Counago & Spaves

The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity

2012-01-25T15:05:00.007Z

There's a stimulating essay by David Graeber that passed me by in the spring/summer 2005 issue of The Commoner. You can download the pdf file here. If you can ignore all the typos, you'll find some original thoughts and arguments about the theory of value. Much of the work here echoes that found in Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, but there are several digressions along the way on such diverse topics as the works of Heraclitus and Parmenides, Roy Bhaskar and Critical Realism, the role of the intelligentsia in America, the significance of Gödel's theorem for social theory, and Piaget's theories of childhood development, all of which make for an interesting read. One section that drew my attention in particular concerned the "Production of Human Beings and Social Relations." A snippet:

The formal distinction between “the economy” and domestic sphere is also represented, in political-economy terms, as the domain of production, and that of consumption. Obviously, this is only true if one thinks what is really significant in the world is the history of manufactured objects, but this has become, over the last two hundred years, the favored way of looking at societies. We are, in other words, in that strange fetishized world Marx described where we continually forget that the point of life is actually the creation of certain sorts of people, and that the same system—even if we look at it in the starkest, Dickensian terms mainly as an opposition of factories (and shops and offices) and private households (and schools and poorhouses)—can be seen as consisting of a sphere for the making of human beings, that are then in effect consumed again in the workplace. One can hardly underestimate how deep this fetishism runs. In Africa and Asia, for example, it’s perfectly unexceptional to hear government officials remarking that HIV infection rates are a serious crisis in their country, because the fact that in certain regions half the population is dying of AIDS is going to have devastating consequences for the economy. Not long ago, “the economy” was recognized mainly as the means by which people are provided with their material needs so that they stay alive. Now the best reason to object to their all dying is that it might interfere with economic growth rates. The thing to ask, it seems to me, is what it takes to put us in a place where public officials can make statements like this without being immediately put away as psychotics. Ultimately life is about the production of people—and not just in the physical sense of “reproduction”, especially if that’s reduced to pregnancy and childbirth (though, of course, pregnancy and childbirth often end up becoming concrete symbols for the process as a whole)—but in the sense that human beings are constantly shaping and fashioning one another, training and socializing one another for new roles, educating and healing and befriending and rivaling and courting one another. This is what life is actually about, and it can never, by definition, be reduced to a simple utilitarian calculus. In most human societies, the forms of labor entailed in all this are recognized to be the most important ones. The production of material necessities, or material wealth, is usually seen as at best a subordinate moment in the overall process of creating the right sort of human beings. Hence the most important value forms in most societies are those that emerge from the process. Certainly, this might involve all sorts of fetishism in their own right, as tokens of honor not only inspire, but come to seem the source of, honorable behavior; tokens of piety inspire religious devotion; tokens of wisdom inspire learning, and so on. But it seems to me these forms of fetishism are relatively minor—at least, in comparison with the kind of grandiose, ultimate fetishism of capitalism, which places the world of objects as a whole above that of human beings and social relations.

Much of Graeber's paper is devoted to exploring and improving on the idea of false consciousness, examining how it could be that members of a society don't actually know what it is they are doing—in anthropological or sociological terms—yet managing to do it nevertheless, a problem that he attempts to resolve using the concept, here taken from Bhaskar (but which must, I think, owe some influence to Russell), of higher-order theories. What struck me about this quotation was Graeber's comment that in most societies, the production material wealth is usually seen as at best a subordinate moment in the overall process of creating the right sort of human beings. It brought to mind something that Cornelius Castoriadis said at the end of an interview with Radical Philosophy magazine in 1990 (available here as part of the pdf A Society Adrift) when asked if he saw any reasons for hope in the present situation:

I don’t much like to talk about “grounds of hope.” I think that you have to do what you have to do—and hope for the best. If you take the rich, ripe capitalist countries, we certainly should not renew the discourse about insurmountable internal contradictions. Yet there are at least two facts that make it extremely difficult to believe in an indefinite reproduction of the present state of affairs. The first is the ecological limit, which we are nearer and nearer to. The second concerns the present state of capitalist society but is somewhat analogous to the ecological question. Everybody is lauding the extraordinary efficiency of capitalism in the field of economic production. This is true. But up till now this has been achieved through the irreversible destruction of a capital of natural resources that had been accumulating for three billion years (or at least 700 million years). This has been thrown away, destroyed, over fifty years or a hundred years. There were sediments of forests, land, oxygen, ozone, a variety of living species, etc. But the same is true on the anthropological level. Capitalism can function—could function—because there was a capitalist entrepreneur who was fascinated and impassioned by producing things and setting up new machines. Very often he was, if not an inventor, at least a quite clever design engineer—Edison and Ford, for example. This type is disappearing. More and more, you make money by playing in the (financial) casino, not by setting up production facilities. Capitalism also presupposes anthropological types—the bureaucrat, the judge, the educator—which are precapitalist products. If the prevailing philosophy and system of values (say) that you try to earn as much money as you can, and to hell with the rest—one doesn’t see why you should have judges, or university professors, or even schoolteachers. You will have them, but they will do their job in the worst possible way: trying to get away with as much as they can; being corrupt, if corruption is materially feasible, and so on. In this respect, capitalism is living by exhausting sediments of previous norms and values, which become meaningless in the present system. Absolutely meaningless. But this is not a “ground” for hope. An ecological catastrophe, for instance, could very well lead to a series of quasi-fascist dictatorships—“The holiday is over. This is your ration for the coming month: ten liters of oxygen, two gallons of petrol, etc. That’s all.”

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I was single-minded about what it was I wanted to be when I grew up: a writer. By the age of 15, such a romantic notion seemed silly even to me, to the extent that when I met the careers adviser, I told him instead that I wanted to be a journalist, which is to writing as dog-walking is to dogging but which had the redeeming quality of mundanity. Even the careers master looked at me contemptuously. Fortunately, I discovered my true passion a couple of years later when I changed school and discovered sociology. Today's kids, supposedly, and by this analysis, don't concern themselves with career ambitions. Their one desire is to be famous. Whether that's marginally better or worse than wanting to be rich, as Castoriadis imagines, if he's right about the collapse of capitalist archetypes and the end of capitalism's ecological sustainability, there are a lot of kids out there who are going to be disappointed.

The upshot, of course, is that, as both Graeber and Castoriadis argue, we have lost sight of any sense of proper value, not just as a society but also as sociologists and social theorists. It's imperative that we recognise the role of imagination and self-creation in re-inventing the social, thereby re-establishing our ownership over value.

Aftermath Network: Metamorphosis of a crisis

2011-10-01T12:48:00.000+01:00

This is well worth a look: An episode of the Dutch TV programme Backlight on the Aftermath Network, a group of intellectuals brought together by sociologist Manuel Castells to interpret the global crisis, and examine the possibilities it offers.

Mamgmanimity Revisited

2011-09-28T16:00:00.000+01:00

Here's Dr. Jeff Klooger talking about his book Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy, which I attempted to review here.

Part One:

Part Two:

A Question of Degree

2011-09-27T17:21:00.000+01:00

Real life and social media have overtaken Counagoites in recent months (in my case redundancy, moving house and Twitter), but here's a little something that turned up in my attic during the clear-out, a pamphlet produced by Solidarity but NOT as a Solidarity pamphlet: Bob Dent's LSE: A Question of Degree. I imagine some political nerd somewhere will want a complete pdf of the the damn thing, but here, just as a taster for the less anal of you, are the front and back covers.

Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011

2011-05-28T15:08:00.002+01:00

One of the true greats has gone, scythed down at a mere sixty two. Gil was a visionary and a poet - a father of hip hop - and, as a drug addict who was arrested and imprisoned for his "crimes," a victim of the way that America treats its poor and its errant. He was a novelist, poet, singer and seer. Gil spoke about a different America to the newscasters and politicians. He saw through the rhetoric and lies and fixed his steely gaze on poverty and iniquity, on madness and farce. There was no American Dream for black America and Gil pointed it out again and again in so many ways, each as eloquent and compelling as the last.

"There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised."

It was as though he was telling you through a bullhorn as a helicopter hovered above your house.

Requiescat in pace, GS-H. If only there were more like you.

The Usual Pun About Class

2011-04-07T14:46:00.003+01:00

A couple of interesting articles crossed my purview this morning. Whatever a purview is.

Conor McCabe has an insightful piece over at Politico.ie on the importance (and absence) of class as an explanatory category in Irish political discourse.

Over at the Stir to Action blog there's a brief interview with David Graeber on the significance (or otherwise) of academic agitation, consensus-based decision making, and the value of the university.

Enjoy.

*Update*: I forgot to mention that Conor has a book coming out at the end of June, Sins of the Fathers: Tracing the Decisions That Shaped the Irish Economy. Those familiar with Conor's writings will know to expect something enlightening, clear-sighted, and rigorous. Preview here.

By Way of Explanation

2011-03-24T12:07:00.000Z

I have removed any reference to the Continuum edition of Cornelius Castoriadis's Postscript on Insignificance and recommend to you that you use the far more comprehensive edition, Postscript on Insignificancy, linked to in the post below, from Not Bored.

David Ames Curtis outlines his concerns about the Continuum edition here.

Postscript on Insignificancy

2011-03-23T11:24:00.001Z

NotBored announcement (via David Ames Curtis)

Today, on the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune, we announce the publication of Postscript on Insignificancy, including More Interviews and Discussions on the Rising Tide of Insignificancy, followed by Five Dialogues, Four Portraits and Two Book Reviews by Cornellius Castoriadis, which has been -- like the other volumes in this series -- translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service.

Link to the Cornelius Castoriadis page we host.

Direct link to the new volume

CONTENTS

Notice ii
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in English, with
Standard Abbreviations v
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in French, with
Standard Abbreviations vii
Foreword x
On the Translation xlvi

PART ONE: POSTSCRIPT ON INSIGNIFICANCY
§Corneille, Key Dissident, by Daniel Mermet 5
§Neither God, Nor Caesar, Nor Tribune (1996) 8

PART TWO: MORE INTERVIEWS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE RISING TIDE OF INSIGNIFICANCY
§Socialism or Barbarism (1961) 27
§A Thoroughgoing Shakeup of All Forms of Social Life:
An Introductory Interview (1973) 53
§Wot? No Contradictions? (1974) 61
§Liberal Oligarchies (1985) 66
§Beating the Retreat Into Private Life (1986) 67
§The Ambiguities of Apoliticism (1986) 75
§This Extraordinary Capacity for Self-Organization (1987) 78
§Perish the Church, the State, the Universities, the Media,
and the Consensus (1988) 88
§The Big Sleep of the Democracies (1989) 93
§Giving a Meaning to Our Lives (1990) 96
§Politics in Crisis (1990) 100
§A Crisis of the Imaginary? (1991) 106
§The Rebirth of a Democratic Movement (1991) 109
§The “End of History”? (1992) 117
§Society Running in Neutral (1992) 130
§The Crisis of Marxism and the Crisis of Politics (1992) 134
§If There Is to Be a Democratic Europe (1993) 144
§I Am a Revolutionary (1997) 153

PART THREE: FIVE DIALOGUES
French Editors’ Foreword to Dialogue 161
§Répliques: “Facing Modernity” with Octavio Paz and
Cornelius Castoriadis (1996) 164
§Interview: Cornelius Castoriadis and
Jean-Luc Donnet (1995) 184
§Interview: Cornelius Castoriadis and
Francisco Varela (1995) 200
§Interview: Cornelius Castoriadis and
Alain Connes (1995) 217
§Interview in Annex: Cornelius Castoriadis and
Robert Legros (1990) 236

PART FOUR: FOUR PORTRAITS
§Benno Sternberg-Sarel (1971) 255
§C.L.R. James and the Fate of Marxism (1992) 258
§Remembering Irving Howe (1993) 288
§Raoul (1995) 290

PART FIVE: TWO BOOK REVIEWS
§Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy
(1980) 296
§Philosophy as Antidote: Roger-Pol Droit, Philosophy
and Democracy in the World (1995) 300

Appendix: Potential Future Translation Projects 305

Does It Seem Like a Long March to You?

2011-03-22T16:07:00.003Z

Eleanor Hartney reviews Feng Mengbo's exhibition at MoMA P.S.1, New York, in the February edition of Art in America magazine.

With his 80-foot-long digital wall installation The Long March: Restart, Feng Mengbo amends Karl Marx's famous dictum: here history repeats itself not as farce but as kitsch.

. . .

In Feng's hands, the Long March becomes an elaborate video game for a single player positioned between two massive projections sprawling over opposite sides of a gallery. At P.S.1, you pass through several blind corridors to enter the darkened gallery containing the work. Appearing on the walls between play sessions is an anachronistic montage of grainy images from the Cultural Revolution era (1966–76), when the propaganda machine of the Communist government was in high gear. To the accompaniment of blaring Chinese music, the stills flash by: beaming young men and women in the uniforms of the Red Guard, mountain scenes and maps, presumably of the area traversed during the Long March, and framed portraits of a handsome young Mao.

This sequence is followed by the game's logo—a Red Army soldier astride a crushed can of Coca-Cola. The game commences with a screen on which the soldier stands poised within a giant red star in a landscape dominated by the Great Wall. The object is to move him across the horizontal stretch of the scene and on to the next scenario. He can jump, move forward and fire his weapon, loaded with exploding Coke can projectiles, at the various obstacles that come his way. There are eight such screens in all, appearing consecutively as players achieve higher levels, each with its own settings and opponents, and each requiring a successively greater degree of dexterity.

How come the sound track isn't Gang of Four?

Coming Soon!(ish)

2011-03-18T08:50:00.003Z

I've just finished reading Shimson & Bichler's Capital as Power and would have really liked to post a review, seeing as how fecund it is with ideas and arguments that could do with broader dissemination (not that reviewing it here would get it any broader dissemination!). But before I can do the book justice, I'm going to have to re-read all of my Veblen, and anyone who's tried reading Veblen will know that this isn't an enviable task. His style is prolix, dry, and to all appearances detached and contemplative (although at the same time he is funny, ironic, and insightful, and his analyses of American capitalism secured for him the epithet "the American Marx.") Shimson & Bichler lament the fact that their book has yet to be reviewed by any Marxists, but I suspect that that's because it means acquiring a familiarity with Veblen that few people of sound mind outside of the academy would want to entertain.

I'll characterize their book as a neo-Veblenite analysis of capital, liberally sprinkled with Castoriadian pixie dust and copious amounts of documentation and research, which is how it should be. Don't go anywhere near it until you've read Veblen's economic writings (The Engineers and the Price System and Absentee Ownership being the two most relevant). I was able to dig out my Portable Veblen and Diggins's Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class in order to jog my memory (I read Veblen for my master's nearly two decades ago), but they really only allowed me to keep up with Shimson & Bichler, and even then I was unable to fully understand many of the passages, particularly those dealing with more arcane arguments amongst contemporary Marxist economists (S&B also claim to be influenced by Polish economist Michał Kalecki, although he really only seems to feature in the closing chapters).

Frankly, I'll probably have to read Capital as Power another couple of times before I can fully understand it. And having now done my best to dissuade you from reading it too, let me just say that you really should read it. ;-)

In the meantime, let me draw your attention to AK Press's newly published Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reader, Property Is Theft! edited by Iain McKay, who's responsible for the Anarchist FAQ site. The ideal gift (see what I did there?)

John Gerassi Interview

2011-03-14T12:04:00.000Z

According to the teaser for this 2001 interview in the "electronic journal of Marxist theory and practice" Cultural Logic, John Gerassi is indeed engaged in work on the second volume of his biography of Jean-Paul Sartre. I shall really loook forward to it.

The interview itself is also well worth a read, if you can forgive the annoying typos (Cantor for Castor, Pupette for Poupette, etc.).

If It's March It Must Be Lanzarote

2011-03-13T12:50:00.005Z

Creature of habit that I am, this month means a getaway to somewhere hot and sunny. The heat is for my better half's arthritis, the sun is for my ageing flesh. It also means an opportunity for some light reading that can't be done on the train for fear of ostracism. I can still remember the confused looks that The 120 Days of Sodom drew from the women who get on at Rush & Lusk (I told them it was research). In retrospect, I should have turned the book upside down or on its side from time to time, so that it seemed like I was looking at pictures. Never mind. I'll do that when I take Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition to work.

Conversations with Manuel Castells, by Manuel Castells and Martin Ince

I doubt that this book would have shocked anyone on the train, come to think of it. They're pretty broad-minded in Drogheda. The soft-focus photo of Castells on the cover has a lurid, vaselined-lens look about it but you won't find anything too erotic inside, unless you get off on discussions about the structure and development of grassroots organizations in urban environments. I do, of course, which is why I had to take this book on holiday.

The book came out in 2003, so there's a dated feel to some of the conversations, and Castells has published a couple of important books in the meantime, such as The Network Society and Communication Power. These interviews were conducted just after the publication of The Internet Galaxy and so is influenced by that, but the focus of Castells's work has been fairly steady over the past 15 to 20 years, so we get here both a retrospective of his theories and a snapshot of his thought in development. The opening interview deals with Castells's personal life and career, offering some interesting insights into some of the motivations behind his thought and work (for one thing, I'd really like to know more about how Pierre Bourdieu attempted to destroy Castells professionally). Subsequent chapters deal with the role that Castells sees for new technologies in the organization of social power, how individuals and groups engage in the cultural construction of meaning, the distinction between politics and power, and the importance of information and knowledge in shaping the world we live in. The seventh of the eight conversations presents a sort of guided tour of Castells's world. Castells has lived, worked, and engaged in research in a variety of countries, so Ince asks him to give his considered opinion of how he sees the world's various regions taking shape in the Information Age. Castells opens by conceding that the Middle East is one of the few regions he does not know well, and given that this interview took place in early 2002, this is the conversation that has aged least well. Not that Castells makes any imprudent forecasts—he generally dislikes doing so in any case—but so much has happened since then that it makes more sense to look at Castells's more recent works and interviews to get a sense of his ideas on this topic.

All in all an easy read and a nice book to start your holiday with. :-)

Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows

It's been at least two decades since I read Norbert Wiener's ground-breaking and eye-~~watering~~opening Cybernetics, and the only other encounter with Systems Theory I've had was the Theory, Culture and Society special issue on the work of Niklas Luhmann a decade ago. Meadows was lead author of the book Limits to Growth (30-year update here), a MacArthur Foundation "genius," and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, so I figured I ought to up (or at least update) my game and get to grips with the principles of systems thinking as it is applied today (as opposed to in Wiener's day).

Meadows died before this book was finished, but there's enough here to provide a not-too-strenuous introduction to the basics. I could have done without the diagrams, which, if anything, were unhelpful and more confusing than the text. The introductory chapters perform the same function as those in Wiener's book, outlining the main ideas behind systems thinking and giving a few theoretical examples. Later chapters here explore the unusual ways that systems can behave, identify common real-world applications of systems thinking, how to spot systemic traps and opportunities (Bounded Rationality, The Tragedy of the Commons, Drift to Low Performance, Competitive Exclusion, Systemic Resilience), and how to intervene in systems and identify leverage points in a system. One of the significant caveats Meadows points out is that there's always a danger of misrecognizing or misidentifying a system at work, particularly when it comes to knowing where a system begins and ends—what feedback loops exist, how they work, and whether they themselves participate in or constitute another system in their own right—so it strikes me that a real-world application of systems thinking needs to be constantly subject to revision. All the same, systems thinking constitutes a useful way of reconceptualizing, or, at least, offering new perspectives on, a range of issues, whether it's social hierarchies, struggles between social classes over resources, political campaigns, or the more standard use and exploitation of resources.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?, by John Gerassi

One of my most enjoyable reads in recent years was John Gerassi's Talking with Sartre (reviewed here), notable for its honesty, humour, and love of its subject. This first volume of Gerassi's "authorized" biography of Sartre is in much the same vein and clearly draws on the same conversations, even though this book was published first. Gerassi is unrelenting in his criticism of Sartre's faults and failings and yet, for all that, it is clear that he has a genuine love and admiration for Sartre, a man he knew intimately and with profound attachment.

According to Gerassi, although he was tasked with writing Sartre's official biography, he felt unable to do so since it was impossible to improve on Sartre's own account of his childhood in Words and because Sartre had given some suggestion that he might write a follow-up, dealing with his later life. It was only with the publication of Annie Cohen-Solal's "objective" biography of Sartre in 1981 that Gerassi then felt free to give the world his "subjective" but nonetheless more accurate Biography.

