Black Friday runs red

These are dark days. A Wal-Mart worker killed in a stampede of frenzied shoppers.

Throngs of Black Friday shoppers stampeded the man as they rushed into the Green Acres mall in Valley Stream minutes before it opened.

"When the doors opened, all hell broke loose," a law enforcement source told The Post.




Full article from the Times here.



And...
In California, two people were killed in a shooting at a Toys 'R' Us in Palm Desert, according to the Riverside County Fire Department. The shooting occurred about 11:36 a.m. (2:36 p.m. ET), authorities said.




Look, even if Soviet grocery stores had endless lines and fights to get staples such as salt, flour, etc, they weren't fighting over getting the best deal on a Clay Aiken box set, George Forman grills, or some configuration of articulated plastic intended to be more fun for a kid than a basketball and a jar of glue.

Yes, when we hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope we will use. But they'll probably convince us that the new model of synthetic fiber Hangman 9 model rope is more effective and really gives the execution that special something. And we, we will probably pay out the nose for it.

At least the trains don't run on time...

This came to me through Iain Boal of Retort, and I thought I should pass it along here.

[Two open letters of support for the nine young grocer-communards arrested under the French terrorism laws in the Limousin village of Tarnac, one by the Italian theorist of permanent suspicion, and the other by the parents of the seized. IB]

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which
belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350
inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order
to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried
to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine
people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and "accused of criminal
conspiracy with terrorist intentions." The newspapers reported that the
Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State "had congratulated
local and state police for their diligence."
Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let's try to examine
the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of
this "diligence."

First the reasons: the young people under investigation "were tracked by
the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho
autonomous milieu." As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior
specifies, "their discourse is very radical and they have links with
foreign groups." But there is more: certain of the suspects "participate
regularly in political demonstrations," and, for example, "in protests
against the Fichier Edvige (Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de
l'Information Générale) and against the intensification of laws
restricting immigration." So political activism (this is the only
possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as "anarcho autonomous
milieu") or the active exercise of political freedoms, and employing a
radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the
anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central
intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a
minimum of political consc ience could not help sharing the concerns of
these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy
entailed by the Fichier Edvige, biometrical technologies and the
hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons,
explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from
it. SDAT officers discovered "documents containing detailed information
on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times
of trains." In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also
confiscated "climbing gear." In simple French: a ladder, such as one
might find in any country house.

Now let's turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the
presumed head of this terrorist gang, "a 33 year old leader from a
well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents."
This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends)
formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no
doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew
Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of
view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let's move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story.
The suspects' activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts
against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains
on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe
the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no
way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder
communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often
late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of
terrorism. It's a case of minor offences, even if we don't condone them.
On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are
perhaps "perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to
attribute a criminal act to any one of them."

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those
engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and
economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as
potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation.
We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous
European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced
laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric
and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put
into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the
detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless –
people, to whom "it is not possible to attribute a criminal act."
Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize
association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and
that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist
"intentions" or "inclinations," acts that until now were never in
themselves considered terrorist.

Giorgio Agamben
19 xi 08

Letter from the parents of the Tarnac 9
Dimanche, 23 Novembre 2008

Lorsque la cacophonie s'accorde pour traîner dans la boue une poignée de jeunes emmurés, il est très difficile de trouver le ton juste qui fasse cesser le vacarme; laisser place à plus de vérité.

Certains médias se sont empressés d'accréditer la thèse affirmée par la ministre de l'intérieur dans sa conférence de presse, alors que les perquisitions étaient en cours : les personnes arrêtées étaient d'emblée condamnées.

Personne n'aura pu rater l'épisode de "police-réalité" que nous avons tous subi la semaine passée. L'angoisse, la peur, les pleurs nous ont submergés et continuent à le faire. Mais ce qui nous a le plus blessés, le plus anéantis, ce sont les marées de mensonges déversées. Aujourd'hui ce sont nos enfants, demain ce pourraient être les vôtres.

Abasourdis, nous le sommes encore, paralysés nous ne le sommes plus. Les quelques évidences qui suivent tentent de rétablir la vérité et de faire taire la vindicte.

Les interpellés ont à l'évidence bénéficié d'un traitement spécial, enfermés pendant 96 heures, cela devait faire d'eux des personnes hors normes. La police les suspecte d'être trop organisés, de vouloir localement subvenir à leurs besoins élémentaires, d'avoir dans un village repris une épicerie qui fermait, d'avoir cultivé des terres abandonnées, d'avoir organisé le ravitaillement en nourriture des personnes agées des alentours. Nos enfants ont été qualifiés de radicaux. Radical, dans le dictionnaire, signifie prendre le problème à la racine. A Tarnac, ils plantaient des carottes sans chef ni leader. Ils pensent que la vie, l'intelligence et les décisions sont plus joyeuses lorsqu'elles sont collectives.

Nous sommes bien obligés de dire à Michelle Alliot Marie que si la simple lecture du livre "L'insurrection qui vient" du Comité Invisible fait d'une personne un terroriste, à force d'en parler elle risque de bientôt avoir à en dénombrer des milliers sur son territoire. Ce livre, pour qui prend le temps de le lire, n'est pas un "bréviaire terroriste", mais un essai politique qui tente d'ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives.

