Bawa on the promenade. Jamie King feels the pulse of the blogosphere as it becomes apparent that a national ID card has been passed into law in the US. Scott McLemee on the most photographed philosopher in history - found via Pas au-dela. A really dumb ‘critique’ of John Holloway’s book by M. Junaid Alam, found via Projekt Subaltern. [As Poulantzas would say, ‘It’s the form of the state, not the personnel, stupid.’] But the review is already overdue so, finally, I make myself read something ‘relevant’, or at least something which will make me enjoy the writing even if I don’t like the book. I start off by re-reading parts of Derek Sayer’s The Violence of Abstraction, which is kind of, remotely, relevant - if one happened to be heading down a path away from the book review at hand. But then, knowing this is not working, I turn to Ranciere’s On the Shore of Politics - not at all relevant, but it makes me approach the prospect of writing as something other than duty, work. Maybe that’ll work, make work not seem quite like work. I am obviously lacking in the necessary enthusiasm here.

S sent a link to a book I’ve looked forward to reading for awhile, Nic Thoburn’s Deleuze, Marx and Politics.** I skipped ahead [spoiler alert], but anyone who begins the conclusion with this quote from Jean-Luc Nancy: “a kind of broadly pervasive democratic consensus seems to make us forget that ‘democracy’, more and more frequently, serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other than its own expansion” has me applauding. Which is to say, anyone who both insists on the inconclusiveness of politics and looks at the connections between democracy and capitalism has got to be worth reading.

I’m not sure how explicit the discussion in the book is of what might be called the ‘grounds of politics’ (a la Nancy, Keenan, others), but this is excellent stuff: “Rather than a deferral of political practice or the affirmation of a teleology, it [a minor politics] is a mechanism for the continual problematization of any notion that political practice achieves a full plenitude, that the people to come ‘arrive’. That is, by situating politics between the extremes of a ‘missing’ people and a ‘new earth’, minor politics seeks to develop an affective condition that is able to live with, even be nourished by, its incompleteness, its difficulties, and its ‘impossibilities’.” Joyous.

**A copy of Nic Thoburn’s Deleuze, Marx and Politics can now be found here.

“This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy.” And so, more or less, begins Tom Nairn’s review of Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude. Yes, the book is quite awful.

Review of Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the Rise of the One Nation Party in Australia, Various authors, with a foreword by Robert Manne. [Overland, 153 Summer 1998 pp.87-89]

For a declaration to appear as uncomplicated and clear, the circumstances of its making - of its making sense as simple and as clear - must have receded beyond the visible horizon, no longer readily available to examination. And so it is - mostly - with the book Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the Rise of the One Nation Party in Australia. In the Foreword, Robert Manne writes: “The thought here is simple and straightforward.” This is not true, which is also to say that it is true, so long as the reader intuitively shares or presumes the question which prompted and frames the writings here.

The rest of the review here.