Much of the book is, in actuality, an account of Gerassi's own dealings with Sartre. In a slight book (a couple of hundred pages), details of Sartre's early years take up no more than half the text (at a guesstimate). But the book is none the worse for that. Much of the ground has already been covered by Sartre himself. Instead, what we get are interrogations by Gerassi of Sartre about episodes from his childhood, anecdotes of meetings with Sartre, de Beauvoir and their circle, and a great deal of background information. All of which makes the book much more likeable. I've no idea whether there will be a second volume dealing with Sartre's middle and later years (this one gets us up to the end of the Second World War); it will require vast amounts of research, I would imagine, but also be much meatier in terms of dealing with Sartre's philosophical and political development. I do hope Gerassi is up to it, because this is a delightful and enjoyable work that presents us with a three-dimensional character, a man flawed in so many ways and yet in so many ways also admirable. And some of the anecdotes, such as the account of Sartre's meeting with Marcuse, render the book a gem in its own right as a memoir. Well worth getting hold of it if you can.

The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid, by Linda Polman

Described as a "no-holds barred exposé of the financial profiteering and ambiguous ethics that pervade the world of humanitarian aid," Linda Polman's book is really only a superficial skimming over the surface of the humanitarian aid business, mainly based on her journalistic experiences in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and a couple of other war zones. She explains how humanitarian aid gets diverted by corruption, how it is used by those engaged in war and genocide to advance their cause, and how the purported neutrality and impartiality of aid organizations plays out on the ground. In some cases, we discover, aid organizations act as, at best, logistical backup to the consolidation of power, at worst, as collaborators in genocide. A moral dilemma faces aid agencies, she argues, yet they refuse to deal with it: Is doing something always better than doing nothing?

It isn't a question that Polman feels the need to answer herself. And one suspects that it's a question that many of those working for aid agencies deal with on a regular basis. What I would have preferred to have seen from this book was an examination of corruption within humanitarian organizations, of the politicization of humanitarian aid not just by warlords and genocidaires but by the UN, by foreign governments, by bureaucrats and administrators. As you'd expect, Polman touches on all of these—the journalistic approach to book writing seems to be to pile example after example into the text without generating any depth of analysis or sense of nuance (and I should make the observation here that this book contains a lot of unattributed statements)—but her main focus is on the consequences of all these factors as they impact on the purported recipients of aid, the people she encountered at the sharp end, as it were. Not that this isn't important. Some of the details she provides will turn your stomach and disgust you with the entire process of humanitarian aid. But I'd be surprised if anyone reading this review or Polman's book hadn't already developed some cynicism about Bono.

There's a handy guide to "Aidspeak" at the back of the book that readers will enjoy. It could almost stand as an appendix to Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. For example:

complex emergency: A situation that involves war, displacement, sickness, and hunger simultaneously in one place. Some say it is nothing more than a label aid organizations attach to emergencies "to cover up the fact that they don't know what's going on."

diversion: Euphemism for making aid money and supplies disappear. They are "diverted" to another destination, such as someone's trouser pocket.

"never again": From events in Darfur, northern Iraq, Rwanda, and Bosnia, we can deduce that "never again" should be interpreted to mean not "never again genocide" but "never again an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people by Nazis."

I think Bierce has the edge, mind you.

Ahem Happy International Women's Day

2011-03-13T09:30:00.000Z

What? We were on holiday.

Here's a link to Lizzy Hyatt's article at YPHR just to remind us how far women still have to go. It includes a link to this inspiring Facebook page.

Social Media and Social Change

2011-03-04T12:09:00.000Z

The exchange here, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, between Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky reminded me of a recent interview with Manuel Castells on the role of the Internet in the recent uprisings in the Arab world. Shirky and Gladwell do not reference those events, but Shirky makes some salient points that are echoed in the Castells interview:

Shirky:

Digital networks have acted as a massive positive supply shock to the cost and spread of information, to the ease and range of public speech by citizens, and to the speed and scale of group coordination. As Gladwell has noted elsewhere, these changes do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.

It would be impossible to tell the story of Philippine President Joseph Estrada's 2000 downfall without talking about how texting allowed Filipinos to coordinate at a speed and on a scale not available with other media. Similarly, the supporters of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero used text messaging to coordinate the 2004 ouster of the People's Party in four days; anticommunist Moldovans used social media in 2009 to turn out 20,000 protesters in just 36 hours; the South Koreans who rallied against beef imports in 2008 took their grievances directly to the public, sharing text, photos, and video online, without needing permission from the state or help from professional media. Chinese anticorruption protesters use the instant-messaging service QQ the same way today. All these actions relied on the power of social media to synchronize the behavior of groups quickly, cheaply, and publicly, in ways that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago.

As I noted in my original essay, this does not mean insurgents always prevail. Both the Green Movement and the Red Shirt protesters used novel strategies to organize, but the willingness of the Iranian and Thai governments to kill their own citizens proved an adequate defense of the status quo. Given the increased vigor of state reaction in the world today, it is not clear what new equilibriums between states and their citizens will look like. (I believe that, as with the printing press, the current changes will result in a net improvement for democracy; the scholars Evgeny Morozov and Rebecca MacKinnon, among others, dispute this view.)

Even the increased sophistication and force of state reaction, however, underline the basic point: these tools alter the dynamics of the public sphere. Where the state prevails, it is only by reacting to citizens' ability to be more publicly vocal and to coordinate more rapidly and on a larger scale than before these tools existed.

Castells:

. . . In my book Communication Power, I devote a large part to explaining, on an empirical basis, how changes to communication technologies create new possibilities for the self-organisation and self-mobilisation of society, by-passing the barriers of censorship and repression imposed by the state. The issue clearly isn't dependent on technology. Internet is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The roots of rebellion lie in exploitation, oppression and humiliation. However, the possibility of rebelling without being quashed immediately depends on the density and speed of mobilisation and that depends on the ability created by the technologies which I have classified as mass self-communication.

. . .

In Egypt, they even tried to disconnect the whole net but they couldn't manage it. There were thousands of ways, including telephone land line connections to numbers abroad which automatically converted the messages into twitters and fax messages in Egypt. And the financial cost and functional effort involved in disconnecting the internet is so much that the connection had to be restored extremely quickly. A power cut on the net is like an electricity power cut today. Ben Ali didn't go that quickly, there was a month of demonstrations and massacres. And in Iran, the internet couldn't be shut down, with information about the demonstrations and videos of them on You Tube. The difference is that over there, politically speaking, the regime had the power to brutally repress things without causing divisions in the army. However, the seeds of rebellion are there and young Iranians (70% of the population) are now massively against the regime. It's a question of time.

What is the Secret of Great Comedy?

2011-03-04T08:11:00.000Z

This arrived in my Inbox 14 hours ago:

Dear John

Are you passionate about LSE? Have you got enthusiasm and ideas about how the School engages with its alumni? Then why not apply to sit on one of the Alumni Association committees.

The LSE Alumni Association was established in 2005 to give alumni a greater voice within the School. Working alongside a dedicated Alumni Relations team, the Alumni Association looks for innovative ways to:

support alumni groups, of which there are currently over 70 across the world;
engage alumni with the School, across all age groups;
develop our programme of events and communications to ensure it appeals to a wide range of alumni.

The Alumni Association is made up of a number of committees, which each focus on a different area of alumni engagement. These committees are overseen by an Executive Committee which meets regularly with representatives from the School to present the ideas and feedback from the committees’ meetings.

The Alumni Association committees are:

To find out more about the work of the Alumni Association and its committees, or for more information about how to apply for a two-year term (September 2011 – September 2013), please see the Alumni Association web pages.

Interested in being involved in the Alumni Association Executive Committee or one of its committees? Apply online today.

Kind regards

The Alumni Association Executive Committee

I wonder if the same message went out to the alumni in Tripoli.

Suze Rotolo 20 November 1943 – 24 February 2011

2011-03-01T18:31:00.004Z

Pronounced "Suzy," Of course.

Everybody always thought he was crazy for dumping you.

R.I.P.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/01/134158270/remembering-suze-rotolo-dylans-freewheeling-muse

The All-New One-Line Book-Review Quiz Competition Contest!

2011-02-17T13:23:00.001Z

Here are my one-line reviews of the ten most-recent books I've read. Just to make it more interesting, I've separated the books and the reviews and added a couple of extra red herrings for kicks. See how many books you can match with their reviews. Or don't bother.

THE BOOKS

(1) Hitch 22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens

(2) Direct Action and Democracy Today, by April Carter

(3) The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, by Richard Wolin

(4) The Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges

(5) Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, by Gareth Dale

(6) Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz

(7) The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century, by Immanuel Wallerstein

(8) Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, by Alan Sokal

(9) Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, by Fintan O'Toole

(10) Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero, by Stuart Schneiderman

THE REVIEWS

(a) Facts? Yes, well, you can prove anything with facts.

(b) Man is born ignorant. It is education that makes him stupid.

(c) A tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

(d) Like the proverbial curate's egg, it is good in parts.

(e) If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I don't want to be right.

(f) Everything I most assuredly know about morality and obligation, I learned from baseball.

(g) With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

(h) It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

(i) Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.

(j) On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

(k) In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

(l) There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is living in Ireland.

You're Wired

2011-02-16T14:38:00.000Z

While we're on the subject of bias in the accumulation of knowledge (see previous post), here's a piece from the January 30th New York Times on the gender bias among Wikipedia contributors. If you can, ignore the unfortunate sexist implications that might be derived from the paragraphs below.

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

You're Weird

2011-02-16T14:29:00.000Z

A brief but amusing article by Joshua E. Keating in Foreign Policy magazine on the limited subject pool of psychology research.

All's weird but me and thee, and even thee's a bit weird.

Capital as Power

2011-02-16T14:07:00.000Z

D. T. Cochrane manages to reference two of my favourite social theorists in the title of his recent paper, "Castoriadis, Veblen and the 'Power Theory of Capital'," which is available for download here and really well worth reading. I'd recommend it to anarchists, anyway. If only Cochrane had managed to crowbar in Pierre Bourdieu and David Graeber as well, he'd have produced my all-time favourite article. The abstract reads

The prevailing, and largely unacknowledged, uncertainty around capital puts a question mark behind many proclamations regarding the ideology, theory, and praxis of the capitalist system. A clearer understanding of ‘what we talk about when we talk about capital’ is a priority if we wish to distinguish useful theoretical positions from misguided pretenders. In this paper, I examine the theoretical common points of Thorstein Veblen and Cornelius Castoriadis as they contribute to the 'power theory of capital' being developed by political economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler.

The download is part of the Bichler & Nitzan Archives on account of Cochrane's heavy use of their book Capital as Power, which I've ordered but am yet to read. The "full description" at the Book Depository reads:

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an 'economic' entity, which they count in universal units of 'utils' or 'abstract labour', respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don't exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters the most - the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape - or creorder - their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of 'capital as power' and a new history of the 'capitalist mode of power'.

Which may not grab many of our readers but which only serves to make it even more alluring to me. Yes, I'm perverted like that. Either way, do give the Cochrane paper a look over, because it provides a valuable (sorry) introduction to alternative theories of value.

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923–2010)

2011-02-16T13:06:00.001Z

In lieu of an obituary, a profile of sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, author of the groundbreaking-but-bloody-difficult-to-obtain Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations and The Political Systems of Empires. Eisenstadt died last September.

Watch It, Assblood

2011-02-16T12:49:00.001Z

The ever-delightful and near-incomprehensible Skateboarder magazine carries a regular feature in which pro boarders (or is it pro skaters?) provide graphic details of all the injuries they've sustained in their brief young lives. This month, it's the turn of Leo Romero:

We're Just Biased

2011-02-04T11:48:00.002Z

Over at the very wonderful Third Culture site (link in blog roll, below left), this year's Edge question, What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?, has been answered by over 160 respondents. Among those we liked is Douglas Rushkoff's:

Technologies Have Biases

People like to think of technologies and media as neutral and that only their use or content determines their impact. Guns don't kill people, after all, people kill people. But guns are much more biased toward killing people than, say, pillows — even though many a pillow has been utilized to smother an aging relative or adulterous spouse.

Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them. We accept our iPads, Facebook accounts and automobiles at face value — as pre-existing conditions — rather than tools with embedded biases.

Marshall McLuhan exhorted us to recognize that our media have impacts on us beyond whatever content is being transmitted through them. And while his message was itself garbled by the media through which he expressed it (the medium is the what?) it is true enough to be generalized to all technology. We are free to use any car we like to get to work — gasoline, diesel, electric, or hydrogen — and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile towards distance, commuting, suburbs, and energy consumption.

Likewise, soft technologies from central currency to psychotherapy are biased in their construction as much as their implementation. No matter how we spend US dollars, we are nonetheless fortifying banking and the centralization of capital. Put a psychotherapist on his own couch and a patient in the chair, and the therapist will begin to exhibit treatable pathologies. It's set up that way, just as Facebook is set up to make us think of ourselves in terms of our "likes" and an iPad is set up to make us start paying for media and stop producing it ourselves.

If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we would put ourselves in a position to implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don't bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us.

and Jonathan Haidt's:

Contingent Superorganism

Humans are the giraffes of altruism. We're freaks of nature, able (at our best) to achieve ant-like levels of service to the group. We readily join together to create superorganisms, but unlike the eusocial insects, we do it with blatant disregard for kinship, and we do it temporarily, and contingent upon special circumstances (particularly intergroup conflict, as is found in war, sports, and business).

Ever since the publication of G. C. Williams' 1966 classic Adaptation and Natural Selection, biologists have joined with social scientists to form an altruism debunkery society. Any human or animal act that appears altruistic has been explained away as selfishness in disguise, linked ultimately to kin selection (genes help copies of themselves), or reciprocal altruism (agents help only to the extent that they can expect a positive return, including to their reputations).

But in the last few years there's been a growing acceptance of the fact that "Life is a self-replicating hierarchy of levels," and natural selection operates on multiple levels simultaneously, as Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson put it in their recent book, The Superorganism. Whenever the free-rider problem is solved at one level of the hierarchy, such that individual agents can link their fortunes and live or die as a group, a superorganism is formed. Such "major transitions" are rare in the history of life, but when they have happened, the resulting superorganisms have been wildly successful. (Eukaryotic cells, multicelled organisms, and ant colonies are all examples of such transitions).

Building on Hölldobler and Wilson's work on insect societies, we can define a "contingent superorganism" as a group of people that form a functional unit in which each is willing to sacrifice for the good of the group in order to surmount a challenge or threat, usually from another contingent superorganism. It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability. It is the secret of successful hive-like organizations, from the hierarchical corporations of the 1950s to the more fluid dot-coms of today. It is the purpose of basic training in the military. It is the reward that makes people want to join fraternities, fire departments, and rock bands. It is the dream of fascism.

Having the term "contingent superorganism" in our cognitive toolkit may help people to overcome 40 years of biological reductionism and gain a more accurate view of human nature, human altruism, and human potential. It can explain our otherwise freakish love of melding ourselves (temporarily, contingently) into something larger than ourselves.

and David Myers's:

Self-Serving Bias

Most of us have a good reputation with ourselves. That's the gist of a sometimes amusing and frequently perilous phenomenon that social psychologists call self-serving bias.

Accepting more responsibility for success than failure, for good deeds than bad.

In experiments, people readily accept credit when told they have succeeded (attributing such to their ability and effort). Yet they attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck or the problem's "impossibility." When we win at Scrabble it's because of our verbal dexterity. When we lose it's because "I was stuck with a Q but no U."

Self-serving attributions have been observed with athletes (after victory or defeat), students (after high or low exam grades), drivers (after accidents), and managers (after profits and losses). The question, "What have I done to deserve this?" is one we ask of our troubles, not our successes.

The better-than-average phenomenon: How do I love me? Let me count the ways.

It's not just in Lake Wobegon that all the children are above average. In one College Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, zero percent rated themselves below average in "ability to get along with others," 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top 1 percent. Compared to our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer — a phenomenon recognized in Freud's joke about the man who told his wife, "If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris."

In everyday life, more than 9 in 10 drivers are above average drivers, or so they presume. In surveys of college faculty, 90 percent or more have rated themselves as superior to their average colleague (which naturally leads to some envy and disgruntlement when one's talents are underappreciated). When husbands and wives estimate what percent of the housework they contribute, or when work team members estimate their contributions, their self-estimates routinely sum to more than 100 percent.

Studies of self-serving bias and its cousins — illusory optimism, self-justification, and ingroup bias — remind us of what literature and religion have taught: pride often goes before a fall. Perceiving ourselves and our groups favorably protects us against depression, buffers stress, and sustains our hopes. But it does so at the cost of marital discord, bargaining impasses, condescending prejudice, national hubris, and war. Being mindful of self-serving bias beckons us not to false modesty, but to a humility that affirms our genuine talents and virtues, and likewise those of others.

and Scott D. Sampson's:

Interbeing

Humanity's cognitive toolkit would greatly benefit from adoption of "interbeing," a concept that comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his words:

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either . . . "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb to be," we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have a paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. . . . "To be" is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is."

Depending on your perspective, the above passage may sound like profound wisdom or New Age mumbo-jumbo. I would like to propose that interbeing is a robust scientific fact — at least insomuch as such things exist — and, further, that this concept is exceptionally critical and timely.

Arguably the most cherished and deeply ingrained notion in the Western mindset is the separateness of our skin-encapsulated selves — the belief that we can be likened to isolated, static machines. Having externalized the world beyond our bodies, we are consumed with thoughts of furthering our own ends and protecting ourselves. Yet this deeply rooted notion of isolation is illusory, as evidenced by our constant exchange of matter and energy with the "outside" world. At what point did your last breath of air, sip of water, or bite of food cease to be part of the outside world and become you? Precisely when did your exhalations and wastes cease being you? Our skin is as much permeable membrane as barrier, so much so that, like a whirlpool, it is difficult to discern where "you" end and the remainder of the world begins. Energized by sunlight, life converts inanimate rock into nutrients, which then pass through plants, herbivores, and carnivores before being decomposed and returned to the inanimate Earth, beginning the cycle anew. Our internal metabolisms are intimately interwoven with this Earthly metabolism; one result is the replacement of every atom in our bodies every seven years or so.

You might counter with something like, "Ok, sure, everything changes over time. So what? At any given moment, you can still readily separate self from other."

Not quite. It turns out that "you" are not one life form — that is, one self — but many. Your mouth alone contains more than 700 distinct kinds of bacteria. Your skin and eyelashes are equally laden with microbes and your gut houses a similar bevy of bacterial sidekicks. Although this still leaves several bacteria-free regions in a healthy body — for example, brain, spinal cord, and blood stream — current estimates indicate that your physical self possesses about a trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In other words, at any given moment, your body is about 90% nonhuman, home to many more life forms than the number of people presently living on Earth; more even than the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy! To make things more interesting still, microbiological research demonstrates that we are utterly dependent on this ever-changing bacterial parade for all kinds of "services," from keeping intruders at bay to converting food into useable nutrients.

So, if we continually exchange matter with the outside world, if our bodies are completely renewed every few years, and if each of us is a walking colony of trillions of largely symbiotic life forms, exactly what is this self that we view as separate? You are not an isolated being. Metaphorically, to follow current bias and think of your body as a machine is not only inaccurate but destructive. Each of us is far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that's been flowing for billions of years. The dividing line between self and other is, in many respects, arbitrary; the "cut" can be made at many places, depending on the metaphor of self one adopts. We must learn to see ourselves not as isolated but as permeable and interwoven — selves within larger selves, including the species self (humanity) and the biospheric self (life). The interbeing perspective encourages us to view other life forms not as objects but subjects, fellow travelers in the current of this ancient river. On a still more profound level, it enables us to envision ourselves and other organisms not as static "things" at all, but as processes deeply and inextricably embedded in the background flow.