Aujourd'hui, des financiers responsables de la plus grosse crise économique mondiale de ces 80 dernières années gardent leur liberté de mouvement, ne manquant pas de plonger dans la misère des millions de personnes, alors que nos enfants, eux, uniquement soupçonnés d'avoir débranchés quelques trains, sont enfermés et encourent jusqu' à 20 ans de prison.

L'opération policière la plus impressionante n'aura pas été de braquer cagoulé un nourrisson de neuf mois en plein sommeil mais plutôt de parvenir à faire croire que la volonté de changer un monde si parfait ne pouvait émaner que de la tête de détraqués mentaux, assassins en puissance.

Lorsque les portes claquent, nous avons peur que ce soient les cagoules qui surgissent. Lorsque les portent s'ouvrent, nous rêvons de voir nos enfants revenir.

Que devient la présomption d'innocence?

Nous demandons qu'ils soient libérés durant le temps de l'enquête et que soient evidemment abandonnée toute qualification de terrorisme.

PS: Nous tenons à saluer et à remercier les habitants de Tarnac qui préfèrent croire ce qu'ils vivent que ce qu'ils voient à la télé.

Zizek and bathroom fixtures...


Ty sent me this photo. It's hard to make out the writing, but it is a toilet paper dispenser in China that states, "PLEASE TAKE ON YOUR DEMAND".

The very form of the non-choice necessity masquerading as a polite offer ("PLEASE TAKE"). Plus, it manifests rather well the internalization of the super-ego injunction to be a clean and proper self-regulating citizen (it's not the demand of society, it is the demand that you must take on fully of your own volition).

B-4 coherent sexuality

OK, as a general rule, I will avoid turning this site into a clearing house of cultural detritus I find on the internet. But this is a necessary exception.

Two videos by the Canadian boy-band group B-4 4 (because there are three of them, as in three comes before four). The pedophilic undertones of the second video ("Get down," an anthem regarding mutual oral pleasuring) are startling, as is the fact that no one along the corporate structure way pointed out this barely sublimated element. Also, it is simply one of the most remarkable things I've seen in a while. As for the first video ("Go go"), it begins with what seems like a homosexual incest rape fantasy (two of the band members are twin brothers) and then involves a turn to stealing a woman back and forth from one another, a woman who has little to no interest in these spiky-gel-haired tools (who always, in their videos, either pursue the same woman en masse or sing while the love object is with another man in a strange sort of cuckold fantasy).

Enjoy.



Smug organic consumer future parent carrying on the legacy in training


Photo I took inside one of the "organic" groceries in Santa Cruz. While not unique, I find the cynicism of this rather staggering, particularly given that it would be unlikely to see such little plastic interpellations displayed so boldly at the non-yuppie standard groceries (Safeway, Kroger, etc).

(These are the flags on top of the tiny shopping carts kids can practice with, learning that buying the right kind of vegan Worcestershire sauce is in fact a crucial index of what kind of voter and person you are.)

The other side of this is that it functions as a referent and compliment to the "cashier in training" badges that new employees have to wear. It extends the consuming pedagogy - of how to streamline and "put a human face on", and the assumption that one has to really work on it to learn how to get it right - straight through both sides of the exchange.

A symptom does not exist prior to the denial of its existence. (On syndromes and causation)

First, three syndromes worth knowing of.

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disorder

The lack of filtering out appropriate responses to sudden stimuli, so named because it was discovered in French-Canadian lumberjacks working in my homeland, lumberjacks who responded to a sudden noise not by a normal degree of surprise or jump but with full leaping, wild flailing. In addition, this disorder also consists of the sudden and unthinking following of orders given by anyone as long as they are given in a loud, authoritative voice. What's quite disturbing about the testing of this disorder is the claim that, "For example, if one of them was abruptly asked to strike another, he would do so without hesitation, even if it was his mother and he had an ax in his hand". I'm not sure I want to know G.M. Beard became sure of this fact without some nasty bloody testing.

Cotard Delusion:
or le délire de négation. The belief that one is dead or that one's body (and/or parts of it) are dead and rotting, incomplete and putrefying. Of course my undead obsession cannot leave this one alone. In is, in a sense, the self-knowing of the zombie. How does one traverse the Cotard Delusion? By negating one's self-negation? Symbolically killing your already-dead self?

A penis panic (the mass form of genital retraction syndrome)
A "culture bound syndrome", this is the widespread fear among a male population that their penises are shrinking, melting, being reabsorbed back into the body, being stolen, etc.

These don't relate directly to my thoughts below on syndromes vs. symptoms, though I have began tracking out, rather morbidly, particular forms of "mass syndromes" or (in the case of the Cotard Delusion) syndromes that seem to me capable of becoming widespread conditions, not diagnostics of individual pathologies but rather as the analysis of coming times.

The question I ask here is: where does the idea of the syndrome stand in relation to a Lacanian notion of symptom and subject? What might be lost by refusing the language and structure of syndromes?

Syndrome, here, might be taken first in its clinical sense: a collection of symptoms (what the patient reports) and signs (what the doctor detects) that, taken together as an aggregate, are indicative of an underlying disease or abnormality.

Two aspects to draw out from this. First, what the idea of the syndrome entails is not only that the presence of a certain symptom or sign indicates the broader morbid condition (the supposed cause) but also that this presence of one effect encourages us to look for certain other effects that otherwise might escape our glance.

The second point concerns the underlying cause. In one register, the designation of "syndrome" is particular to when we begin to recognize a set of associated effects with no sense of the underlying, structural cause. The commonality of these aggregates, across a number of subjects, indicates - sometimes falsely - that there must a shared cause. Yet in the type of syndromes that interest me most ("culture-bound" syndromes) there is no discernible cause to be located, only a set of associations and - most crucially - the contagion of the syndrome itself, the hysteria, panic, and transferability of a set of determined symptoms to other subjects who themselves lack the underlying cause that never was.

From this, we detect both the analytic power and the ultimate failure of thinking syndrome outside of a clinical situation. What is gained, and what we should remain attentive to, is how the syndrome itself functions as a veil to cover the true cause: a constellation of effects whose interrelation proposes a common "horizontal" logic but which misses the "vertical" causation of the disease that produces these effects. In addition, it lets us begin to think about how entire sets of symptoms can be assumed on mass, beginning not from any shared causation (i.e. some set of conditions that produce the same singular effect in many subjects) but from the whole mess of the syndrome, the entire arrangement of signs and symptoms that itself produces those symptoms after the assumption of their relational logic.

But...

While we might guard these observations, particularly the later, as a way of thinking how ideological forms self-replicate, stressing syndromes over symptoms leads to a certain type of reactionary political logic and bad humanist notion of the subject of economic processes. We can put these objections quite directly.

The syndrome seems to become a veil for the true cause of its associated effects, but the true cause is itself that veil, that attempt itself to find a "true cause".
In other words, the cause of the symptom is always the attempt to repress the symptom, in the retroactive circuit through which the symptom comes to be via the imposition of a system of reading that is threatened by its symptoms. (A symptom does not exist prior to the denial of its existence.)

The rational organization of symptoms into a syndrome - an organization that is precisely fantasmatic in its character - misses the fact that all symptoms are singular and incommensurable, even while they function as the knots that make meaning-making possible.
If fantasies are the attempt to provide narratives and structures for desire, then this syndromatic structure is itself the naturalization of singular symptoms into a sort of cover story about "just the kind of subject I am" or "just the way the world is." Thinking our world of blind, contingent, historical effects this way flattens both their specificity (not the way the world is, but the way this world has become) and the difficult work of reading them.

The syndrome assumes that there is a constant subject beyond this constellation of symptoms, that we are something more than the organization and articulation of our constitutive misfirings.
This is the crucial failure, and one we might see deeply imbedded in a liberal notion of the subject: the idea that the subject is a plane of consistency on top of which are erected certain unnecessary structures of thought that obscure our "good human nature," the idea that modern forms of reification and alienation pervert the transhistorical self that waits in the wings to be rediscovered and shared through representational politics (if our symptoms are accidents and/or conspiracies that can be undone, there lies commensurable subjects that can be exchanged and represented).

Against this, we want to say that alienation and reification, perversions and fuck-ups, deviations and interruptions are all we ever have had or have been. To borrow a title from a Third Eye Foundation song, we are a "galaxy of scars."




As Pettibon writes it here, every word counts, even those words, those instances and utterances, that shouldn't count or that seem to distance us from something we never could have gotten back to. Capitalism itself is a syndrome, in that it is the very lie of the natural order: one can see this in the calls for a greener, more ethical capitalism. As if it has a stable heart beneath its loops and circuits, as if it were more than the organization of our bodies like symptoms. As if it could excise and cure itself of those of us who cannot or will not be recognized in our relational logic, not just vertically bound to capital but horizontally to something like a form of being-together that starts to take morbid shape, eating away slowly at capital, from its smooth total surface to its obscene absent center.

Jailbirds and their poor nag steeds


From Jacques Gernet's A History of Chinese Civilization (speaking here of the financial crisis and impoverishment of the overblown, ineffective mercenary army during the decline of the Ming dynasty):

According to Ricci, the horses of the imperial army were poor nags which the mere whinnying of the steppe horses was sufficient to put to flight. The armies were the refuse dump of society and consisted of idlers, rascals, jailbirds, and highwaymen.

"oh God, the sublime suffering"



Brilliance from the Onion today. Now I'm thinking of extended products along these lines (sort of the inverse of Bloch finding utopia in makeup, fascism, Tylenol). Rather, the location of a pain principle in all products. How about Pierre Klossowski Home Defense Systems, which only sound the alarm if the intruder is not a Sadean neighbor carrying sharp objects.