One of the greatest obstacles confronting science education is the fact that the bulk of the universe exists either at extremely large scales (e.g., planets, stars, and galaxies) or extremely small scales (e.g., atoms, genes, cells) well beyond the comprehension of our (unaided) senses. We evolved to sense only the middle ground, or "mesoworld," of animals, plants, and landscapes. Yet, just as we have learned to accept the non-intuitive, scientific insight that the Earth is not the center of the universe, so too must we now embrace the fact that we are not outside or above nature, but fully enmeshed within it. Interbeing, an expression of ancient wisdom backed by science, can help us comprehend this radical ecology, fostering a much-needed transformation in mindset.

and we haven't even begun to skim the surface. No doubt the answers will all be out in book form before Christmas. But don't wait. Go look now.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

2011-01-28T12:56:00.003Z

Caitlin Rose - Own Side Now

Manuel Stimulation

2011-01-24T20:53:00.002Z

Only just spotted at Occupied London, a very interesting interview with Manuel Castells, author of the Information Age trilogy briefly reviewed here. At the time of my review I described him as a "self-described neo-Marxist," but it seems from this article that he's moved closer to anarchism in recent years. Although I complained about the intrusiveness of the extensive documentation in the Information Age trilogy, the sociologist in me found his respect and advocacy for fieldwork and research in preference to theorizing very refreshing. He takes no prisoners in this interview either. Some highlights (selected as much for their tone as their content). Interviewer's questions in bold:

In 1903, Georg Simmel referred to the blasé attitude as the most typical psychological condition in the metropolis: “The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”, included in Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society, Eric & Mary Josephson, 1962). In that way Simmel touched upon the results of this continuous shift of stimuli during the early development of the metropolis. His position brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s metropolitan shock as well as Bauman’s liquid modernity. They all highlight the importance retained in stable structures and relationships in the urban setting precisely at a time when these come under threat. Network technologies intensify the level of swift and shift of these stimuli, in turn intensifying the threat of rupture in stable relationships and structures. What is your position in relation to the said danger? What levels can the blasé phenomenon reach within the network condition (see for example the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan)? And how can the notion of community be defined today, amidst a fluid and network condition of constant shifts, swifts and transmutations?

I published a book in 1972, The Urban Question, to debunk what I called “the myth of the urban culture”. Although the book presented a Marxist framework that by and large I consider superseded, it did make a number of important points, this being one of them. Spatial forms per se do not produce certain psychological reactions or social behavior. The notion of community was ideological nostalgia, and most of the so-called effects of the metropolis were in fact characteristics linked to the expansion of capitalism, the individualization of relationships under the influence of market relationships, and the dissolution of traditional forms of association. Similarly today, my empirical studies on the Internet have shown that we do not have less but more sociability in a networked context, but it is a different kind of sociability, what is know as networked individualism. There are communities, but of different types, from instant communities of practice to self-defined communities of resistance or of projects. The major trend, supported but not caused by communication technologies, is the culture of autonomy and the ability of people to define their own projects and build their own communication networks. Most of the characterizations are built by contrast to a mythical view of the industrial society or of the traditional societies. Most sociological theory nowadays is based on words, not on observation.

. . .

When Hannah Arendt insists upon the importance of the presence of others for political action, she presupposes an in-between space, a political topos wherein freedom gains meaning – freedom as is visible in the eyes of others (e.g. in the agora, the polis). And when she touches upon the classic notion of the law (nomos) she reminds us this refers to the relationships between subjects and that these relationships require an in-between space in order to be articulated. In a network condition where the notion of space is liquefied, how can the political action in the presence of others exist? What type of in-between space is produced via network technologies and relationships?

This question is simply too complicated for me. Hannah Arendt is a normative philosopher, not an analyst. If you mean how network technologies enhance the chances for political action it is very simple: by increasing the chances for people to network with each other. Since state power and capital power is based on disconnecting people, workers, and citizens, so to make their common interests more opaque and their fighting chances less coordinated, anything that helps connection helps social change. You do not need fancy words to say that. Make things simple, they are usually more simple than our concepts. Some social scientists use abstraction to enhance their status rather than their knowledge.

. . .

An example highlighting the inversion of technology’s potentially liberating capacities: The demands of the autonomist movement (influenced by Deleuze and Guattari) for flexibility, ephemeral relations, nomadism etc. were absorbed and recuperated by capital and state formations in such ways, that today we witness the descendants of this movement organising against the precarity brought with the way of life it had itself demanded. This brings up, once again, the element of stability and continuity, this time at the level of social movement procedures. To what extent could it be argued that these demands were unbearable first and foremost for those who were the first to experimentally set them? And what space exists for redefining them today, when the technologies of information impose this liquid condition as an urban axiom built upon the importance of control and security?

No idea about what you mean about liquid condition, another of these fancy terms to say societies have changed (but were they solid earlier? When? How?) What we observe is that social movements are constructed around shared practices rather than formal organization, and around the capacity to connect global networks with local existence. Thus, networking technologies are a constitutive element of the new social movements, such as the movement for global justice or the environmental movement.

. . .

In an article published by Catalonia’s La Vanguardia, you argue that anarchism might seem to be “an ideology for the 21st century”. This is a very tempting proposition and yet, the following question emerges from it: Given that as you state yourself, it is the “old” anarchist doctrine that has become suitable for our time (after being ahead of its own), why is there a need to describe it as “neo-” anarchist? And secondly, if it is true that anarchism’s newly-found relevance is based more on a structural disposition, a failure of communist governments to absorb productive forces and equally of capitalism to prevent undermining the foundations of the nation-state that fed it: If anarchism’s relevance is being initiated by these structural failures, to what extent could we be talking of anarchism, rather than anarchy emerging? And crucially, how can social movements and civil society make sure that we head for one, rather than the other?

The main ideas of anarchism (anti-statism, freedom, communes, peace, international solidarity, rejection of bureaucratic organizations, love of nature, gender equality, and the like) are present today as they were in the 19th century. But similar ideas in an entirely different historical contexts have a somewhat different meaning, this is why I call it neo. The main proposition is that the new technological environment and the network society induce social and political conditions in which Marxist categories appear to be obsolete while the Anarchist themes resonate with current social movements. Anarchy is utopia, anarchism is ideology. Social movements are increasingly rooted in anarchist themes, even if they would not call themselves anarchists. However, what will be the historical outcome of the practice of these social movements is an open question.

. . .

When referred to your work is often distinguished in two distinct periods (the so-called “old” and “new” Castells). How do you feel about this distinction and further, about the often-found obligation in academia for one to retain a unchanged position throughout their career? How does that compare to one’s political orientations and possible changes to the latter?

I never think of myself as a theorist, and so I am just amused by this categorization. I am a researcher, a worker of social science research, and in different periods of my life I did different types of research, and used different methodologies, and different conceptual systems to understand what I was studying. And I keep doing the same now. So, it is normal that I change the conceptual framework because I evolve, my work evolves, and more importantly, the world evolves. When theory does not match reality, I throw away the theory rather than forcing useless concepts on the complexity of what we observe. But I find essential not to build closed theoretical systems with the only purpose to win a share in the intellectual market of social theory. I always go back to the drawing board. It is so much more fun to try to understand new social forms and processes than to play with words. Theorists are usually very boring chaps. Do not fall in such a trap. Live in your practice, not in your books. Stay close to the facts, ask your own questions, and build your own conceptual systems with whatever is useful to your work. Ignore words or concepts that even their authors only half understand. Escape from theory courses, the last refuge of the intellectual gentry. Look around you and try to understand the world as it is, your world. And keep changing. The day you stop changing you are basically dead. Life is change. We live in a world of zombies that were programmed not to change. This is true for science, and also for politics. A different matter is some basic values, decency, dignity, democracy, equality, solidarity, intellectual curiosity, search of truth, as you understand them. This should not change, you should stick to the good values you got when you were young, the moment of openness, hope, and generosity. But which politics reflects these values keeps changing all the time, and you keep changing in finding out about political options. Keep living, thus changing. This is what I tried to do. In research as in politics. So, there never was a young and old Castells, because there was never a Castells. There was, and there is, myself, me as a person and as a researcher, resisting any reification (ummm, another fancy word: I can do it too!)

Some video interviews and lectures by Castells can also be found on YouTube.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie! (Part 2)

2011-01-21T20:48:00.000Z

Mala Vida @ Airport @ Nouvelle Vague

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!!

2011-01-21T17:53:00.002Z

Go here.

Lost Text: David Brown Resigns from Solidarity

2011-01-21T08:27:00.001Z

International Marxist-Humanist Organization Hobgoblin (formed last year by U.S. Marxist-Humanists, the London Corresponding Committee and representatives from Africa, Canada, India, and The Netherlands) have published a "lost text" from 1975 constituting a letter of resignation from Solidarity and a critique of the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis and Chris Pallis/Maurice Brinton by David Brown. The Collective's introductory explanation reads (I have corrected punctuation):

We publish for the first time the following text, written in 1975 as a letter to the membership of the Solidarity group – also known as ‘Solidarity For Workers Power’. This group was founded in 1960 by Chris Pallis, an eminent neurologist who wrote under the name “Maurice Brinton,” and Ken Weller, a young shop steward working in the motor industry. The group, initially known as Socialism Reaffirmed, published a journal, Agitator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity. Both Brinton and Weller had previously been members of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League, founded amidst the mass defections from the Communist Party after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As Richard Abernethy put in an obituary for Chris Pallis in Hobgoblin in 2005,

“Solidarity punctured and deflated some favourite left-wing illusions. It recognised that there was no actually existing socialism, no worker’s states, in the world. Notwithstanding all differences between the Western capitalist bloc, the Eastern bloc ruled by Communist parties, and the Third World, the basic divide between rulers and ruled existed everywhere.”

The Solidarity group, despite never having much more than a hundred members, was influential, not least because Solidarity became the main conduit of the political theories of Cornelius Castoriadis aka Paul Cardan (1922-97), founder of Socialisme ou Barbarie in France.

The following resignation statement by Solidarity member David Brown was written at a time (1975) when the group was in decline, facing splits and having to deal with the fact that Castoriadis/Cardan had, following the demise of Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1965, moved to the Right. Brown was influenced by French ex-Bordigist Jacques Camatte, some of whose writings he translated, by the Russian value-theorist, I. I. Rubin, and by Karl Korsch, author of Marxism and Philosophy.

According to Brown, Castoriadis and Solidarity shared with the traditional left a restricted understanding of Marx’s ideas, not recognising the liberatory core of Marx’s Capital, and taking the shortcoming of the traditional left as grounds for breaking with Marx. Brown argues that Castoriadis, Brinton and the Solidarity group misunderstood the cardinal term of the Marx’s critique of political economy – value. Brown writes:

“The attack on the labour theory of value is only a prelude to a more general attack on the materialist conception of history. By reducing the general conception of the mode of production to mean technology and the word ‘determine’ to mean the same as ‘cause’, a simple transformation of Marxism into banality follows.”

Castoriadis had argued that,

"The revolutionary movement... must become the place (the only place in contemporary society, outside the factory) where... individuals learn about collective life, run their own affairs and fulfill and develop themselves, working for a common objective in reciprocal recognition."

Brown finds this position to be “entirely false,” and argues (following Jacques Camatte) that “all organisations are despotic” because, basing themselves on “critique of other organisations and individuals” they are “already” the conception of competitive capital.

Two of the editors of The Hobgoblin (Richard Abernethy and George Shaw) are former members of the Solidarity group. As Marxist-Humanists, we do not agree with a lot of the positions David Brown expressed in 1975. If the statement that “all organisations are despotic” means that all attempts to overcome atomization and individual isolation are doomed, then we certainly disagree, believing, as we do, in a philosophically-grounded alternative to capitalism – something Castoriadis, as a “positivist,” never even considered. Nor do we agree that “support for oppressed peoples” was part of the degeneration of Marxism (this in spite of Marx's own statements on Ireland, Poland etc), or saying that people who voted Labour in 1974 "voted for capitalism."

We are publishing this text not only because of its historical interest as a critique of a (dead) organization of the Left, once significant (and still influential “beyond the grave,” through the works of its theoreticians and the legacy of its activists) , but also because of the general theoretic questions it raises have, in the 21st century Left, not been surpassed.

The letter of resignation comes in two parts: "The Illusions of Solidarity" and "To the Membership of Solidarity (London) 1975."

The above-mentioned appreciations of Brinton by Shaw and Abernethy can be found here.

Swell Maps

2011-01-20T15:37:00.000Z

An article from the English-language edition of El País discusses the new Atlas of the Civil War in Catalonia, "a unique volume on this subject, filled with over 400 fascinating maps, that was five years in the making by a team at the International Historical Studies Center of Barcelona University."

Everything is documented with military precision, down to the road networks, the railroad lines and the cities' street names. Where does all this information come from, including the disheartening list of 70 high-ranking officials of the Catalan Army who plotted the coup on July 18, and the headquarters where they were stationed? Or the exact formation of the military columns, and even of the civilian columns that sprung up spontaneously with no support from any party? Or the map showing the location of all the banks in the Catalan capital?

and interestingly, if a little disconcertingly:

Seen from this bird's eye-view, the war seems different. Barcelona awoke in an insurrectionist mood on July 18, 1936, and it was only in the evening that there was a change of sides in the armed confrontations. There were air battles on July 19; readers can track the route followed by the hydroplanes of General Goded, which took off before receiving the order to bomb El Prat airport. The map of the fearsome checas (detention and torture centers) shows that most belonged to the anarchist federation CNT-FAI. The Catalan republican left (ERC) had two and the union UGT one.

Maps are not silent. At the Battle of the Ebro, the Fascist counteroffensive shows the existence of eight German and three Italian airfields. Another map details ships that were sunk near the Catalan coast. Most were merchant ships, and many were British. There are maps showing the 11 traveling libraries that the Generalitat sent out to soldiers on the Aragón front, as well as maps of the entertainment possibilities in a war-torn Barcelona, including three bullrings and two circus rings in 1938. There is nothing like this book elsewhere in Spain, although Segura notes that "the model could be exported."

Thank You for the Music

2011-01-17T13:42:00.000Z

In the December 9 issue of Rolling Stone, The Edge picks his post-punk playlist. I like the implied modesty of this one:

11. "Teenage Kicks" The Undertones, 1978

We did a kids' daytime TV show with the Undertones. It would have been for this, their first single, and for ours. And they were the same as us — snot-nosed, pimply teenagers. But they were writing great songs.

Yeah. Whereas . . .

One for the Plinth

2011-01-17T13:12:00.000Z

Train, Mechanical, by Paul McCarthy, at L & M Arts, Los Angeles.

Reviewed by Jason Edward Kaufman

I never much cottoned to Paul McCarthy, but Train, Mechanical (2003-2010), part of “Paul McCarthy: Three Sculptures,” which inaugurates the new Los Angeles gallery of New York-based L & M Arts, has made me a reluctant fan. The grotesque sculpture is a robotic double image of George W. Bush copulating with a pig, just the sort of shock-schlock that McCarthy has made his stock in trade. While I generally have no patience for any of his slovenly garbage, this new work may well be a masterpiece of political agitprop: an appalling satire that captures as no other the revulsion and rage engendered worldwide by the long, dark tenure of our 43rd president.

The spectacle consists of a row of motorized, life-sized animatrons of Bush and hogs, their mechanical armatures covered with pink fleshlike resin. The Bush figures’ hips pump as their oversized heads turn from side to side, periodically spinning full circle, “Exorcist”-style, lips parting in orgasmic reverie. The daisy chain continues as the pigs in turn are penetrated in the ear by piglets. The ghastly contraption is set atop a metal frame containing the computerized machine that automates it. No need to belabor a close reading here: the figures, self-absorbed in bestial depravity, represent the utter debasement of statesmanship, democracy, and truth that marked the Bush years.

On this weekend of derbies

2011-01-15T15:02:00.006Z

First, a confession: Liverpool Football Club serve a special purpose in my life because they give me something to hate. A pantomime villain to boo and hiss, if you will. A Professor Fate to laugh at as they stumble from catastrophe to catastrophe. Let's be straight - that is the way of things these days in the city of my birth. The days of the "friendly derby" are no more, for reasons which are far too complicated to go into with this post.

That said, I found it impossible to resist the charms of Peter Lupson's Across the Park (sutitled Everton FC and Liverpool FC - Common Ground) because the reasons for the "friendly derby" are contained within its pages. The simple truth is that both clubs are linked historically in a way that perhaps no other clubs are, springing as they did from the same Methodist church side. Little did the Reverend Ben Chambers know, when in 1878 he formed a football team to keep the St Domingo church cricket team fit in the winters, that he was starting something which would bring twenty seven league titles to the city, shared between two illustrious clubs.

St Domingo soon changed their name to Everton FC and became founder members of the Football League in 1888, playing their home games at Anfield and winning the title at their third attempt. Soon, though, a dispute between the ambitious (and tory, not to mention Orangeman) John Houlding and the rest of the club led by (the liberal) George McMahon over rent - Houlding was renting the ground and subletting it the Everton - led to the Toffeemen upping sticks across the park to build a brand new stadium and leaving Houlding with a ground but no team. His solution was to draft in a scratch team of Scottish pros and, having been told by the Football League that he could not use the name Everton, Liverpool FC were formed in 1892.

Clearly, neither side was going to get over this bitter schism overnight but, in time, the ties between the clubs began to grow ever stronger, not least because of the great friendship between Everton chairman Will Cuff (who, as a lad, had watched St Domingo play their first games in Stanley Park) and his counterpart at Anfield, John McKenna.

Such was the healing of the rift that in 1902, when John Houlding died, Everton sent their own representatives to his funeral and flew their flags at half-mast at Goodison.

All of this, plus the many other connections between the clubs down the years through John Moores (who, Blue though he was, owned shares in both clubs) and his family, as well as the great communal grief and inter-club co-operation over the Hillsborough disaster and the Rhys Jones murder, is described in compelling detail by Lupson and even if it does have a bit of a "hey, can't we all just get on?" tone to it it is a thoroughly enjoyable and quite convincing read which would, I'm sure, be enjoyable for any fan of the English game to read. Even Villa fans.

I still want us to batter the red bastards tomorrow, of course.

It's Friday! Let's Boogie!!

2011-01-14T18:31:00.002Z

Guster: "Stay with Me Jesus"
Director: Kathleen Judge

Reeling in the Ears: The Irish Top Ten 2010

2011-01-12T21:51:00.002Z

The 2010 Irish Top Ten was somewhat delayed this year owing to the bad weather and the recession. Nevertheless, it has proved to be worth the wait, since all of this year's entries are home-grown, with the exception of the Thurles Male Voice Choir, most of whom are Welsh. There was some dismay expressed when this list appeared prematurely on Wikileaks at the absence of one or two of the nation's better-known and more widely acclaimed recording artists, but it's worth bearing in mind that this particular list comes courtesy of independent pirate station Raidio Siamsa (89.8 FM), whose listeners are nothing if not purists, and the slightest whiff of conglomerate approval or the imprimatur of the state broadcaster is enough to condemn any artist, in their eyes, to the Purgatory of corporate mediocrity, thereby disqualifying them from consideration. Thus, no Daniel O'Donnell, no Bono, no David McSavage. Here, instead, are the very best of last year's sea-green incorruptibles:

10: "Mommy, Drop the Gun," by Crystal Meth (Kimmage Music)

9: "Stop Calling Me Your Bird," by the Pigeon Holes (Phist the Lord Records)

8: "Smokeless Coalition," by Floorless Komplexxion (Hemi)

7: "Fuck Me, Fuck My Children," by Conditional Discharge (Xiao Long Bao)

6: "Hurling for Your Love," by The Thurles Male Voice Choir (GAA Official Audio Recordings)

5: "Nip Lip Bip, Nip Lip Bip Nip," by The Picky Eaters (Retro-Hetero-Metro)

4: "Dream Home in New England," by White Collar Clive and the Emigrant Solution (Drummbeat)

3: "Let Them Snort Coke," by Kill All Dee-jays (Deathrattle/Gerrymade)

2: "My Brown Trousers," by the Liquidity Problem (Loose)

and, by universal agreement,

1: "Death Before Bosco," by the Twittershit Spangles (Afternoon Wank)

You can find previous top tens here, here, here, here, and here.

Better Than Fine

2011-01-12T21:03:00.000Z

I said recently, when reviewing Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender that there remains to be written a fantastic, comprehensive demolition of arguments for cognitively based sexual differences. Allow me to recommend Rebecca Jordan-Young's Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. My problem with Fine's book was one of style rather than substance, but if this review is anything to go by, Jordan-Young's book may be the one to go to for clarity as well as comprehensiveness.