Snippet from the article:

A nationwide advertising campaign for the new medication is slated to begin next week. In the first of two 30-second TV spots, a woman is shown walking outside on a winter's day and coming upon a puppy that has frozen to death. As she stares unblinkingly at the small, frail carcass, a disembodied announcer tells viewers: "Don't spend another day unable to shed a single tear for the eternal tragedy that is existence. Embrace the pain. Advil pain. It's the only thing that's real."

Sea grabs


Literal, "material" piracy is back - if it ever left - on the horizon of capitalism. With the most recent Somali pirate hijacking, this time of a Saudi supertanker carrying crude (news of which caused the price of oil to jump up a dollar a barrel), it's starting to look like one of the weak links in global circulation is coming as a return of a repressed imperial past.

If one can no longer access world accumulation of capital via "legitimate" means (offering tax sheltering, disposable manual labor, turning a blind eye to repressive anti-union policies, etc), the Somali pirates are showing, with a sort of striking literalness, how to skip the whole circuit. Forget the new era of land grabs. This may be the time of sea grabs (something we can perhaps see in Schmitt's conception of the geographical reimagining of the world in Nomos of the Earth). Can steam-punk dirigibles snagging passing cargo planes be far behind?

"You're coming to get you, Barbara..."

In Romero's Night of the Living Dead, we have three regimes of vision, three structures of what to look at and how to orient oneself in regard to that looking. We have zombie sight:


Always a tangled mess of partial objects, bits and pieces of bodies, jumbled, disjointed, already ripped apart before the literal act. The swallowing of Barbara by the horde (in the image above) is the absorption of her into that kind of optic: the pathos and jouissance of her face, a little kernel in the swarm of which she then becomes just one more bit of dissembled flesh.

Then you have Ben's mode of vision, which isn't really representable in a still: it hinges on the duration of focus, and particularly on the practical banality of his way of seeing. The visual world is constituted of a set of indexes to be correctly read so as to formulate the correct path of action. As a result, we get large portions of a horror film simply watching a man hammer boards, move furniture, and talk about gathering food and gasoline.

Third, and the point of all this, is the properly obsessive seeing of Barbara.

The death of her brother Johnny inaugurates this structure of sight, both for her (in the POV shots we are given) and for the audience (the breakdown of diagetic/non-diagetic commensurability, the non-linearity of spaces, the breaking of classical Hollywood cinema rules, and so on). She becomes a traumatized subject, bound to an obsessive mode of organizing the world. (Obsessive here should be read in the Lacanian sense, as that particular form of neurotic subject for whom the central question is not the hysteric's am I man or woman but rather am I alive or dead. The obsessive is s/he who is shattered by the contingency of existence and bears an unsupportable, unsurpassable guilt about the fact that "I live while others do not.") This is precisely the neurotic order that Barbara imposes on herself at the very moment seen in the image above, her inability to intervene in the death of her brother (who is coded as both taunting Big Other and as lover, as held-in-abeyance site of pleasure, as becomes evident in her long speech to Ben about Johnny).

What, then, is the consequence of this obsessive operative mode for the structure of seeing? In short, what is "Barbara-vision"?

It is a visual field equally racked by contingency, a way of seeing that remains incapable of connecting causes and effects. It is seeing the world as composed solely of untraceable symptoms, of stains upon the order that once was. This is literalized in the obsessive practice of her gaze, unable to stop herself from staring at not the rotting corpse on the stairs, but on the visual stains it leaves behind, a pure aesthetic phenomenon, until it really stains her, black blood hitting her hand and undoing, for a moment, the new obsessive fantasy that demands she take no pleasure in this radically contingent new world. For a moment, she - and we with her - get a pure pleasure of looking, decoupled from the violence that produced these effects.

And if Barbara's vision is a vision of stains, there is equally a stain of vision that persists beyond her death in the zombie swarm, a sudden reemergence in the midst of the sequence where zombie Karen kills her mother with a trowel.



The dramatic contrast of the blood on the white wall appears not just as a stain in the world of the film but a stain on the film itself, a pulp horror version of Brakhage's handpainted 8 millimeter work. Something splattered not from within. Something from our side, our being hailed into and hurling onto this undead, obsessive space.

The last house on the Hungarian modernist left (part two)

Two remarkable sequences. The first is the epic tracking shot from Tenebre (1982) that I wrote about in "Killer design" (and which I talked about in an earlier post).

The second is from La morte ha fatto l'uovo (Death laid an egg), Giulio Questi's incredible, underwatched giallo about a post-Fordist egg factory, highway motels, and the like. This is the opening sequence (after the title sequence of pulsating embryos and sepia toned fluid sliding about beneath the credits).

These sequences are, along with Fulci's Non si sevizia un paperino (Don't torture a duckling) the central films in my thinking about the intersections between modernist architecture and violence, as theorized (perhaps symptomatically or unintentionally) by the giallo film.


Old war modern (atavism, fantasy, wastescapes, and sleeveless tunics)

Scattered thoughts on, and images from, the Cold War Modern show I went to in London.



The Smithsons' design for the house of the future

A far, far cry, it seems, from Robin Hood Gardens. Are arcs and curves and ergonomic shapes only allowable in the future? Why then, do the 60's require the monolith and gridded hulks of Brutalism? What changes in the future will mean that we will have outmoded those shapes? What is the assumed gap in history that will undo the Brutalist project, with the consequence of making these self-designated "futurish-seeming-shapes-and-lives" needed?



The Great Vienna Auto-Expander.

This is basically a pinball machine design for routing traffic around before finally compacting them into what I can only imagine as bleeding, burning of metal and passengers. I think I shall propose a similar solution to traffic here in Santa Cruz. That and random mines planted everywhere except for bike lanes. Rather subtle encourgagement to give up the automotive ghost.



Sketch for the set of Doctor Strangelove.


Design for the non-reconstruction of Hiroshima.

I sadly can't recall the name of the artist who did this (anyone know, let me know), but it's remarkable. It reminds me of how I want post-industrial landscapes to be treated and reinhabited: preserve the skeletal wastes of the processes brought about by capital, yet recolonize precisely from that position, not as some new gentrifying, revitalizing force, but as survivors, colonizers who set up outposts of new life in the wastescape. What happened in the rebuilding of Hiroshima was nearly precisely the opposite: one outpost of the past was preserved (the bombed-out shell of the Atomic Bomb Domb), a tiny kernel of necropolitics, and it was then surrounded by the incursions of economic boom and reconstruction. This is not to wish upon a post-nuclear city a continued unliveabilty but for it to insist upon the presentness of its exploded past. The solution of this photo montage is something like that: new modes of collective life that stares out and through the lens of a world gone very wrong.




Oasis no. 7 (enclosed hammock, palm trees, etc)

Aarnio's Globe Chair. (i.e. even atomized subjects need a womb somtimes.)

This globe chair (and the other red chair below), along with many of the other objects and designs, such as the Smithson's future house, got me thinking about the atavistic impulse in modernist design, particularly when such design finds itself on new technological territory of plastics, compounds, any-shape-possible materials.

In particular, about the question of what it means for something to self-designate as "futuristic," and the accompanying tendency of new materials to mimic - and overleap - the look and capacity of older materials. Thinking here of something like Benjamin's comments on the use of glass and iron in the construction of the Paris arcades. For, on the one hand, they represented the high point of technological innovation used to create previously unprecendented spaces: borrowing the developments from the industrialization of Europe (and particularly forms that came from railroad construction, such as long girders, and slowly curving metal lines), it allowed for those wide expanses of glass stretching over the contained markets. On the other hand, though, Benjamin notes that these new forms often took the ornamental form of previous styles and technologies, veiling their newness in a sort of nostalgia. In addition, if we think about the arcades, they are essentially old-fashioned European street markets, the tight cluster of vendors, altered only by their rainproofing (and the depth of shops, those narrow but long magasins).

In any case, with these egg-womb-kidney-intestine-bone chairs and planned biomorphic architecture, you get the further - and maybe ultimate - extension of that logic, hearkening back not to previous architectural styles but to "organic" shapes: new technologies and materials allow one to live with a vision of the very old. Though this vision of the old remains, as in the iron girder citation of earlier styles, only a referent, a hollowed out allegory of the distance from that. Making a chair like an egg implies that one has rather forgotten what eggs are like, and hence we get their form only in this plasticine, shiny, blinding bright yellows and reds.


Modzelewski chair (organ cradling shapes)



Project of the Reconstruction of the Firmament. Francisco Infante-Arana.

One can see here something like the aestheticized fantasy version of the space race. Forget getting to the stars: can we rearrange them into constellations adequate to our new modernist sensibilities?

The good ol' days.




Pierre Cardin "Cosmos" menswear/abomination

Perhaps most importantly:
why do all visions of the future involve terrifying sleeveless tunics and turtlenecks? Do we face a world with such dramatic climate shifts that we need to be able to quickly transition our look from aging bohemian with cold neck to a 60's mod girl minus her boots and plus some sensible leggings?

Winter wonderland



Emilia sent me this photo (of Dubai's Palm Jumeirah development) and suggested that this may in fact overleap the Rimini riviera as Tafuri's worst nightmare. What, she asked, would be the utopian alternative?

I think that the utopian alternative to this wouldn't be much different. All that we need is for the water to flood up between the houses and then freeze permanently. Interaction consists of gliding around on ice skates, cutting through frozen flooded living rooms, pairs ice dancing, children on slippery chairs, just one giant skating rink of post-bourgeois-house subjectivity.

Hell, it worked for us in Maine.

The Offense of Lost Causes: A Manifesto

[This is the talk I gave yesterday at the HM conference in London. It represents an incomplete account of a lot of the questions at hand; it is, rather, a provocation to thought about how to move through the melancholia of the radical left now, how to not retreat in the closing off of our "nightmare history" by mourning, how to make something other of this apparent impasse.]


The manifesto, as form, is the speaking of a we that does not exist prior to its articulation. A we that holds out in thought, but not yet a who, not yet an us. There lies its uncanny time: it claims to make manifest, to make public, that which can no longer be ignored. A spectre is haunting Europe. But what was this spectre? It was, precisely, the dark cloud of proletarian uprising that had no shape until it gathered storm in the course of the Communist Manifesto itself. The spectre of Communism is never merely the spectre of dissent: it is the directionality of that dissent, the consolidation of enmity to its crucial basic antagonisms, laid bare in the cross-fire of proletarian theory and bourgeois ideology.