On a slightly related note, let me also recommend a couple of articles on the scientific method that recently landed on my desk: Jonah Lehrer, writing in The New Yorker magazine, discusses a phenomenon known as "the decline effect":

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

It's also worth reading Lehrer's follow-up blog, in which he responds to the letters that The New Yorker received about his article.

But even those theories that do get replicated are shadowed by uncertainty. After all, one of the more disturbing aspects of the decline effect is that many results we now believe to be false have been replicated numerous times. To take but one example I cited in the article: After fluctuating asymmetry, a widely publicized theory in evolutionary biology, was proposed in the early nineteen-nineties, nine of the first ten independent tests confirmed the theory. In fact, it took several years before an overwhelming majority of published papers began rejecting it. This raises the obvious problem: If false results can get replicated, then how do we demarcate science from pseudoscience? And how can we be sure that anything—even a multiply confirmed finding—is true?

The other article that caught my attention was this one by Benedict Carey in the New York Times on the publication of a research report in a psychology journal that claims to show the existence of ESP. The broader argument was what interested me.

For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.

By incorporating statistical techniques that are now widely used in other sciences — genetics, economic modeling, even wildlife monitoring — social scientists can correct for such problems, saving themselves (and, ahem, science reporters) time, effort and embarrassment.

Although, of course, even if those results are replicated, it doesn't necessarily mean they're correct.

The Thrill of the Kill (or Kill Your Pet Lion)

2011-01-06T10:34:00.001Z

Ted Williams writes on the phenomenon of canned hunting in Audubon magazine.

It was at Lido’s Game Farm in Taghkanic, New York, that I finally participated in a “canned hunt.”

In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas.

But Lido’s has pheasants only, so a guy named Dave threw them from a tower for a dozen of us to shoot. Some, diseased or wounded from past shoots, dropped to the ground. Other times we’d fire simultaneously, and the bird would exude feathers as if you’d shaken a slashed pillow in a nor’easter. Once someone shot while Dave was still holding the pheasant, and he screamed: “Hey, what you shooting at? Don’t never play games wid me!” The year was 1991, and I was on assignment for Audubon.

Provocative and Thoughtful

2011-01-06T10:01:00.000Z

. . . is how Laurie Taylor describes the responses to the recent Thinking Allowed program on the absence of utopian thought in the world today. You can hear my contribution at 11 minutes 15 seconds.

Liza with a Die

2011-01-05T05:55:00.001Z

Now we know who to blame:

Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?

A: My work on behalf of AIDS.

A brave, contrarian career move, when so many other celebrities were campaigning against AIDS. Or maybe she just needs a new agent.

Kill Your Pet Puppy

2011-01-04T14:41:00.001Z

Nice to see a dissenting opinion:

A 2006 survey of Americans by the Pew Research Center, for instance, reported that living with a pet did not make people any happier. Similarly, a 2000 Australian study of mortality rates found no evidence that pet owners lived any longer than anyone else. And last year Dutch researchers concluded that companion animals had no effect on their owners’ physical or mental well-being. Worse, in 2006, epidemiologists in Finland reported that pet owners were more likely than non-pet owners to suffer from sciatica, kidney disease, arthritis, migraines, panic attacks, high blood pressure and depression.

This pattern of mixed results also holds true for the widely heralded notion that animals can cure various physical afflictions. For example, a study of people with chronic fatigue syndrome found that while pet owners believed that interacting with their pets relieved their symptoms, objective analysis revealed that they were just as tired, stressed, worried and unhappy as sufferers in a control group who had no pets. Similarly, a clinical trial of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy found that interacting with therapy dogs did no more to enhance the participants’ morale than reading a book did.

Presents of Mind

2010-12-30T20:56:00.000Z

If Santa left you disappointed this year, you could do worse than download the pdfs to the translations of Cornelius Castoriadis's Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Figures of the Thinkable, and A Society Adrift, and then self-publish them using Xlibris, Lulu.com, or one of the other online publishing ventures. I gave my copy of A Society Adrift the rather gloomy cover above, but there's nothing to stop you tarting up your edition with pictures of bald-headed Greeks, Molotov-lobbing Athenians, or a large cock. Whatever takes your fancy. It makes them easier to read on the train if you don't have an iPad, and there's a good chance people will ask what it is you're reading. Especially if it has a large cock on the front.

A Happy New Year to All Our Reader

2010-12-30T20:46:00.001Z

We collectively promise to be more productive next year.

Not more interesting. Just more productive.

My Brilliant Blogging Career

2010-12-20T11:03:00.005Z

...or "how the internet killed my brain and sprained my wrist by telling me lies and feeding me too freely available porn."

But that's enough of that. Here's something for you: I watched the remake of The Karate Kid the other day. The kids in my class chose it as their end of term DVD treat and though my heart sank as I counted the hands in the air I actually really enjoyed it on the whole. Here's the thing though - it has no Karate in it. The new version is set in Beijing and since Karate is a Japanese martial art we see Jackie Chan (who is an absolute revelation, by the way) imparting the ways of Kung Fu (you're thinking of David Carradine now, aren't you?) to Will Smith's lad.

You should have called it The Kung Fu Kid, you fucking tossers!

Would I have been as angry about that when I was twenty two as I am about it now? We'll probably never know. The Kung Fu Kid. It has Kung Fu in it. Not Karate. Karate is Japanese. It should have been called The Kung Fu Kid. Is that really too much to ask?

Bah.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Books on the Fly

2010-11-24T22:05:00.006Z

Each time I update LibraryThing with my latest reads I feel guilty about not offering an opinion for the benefit of friends. It's rare that anyone would actually want to read anything accumulating in that pile in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen unless prompted by the recommendations of others or as punishment for some ineffable crime. Even so, the odd book turns up that actually looks like it might be worth seeking out, and when it isn't, I want to make sure my friends are forewarned. Books very very rarely live up to their hype, and more fool us if we take the word of paid shills in the mass media or blurb writers married to the author's daughter/son/publisher. So here's a quick run-through of the worthy, worthwhile, and worthless from the past couple of months:

The Information Age Trilogy, by Manuel Castells.

Volume One: The Rise of the Network Society

Volume Two: The Power of Identity

Volume Three: End of the Millennium

I encountered Castells in passing through a reference to him in either one of David Harvey's books or a footnote to Erik Olin Wright and was intrigued enough to want to find out more. Castells is a self-described neo-Marxist who takes seriously the significance of the new social movements that had such an impact in the 1960s and which he documented at the time. He also accepts some of the implications of the move from industrialism to post-industrialism without yielding to the relativistic arguments advanced by postmodernism. His is a Marxism, it should be said, that most orthodox Marxists would find problematic. As an anarchist I saw little to disagree with in Castells's description and diagnosis of social dynamics. He is what Olin Wright would describe as a "sociological Marxist" rather than a "historical Marxist," which is to say he might more suitably be called a Conflict Theorist; he disregards the vulgar Marxist base-superstructure dichotomy in favour of interpenetrating social forces and sees no need for a labour theory of value to explain capitalist dynamics. Consequently, his works constitute a clear-eyed up-to-date account of globalization and neo-liberalism reinforced by in-depth case studies of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the rise of the women's movement, and the transformation of the labour market. It makes for fascinating reading, but at around 1,500 pages (excluding index and bibliography) it's a challenging read, particularly when one feels the argument could have been summed up in a work a quarter of that size. The sheer quantity of statistical and empirical data is impressive but doesn't add that much to the discussion; most of it could happily have been contained in the appendices.

Bakunin: The Creative Passion, by Mark Leier

A relatively light read after Castells, Leier's book is a reasonably decent biography of Bakunin that doesn't strain the intellect too much and manages to avoid in-depth accounts of Bakunin's writings other than to acknowledge his anti-Semitism and various other flaws and to draw out his differences with Marx. I found Leier's almost matey style and frequent references to current popular culture highly annoying. They felt completely out of place, for me at least, in what is ostensibly otherwise a serious work. This isn't a book that would entice the reader to find out more about Bakunin, but it will satisfy a general readership who might not have known of the big man's existence before.

A New Paradigm for Understanding Today's World and

Thinking Differently, both by Alain Touraine

Touraine has always hovered on the periphery of my awareness ever since A level sociology 30 years ago, and the discovery that he is Castells's mentor prompted me to seek out his most recent publications in order to get a grip on his work. A New Paradigm for Today's World pretty much repays the compliment to Castells, drawing on his ideas and research and quoting him directly on occasion. A bit of a lovefest all round, in fact. Essentially, Touraine's argument (I conflate both books here) is that sociology and political theory have lost sight of the role and significance of the subject, both descriptively (sociology) and prescriptively (political theory). Sociology is so focused on structural, deterministic explanations that it fails to recognize the contribution of the subject in praxis. At the same time, French society is so hierarchical and centralized, so state-dependent, that the rights of the individual are lost or surrendered in collectivist solutions to social problems like the wearing of headscarves in French schools. He thus recommends a new sociological approach that takes sufficient account of the role of the individual within structures (which sounds to me like the late Sartre, even though Touraine cites Sartre as the founding thinker of the dominant ideology permeating French political thought), as well as a new politics founded on the promotion and protection of the rights of the individual (which sounds to me like a call for liberal, Amnesty-style campaigning).

What struck me above all, however, was how very French Touraine's descriptions are, particularly Thinking Differently, where the description of sociology's failings surely only apply to French sociology. Much of what he demands from the discipline strikes me as common-sensical among British sociologists. Vive la difference, I guess.

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, by Cordelia Fine

There's a fantastic, comprehensive demolition of arguments for cognitively based sexual differences yet to be written. Cordelia Fine's book isn't it. This is page after page of à la carte research findings that provide evidence to contradict the widely known arguments in the works of folk like Simon Baron-Cohen, John Gray, Stephen Pinker, David Buss and so on, whose works seem all the more convincing because of the way they are couched in neurological terms. Fine is a neurologist herself and well able to dismantle their arguments. My objection is only to Fine's writing style. I began reading her earlier work A Mind of Its Own, but you won't see it included in My Library because it's practically unreadable. Tedious and repetitive. And sadly, this book follows the same format. Fine's position is most likely closer to the truth than that of her targets, assuming that her depth of knowledge and familiarity with the evidence count for something, but her lack of rhetorical skills will mean, I suspect, that fewer people take on board her views simply because she fails to convey them with any consideration for the reader.

Why I am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge, by Jonathan Marks

A bit of a hodge-podge, this one. I wasn't really sure what to make of it. Marks seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the claims made for and respect bestowed upon science and scientists, but his book doesn't hold together in any coherent way. He starts off by rehearsing the now-familiar arguments about scientific method—problems with induction, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, all make an appearance—before proceeding to identify social and professional influences that distort or undermine the onward, ever-upward progress in the accumulation of impartial, objective knowledge about the world. As an anthropologist he makes legitimate and perceptive points consistent with a form of epistemological relativism that your stereotypical scientist (think Dawkins here; Marks seems to) would find appalling but which any sociologist of science would shrug his/her shoulders at. Finally, Marks lays in to a range of pseudoscientific theories like Creationism and Intelligent Design, but also Eugenics, Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Alchemy, all now discredited, he insists, but which at one time or another have been regarded as perfectly respectable by similarly respectable scientists.

I read this book in preparation for Steve Shapin's Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, but on reflection I should perhaps have proceeded straight to Go. I wouldn't have collected £200 but might have saved 15.

Some Future

2010-11-04T13:24:00.000Z

A couple of articles from the magazine and website of The Futurist. Cory Doctorow interviewed by 60 members of his public:

Audience: In your novel Makers, you talk about people who take electronic gadget waste (referred to as e-waste) and turn it into something new. Where do you see this happening in real life?

Doctorow: A large part of the e-waste problem is that we design devices that are meant to be used for a year but take a hundred thousand years to degrade. I wonder if we won’t someday design some devices to gracefully degrade back into the part stream, back into materials faster. Bruce Sterling wrote a manifesto about this for MIT Press called Shaping Things. He proposed that, with the right regulatory framework and technology, it might be possible to start readdressing design decisions so that things gracefully decompose back into components that can be reused in next-generation devices.

Audience: In For the Win and in Little Brother, you discuss small, technologically savvy networks sparking revolutions among a larger, much less sophisticated group, like enslaved factory workers who were waiting for a catalyst to overthrow their oppressors. Do you really believe that a few thousand well-connected individuals can trigger revolution?

Doctorow: My themes in those books aren’t small groups of people using technology to liberate larger groups, but rather that information rapidly diffuses through small groups, and then larger groups of people use it to help themselves. This is characteristic of all technological diffusion.

Audience: Does that go both ways?

Doctorow: Technology is good at disrupting the status quo because technology gives an advantage to people who want to undermine something that’s stable. Imagine a scenario in the Middle Ages where someone had just invented earth-moving technology and you manage security for a city. You want to defend your city with earth-moving technology. I want to break into your city with earth-moving technology. You need a perfect wall; I need to find one imperfection. Your task is exponentially harder than my task.

When you look at Orwell in 1984, he comes across as a technophobe. What he was seeing was a small piece in the arc of technology, where tech had realized an old totalitarian dream, where there had been states previously who wanted to assert control over private lives of the people who lived in them but they couldn’t make that a reality until technology gave them an assist. According to Orwell, this is what technology does: It allows authoritarians to assert authority. But not long after he wrote that, technology became a tool to undermine the state.

Today, we’re living in another one of those inflection points. We went from technology as a liberating force during my adolescence—it gave young people access to tools, ideas, communities, that even the most powerful and rich couldn’t have dreamt of before—to an age where everybody’s kid gets an iPhone with an application that tracks them like they’re a felon. Every library is mandated to put spyware on their computers, and students who are caught using proxies or another tool that might enhance their privacy are thrown out of school. Educators are scanning students’ Facebook pages. I’m hoping for another swing of the pendulum.

Audience: What did you think of the recent Viacom versus Google verdict?

Doctorow: Here’s the background: Recently, Viacom sued Google, owner of YouTube, for a billion dollars, claiming that YouTube has a duty to police all the material it hosted before the material went live. Viacom also argued that YouTube should not be allowed to have any privacy settings for its users. Right now, if you want to post a video of your newborn taking a bath and you just want to share it with family, you can show the video privately. You can select a privacy setting. Viacom argued that there should be no private videos, because Viacom had no way to police these videos to see if copyrighted material was being shared. By extension, they were arguing that no one should have any privacy settings, because if it’s illegal for YouTube it should be illegal for everyone.

If Viacom had won, they could have changed established law. There’s a copyright law called the Digital Media Copyright Act (DMCA) published in 1998. DMCA exempts people who host content from liability if that content infringes on copyright if they take it down expeditiously. If you have a Web server and one of your users posts something that infringes on copyright, you aren’t liable provided that when you receive a notice that the material is infringing you take the material down. This is what YouTube does with all of the material that its users post. It’s a ton of material; 29 hours of video per minute is uploaded to YouTube. The DMCA allows all the user-generated material on Web sites to exist. It’s why Blogger, Twitter, and Wordpress exist. There aren’t enough lawyer hours between now and the heat death of the universe to review all this material before it’s posted online. In other mediums where similar protections don’t exist, like cable television, very small amounts of user-generated material are shared.

Over the course of the court proceedings, it turned out that, even as Viacom was suing YouTube, it was still uploading videos to YouTube because they needed to have them there as part of their media strategy. Various Viacom divisions were paying as many as 25 marketing companies to put Viacom videos on YouTube under false fronts because no one officially connected to Viacom could put the videos on YouTube. The firms were even “roughing up” the videos to give them a “pirate chic.” At any big media company, beneath the top layer of corporate leadership, beneath the people who file lawsuits for things like copyright infringement, you have a layer of people who understand the realpolitik. These are the actual content producers. They say to themselves, “I have a new TV show. I have to get a certain number of viewers or it will be canceled, and I can’t do it unless I have my video on YouTube.” The real question is, how do you empower those people? We need to start a secret society for clued-in entertainment executives to help each other across companies.

What the court held in the case was that you don’t have to preemptively police all material before it gets onto the Internet. Viacom said it would appeal. It was a foregone conclusion that they would. One day, your university will change its Internet-use policy based on this case. Your Internet service provider will change its policy based on this. It affects everyone, even people who use the Internet for reasons besides uploading entertainment content.

This case speaks directly to how we will share information collectively in the future. It’s the basis also of all of tomorrow’s political organizing. The more constricted that becomes, the harder it becomes to resist bad laws.

Audience: Last year in Spain, the government deactivated 3 million phone numbers. The owners of the phones had to go to a store and show ID to register their phones to get service again. A few weeks ago, Senator Charles F. Schumer (Democrat–New York) proposed mandatory registration of cell phones in the United States because the Times Square bomber used a prepaid phone. How do we resist this in the context of the May 11 threat of terrorists using prepaid phones?

Doctorow: This is another example of politicians shouting terrorism as a way to get anything passed. If the Times Square bomber didn’t have access to an anonymous phone, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have just bought a phone using his ID. What he was worried about was blowing up Times Square, not whether or not he would get caught afterward. All of the 9/11 bombers used a real ID when they got on their planes. Being identified after you committed your suicide atrocity is not a downside. These people record videos with their information before they act. Our current approach to antiterrorism seems to take as its premise that al-Qaeda was trying to end aviation by making flying inconvenient.

In the other article that attracted my attention, author and anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses the "new monogamy":

Marriage has changed more in the past 100 years than it has in the past 10,000, and it could change more in the next 20 years than in the last 100. We are rapidly shedding traditions that emerged with the Agricultural Revolution and returning to patterns of sex, romance, and attachment that evolved on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago.

Let’s look at virginity at marriage, arranged marriages, the concept that men should be the sole family breadwinners, the credo that a woman’s place is in the home, the double standard for adultery, and the concepts of “honor thy husband” and “til death do us part.” These beliefs are vanishing. Instead, children are expressing their sexuality. “Hooking up” (the new term for a one-night stand) is becoming commonplace, along with living together, bearing children out of wedlock, women-headed households, interracial marriages, homosexual weddings, commuter marriages between individuals who live apart, childless marriages, betrothals between older women and younger men, and small families.

. . .

But the most profound trend forward to the past is the rise of what sociologists call the companionate, symmetrical, or peer marriage: marriage between equals. Women in much of the world are regaining the economic power they enjoyed for millennia. Ancestral women left camp almost daily to gather fruits, nuts, and vegetables, returning with 60% to 80% of the evening meal. In the hunting and gathering societies of our past, women worked outside the home; the double-income family was the rule, and women were just as economically, sexually, and socially powerful as men. Today, we are returning to this lifeway, leaving in the “dustbin of history” the traditional, male-headed, patriarchal family—the bastion of agrarian society.

A Society Adrift

2010-10-27T17:44:00.001+01:00

Not Bored! have made available a new pdf file here of

A Society Adrift: More Interviews and Discussions on The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Including Revolutionary Perspectives Today.

Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service. Electronic publication date: October 2010.

Notice ii
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in English, with Standard Abbreviations v
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in French, with Standard Abbreviations vii
Foreword x
On the Translation l
French Editors' Preface li
PART ONE: ITINERARY
The Project of Autonomy Is Not a Utopia (1993) 5
Autonomy Is an Ongoing Process: An Introductory Interview (1990) 16
Revolutionary Perspectives Today (1973) 35
Imaginary Significations (1981) 63
Response to Richard Rorty (1991) 95
On Wars in Europe (1992) 113
PART TWO: INTERVENTIONS
Is it Possible to Create a New Form of Society? (1977) 138
What Political Parties Cannot Do (1979) 156
The Stakes Today for Democracy (1986) 165
"We Are Going Through a Low Period . . . " (1986) 171
Do Vanguards Exist? (1987) 177
What a Revolution Is (1988) 189
Neither a Historical Necessity Nor Just a "Moral" Exigency: A Political and Human Exigency (1988) 199
When East Tips West (1989) 205
Market, Capitalism, Democracy (1990) 210
A "Democracy" Without Citizens' Participation (1991) 220
Gorbachev: No Reform, No Turning Back (1991) 226
War, Religion, and Politics (1991) 234
Communism, Fascism, Emancipation (1991) 242
Ecology Against the Merchants (1992) 247
A Society Adrift (1993) 250
On Political Judgment (1995) 264
No to Resignation, No to Archaism (1995) 269
A Unique Trajectory (1997) 273

Bigger Johnson

2010-10-21T15:26:00.000+01:00

The September 27 issue of Publishers Weekly features an interview with Steven Johnson discussing his new book (see below) and the future of the publishing industry. It's well worth a read. I was particularly struck by Johnson's conception of ideas as networks, since it chimes in with some of the arguments advanced by Manuel Castells in his Information Age trilogy, the first volume of which is titled The Rise of the Network Society.