As such, the spectre of Communism arises only at the end of the manifesto, in the call: Workers of the world, Unite! The looming presence of Communism that haunts Europe – and the text of the Manifesto itself – is created retroactively, based on the articulated conditions (“the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”) and the conditions of articulation (“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims”). In other words, the call to unite – a call conditioned by the fact that Europe is already haunted by the coming violence of proletarian revolution – is a sort of short-circuit, a negative feedback loop in the text. Though we must insist: this is no failure of the Manifesto. It is its conceptual and practical triumph.

Only with Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written four years later, do we get the expression, however fleeting, of what is at stake in this untimely logic, in how it seems to be both creating a new we and, conversely, giving voice to the swelling ranks of a we that has yet to find a voice. Yet this “seems” remains deceptive, for it is precisely in that perspectival slippage that we find its radical point of departure – its hard political kernel – and our point of departure, for imitating differently, such a gesture now.

The expressive project of the Manifesto, as distinct from – yet bound to – its political project, is laid out in the 18th Brumaire:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past.”

Where previous revolutionary movements needed the radical triumphs of the past to glorify and buttress the historical validity of their moments – a claiming of lineage with revolts of the past – the time has come, for Marx in the mid 19th century, to force a break in this assumed continuity. The Communist offense must begin with itself, not with its predecessors, for it is those predecessors – reduced to superstitious, mythicized events – that both overdetermine and limit the capacity to act in the present.

This is, for Marx, a problem of the weight of inherited forms: past tactics, bloody icons, and, to détourne Robespierre’s words, “revolution without a revolution”, a lifeless, crystallized historical shape. Marx writes,

“In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.”

What is this dialectic of content and phrase? It is this: previous manifestos, prior articulations of revolutionary becoming, had an excess of “phrase” beyond their content. As such, they remained at once utopian and restricted in their vision: blueprints for political action without the “content” of developing proletarian consciousness.

Writing in 1852, after the incendiary years of the late 40’s and the repressive closure of that opening, the situation is different. There was a spilling over of uncontained “content,” of working class dissent and enmity. What was lacking was a phrase adequate to give shape: not to dictate how such revolutionary affect should be but rather to give direction to it, to focus it toward the chinks in the armor of the consolidating state forms and industrial might of Europe. How, then, is this remedied? By letting the “dead bury the dead,” of refusing to look to the continuation of past struggles as the constant site of battle, of no longer borrowing forms that once were adequate. In short, with the poetry of the future.

Poetry, here, is not an accidental designation: it is precisely the question of a poetics of experimental form, of avant-garde politics, rethinking not only what revolution looks like to us but how revolution should look, how it should see, and how it understands the historical conjuncture in which it unfolds and which it makes unfold. The question is a need to rethink the phrase, as in phrasing in singing: how do we give form to breath, that which is needed as the content-to-be.

To speak of this moment now, not of 1852, must still be to speak, unapologetically, of a we. Against pluralism, against obsessive identity particulars, against an assumption of determinate, fixed commonalities. Or better, not to speak of a we, for it is worth noting that in the Communist Manifesto, “we” is rarely used to speak as the proletariat – it functions more a placeholder for we, the knowing reader. It takes Lenin to fully make the move, in What is to be Done, to forcefully integrate the reader into the position of the radical we, the revolutionary party.

Not to speak of a we, then, but to grasp that speaking a we is not the same thing as describing an already existing us to which one may or may not belong. This failure, this slippage in articulation, produces very real consequences not only in how to think about what we – as a revolutionary movement – look like but what the enemy looks like, how we think capitalism itself.

This is the very failure that haunts certain workerist – and post-workerist – models of the “socialized worker” (operaio sociale). Developed initially by Alquati and adopted by Negri, Lazzarato, and other theorists of the “post-Fordist turn,” the notion is now familiar to us: in the 60’s and 70’s, the increasing abstraction of labor, confronted with the factory struggles and strikes of the worker’s movement, resulted in the development of increasingly socialized labor no longer limited to particular sites of work that had become, equally, sites of resistance. Developed outside the immediate processes – and changes within – the production system, the socialized worker is not tied to a single sector; as such, it is the proletarian subject of abstract labor constituted across the process of valorization itself, the zero sum of the post-Fordist global system. We can detect this figure of socialized labor as the broader base beneath other current forms of labor: immaterial labor, service sector work, information technology, “precarious” off-site work. We are concerned here neither with the accuracy of designating this as the dominant figure of late capitalism nor with the important work done by operaismo theorists in grasping new valences of accumulation, circulation, and domination.

Our concern is the political potential Negri located in the socialized worker. His thesis, one that has continued to unfold into Empire, is that the mutations of capitalist restructuration did not result in the collapse of proletarian political potential. He strains, as it were, against the reactionary conclusions regarding the end of radical politics. Instead, he argues in Proletari e Stato, there is an unintended consequence to the new political composition of the working classes, the unification in the form of socialized labor: there is, “a single law of exploitation present over the entire process of planning of capitalist society.”

What is the problem with this, from the perspective of new struggles against capitalism? The fundamental problem is the flattening of capital, through the generalized figure of the socialized worker. For we cannot claim that we have revolutionary potential because there is now a generalization – by capital – of diverse workers into the socialized worker subject. The proletariat must be instead the universalization of radical difference, not the consequence of capital “flattening” the world and colonizing the whole life world of the worker. To speak the we, in the model we detected in the circuits of the Communist Manifesto, is to insist against the tendency that says “we are already a we”, a multitude of socialized workers.

But who is the we that speaks now? Who is the we that must be articulated so as to produce, out of the field of disparate antagonisms, its retroactive necessity, the figure of its threat so we can begin from there?

The time of the great struggles, of emergent moments of the revolutionary Event, is supposed to have passed. Yet counter-intuitively, we should in fact insist on this position, on the constitutive anxiety that forms the core of the revolutionary position today. We speak from a position of anxiety, and it would seem that this is anxiety about the “absence of revolutionary potential,” anxiety about the “end of politics,” anxiety about the past tradition we seem incapable of resurrecting. Have we lost, irrevocably, the horizon, the thinkability of Communism?

This would be a misreading. Anxiety here means neither our nervousness about the unknowability of the future nor the creeping fear that such a future is all too knowable. Rather, anxiety, following Lacan in his tenth seminar, is “the lack of a lack.” Our problem is not that we lack the sort of explosive antagonisms and radical potential we once had, but that we suffer from too many, too much. Not a lack of crisis-moments, but their excess, and this field of waste, of chances slipping past us, this lack of lack makes it difficult to clear the necessary space to recognize what is crucial. We assume that repression is like pornography: I know it when I see it, that there will be a moment where suddenly naked power shows itself fully, and we receive, from the development of capital toward its tendential crises, coordinates for our action. Yet this injunction should be reversed: I know it when I can’t see it. We detect coercion where it seems most absent. This is old heart of Marxist ideological critique: it is from the “purely” economic that the repressive circuit of capitalist social codes begins, the central germ of antagonism and domination. This core of cultural critique must be maintained, all the more revived today, in order to cut away and reveal the subversive and productive force of starting from anxiety, moving toward and through the fear of repetition.

We think from this position of anxiety, and it is from here that we need to articulate a we capable of negation, and the space of lack in which real political desire can find its targets and objects. As such, the project seems to be ever more that of the 18th Brumaire, letting the dead bury the dead and “focusing on the new.” This would be – and perhaps has been – our fundamental mistake. I cannot judge how accurate those judgments of the Brumaire were for the mid 19th century. But to speak for now: we might insist – against the fetishization of the unforeseen and unthinkable new –that we need to unbury the dead, not to resurrect them as messianic visions, but to detect, in their very undeadness, a sense of how the imitation of politics was and is our most radical gesture. Marx writes,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living.”

What allows us to speak the we, to conceive of directed political action toward the future? It is precisely this nightmare weight of the past. What conditions the emergence of that call – workers of the world, unite – is the dead of our history, out from under whose mass and through whose singular, repeated failures comes something like a spectre.

But we should not obsess so much over ghosts, or take them too literally as our model. Marx again provides a way from here:

“The awakening of the dead in those revolutions therefore served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given tasks in imagination, not of taking flight from their solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making the ghost walk again.”

The particular wording is crucial here: to make the ghost walk again. Not to wake the dead – that which once was organic and living – as a ghost, but to make the ghost walk again. Is it not the case, then, that what is at stake here is precisely not resurrection but repetition? What Marx warned against for the revolution of the 19th century may be the very needed rallying cry for our revolution: a recognition that the spirit of revolution has always been a ghost, or perhaps the endless reanimation of its acting body, a repetition gone wrong. Most precisely, a thought of politics not as something that once was “really alive” but instead as the inhuman imitation that, in getting it wrong, gets it right.

This is to say: revolutionary politics – in its strategies, tactics, and imaginings – imitates the New, the Evental. Such tactics and orientations are based on our slippages, failures, unexpected gains: the moments where the reigning order displays the lie of its seeming permanence. Even without a tinge of revolutionary romanticism, we necessarily – and this we includes those like Negri who accuse comrades of worshipping the “whore of continuity – hail the moments of rupture, the great events, the lost causes. But we cannot simply defend them as the triumph belonging to “another age,” some time when massive structural change was possible. Such change is always unthinkable: that is the point. We cannot defend a lost cause – we can only become its offense. And, perhaps, insist on the lost cause as the central figure of radical thought today. This is the recognition that, as Zizek puts it, “What we are unable to repeat, we are haunted by and are compelled to remember.” This should be supplemented to say: what we cannot fathom repeating - what we think of as the incommensurable New of past revolutionary moments, we are compelled to remember, to consign either to the dead and buried, or to the resurrectional promise that never will be.