When I gave the book to Kevin Kelly to read, he wrote back, "It's a book about how ideas are networks that are made up of a network of ideas." I love that. An idea is not a single thing. It's literally a network in your brain, and it's almost always a network in terms of the flow of information that leads to the idea. A solitary moment of inspiration is absolutely the exception, not the rule.

Until I encountered your description of the Web as a developing city, complete with homage to Jane Jacobs, I hadn't realized how much I wanted a visual analogue to understand how the Web is evolving.

You know how people talk about American exceptionalism? I think there's a kind of Web exceptionalism, where people say the Web and the Internet have these magical properties, where open source software can happen and people can collaborate and make Wikipedia, but that these kinds of things never happen in the real world. Part of my argument is to show how these patterns of innovation have a long history in the so-called real world. When you think of the organizational structure that sustained Renaissance development as being partially the city states, you have to understand the particular quality of cities: they're not really owned by anybody. They're collectively built, and although they are the seat of commercial activity that is closed and propriety and market-driven, the space the city creates is not. When you push the analogy over to the biological systems and you can see the innovation that develops in those environments, you start to see deep patterns. People often talk about the Web like it's this 1960s commune—"Oh, the Web, weird things happen there!"

Where Good Ideas Come From

2010-10-19T10:24:00.001+01:00

The always-interesting Steven Johnson, author of such books as Emergence and Everything Bad Is Good for You, has a new book out, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. In the October issue of Wired, he discusses the book with Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants.

Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Kelly: The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.

Johnson: At the end of my book, I try to look at that phenomenon systematically. I took roughly 200 crucial innovations from the post-Gutenberg era and figured out how many of them came from individual entrepreneurs or private companies and how many from collaborative networks working outside the market. It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.

Explicit Book Pr0n

2010-10-17T15:40:00.001+01:00

To facilitate our readers' intellectual stimulation, I've replaced the original photos in the post below with higher-resolution pix from my camera, enabling them to see the spines of my unread tomes - and thus the true extent of my ignorance - more readily. Any suggestions regarding books I might wish to discard will be entertained, providing you've already read it yourself and can give a précis of its shortcomings. ;-)

It's All Gone Very Quiet

2010-10-15T14:06:00.008+01:00

I can't seriously believe that anyone misses posts at this blog all that much, but if you're wondering why there's not much happening here, it's because I've found myself caught up in a classic Socratic dilemma: The more I read, the more I realize how little I know, which means I have to read more, which results in me realizing how little I know, and round and round we go. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to have a firm opinion on anything. Of course, you might say, that never stopped me before, but that's because I hadn't read as much as I have now. ;-)

Here's some idea of the scale of the problem:

This is actually my CD shelf converted to hold books. My CDs are all in boxes and in the attic unless I play them regularly. There are one or two reference books here that I can knock off the list of "to reads," and there are a couple of books mixed in here that I've read but kept in the same place for ease of recollection. Cassell's Dictionary of Slang is a cornucopia in its own right and deserves to be read in its entirety. At some point.

There's no great order to this collection, since I've bought new shelves recently to give me more space, but I've managed to keep the J.G. Ballards together.

These are actually books that I've read. Most of them, anyway. I hold onto them if they have reference or sentimental value, otherwise I pass them onto charity via my wonderful friend Trish. Looking at these now, I could get rid of a fair number, but I doubt anyone would want them. The framed photo is me and Felix Savon in Havana. The unframed one is my nephew Ollie with his children's BAFTA. My mom and dad bought me the Laurel & Hardy figurines.

Lots to go at here. Recent purchases include Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris, Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity, Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies, and The Rough Guide to Sex, which I bought thinking it was The Guide to Rough Sex. This bookcase above, incidentally, is two books deep.

This is supposed to be my bookcase of "next to reads" but there's an overflow on the adjoining case. I find myself picking from them at random for my train read, depending on how I feel that morning and how heavy the volume is. Heavy books get read at home. The big yellow volumes stacked horizontally are the last hard-copy editions of Readers' Guide Abstracts, before we went virtual. They're nice to have because I can show visitors I'm a published editor. Recently bought books on this case are Stefan Collini's Common Reading, my most recent purchase; Bakunin, by Mark Leier; Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; and Communication Power, by Manuel Castells. There are also two unread biographies of Engels I'm looking forward to.

This is the overflow bookcase of "next to reads." These are mostly books bought with the best of intentions, but when I actually consider the prospect of reading them, I manage to find something less worthy but more attractive. New purchases here usually have something to do with Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time program, which is why it features Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, writings by and about Hazlitt, and the In Our Time volume itself. There's about eight Steven Aylett books on this case that I really should have a go at, but none of them look as much fun as Bigot Hall. If you buy ANY books shown here, make it that one.

Yes, I've even got bookcases in the porch. This is the motherlode, containing some books that I've had with me for nigh on a decade. It's a kind of elephants' graveyard of unread books, the desperately worthy and intellectual stuff that I've promised myself I'll read but which become less attractive the closer I get to them. Some of them I've dipped into and put back, and I suspect they may never get read. Others are just sitting there until I've ploughed through the more urgent material, urgent being defined as more engaging rather than relevant. It isn't that I have ADHD so much as an overstimulating job that presents subjects that arouse my curiosity with such regularity that I cannot satisfy it before another subject arises. Highlights of this bookcase include Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought, Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, and Darconville's Cat, by Alexander Theroux. All fascinating in their own way. I imagine.

To finish on a defiant and optimistic note, two cases of books that I've read. These are books either that I intend to hold onto—all my Sartre and Castoriadis books, for instance—or books that I haven't yet had a chance to pass on to Trish. The most recently read books are in the case below, stacked horizontally. This bookcase is also two books' deep. The books I read on holiday, and which you'll find listed in the "My Library" app to the left of this page, I either left behind in Cyprus or passed on to Martin. I notice, looking at this picture, that there are even books on this final shelf that are there because I had nowhere else to put them and they still remain to be read. The Fernand Braudel trilogy, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. I shall probably wait for the DVDs to come out.

So that's the story. As to why nobody else on the C&S team blogs here . . . I'll let them tell you.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

2010-08-27T08:53:00.000+01:00

Buzzcocks - Promises

Urban Wanderings

2010-08-18T13:31:00.001+01:00

The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.

It isn't entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material in the book redundant, tells us in the acknowledgments at the rear that,

This book would not have come into being if not for Mike Davis, who first suggested a reader that would concentrate on the Situationist International's work on the city, and I would not have been involved in this project if not for the generous support of Rowan Wilson and Tom Penn at Verso, who invited me to edit this volume and who saw it through to publication,

which I suppose helps to identify at least three of the culprits. The decision to publish is peculiar for a number of reasons. First of all, there is the dearth of material to work with. As readers go, this is a short one, with McDonough's essay comprising the first 30 pages of the 242 pages of text and the inclusion of pre-Situationist writings and pieces by the non-Situationist Henri Lefebvre helping to pad things out. Second, there is not a great deal in these writings that remains relevant; the texts are very much of their moment, and while they may therefore prove to be of some use to undergraduates in architecture or urban studies, at best they constitute a historical curio, an anti-modernist declaration of war with elements of romanticism and, in the case of Guy Debord's writings, an almost Nietzschean celebration of youth and bodily exhilaration (someone should write a thesis on Debord's fascination with the word "thrilling"). In Simon Parker's book Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, which, "brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies . . .," the Situationists merit only one mention, and even at the time they were active, McDonough tells us,

. . . when critic Françoise Chouay published her epochal anthology on modern-city planning in 1965, the S.I. went unmentioned.[)] Having categorically refused all architectural experimentation . . . by this point the Situationists had become all but invisible within the arguments that were shaking up architecture and urbanism at this time.

This is because, McDonough explains,

In its place, the S.I. was developing a disabused theory of the place of building and city-planning in advanced capitalism, and sketching the outlines of its negation.

Which brings me to my third reason: the argument advanced by the Situationists themselves that urban theory that is not at the same time a total critique of capitalist society is pointless. While McDonough's judicious selection of texts does at least allow us to see how the Situationists' thought arrived at this conclusion over a period of a decade and a half, the irony should not be lost on us that it comes at the end of a book that has isolated the Situationists' writings on the city from the rest of their thought. Here's Debord in an extract from The Society of the Spectacle that is included towards the end of McDonough's book:

Capitalist production has unified space, which is no longer limited by external societies. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization. As the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market had to shatter all regional and legal barriers, and all the guild restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of craft production, it had also to annul the autonomy and quality of places. This homogenizing power is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.

. . .

This society that abolishes geographical distance shelters a new internal distance inside itself, as spectacular separation.

. . .

Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. the same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space.

It is at this point in their trajectory, in fact, that the Situationists' thought becomes interesting and relevant. Notwithstanding Debord's heavy indebtedness to Hegel, Marx, and the Surrealists, his theorizing of the spectacular society in 1967, prior to Les Événements that catapulted the Situationists to notoriety, was subsequently to provide both inspiration and a vocabulary for postmodernists like Baudrillard and Lyotard (a former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie), whose defanged Situationism provided the basis for the academicization of revolutionary theory, a prime example of the kind of recuperation that the Situationists warned us against. Even the classic Marxist text on the subject, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, which attempts to reduce the postmodern experience to an epiphenomenon of a change in the regime of accumulation within capitalism beginning around 1972, manages to excise the Situationists from the debate, even though they had thoroughly formulated a description and explanation of what subsequently came to be described as the postmodern experience five years before this purported change in the regime of accumulation began. McDonough's book thus provides at least a partial corrective and a necessary one.

Social and political science students of a certain vintage will still be able to recollect the delight of their first encounter with Situationist theory and practice, particularly if they recall the wittiness of its détournements, the emphasis on pleasure and autonomy at the expense of the Protestant ethic and puritanical doctrinaire "revolutionary" parties, its insurrectionary posturing and enthusiasm for pranks. With the benefit of hindsight it's a perspective that feminist theorists of urbanism might easily tear to pieces, and there are gaping holes in the Situationists' own account of the city and the urban experience that subsequent theorists, such as Castells and, indeed, Harvey, might drive a coach and horses through, if you've forgive the metaphor. What's more, in an era of iPods, iPhones, portable TV and DVD players, flash mobs, YouTube, street festivals, handheld video, and the like, the opportunities afforded individuals and groups to manipulate their affective response to any environment is already in the hands of the consumer, albeit in commodified form; not only has Situationist theory been recuperated, but so, it would appear, have its solutions. Nonetheless, as Sadie Plant has ably shown in her work The Most Radical Gesture, Situationist ideas continue to inform and pervade our political, philosophical and theoretical debates. Moreover, they enable us to more adequately situate and contextualize both postmodern theory and postmodernity. While McDonough's book manages to decontextualize the Situationists' writings on urbanism, we can hope that readers of it will be stimulated enough by its contents to look for and explore other, more germane Situationist texts that will help them understand Situationist theory as a whole and their writings on the city within it.

Give Em What They Don't Want

2010-08-05T09:39:00.001+01:00

Larry Lash (yes, honestly) in the March 2010 Opera News:

In several early Verdi works, there are passages where the music doesn't quite fit the action. Let's call it the oom-pah-pah factor. A notable example is the lilting march tune that accompanies Duncan's entrance in Macbeth. A director today can search for a dignified solution or give in to the sheer campiness of the situation. The latter was the approach chosen by Vera Nemirova for her production of Macbeth at Wiener Staatsoper (seen Dec. 7): the king and his kilted retinue pranced onstage in a silly dance that actually suited the music but not the dramatic situation. Booing erupted. Actually, booing began five minutes into the performance, when the witches were revealed to be a coven of society ladies in a blackened forest, gathered to observe performance-art involving nude women, slathered with paint, sliding on a large canvas.

Nemirova essentially played the opera for comedy. As there is much bouncy music in Macbeth (including the rarely performed ballet music), few characters escaped being given choreography of some sort. Add to this a chubby Duncan taking a bubble bath and flopping on the Macbeths' bed for a nap; Banquo's murderers in trench coats, white gloves and red clown noses carrying red helium balloons; blond bombshell Lady Macbeth entering with a baby stroller that concealed a machine gun; and those witches, back in the forest, clad in white bathrobes, hair wrapped in white towels, reenacting the murderous history of Scotland. The resulting incoherent cocktail of absurdity drew booing and yelling throughout the entire performance, at times obliterating the music or forcing conductor Guillermo Garcia Calvo to stop. It's a wonder that Nemirova and her design team weren't blown offstage by the booing and heckling that greeted their repeated curtain calls.

Disapproval wasn't reserved for the production team. Erika Sunnegårdh, making her debut as Lady Macbeth, was booed almost as harshly as Nemirova, and not just at her curtain call: after a less-than-satisfactory sleepwalking scene, she bungled the high D-flat badly. Save for a few loud notes on top, her inflexible voice sounded like that of a Soubrette, and not a very good one at that, despite a flabbergasting résumé that includes Turandot, Senta, the Fidelio Leonore and Abigaille.

Totally out of his depth, Stefan Kocan was booed as well for his off-pitch, lightweight Banquo. Conductor Calvo took a severe drubbing, too, for his lack of command and coordination between stage and pit. Dimitri Pittas, making his company debut as Macduff, got a hero's reception, but while his aria was sung impressively, his steely tone lacks Verdian warmth.

Overcoming all these odds, Simon Keenlyside scored an absolute triumph in the title role. His gorgeous lyric baritone is at its zenith, generous and positively glowing. He is a natural actor: it was fascinating to watch his Macbeth's gradual mental disintegration. In this farrago of a production, he never lost an ounce of dignity, but he did blow his cool when the Uzi-carrying pram refused to stay put: Keenlyside walked upstage and kicked it, dispatching it into the woods.

Capitalist Provides Rope

2010-07-18T13:59:00.001+01:00

Murdoch's Wall Street Journal provides an excerpt from Richard Wolin's book The Wind from the East.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

2010-07-16T10:51:00.001+01:00

Boston Spaceships - How Wrong You Are

He's Also a Naturell Kokbar

2010-07-14T19:35:00.001+01:00

Nice story here from Libération:

Un Grec de 77 ans qui figure par erreur sur les pots de yaourt de recette turque vendus par une laiterie suédoise a obtenu plus de 160.000 euros de dédommagements.

A 77-year-old Greek bloke has received €160,000 in damages from a Swedish dairy after his picture was used on pots of Turkish-style yogurt.

. . .

Le Grec avait été alerté au printemps par un ami vivant à Stockholm. Il avait immédiatement réclamé près de 5 millions d’euros à Lindahl pour l’avoir assimilé à un Turc et avoir utilisé depuis des années son image sans autorisation sur ce yaourt populaire vendu dans presque tous les supermarchés de Suède.

La laiterie Lindahl plaidait le malentendu, en expliquant avoir acheté la photographie de bonne foi à une banque d’images. Selon les médias suédois, le moustachu se nomme Minas Karatzoglis.

The Greek bloke was alerted in spring by a mate living in Stockholm. He immediately demanded around €5 million from Lindahl for calling him a Turk and for having used his picture without authorisation for some years on this popular yogurt sold in nearly all Swedish supermarkets.

The dairy said it was a misunderstanding, explaining that it had bought the picture in good faith from an image bank. According to Swedish media, his name is Minas Karatzoglis.

Define Sad

2010-07-14T14:11:00.001+01:00

Or, for that matter, "adolescent."

Today's Thinking Allowed:

Faces and what we might glean from them. That will be our topic today when I meet the author of ‘About Faces’, a study of the manner in which facial traits have been used as a way to understand character.

That’s at four o’clock today or after the midnight news on Sunday or on our downloadable podcast.

Also today… Is it sad to hang on to your adolescent musical tastes?

Laurie

Eco Eco

2010-07-13T17:33:00.083+01:00

Entirely on a whim, this afternoon I googled the phrase "Ecological Economics" just to see if there was anything that could help me develop my own half-baked extemperaneous reflections on the shortcomings of neoclassical pricing and the labour theory of value. Lo and behold, there's an entire school of economists devoted to the subject:

Ecological economics distinguishes itself from neoclassical economics primarily by its assertion that the economy is an embedded within an environmental system. Ecology deals with the energy and matter transactions of life and the Earth, and the human economy is by definition contained within this system. Ecological economists feel neoclassical economics has ignored the environment, at best relegating it to be a subset of the human economy.

However, this belief disagrees with much of what the natural sciences have learned about the world, and, according to Ecological Economics, completely ignores the contributions of Nature to the creation of wealth e.g., the planetary endowment of scarce matter and energy, along with the complex and biologically diverse ecosystems that provide goods and ecosystem services directly to human communities: micro- and macro-climate regulation, water recycling, water purification, storm water regulation, waste absorption, food and medicine production, pollination, protection from solar and cosmic radiation, the view of a starry night sky, etc.

It turns out that there's even an International Society for Ecological Economics. And most considerately, the site carries an entire volume, an ebook entitled An Introduction to Ecological Economics. Chapter 2, here, gives a brief historical run-down of the development of the theory and, in reference to the shortcomings of Marxism, says,

Marx and his followers in communist countries have made a negative contribution to the allocative efficiency problem, even while highlighting issues of just distribution. Their ideological rejection of rent and interest as necessary prices, and their insistence on a labor theory of value that neglected nature’s contribution were responsible for much of the environmental destruction in communist countries.

Well, that's what I said four years ago. I could have saved myself a lot of pfaffing around if I'd had the sense back then to do some simple checking.

Bugger.

Anarchist Writers

2010-07-12T21:30:00.000+01:00

A shameful oversight on my part not to include the Anarchist Writers blog on our blogroll. Consider this now remedied.

You'll find news, history, theory, interviews, sexual politics, reviews, and where Karl Marx got his ideas from. Even the wrong ones!

Frank's Fantastic Send-Off

2010-07-08T08:21:00.001+01:00

Because of the sheer amount of love and goodwill, Chris Sievey's family has agreed to host a send-off for Frank Sidebottom which will be held at Castlefield Arena on 8th July between 7:00pm and 10:00pm. The event is totally free and will feature the likes of Badly Drawn Boy, Charlie Chuck and others. More details can be found at

http://www.radiotimperley.com/franks-fantastic-send-off-information/

We hope that you, your friends and colleagues will all be able to attend the event to celebrate and remember the character of Frank Sidebottom specifically as it's bound to be a very joyous occasion filled with much fun and frivolity.

Radio Timperley is also campaigning to get Frank to Number One:

http://www.radiotimperley.com/lets-get-frank-to-number-one/

There's an iTunes link you can click on.

Readings #6

2010-07-07T19:02:00.001+01:00

Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology, by Murray Bookchin

Marx's work, perhaps the most remarkable project to demystify bourgeois social relations, has itself become the most subtle mystification of capitalism in our era. I refer not to any latent "positivism" in the Marxian corpus or to any retrospective recognition of its "historical limits." A serious critique of Marxism must begin with its innermost nature as the most advanced product—indeed, the culmination—of the bourgeois Enlightenment. It will no longer suffice to see Marx's work as the point of departure for a new social critique, to accept its” method" as valid despite the limited content it yielded in its day, to extol its goals as liberatory apart from its means, to view the project as tainted by its dubious heirs or adherents.

Indeed, Marx's "failure" to develop a radical critique of capitalism and a revolutionary practice emerges not even as a failure in the sense of an enterprise that remains inadequate to its goals. Quite to the contrary. At its best, Marx's work is an inherent self-deception that inadvertently absorbs the most questionable tenets of Enlightenment thought into its very sensibility and remains surprisingly vulnerable to their bourgeois implications. At its worst, it provides the most subtle apologia for a new historic era that has witnessed the melding of the "free market" with economic planning, private property with nationalized property, competition with the oligopolistic manipulation of production and consumption, the economy with the state —in short, the modern epoch of state capitalism. The surprising congruence of Marx's "scientific socialism"—a socialism which reared the goals of economic rationalization, planned production, and a "proletarian state" as essential elements of the revolutionary project—with the inherent development of capitalism toward monopoly, political control, and a seemingly "welfare state" has already brought institutionalized Marxian tendencies such as Social Democracy and Euro-Communism into open complicity with the stabilization of a highly rationalized era of capitalism. Indeed, by a slight shift of perspective, we can easily use Marxian ideology to describe this state capitalist era as "Socialist."

Can such a shift of perspective be shrugged off as a "vulgarization" or "betrayal" of the Marxian project? Or does it comprise the very realization of Marxism's most fundamental assumptions—a logic that may have even been hidden to Marx himself? When Lenin describes socialism as "nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people," does he violate the integrity of the Marxian project with his own "vulgarizations"? Or does he reveal underlying premises of Marxian theory that render it historically into the most sophisticated ideology of advanced capitalism? What is basically at stake in asking these questions is whether there are shared assumptions between all Marxists that provide real premises for Social-Democratic and Euro-Communist practice and Lenin's futuristics. A theory that is so readily "vulgarized," "betrayed," or, more sinisterly, institutionalized into bureaucratic power forms by nearly all of its adherents may well be one that lends itself to such "vulgarizations," "betrayals," and bureaucratic forms as a normal condition of its existence. What may seem to be "vulgarizations," "betrayals," and bureaucratic manifestations of its tenets in the heated light of doctrinal disputes may prove to be the fulfillment of its tenets in the cold light of historical development. In any case, all the historical roles, today, seem to have been totally miscast. Rather than refurbishing Marxism so that it can catch up with the many advanced phases of modern capitalism, it may well be that many advanced phases of modern capitalism in the more traditional bourgeois countries have yet to catch up with Marxism as the most sophisticated ideological anticipation of the capitalist development.

Let there be no mistake that I am engaged in an academic play of words. Reality exhibits even more compelling paradoxes than theory. The Red Flag flies over a world of Socialist countries that stand at mutual war with each other, while Marxian parties outside their perimeter form indispensable props for an increasingly state capitalist world that, ironically enough, arbitrates between—or aligns itself with—its contending Socialist neighbors. The proletariat, like its plebian counterpart in the ancient world, shares actively in a system that sees its greatest threat from a diffuse populace of intellectuals, urban dwellers, feminists, gays, environmentalists—in short, a trans-class "people" that still expresses the Utopian ideals of democratic revolutions long passed. To say that Marxism merely takes no account today of this utterly un-Marxian constellation is to be excessively generous toward an ideology that has become the "revolutionary" persona of state capitalist reaction. Marxism is exquisitely constructed to obscure these new relationships, to distort their meaning and where all else fails, to reduce them to its economistic categories. The Socialist countries and movements, in turn, are no less "socialist" for their "distortions" than for their professed "achievements." Indeed, their "distortions" acquire greater significance than their "achievements" because they reveal in compelling fashion the ideological apparatus that serves to mystify state capitalism. Hence, more than ever, it is necessary that this apparatus be explored, its roots unearthed, its logic revealed, and its spirit exorcised from the modern revolutionary project. Once drawn into the clear light of critique, it will be seen for what it truly is—not as "incomplete," "vulgarized" or "betrayed" but rather as the historic essence of counter-revolution, indeed, of counter-revolution that has more effectively used every liberatory vision against liberation than any historic ideology since Christianity.

MARXISM AND DOMINATION

Marxism converges with Enlightenment bourgeois ideology at a point where both seem to share a scientistic conception of reality. What usually eludes many critics of Marx's scientism, however, is the extent to which "scientific socialism" objectifies the revolutionary project and thereby necessarily divests it of all ethical content and goals. Recent attempts by neo-Marxists to infuse a psychological, cultural, and linguistic meaning into Marxism challenge it on its own terms without candidly dealing with its innermost nature. Whether consciously or not, they share in the mystifying role of Marxism, however useful their work may be in strictly theoretical terms. In fact, as to the matter of scientific methodology, Marx can be read in many ways. His famous comparison in the "Preface" to Capital of the physicist who experimentally reproduces natural phenomena in their "pure state" and his own choice of England as the "locus classicus" of industrial capitalism in his own day obviously reveals a scientistic bias that is only reinforced by his claim that Capital reveals the "natural laws" of "economic movement" in capitalism; indeed, that the work treats "the economic formation of society (not only capitalism—M.B.)... as a process of natural history..." On the other hand, such formulations can be counter-balanced by the dialectical character of the Grundrisse and of Capital itself, a dialectic that probes the internal transformations of capitalist society from an organic and immanent standpoint that hardly accords with the physicist's conception of reality.

What decisively unites both the scientism of physics and the Marxian dialectic, however, is the concept of "lawfulness" itself—the preconception that social reality and its trajectory can be explained in terms that remove human visions, cultural influences, and most significantly, ethical goals from the social process. Indeed, Marxism elucidates the function of these cultural, psychological, and ethical "forces" in terms that make them contingent on "laws" which act behind human wills. Human wills, by their mutual interaction and obstruction, "cancel" each other out and leave the "economic factor" free to determine human affairs. Or to use Engels's monumental formulation, these wills comprise "innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallograms of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historic event." Hence, in the long run, "the economic ones are ultimately decisive." (Letter to J. Bloch) It is by no means clear that Marx, who adduces the physicist's laboratory as a paradigm, would have disagreed with Engels's social geometry. In any case, whether social "laws" are dialectical or not is beside the point. The fact is that they constitute a consistently objective basis for social development that is uniquely characteristic of the Enlightenment's approach to reality.

We must pause to weigh the full implications of this turn in what could be called Marx's "theory of knowledge." Greek thought also had a notion of law, but one that was guided more by a concept of "destiny" or Moira than "necessity" in the modern sense of the term. Moira embodied the concept of "necessity" governed by meaning, by an ethically conditioned goal fixed by "destiny." The actual realization of "destiny" was governed by justice or Dike which preserved the world order by keeping each of the cosmic elements within their appointed bounds. The mythic nature of this conception of "law" should not close our eyes to its highly ethical content. "Necessity" was not merely compulsion but moral compulsion that had meaning and purpose. Insofar as human knowledge has a right to assume that the world is an orderly one—an assumption that modern science shares with mythic cosmologies if only to make knowledge possible—it has a right to assume that this order has intelligibility or meaning. It can be translated by human thought into a purposive constellation of relations. From the implicit concept of goal that is inherent in any notion of an orderly universe, Greek philosophy could claim the right to speak of "justice" and "strife" in the cosmic order, of "attraction" and "repulsion," of "injustice" and "retribution." Given the eventual need for a nature philosophy that will guide us toward a deeper sense of ecological insight into our warped relationship with the natural world, we are by no means free of a less mythic need to restore this Hellenic sensibility.

The Enlightenment, by divesting law of all ethical content, produced an objective cosmos that had order without meaning. Laplace, its greatest astronomer, removed not only god from his description of the cosmos in his famous reply to Napoleon, but also the classical ethos that guided the universe. But the Enlightenment left one arena open to this ethos—the social arena, one in which order still had meaning and change still had purpose. Enlightenment thought retained the ethical vision of a moral humanity that could be educated to live in a moral society. This vision, with its generous commitment to freedom, equality, and rationality, was to be the well-spring of Utopian socialism and anarchism in the century to follow.

Ironically, Marx completed Enlightenment thought by bringing the Laplacian cosmos into society—not, to be sure, as a crude mechanist but certainly as a scientist in harsh opposition to any form of social utopianism. Far more significant than Marx's belief that he had rooted socialism in science is the fact that he had rooted the "destiny" of society in science. Henceforth, "men" were to be seen (to use Marx's own words in the "Preface" to Capital) as the "personification of economic categories, the bearer of particular class interest," not as individuals possessed of volition and of ethical purpose. They were turned into the objects of social law, a law as divested of moral meaning as Laplace's cosmic law. Science had not merely become a means for describing society but had become its fate.

What is significant in this subversion of the ethical content of law—indeed, this subversion of dialectic—is the way in which domination is elevated to the status of a natural fact. Domination is annexed to liberation as a precondition for social emancipation. Marx, while he may have joined Hegel in a commitment to consciousness and freedom as the realization of humanity's potentialities, has no inherent moral or spiritual criterion for affirming this destiny. The entire theory is captive to its own reduction of ethics to law, subjectivity to objectivity, freedom to necessity. Domination now becomes admissible as a "precondition" for liberation, capitalism as a "precondition" for socialism, centralization as a "precondition" for decentralization, the state as a "precondition" for communism. It would have been enough to say that material and technical development are preconditions for freedom, but Marx, as we shall see, says considerably more and in ways that have sinister implications for the realization of freedom. The constraints, which Utopian thought at its best placed on any transgression of the moral boundaries of action, are dismissed as "ideology." Not that Marx would have accepted a totalitarian society as anything but a vicious affront to his outlook, but there are no inherent ethical considerations in his theoretical apparatus to exclude domination from his social analysis. Within a Marxian framework, such an exclusion would have to be the result of objective social law—the process of "natural history"—and that law is morally neutral. Hence, domination can be challenged not in terms of an ethics that has an inherent claim to justice and freedom; it can be challenged—or validated—only by objective laws that have a validity of their own, that exist behind the backs of "men" and beyond the reach of "ideology." This flaw, which goes beyond the question of Marx's "scientism," is a fatal one, for it opens the door to domination as the hidden incubus of the Marxian project in all its forms and later developments.

THE CONQUEST OF NATURE

The impact of this flaw becomes evident once we examine the premises of the Marxian project at their most basic level, for at this level we find that domination literally "orders" the project and gives it intelligibility. Far more important than Marx's concept of social development as the "history of class struggle" is his drama of the extrication of humanity from animality into society, the "disembeddedness" of humanity from the cyclic "eternality" of nature into the linear temporality of history. To Marx, humanity is socialized only to the degree that "men" acquire the technical equipment and institutional structures to achieve the "conquest" of nature, a "conquest" that involves the substitution of "universal" mankind for the parochial tribe, economic relations for kinship relations, abstract labour for concrete labour, social history for natural history. Herein lies the "revolutionary" role of capitalism as a social era. "The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand the universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development or the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies," Marx writes in The Future Results of British Rule in India (July, 1853). "Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain."

The compelling nature of Marx's formulations—their evolutionary schema, their use of geological analogies to explain historical development, their crassly scientistic treatment of social phenomena, their objectivization of human action as a sphere beyond ethical evaluation and the exercise of human will—are all the more striking because of the period in which the lines were written (Marx's Grundrisse "period"). They are also striking because of the historic "mission" Marx imparted to English rule in India: the "destruction" of ancient Indian lifeways ("the annihilation of old Asiatic society") and the "regeneration" of India as a bourgeois nation ("the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia"). Marx's consistency in all of these areas deserves respect, not a tasteless refurbishing of classic ideas with eclectical exegesis and a theoretical adorning or "updating" of Marx with patchwork conclusions that are borrowed from utterly alien bodies of ideas. Marx is more rigorous in his notion of historic progress as the conquest of nature than his later acolytes and, more recently, neo-Marxians. Nearly five years later, in the Grundrisse, he was to depict the "great civilizing influence of capital" in a manner that accords completely with his notion of the British "mission" in India: "the production (by capital) of a stage of society compared with which all earlier stages appear to be merely local progress and idolatry of nature. Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces."

These words could be drawn almost directly from D'Holbach's vision of nature as an "immense laboratory," from D'Alembert's paeans to a new science that sweeps "everything before it . . . like a river which has burst its dam," from Diderot's hypostasization of technics in human progress, from Montesqieu's approving image of a ravished nature—an image that, judiciously mixed with William Petty's metaphor of nature as the "mother" and labour as the "father" of all commodities, clearly reveal the Enlightenment matrix of Marx's outlook. As Ernst Cassirer was to conclude in an assessment of the Enlightenment mind: "The whole eighteenth century is permeated by this conviction, namely, that in the history of humanity the time had come to deprive nature of its carefully guarded secrets, to leave it no longer in the dark to be marveled at as an incomprehensible mystery but to bring it under the bright light of reason and analyze it with all its fundamental forces." (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment)

The Enlightenment roots of Marxism aside, the notion that nature is "object" to be used by "man" leads not only to the total despiritization of nature but the total despiritization of "man." Indeed, to a greater extent than Marx was prepared to admit, historic processes move as blindly as natural ones in the sense that they lack consciousness. The social order develops under the compulsion of laws that are as suprahuman as the natural order. Marxian theory sees "man" as the embodiment of two aspects of material reality: firstly, as a producer who defines himself by labour; secondly, as a social being whose functions are primarily economic. When Marx declares that "Men may be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like (but they) begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence," (The German Ideology), he essentially deals with humanity as a "force" in the productive process that differs from other material "forces" only to the degree that "man" can conceptualize productive operations that animals perform instinctively. It is difficult to realize how decisively this notion of humanity breaks with the classical concept. To Aristotle, "men" fulfilled their humanity to the degree that they could live in a polis and achieve the "good life." Hellenic thought as a whole distinguished "men" from animals by virtue of their rational capacities. If a "mode of production" is not simply to be regarded as a means of survival but a "definite mode of life" such that "men" are "what they produce and how they produce" (The German Ideology), humanity, in effect, can be regarded as an instrument of production. The "domination of man by man" is primarily a technical phenomenon rather than an ethical one. Within this incredibly reductionist framework, whether it is valid for "man" to dominate "man" is to be judged mainly in terms of technical needs and possibilities, however distasteful such a criterion may seem to Marx himself had he faced it in all its brute clarity. Domination, too, as we shall see with Engels' essay "On Authority," becomes a technical phenomenon that underpins the realm of freedom.

Society, in turn, becomes a mode of labour that is to be judged by its capacity to meet material needs. Class society remains unavoidable as long as the "mode of production" fails to provide the free time and material abundance for human emancipation. Until the appropriate technical level is achieved, "man's" evolutionary development remains incomplete. Indeed, popular communistic visions of earlier eras are mere ideology because "only want is made general" by premature attempts to achieve an egalitarian society, "and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old shit would necessarily be reproduced." (The German Ideology).

Finally, even where technics reaches a relatively high level of development, "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise." (Capital, Vol. Ill) The bourgeois conceptual framework reaches its apogee, here in images of the "savage who must wrestle with nature," the unlimited expansion of needs that stands opposed to "ideological" limits to need (i.e., the Hellenic concepts of measure, balance, and self-sufficiency), the rationalization of production and labour as desiderata in themselves of a strictly technical nature, the sharp dichotomy between freedom and necessity, and the conflict with nature as a condition of social life in all its forms—class or classless, propertied or communistic.

Accordingly, socialism now moves within an orbit in which, to use Max Horkheimer's formulation, "Domination of nature involves domination of man"—not only "the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman" but human nature. (The Eclipse of Reason) Following his split from the natural world, "man" can hope for no redemption from class society and exploitation until he, as a technical force among the technics created by his own ingenuity, can transcend his objectification. The precondition for this transcendence is quantitatively measurable: the "shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise." Until these preconditions are achieved, "man" remains under the tyranny of social law, the compulsion of need and survival. The proletariat, no less than any other class in history, is captive to the impersonal processes of history. Indeed, as the class that is most completely dehumanized by bourgeois conditions, it can only transcend its objectified status through "urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need . . ." For Marx, "The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment, considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do." (The Holy Family) Its "being," here, is that of object and social law functions as compulsion, not as "destiny." The subjectivity of the proletariat remains a product of its objectivity—ironically, a notion that finds a certain degree of truth in the fact that any radical appeal merely to the objective factors that enter into the forming of a "proletarian consciousness" or class consciousness strike back like a whiplash against Socialism in the form of a working class that has "bought into capitalism," that seeks its share in the affluence provided by the system. Thus where reaction is the real basis of action and need is the basis of motivation, the bourgeois spirit becomes the "world spirit" of Marxism.

The disenchantment of nature yields the disenchantment of humanity. "Man" appears as a complex of interests and class consciousness as the generalization of these interests to the level of consciousness. To the degree that the classical view of self-realization through the polis recedes before the Marxian view of self-preservation through Socialism, the bourgeois spirit acquires a degree of sophistication that makes its earlier spokesmen (Hobbes, Locke) seem naive. The incubus of domination now fully reveals its authoritarian logic. Just as necessity becomes the basis of freedom, authority becomes the basis of rational coordination. This notion, already implicit in Marx's harsh separation of the realms of necessity and freedom—a separation Fourier was to sharply challenge—is made explicit in Engels's essay "On Authority." To Engels, the factory is a natural fact of technics, not a specifically bourgeois mode of rationalizing labour; hence it will exist under communism as well as capitalism. It will persist "independently of all social organization." To coordinate a factory's operations requires "imperious obedience," in which factory hands lack all "autonomy." Class society or classless, the realm of necessity is also a realm of command and obedience, of ruler and ruled. In a fashion totally congruent with all class ideologists from the inception of class society, Engels weds Socialism to command and rule as a natural fact. Domination is reworked from a social attribute into a precondition for self-preservation in a technically advanced society.

HIERARCHY AND DOMINATION

To structure a revolutionary project around "social law" that lacks ethical content, order that lacks meaning, a harsh opposition between "man" and nature, compulsion rather than consciousness—all of these, taken together with domination as a precondition for freedom, debase the concept of freedom and assimilate it to its opposite, coercion. Consciousness becomes the recognition of its lack of autonomy just as freedom becomes the recognition of necessity. A politics of "liberation" emerges that reflects the development of advanced capitalist society into nationalized production, planning, centralization, the rationalized control of nature—and the rationalized control of "men." If the proletariat cannot comprehend its own "destiny" by itself, a party that speaks in its name becomes justified as the authentic expression of that consciousness, even if it stands opposed to the proletariat itself. If capitalism is the historic means whereby humanity achieves the conquest of nature, the techniques of bourgeois industry need merely be reorganized to serve the goals of Socialism. If ethics are merely ideology, Socialist goals are the product of history rather than reflection and it is by criteria mandated by history that we are to determine the problems of ends and means, not by reason and disputation.

There seem to be fragments in Marx's writings that could be counterposed to this grim picture of Marxian Socialism. Marx's "Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper" (April, 1856), for example, describes the enslavement of "man" by "man" in the attempt to master nature as an "infamy." The "pure light of science seems unable to shine but on a dark background of ignorance" and our technical achievements "seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force." This moral evaluation recurs in Marx's writings more as explanations of historic development than justifications that give it meaning. But Alfred Schmidt, who quotes them at length in Marx's Concept of Nature, neglects to tell us that Marx often viewed such moral evaluations as evidence of immature sentimentality. The "speech" mocks those who "wail" over the misery that technical and scientific advances yield. "On our part," Marx declares, "we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit (one may justifiably translate "shrewd spirit" to read "cunning of reason" — M.B.) that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men—and such are the working men." The speech, in fact, ends with a tribute to modern industry and particularly to the English proletariat as the "first born sons of modern industry."

Even if one views Marx's ethical proclivities as authentic, they are marginal to the core of his writings. The attempts to redeem Marx and fragments of his writings from the logic of his thought and work becomes ideological because it obfuscates a thorough exploration of the meaning of Marxism as a practice and the extent to which a "class analysis" can reveal the sources of human oppression. We come, here, to a fundamental split within Socialism as a whole: the limits of a class analysis, the ability of a theory based on class relations and property relations to explain history and the modern crisis.

Basic to anti-authoritarian Socialism—specifically, to Anarchist Communism—is the notion that hierarchy and domination cannot be subsumed by class rule and economic exploitation, indeed, that they are more fundamental to an understanding of the modern revolutionary project. Before "man" began to exploit "man," he began to dominate woman; even earlier—if we are to accept Paul Radin's view—the old began to dominate the young through a hierarchy of age-groups, gerontocracies, and ancestor-worship. Power of human over human long antedates the very formation of classes and economic modes of social oppression. If "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," this order of history is preceded by an earlier, more fundamental conflict: social domination by gerontocracies, patriarchy, and even bureaucracy. To explore the emergence of hierarchy and domination is obviously beyond the scope of this work. I have dealt with it in considerable detail in my forthcoming book, The Ecology of Freedom. Such an exploration would carry us beyond political economy into the realm of the domestic economy, the civil realm into the family realm, the class realm into the sexual realm. It would provide us with an entirely new psychosocial set of foundations from which to read the nature of human oppression and open an entirely new horizon from which to gauge the true meaning of human freedom. We would certainly have to shed the function Marx imparts to interest and technics as social determinants—which is not to deny their role historically, but to search into the claims of non-economic factors such as status, order, recognition, indeed, into rights and duties which may even be materially burdensome to commanding strata of society. This much is clear: it will no longer do to insist that a classless society, freed of material exploitation, will necessarily be a liberated society. There is nothing in the social future to suggest that bureaucracy is incompatible with a classless society, the domination of women, the young, ethnic groups or even professional strata.