This means: the New is itself a repetition, in its moments of emergence, before it has the character as that which inaugurates an order. It is the retroactive symptom – which we inevitably fail to grasp in our symbolic version as the New, the representation of what we tell ourselves cannot be represented – of a politics of imitation. Imitation has negative undertones, but maybe in more ways than one, and hence the need to embrace it. It undoes the banal fantasies of a humanist subject blazing a new path of action from an analytical cogito. And more than that, it is the needed figure of negation, of how we work through anxiety: we do not remember, we repeat. But we repeat in a gesture of militancy: we imitate.

Here, then, we need to ask: what does this militant repetition look like, and how does it stand against both capitalist totality and political conjunctures? It is – and can only be – a politics of the vanguard, a self-consumptive, self-effacing vanguard, the dark precursor of revolution. For in capitalism, we face a fundamental non-dialectical Two, a false opposition that constitutes the limits of how capital articulates, adapts, and advances itself: there is capital, and there is that which can become capital. Such is the totalizing vision of the logic of the value-form. Yet to think through Lacan’s formula for the missing third in an apparent opposition (1 + 1 + a or 1 + 1 = 3), we see precisely the equation of this non-dialectical Two and its excluded core, eliding the true antagonism: between capital and that which never can be capital. This is the hard kernel of the enmity capitalism generates, the basic fact of exploitation. Yet that which forms the basis of our resistance also creates the distortion and tension that makes it so difficult to transition from a recognition that something is very wrong to a confrontation with the fundamental principle of distortion. As Zizek writes,

“it is wrong to say that the “central” social antagonism (“class struggle”) is always expressed/articulated in a distorted/displaced way: it is the very principle of this distortion.”

We might think this further and say: this unseeable thing – not the real, material effects of exploitation but the abstract logic of abstract exploitation, the form itself of the commodification of human labor – this is at once the object which we need in our struggle yet cannot find, and the obstacle that makes such access so difficult. At once the missing object and the cause of its missingness.

But as we said of both the perspectival slippage of the we of the Communist Manifesto and the paralysis of anxiety, so too can be said here: the apparent overdetermination and failure of these positions – their very nature as lost causes – is precisely where they gain their radical force. For it is this perspectival slippage itself, between that which cannot be capital as missing from our sight and as blocking our sight, that produces the dizzying blur of overdeterminations, of the too-many apparent “central antagonisms” that put us in a position of anxiety. Here, though, is the crucial point: this true opposition is – like a politics that never had its originary, living content – uncanny, inaccessible. Unlike our chances for militant politics, this heart of capital never “exceeds the phrase with its content”: it is pure phrase, an opposition without content, the basic architecture of the abstraction of value. To stare it in the face, to try and act in the space between this inhuman logic and the real human consequences, is to stand in a position of anamorphosis, of distortion. The whole picture, so to speak, is lost.

Again, though, this might be a point of departure, rather than the closure of possibilities. What we would need, then, is a way to ourselves stand in that position of distortion, in that uncanny spot between two radically opposed ways of seeing, two sets of symptoms and consequences and effects that seem incompatible, even though we know their intimate connection. Such knowing is not priviledged to Marxists or specialized thinkers of anti-capitalism. It is the general knowing – one could say the general anti-intellect – of all subjects of capital: je sais bien, mais quand meme… I know very well, but all the same…

To end, then, is to call for a position of the vanguard as a dark precursor, that vanishing mediator which by virtue of its own power (or perhaps, the power of its virtú), acts as the fuse-point, the immediate contact, between these two series of apparently incommensurable effects. The vanguard, in this sense, is the point of passage between two worlds: the spectral architecture of capitalism, and the enacted terrain of worker struggle. The we that speaks here is precisely that missing object, the point that emerges to close a gap, a gap not only between two directions of vision (capitalist development and the history of the working class) but also between two political sequences, bourgeois and revolutionary. Our vital point then, following this concept of the dark precursor, is that this vanishing mediator creates the effects of resemblance: it is precisely not the retroactive vision that, “oh, indeed, here was a point of similarity”. It is the symptom of the incompatibility of these two political worlds, the symptom that makes it possible for one to conquer the other. The history of capitalism is primarily the history of capitalist development dominating its laboring bodies. But through the point of the vanishing vanguard, it becomes possible, to imitate a well-known phrase, to storm heaven, to collapse the political and economic into points of struggle.

In his late film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Debord speaks the following:

“But theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they’re needed. They have to be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete – by their decisive victories even more than by their partial defeats.”

This is the vanguard that we have been without knowing it, the embodiment of theory made to die in the war of time and the time of war. We cannot desire to be the permanent principle of where we go from the dismantling of capitalism. What we must desire is to imitate through distortion, to bring about the New by welcoming the weight of anxiety, by turning what feels to be a cursed inheritance into a tactics of repetition, of insisting on a speakable, militant, and undigestable we in the face of capital’s endless smoothing-out of the world. We have been turning our history against ourselves, split between the catastrophes that we should avoid and the emergent Events we cannot repeat. This is a sad history, but one to be repeated into a productive point, not remembered and mourned. For history may be cunning. But, after all, so are we.