These notions reveal the limits of Marx's own work, his inability to grasp a realm of history that is vital to understanding freedom itself. So blind is Marx to authority as such that it becomes a mere technical feature of production, a "natural fact" in "man's" metabolism with nature. Woman, too, becomes an exploited being not because she is rendered docile by man (or "weak" to use a term that Marx regarded as her most endearing trait) but because her labour is enslaved to man. Children remain merely "childish," the expression of untamed and undisciplined "human nature." Nature, needless to say, remains mere object of utility, its laws to be mastered and commanded in an enterprise of conquest. There can be no Marxian theory of the family, of feminism, or of ecology because Marx negates the issues they raise or worse, transmutes them into economic ones. Hence, attempts to formulate a Marxian feminism tend to degenerate into "wages for housewives," a Marxian psychology into a Marcusean reading of Freud, and a Marxian ecology into "pollution is profitable." Far from clarifying the issues that may help define the revolutionary project, these efforts at hybridization conceal them by making it difficult to see that "ruling class" women are ruled by "ruling class" men, that Freud is merely the alter ego of Marx, that ecological balance presupposes a new sensibility and ethics that are not only different from Marxism but in flat opposition to it.

Marx's work is not only the most sophisticated ideology of state capitalism but it impedes a truly revolutionary conception of freedom. It alters our perception of social issues in such a way that we cannot relevantly anchor the revolutionary project in sexual relations, the family, community, education, and the fostering of a truly revolutionary sensibility and ethics. At every point in this enterprise, we are impeded by economistic categories that claim a more fundamental priority and thereby invalidate the enterprise at its outset. Merely to amend these economistic categories or to modify them is to acknowledge their sovereignty over revolutionary consciousness in altered form, not to question their relationship to more fundamental ones. It is to build obscurantism into the enterprise from the outset of our investigation. The development of a revolutionary project must begin by shedding the Marxian categories from the very beginning, to fix on more basic categories created by hierarchical society from its inception all the more to place the economic ones in their proper context. It is no longer simply capitalism we wish to demolish; it is an older and more archaic world that lives on in the present one—the domination of human by human, the rationale of hierarchy as such.

February 1979

It's Friday. Let's Bounce!

2010-07-02T13:12:00.002+01:00

Chris Sievey and The Freshies I Can't Get "Bouncing Babies" By The Teardrop Explodes

Telling It Like It Is

2010-06-28T11:47:00.008+01:00

Slavoj Žižek interviewed in yesterday's Observer:

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

or, as we put it:

A philosopher for our age, if by that one means a philosopher lacking any rigorous empirical standards of reference. Anything's fair game as a source of evidence for Žižek, including Wikipedia, Newsweek, and Lacan, FFS. This is just bricolage in the service of producing original and novel interpretations of the world without having to measure them against any objective criteria. His books offer the jouissance of avant-gardism while reinforcing the idea of philosophy as conspicuous consumption. The perfect postmodernist thinker, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

First as farce, then as tragedy.

It's Friday. You Know It Is, It Really Is.

2010-06-25T12:58:00.001+01:00

Frank Sidebottom - Great Big Zoo Scrapbook

In Memory of Frank Sidebottom & Chris Sievey

2010-06-22T12:38:00.005+01:00

I first became aware of Frank Sidebottom when the local TV news magazine ran a piece about him having the hump with Sting and Madonna for nicking his song ideas out of his suit while it was at the dry-cleaners in Timperley Village. I was in stitches from the word go. Living in Timperley meant that there was ample opportunity to see him live, not just at the Summer Carnival, but regularly at the local Labour Club or even at the International in Manchester, and if that didn't satisfy the craving he had his own radio shows and released records, sometimes an LP a week.

During the late 80s he seemed to permeate so many parts of my life: in football he was Tommy Doc's "assistant" at Moss Lane on Saturday afternoons, on Sundays I'd play against his Timperley Big Shorts in the Pub League, and he was on kids' TV on Saturday mornings where one of his co-stars was an old schoolmate of mine. Even the busstop I used every day for work had a flyer for Chris's band, The Freshies, jammed behind the plastic where the timetable should be.

After a hiatus for much of the 90s/00s during which Chris worked successfully in animation (he won an award for writing Pingu), Frank returned with his own telly show on Channel M, not dissimilar to his Fantastic Shed Show of 1992, but with more innovation, such as his experiments in 3D TV. And he started touring again. Last year he played a residency at the LMRCA club at the bottom of our road, which meant I saw him 10 times at a fiver a throw, and every night he had me in stitches, even when he had a hangover. It's these shows I'll probably remember him for as I made many new friends there and they had something of a street party spirit about them.

I only met Chris once. We shared a few beers after his first show abroad in Darmstadt, Germany, a show I flew out specifically to see. He was obviously a very creative and mischievous bloke, but you'd wouldn't have guessed who he was if he hadn't been the only other Englishman there.

I'm so sad he's passed away as I know he had some many things planned in all different types of media. Hopefully they'll see the light of day and he'll get a bit more of the recognition he deserves. I'm missing him already. He still owes me 1p.

Bobbins News

2010-06-22T08:35:00.000+01:00

Frank Sidebottom R.I.P.

Ish Friday . Lesh Boogie!

2010-06-18T10:51:00.001+01:00

Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #3

2010-06-18T10:25:00.004+01:00

Sean O'Casey Bridge

It was a source of constant irritation to Joyce that Sean O'Casey had a bridge named after him when no writer had done more to integrate north and south sides of the Liffey into a cohesive and coherent lifeworld than Joyce had. Perhaps his irritation went deeper than that, though. After all, it was Casey who the kids loved; Joyce's atonal modernism couldn't compete with Casey's Stalinist sense of humour, his jaunty nostalgie de la boue, and adolescent sense of indignation. Even today, 300 years later, teenage buskers who should know better congregate on this highly unstable swing bridge to sing "The East Is Red," "Comandante Che Guevara," and "The Silver Tassie." Some of them even try to play the Uilleann pipes, as Casey did, but they tend to get moved on by the Gards as a danger to public safety. Casey also wrote "Red Roses for Me," the first Pogues album. A lot of people think Shane MacGowan got all his ideas about Irishness from going to Westminster public school, but in fact he did meet genuine Irish people, who told him about Casey and co. and whom he then parodied.

Casey, who was never one to bear a grudge, in spite of having loads, once said, "Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other. With neighbours like that it's a wonder he got anything written."

The bloke standing to the right of this scene in the casual beige jacket and trousers is about to nick that scooter.

International Financial Services Centre

Of course, the IFSC was not around in Joyce's time. This was just an urban wasteland of empty warehouses and docklands doing no harm to anyone while occasionally providing a backdrop for movies such as The Commitments, Michael Collins, On the Waterfront, and Moby-Dick. This all changed in 1987, before some of these films had even been made, when Charlie Haughey and Dermot Desmond realized that what Dublin really lacked was a conduit to enable multinationals to avoid paying tax through a combination of reincorporation and lax "light-touch" regulation.

As you can see from the photo above, with friends like that, Freedom in Ireland is always going to be a work in progress. Thus far, as with her American counterpart, only those who have money can get inside her. Yeah, Liberty's a bit of a whore, when it comes down to it. And she's fooling nobody with that book. Where's the second set of accounts, love?

The Ormond Hotel

Home to Honoré de Balzac from 1820 to 1825 and where he wrote his five-act tragedy Cromwell, the Ormond Hotel has seen better days. You'd hope it has, anyway. This is where Joyce both wrote and set Episode 11 of Ulysses, The Sirens, a scene dominated by music; to this very day, the Ormond echoes with the delights of the Terpsichorean muse, mostly from the radios of builders. The Sirens were creatures in ancient Greek mythology, part woman, part seagull, whose enchanting cawing lured sailors to their deaths on the rocky shores of the Sirens' island. The Sirens would then tie the sailors to the masts of their ships and eat their livers for eternity while shitting everywhere and making a right bloody mess, a metaphor used by Anton Chekhov for his play The Seagull and which Alfred Hitchcock more famously used for his movie Rear Window. In Ulysses, Bloom mixes his liver with mashed potatoes, to make it more palatable. And of course, it isn't his liver. It's a pig's. Or maybe a little lamb's.

Joyce wrote this episode in a "musical" style, to reflect the subject matter. A German opera called Martha is frequently referred to, echoing the previous scene set outside Davy Byrne's pub in that Guinness advert, and the episode ends with Bloom letting out a resounding fart as he passes a picture of Robert Emmet. Arse as wind instrument. Ironically, it was a resident setting light to a fart that gave the Ormond the distinctive appearance it has today.

Glasnevin Cemetery

From the top of the round tower over the tomb of Daniel O'Connell, it's possible to see all the way to Naas. And yet, oddly, the tower itself cannot be seen from Naas. This is due to the curvature of the earth or because the tower has four corners to hide round. Nobody knows for sure which.

Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Joyce wrote to Bertrand Russell that had Dublin been destroyed by an atom bomb, "it would be possible to rebuild the entire city, brick by brick, using Ulysses. Though God alone knows why anyone would want to. The place is a shithole." Russell replied, tersely, "There is no God." Dublin corporation rarely, if ever, used either letter to promote Dublin to tourists.

Ulysses is often cited as the culmination of the Modernist tradition. How fitting, then, that we should end here, at the cemetery, for Ulysses represented not just the culmination but the end point of Modernism. If what Joyce claimed for his novel is true, then it is not so much a work of art as a work of anthropology. Indeed, we might say it is the first "postmodern" anthropological text, combining high art, low culture, politics, religion, sport, working-class life, economics, sex and gender relations, and race in a wild, swirling vortex, just as they are in reality. And how fitting, too, that it was Bruno Latour, after whom Latour Eiffel is named, who observed in his book We Have Never Been Modern that a reflexive anthropology alone is capable of giving us an accurate depiction of our society, subverting the imperialist discourse that gave birth to the discipline in the first place. He clearly had Ulysses in mind. Or, if not, another book.

It is sometimes said that all those tossers celebrating Bloomsday are a secret sect of Joyce haters who are, metaphorically, dancing on his grave, making a mockery of him and his book, a work that managed to capture with incredible accuracy a living, breathing, thriving metropolis in all its complexity and subtlety. It is also said that there have been only three people in the world who have read Ulysses from cover to cover and actually understood it. Not one of them knew English. The debate rages on. It's what he would have wanted.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part Two)

2010-06-17T21:47:00.002+01:00

Friday

Yes, Pixies. They’re about to play on the main stage and Pixies-hill is crowded. They come on stage and there’s a big cheer, and when they open with Cecilia Ann, the crowd’s even louder. They’re on form and faithful to their sound and style. They played most of their classics: 'Velouria', 'Nimrod’s Son', 'Here Comes Your Man', 'Monkey Gone to Heaven', 'Where Is My Mind?', etc. I ruined my vocal chords for a couple of days yelling with 'Debaser' and 'Broken Face'… But what an experience! I’ll never forget that concert.

Saturday

Veronika and me arrive early, for the Minimúsica session, which is about pop bands playing stuff for kids. Sweet, but we soon get tired of it and go to the Pitchfork stage to catch Real State. I don’t know them, we’re told they’re from New Jersey and they became one of my favourite acts of Primavera, very interesting guitars.
When they finish we go to a small stage facing the sea and sit down to watch Gentle Music Men, a Catalan indie band. They’re pretty good and the singer’s got a nice voice. Apparently, they’re quite known for the fact that one of them is the fattest member in an indie band…
After that, I make my way to the Auditorium where I meet Pep, to watch Roddy Frame. He plays a lovely acoustic set and charms the audience. He plays mostly stuff from his solo albums, but also includes 'Oblivious' and 'Walk Out to Winter', which, of course, get a big cheer.
We don’t wait till the end, though, we need to rush to join the others and catch The Drums at some other stage. We’re far away but we can tell they’re having fun. They display their naïve pop stuff with some energy and ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ has become one of my Primavera anthems.
So, what next? Too much takes place at the same time. We’ve already missed Michael Rother presenting Neu! Music, Van Dyke Parks, The Slits and Grizzly Bear (we only arrive in time for their last song). And now, it’s a toss-up between The Charlatans and Built to Spill. We opt for the Mancunians, with the idea of going to Built to Spill after four or five songs. In the end, we stay with The Charlatans for the whole gig. Tim Burgess must have made a pact with the devil, or maybe his long hair covering his face hides the ageing process, but it looks like they’re frozen in time. And they put on a very good show. Their songs, to me, sounded better live than on record. Really, and rather unexpectedly for myself, one of the highlights of this year’s Primavera.
Next, Gary Numan. A bit of a mistery that one, we didn’t know what to expect. After half an hour there was no mistery at all. Gary’s act was pretty boring and people were leaving. And, yes, he played that obscure B-side, ‘Cars’.
Now, another choice. Lee Perry or Pet Shop Boys. They’re so similar… My American mates, Ken and Dave, go to the Pet Shop Boys and me and Veronika go to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, which was good. Not the most exciting of concerts, but the man is a legend and I think it’s worth watching him, in spite of some mildly irritating dancers on dope… At 1.30 in the morning, with the sea breeze, that solid dub-reggae sound somehow fits perfectly. He finishes on time and we can just catch Pet Shop Boys on the big screen, doing their last number ‘West End Girls’, with dancers wearing big square boxes for heads. It looks both silly and arty.
We all regroup and sit down to relax for a while, watching Orbital in the distance at 3 am… and then we go home. It’s been an intense Primavera!

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #2

2010-06-15T21:32:00.009+01:00

Westland Row

The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom's time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent clusters hereabout smoking all manner of substances, taking photos of one another, and generally being a nuisance to both the living and the dead. In Ulysses, Bloom pays a visit to Sweny's chemist at the bottom of the street, where he buys some lemon soap, presumably to remove all the lipstick, and a packet of johnnies "in case Molly fancies a tumble when I get home." This is what is generally known to literary scholars as dramatic irony: The reader, unlike Bloom, knows that, at that very moment, Molly is being taken up the shitter by Blazes Boylan, using neither soap nor johnnies.

Sweny's can still be found at its old location. It is now a secondhand bookstore, but it still stocks lemon soap. If you require johnnies, there's another pharmacy a little further up Westland Row, but if you ask the Sweny's staff politely, they are only too happy to lend you johnnies from their own personal stash. The store is under new ownership, and they're trying to oblige all customers. Just say that you always used to get your johnnies there.

Davy Byrne's Pub

Davy Byrne's. The moral pub. The moral being, don't drink in Davy Byrne's. Bloom stops off here and consumes a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich, even though Gorgonzola was not invented until the First World War and anyone who has visited this pub knows that burgundy is only ever drunk out of the brain cavity of the original Davy Byrne, whose skull is kept behind the bar specifically for this purpose, as requested in his will. It has been suggested that this cheese reference is in fact a tribute to Émile Zola, the chronicler of Parisian working-class life on whom Joyce closely modeled his own career. Others have said that it was simply a mistake, one of the several thousand historical inaccuracies that have been spotted in the work to date. Experts in the field are now generally of the view that Joyce was "making it up as he went along."

It is interesting that, per Joyce, nobody drinks Guinness in Davy Byrne's, since the pub featured in a recent advertising campaign celebrating the 250th anniversary of the brewery's founding. In one television advert, drinkers are seen outside the pub offering a toast "To Arthur!" a reference to brewery founder Arthur Guinness, and in a semi-humorous relay of Chinese Whispers across Dublin pubs, the toast becomes increasingly distorted: "To Martha!" "To Hearth Rugs!" "To Bath Plugs!" "To Garth Brooks!" "To Garth Crooks!" and so on, until it has done the rounds of Dublin and gets back to Davy Byrne's, by which time the drinkers have actually sampled the brew. At that point, they shout, as one, "To Lager!" and spend the rest of the night drinking Stella.

But that bit was cut.

The bat motif that you can make out on the wall is the symbol of Bacardi rum. It is often asserted, mistakenly, that the Bass triangle was the first brand logo to appear in a work of art, in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, but this sculpture predates it by 12 years. The motif is also a reminder of another Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, who used to come into Davy Byrne's and drink Bacardi by the gallon. The bar staff let him sleep off his appalling hangovers during the daytime in the cool of the cellars, because the slightest glimpse of sunlight caused him immense agony. Thus was the story of Dracula born.

The National Museum

There are some artifacts behind these doors that date back to the days of pre-history, when humans were little more than grasping, instinctual, selfish, animalistic monsters. Take a contemporary Dublin citizen and hand them one of these items, and they simply wouldn't know what to make of them. There are no clues to how they should be used or, indeed, to how they were used. They belong to an era that we can barely conceptualize, and the presence of these artifacts only compound our confusion. That we should even encounter them in the midst of our own, advanced civilization seems so anachronistic that one can only wonder what purpose could lie behind the act of displaying them to us other than to confront us with the Other which we once were, to disprove Montaigne's assertion, "I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me."

Leopold Bloom visits the National Museum principally to contemplate the arses of the statues within. There were a number of arseholes in here when we dropped by, too, but we didn't find them arousing in the way Bloom did. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

Martello Tower, Sandycove

At this point in our dérive, we slipped into something long and uncomfortable, namely, the 5.13 DART from Pearse Station to Bray, alighting at Sandycove in order to visit the Martello Tower where Joyce opens his novel. The DART now runs underground, and the drivers are all French.

As you can see, Sandycove is, despite its name, one of Dublin's leafier suburbs. The Tower itself, in the distance, was built by the British to spot Napoleon's forces should he attempt anything so underhand as inciting the Irish to revolt. Joyce has Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus play his modern-day "lookouts," although they fall out over the fact that Mulligan has invited an Englishman, Haines, to stop with them, thereby illustrating the tension between Irishmen of the time over their relationship to Empire. Also, there are only two beds.

There are 365 steps to the top of the Martello Tower, which is why Mulligan complains about his tea being cold when Dedalus brings it up to him. There are several witty puns about Dedalus taking years over breakfast that will escape readers unless they know this fact. Several other puns relating to cramps, caresses, and Crete cannot be fully appreciated without a full knowledge of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who jumped off a high tower to escape King Minos. Interestingly, Paul McCartney got the name of his band Wings from this chapter of the book. The Beatles acquired their name from the Ladybird Book of Beetles.

Part the Third suivant.

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

2010-06-13T17:00:00.007+01:00

In honour of Ireland's first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce's remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de la flâneuristicisme and spiritual home of the Lettrist International and Situationism. The coach from Beauvais brought us, in the first acte gratuit of the day, to the portals of the James Joyce Pub, an omen, some of us imagined, a portending portal, if you will, a benevolent Delphic, nay, Homeric, augur signifying the Immortals' blessing on our adventure. Others amongst us pointed out that the bus always stops here.

The Guinness Brewery

Not, strictly speaking, the Ulyssean starting point, and thanks to the four Thermoses of room-temperature red wine we had packed and the ready availability of imbibing establishments for which Paris is renowned, Bloom's original path as described in the book soon became more of a drunkard's stagger, although we endeavoured to reach as many points of interest as we could, regardless of their chronological order in the text. Nonetheless, in many ways the Guinness Brewery constitutes a suitable starting point for our day out. "A Visit to Guinness' Brewery" is an essay topic suggested in Finnegans Wake, and as Joyce once observed, Dubh Linn, the uncorrupted name of Ireland's capital, means "black pool," identifying a subconscious motivation for the consumption of this darkest and foulest of beers by the unsuspecting natives. The brewery is thus an oneiric spring, the city's fount from which all life and death bubbles forth, dark and laden with original sin, much like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Metaphorically, then, the Brewery evokes not just Dublin's alcohol-sodden Viking past but also Holles Street Hospital, setting for Joyce's Oxen and the Sun scene in Ulysses, and the place where modern-day Dubliners give birth to their own Fleurs du mal.

The tower you see in the picture gives visitors a 360-degree view of the entire city of Dublin. It also marks the precise location of the Marquis de Sade's liberation after the Brewery was stormed in 1789. In those days, the citizens of Dublin had the wit to make former inmates members of their parliament. Today's Dubliners can't even manage to do the reverse.

We were taken on a tour of the Brewery (you can see the building behind), but we were forcibly ejected at the end of the tour when we demanded our free pints of Guinness. So much for Irish hospitality.

The Phoenix Park

Ah yes, the phoenix, mythological bird ripe for all sorts of linguistic jiggery-pokery but never much good for cooking. We were surprised upon our arrival to see how literally the parks department has taken the name, the park's fields being liberally covered over with what at first sight looked to be ashes. Closer examination revealed it to be sand, however, much to the delight of our pro-Situ members always on the lookout for the beach beneath the cobbles. A couple of the capital's young bucks were engaged in what we took to be some kind of religious rite involving clubs and a round projectile. Could this be the fabled "hurling," the Irishman's national sport? If so where was the vomit and blood? Or polo, perhaps? Our map indicated that there were polo grounds around here somewhere. Or were they simply two strapping Irish lads revelling in their own strength and vigour, frolicking gamely in the sunshine on the ersatz beach, their own Sandymount Strand, while lusty onlookers furtively masturbated behind the rocks? Who can say? More than one of us on encountering this scene thought immediately of Albert Camus and his love of outdoor life on the beaches of Algeria. A Joycean link here too: So struck was he by the structure and plot of Ulysses that Camus sketched out the plan for a novel about Bloom's mother, culminating with her death at the hands of her son on June 15th, 1904. The fact that Bloom makes no reference in Ulysses to the murder of his mother for the entirety of the next day transforms this Everyman into the archetypal modern-day psychopath, an Outsider not merely by virtue of his Jewishness, but by virtue also of his lack of fellow-feeling, the affectless, blasé personality incarnate, to use Simmel's categorisation.

Of course, we know what happened next. Bloom became Meursault, the Outsider who kills an Arab for kicks. The opening line of that book?: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

La Peste is better, anyway.

Mountjoy Prison

To inmates, "The Joy." To the screws, "The Mount." To the locals, "Mounters," "Joyo," "Priso," "Ountjoyp." Home to de Sade in his senility and madness, to Behan in his cups, to several popes (frocked, defrocked and unfrocked), and, a surprise to many, quite a few little old ladies, some of whom just love the place and keep coming back simply because they enjoy the company and the warmth, others amongst them who cannot help but come back because they are so thoroughly institutionalized they cannot cope with life on the outside. Sartre once said, ridiculously, that every man is free, even in prison. What he forgot to add is that even outside a prison's walls, a man can carry a prison inside his head. The former inmates of this particular asylum are frequently damaged in this way. Once the madness acquired in this particular building gets under your skin, it can require decades of re-education, beatings, and waterboarding to flush it out of you.

There is no truth to the rumour, incidentally, that the cells are so crowded that inmates develop hunchbacks. Though critics are yet to determine why Behan wrote about an old triangle instead of the bells, the bells.

Holles Street Hospital

The setting of the Oxen and the Sun portion of the novel and the site of the Guillotine during the Revolution, here it is that Ireland's monstrous beauties are born. As Baudelaire, described by Walter Benjamin as the master expositor of modernity, once said, "the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil." Molly Bloom's "Yes, yes, I said, yes," thus becomes an affirmation of evil, a declaration of nihilism that encapsulates the modernist spirit. It is fucking that leads to creation, to birth. Baudelaire's evil flowers are his poems, while Joyce generates Ulysses by fucking with language. The Revolution itself gave birth to Modernity, to Saint-Simonism, Comtean Positivism, the ontological rupture between subject and object, knower and known, mind and body. It is no coincidence to those astute enough to notice that the executioner's tool of choice during the Revolution was the Guillotine, not because of its purported humaneness or its symbolic representation of progress, but because it enacted the literal separation of body and mind. The Guillotine is Descartes' Cogito put to the task of social cleansing. And, in the same stroke, it is a symbol of rebirth, a cutting of the umbilical cord between parent and child, the birth of a new nation, a new society, out of the death pangs of the old.

A happy confluence of birth and death, then, echoing not just the Guinness Brewery where we began our day's outing, but also Glasnevin Cemetery, where I fear we shall all end up, whether it be by accident or design or misreading of the map while langered.

Part the Second to Follow.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part One)

2010-06-12T16:18:00.002+01:00

Hi all, this is my personal account of the Primavera festival in Barcelona, in two parts... Sorry about the delay.

Thursday

We arrive at 20 h, just in time for The Fall. Mark E. Smith starts mumbling ‘your future-ah is our clutter-ah…’ and there’s non-stop from then on, with the band, very solid, playing their typically repetitive but vibrant sound. They’re on the main stage and we can mostly see them on the big screen. Mark E. Smith reminds me of a guy in my local area who sleeps on a bench surrounded by cans of beer… But he’s still alive! And they’re a great act.
After that we caught The XX. I’ve heard of them but don’t know their stuff. They sound gentle and interesting, but after them, Broken Social Scene stole the show. They play quite a few songs from their last album, and, maybe it was the beers, but I can’t recall them playing a classic like ‘Anthems for a 17 year old girl’, but still, on stage they’re funny and inventive.
And after that, at 1 am, Pavement are… Pavement. Good songs and a good band… but the beers I’ve drunk are taking their toll now…

Friday

My friend Veronika and I arrive in time for A Sunny Day in Glasgow. To me, the songs are OK, pretty good, but mostly I love their live act. Too short, though, which is fine because it gives us time to go to the Auditorium to watch Low perform ‘The Great Destroyer’. The place is packed and we struggle to find seats. Well, in fact we don’t find them… We sit on the corridors and are told by security to move on somewhere else. That happened three or four times until we managed to find two seats. And as for the show… oh my god, it’s beautiful. Very moving. Definitely, one of the highlights of the festival.
When we leave the Auditorium I join my mate Pep and we both go to see Wire, whilst Veronika goes to see Here We Go Magic. They’re very noisy and mad, she tells me, but she enjoyed the show. Wire weren’t too noisy nor mad, but they were good, they played some classics (not the Elastica song, though…) and I was happy to see them live for the first time.
We join the others and make our way towards the main stage to catch a bit of Wilco. Maybe because I’ve seen them before, maybe because we were far away and I wasn’t paying attention, concentrated in getting drinks, they sounded to me a bit MOR-ish. I think really we were all geared up for the next act, the stars of this year’s Primavera, Pixies (to be continued…)

"These two need to spend six months in a third world country building schools."

2010-06-09T08:26:00.001+01:00

Linder Sterling interviewed by Morrissey in Interview Magazine.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

2010-06-04T13:32:00.001+01:00

John Hyatt - Boomerang Love

Cognitive Surplus

2010-05-28T09:49:00.003+01:00

Two guys plugging their latest books can actually generate a stimulating discussion, as demonstrated by this brief conversation between Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink in the June issue of Wired magazine. Pink's book is called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. Shirky's is called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Excerpts that attracted my interest:

Shirky: . . . Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.

Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.

Shirky: That’s what’s happening. Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

. . .

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

. . .

Pink: . . . Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.

Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Pink: Same goes with organizations. We don’t realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I’m running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won’t do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that’s the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.

Shirky: The power of the default setting.

Pink: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged. That’s how we are out of the box. And if you begin with this presumption, you create much more open, flexible arrangements that almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals and great innovation for organizations.

Irish Anarchist Review

2010-05-27T15:42:00.001+01:00

Issue 1 out now. Details and pdf here.

Always Interesting

2010-05-27T13:50:00.002+01:00

David Graeber, that is, being interviewed here by Yiannis Aktimon of the Void network. Some highlights:

Void Network: what are the major challenges of antiauthoritarian movement of today? Is there really a revolution to be waited for, or in truth, the radical procedure of present, has to do with the ideas and forces of a general daily reformation of life?

D.G.: Globally, I think we are at a turning point, but that turning point has been, as it were, endlessly suspended. One reason the alter-globalization movement slowed down so in the second half of the '00s was not just the lingering effects of the war on terror and resultant stepping up of repression, but the fact that the other side simply couldn't get their act together. They were faced with enormous structural crises, really, the effects of the same broad diffuse popular resistance of which are movements were perhaps the most self-conscious, explicit, and articulate form. Yet all they did was bicker with each other at their summits - they didn't really seem to have a strategy, and thus, it was very hard to come up with a strategy of opposition. This might be changing now. As for the grand strategic question: well, I don't think the transformation of daily life, and the larger question of revolution, can any longer be clearly separated. How might radical transformation happen? We can't know. We're really flying blind. But I also think we've been working with a very limited set of historical analogies: the history of revolutionary movements first in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, then globally in the 20th, but that's it. It's a tiny tiny slice of human history. There have been hundreds of successful revolutions in world history we don't even know how to see. It's quite likely that many of the "primitive communists" in say, the Eastern Woodlands of North America that so inspired Engels, or in Amazonia, weren't primitive at all, but the descendants of revolutionaries, of people who had overthrown earlier centralized states. The world is much more complicated, and the history of resistance much deeper than we have been taught to imagine. Or another way of making the same point: we have come to accept, over the last couple hundred years, since the Enlightenment basically, that there is only one paradigm for fundamental social change, "the transition from feudalism to capitalism" - which must then be the model for the next one, "the transition from capitalism to socialism" (or whatever). It's becoming screamingly obvious that the transition to whatever comes next is not going to look like that. So people think no revolutionary change is possible at all. Nonsense. Capitalism is unsustainable. Something will replace it. For me, I think a more useful paradigm right now is the transition from slavery to feudalism, at least in Europe. Remember, under Rome, huge percentages of the population of the empire were outright chattel slaves (maybe a third, even, and much more if you count the coloni and debt-peons and so on who were effectively slaves). A few hundreds years later, the number of slaves in Europe was almost none. This was one of the greatest liberations in human history (and similar things did happen in India and China around the same time.) How did it happen? How were all the slaves freed? Well, since we're only used to seeing it from an elite perspective as "the decline and fall of the Roman empire" and can't see any explicit anti-slavery movements, we're unable to write the history at all, but it happened. Will wage-slavery be eliminated in a similar apparently catastrophic and confused moment? It's possible. But it could only happen the first because of pressure from below, based on certain egalitarian values that were always there, all operating below the historical radar screen. Obviously, there were also horrific thugs taking advantage of the chaos, as there will be now too. But we need to think about how to mobilize similar bottom-up alliances when things start breaking down.

Void Network: Is there really a national and international debt? What would you like to put as a small analysis of what it seems to be the Greek paradigm in the great saga of domino financial collapse of many countries economies after the 2008 broke of international crisis?

D.G.: Money nowadays is a purely political instrument. Some people - central bankers, to some degree ordinary banks and even the financial divisions of large firms - have the right to generate it, to make up money, relatively as they wish. Banks after all don't mostly lend money they actually have, they lend money they just made up - if under certain constraints. So the rhetoric people use, that "there's only so much money" is nonsense. Money isn't like oil, it's not even like bananas, you can't actually run out of it. So the scam is to allow some people to just whisk it into existence and then, even more importantly, to say that other people can't. In a way banks' ability to make money is not so outrageous since money is basically debt, it's an IOU, a promise, and in a free society everyone should have the right to make promises. In a way that's what being "free" means. The problem is in our society, the only really important promises are financial, and some people are granted the political right to make as many of these as they like, with no little or responsibility for keeping them, and others (the politically powerless) are not, and everyone acts as if the most important moral responsibility everyone has is to pay back money that others were allowed to simply make up. This is particularly ridiculous in the case of governments, who grant the banks the right to make up the money, and then act as if they have no choice but to honor their commitments to these same people. It's all nonsense. But it's just a new variant of an age-old pattern. Conquerors, tyrants, powerful lords throughout human history have always tried to convince their subjects or those they conquer that they owe them something, at the very least, that they owe them their life, for not having massacred them all. It's basically the logic of slavery (I could have killed you, I didn't, now you owe me everything) but it's also the foundation of what we like to call "sovereignty." The unusual thing about the present day is just that this sovereignty has been transferred from states to this semi-independent financial establishment as a way of undercutting any notion that sovereignty any longer belongs with what they used to call "the people."

. . .

Void Network: Are there any values that have to be defended against the formulated extremity of extreme nihilism and elitism?

D.G.: Someone once said that the ultimate stakes of any political struggle is the ability to define what value is. Autonomy does not just mean making up one's own rules, as Castoriadis says, though that's important - it also means being free to collective establish what you think value is. In that way, any enclave that preserves a system of value even relatively autonomous from capital is a form of freedom that should be defended. One of the terrible mistakes of old-fashioned socialism was to subordinate everything to the revolution in the same way that capitalists subordinate everything to profit. It's funny because I'm often accused of criticizing anthropologists and academics for not helping radical social movements. That's not true at all. I think it's a scandal that many seem actively opposed, or pretend to be leaders when they're not, or refuse to engage with people who want their help. But I also think that it's absolutely great that there are people who get to spend their lives thinking about, I don't know, Medieval Provencal musical instruments as an end in themselves. I call this the utopian moment in academia. Don't we want people to be able to do this? Anyway, for me, a free society is one where there are endless varieties of forms of value, and people can decide for themselves which they wish to pursue. Therefore the key social question is "how do we provide people with sufficient life security, in a free society, that they are able to be as free as possible to pursue those forms of value (moral, artistic, spiritual, hedonistic, communal, etc, etc etc) they feel to be the most important - whatever these may be."

. . .

Void Network: what is your present attitude about the end of traditional labour? Would you like to give us some more analysis of your current approach?

D.G. : Well, our horizon has to be the abolition of work in its conventional form. For me, I again find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the Italians who say the production of value is now dispersed through all forms of social life, so we need to think about a social wage. My objection is they seem to think there's something new here, that "immaterial labor" or the dominance of such is a new development. I find this racist and sexist. They seem to think that in the 19th century, value was produced exclusively by factory work, or anyway paid employment, but that now, especially since the '70s, the real cutting-edge is the production of the informational and stylistic content, and context, or commodities - "immaterial labor" (a stupid phrase, it's not immaterial in any sense). Why? Well, when looking at such analysis, the way to understand it, I always say, is to follow a simple principle: "follow the white guys." Was there no one working outside the factory on the informational or stylistic or cultural aspects of the commodity, etc.? Of course. But they were mostly women, so they say, well, who cares, that's not part of the production of value, it's all in the factories where the white guys are. Now, most factory work is being done by women and/or people of color so suddenly, factory work is unimportant and it's the white guys working on computers, etc., who are really producing value. Nonsense. What we need to start thinking about is how all these new forms of labor, and some very old ones, draw on one another. For every person who can push a button and instantaneously do a transaction with Japan that would have taken weeks in the past, there's some guy in Brazil or Pakistan who has to work twice as many hours or spend hours more on the bus just getting to work so he can do it. We need to look at the world as a whole. We also need to understand that war and imperial extraction still operate and how, which brings us back to the money system again (modern credit money is basically war debt created by governments who borrow the money to create the means of coercion, then allow the bankers to lend that debt to everyone else - and use the means of coercion to enforce the debts. This is the regime under which all labor now operates.)

Erm . . . Mirage

2010-05-26T15:38:00.002+01:00

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, in the New York Times last week, asking whether the Irish economic miracle was real or not.

Ireland was one of the first nations to introduce tough fiscal austerity in this cycle — in spring 2009 the government slashed public-sector spending and raised taxes. Despite the cuts, the European Commission forecasts that Ireland will have one of the highest budget deficits in the world at 11.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2010. The problem is clear: when you cut spending you also lose tax revenues from people who earned incomes from that money. Further, the newly unemployed seek benefits, so Ireland’s spending cuts in one category are partly offset by more spending in another. Without growth, the budget deficit still looms large.

Ireland’s problems are, sadly, far deeper than the need for simple fiscal austerity. The Celtic Tiger’s impressive reported growth over the past decades was in part based on its aggressive attempts to help major corporations in the United States reduce their tax bills. The Irish government set corporate taxes at just 12.5 percent of profits, thus attracting all sorts of businesses — from computer services like Google and Yahoo, to drug companies like Forest Labs — that set up corporate bases and washed profits through Ireland to keep them out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service.

The remarkable success of this tax haven means that roughly 20 percent of Irish gross domestic product is actually “profit transfers” that raise little tax for Ireland and are owned by foreign companies. Since most of these profits are subject to the tax code, they are accounted for in Ireland where they are lightly taxed; they should not be counted as part of Ireland’s potential tax base. A more robust cross-country comparison would be to examine Ireland’s financial condition ignoring these transfers. This is easy to do: a nation’s gross national product excludes the profits of foreign residents. For most nations, gross national product and G.D.P. are nearly identical, but in Ireland they are not.

When we adjust Ireland’s figures accordingly, the situation is dire. The budget deficit was about 17.9 percent of G.N.P. in 2009, and based on European Commission projections (and assuming the G.N.P.-G.D.P. gap remains the same) it will be roughly 14.6 percent in 2010 and 15.1 percent in 2011, while the debt-to-G.N.P. ratio at the end of this year is expected — by our calculation — to be 97 percent, and 109 percent at the end of 2011. These numbers make Ireland look similarly troubled to Greece, with a much higher budget deficit but lower levels of public debt.

Ireland’s politicians, rather than facing up to their problems, are making things ever worse. Simply put, the Irish miracle was a mirage driven by clever use of tax-haven rules and a huge credit boom that permitted real estate prices and construction to grow quickly before declining ever more rapidly. The biggest banks grew to have assets twice the size of official G.D.P. when they essentially failed in 2008. The government has now made a fateful choice: rather than make creditors pay some part of the losses, it is taking the bank debt onto the national balance sheet, effectively ballooning its already large sovereign debt. Irish taxpayers are set to be left with the risk of very large payments to make on someone else’s real estate deals gone bad.

There is no simple escape, but if the government hopes to avoid a sovereign default, the one overriding priority should be to stop bailing out the banks. Instead, the government should wind down existing banks in a “bad bank,” while moving their deposit base and profitable businesses into new, well-capitalized banks that can function without a taxpayer burden. This will be messy, but it is far better than a sovereign default.

I guess Not.

Listen!

2010-05-26T10:46:00.001+01:00

In Our Time: Anarchism

Persons Unknown Trial

2010-05-26T09:17:00.004+01:00

Following on from the post below, a series from one of the jurors at the Persons Unknown trial, in which Vince Stephenson was involved. There are a couple of "anonymous" comments from Ronan Bennett, also one of the defendants, under some of the posts.

Post One

Post Two

Post Three

Post Four

Post Five

Post Six

Post Seven

Post Eight

final part (closing credits) in my post below.

While Googling, I also found a nice post at Darren's worth a look, even if you've read it before. It even manages to get Mike Leigh's High Hopes in! :-) There's a link there to an interview with Stuart Christie in 3:AM magazine.

Halcyon Daze

2010-05-26T08:27:00.004+01:00

The Kill Your Pet Puppy website has a post about the old Autonomy Centre in Wapping. In the early 80s I used to pop down on a Friday afternoon after a visit to the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel, just to see what was going on. Normally nothing. Just Vince Stephenson reading a book or looking for a game of chess (I never took up the challenge. I was useless at the time . . . in so many ways). A copper strolled in on one occasion for a nose around, but he didn't stay very long.

My fellow Brummies UB40 played a benefit gig for the Autonomy Centre at Woolwich Odeon. I believe it was the first time they performed stuff from their second album, Present Arms. I still have the T-shirt. The support band was The Nervous Kind, another Brummie band.

Bizarrely/coincidentally, Paul Comaskey from Nervous Kind turns up here. His sister-in-law used to be married to Richard Buckner.

It's a very small world indeed.

How to Understand the Economy

2010-05-26T08:06:00.003+01:00

More a bookmark for my own future reference, I think, there's a review here at the New York Review of Books, by Robert Solow, of Duncan Foley's book Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, a book I've already read. The review itself is interesting, however, for what it has to say about theories of value. Solow for the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on economic growth. He's the author of Growth Theory: An Exposition, which should keep you going through the warm summer nights ahead.

Foley's book is a primer in economics and, as Solow observes, it has its flaws even in that regard. There are more interesting things you could be doing with your time.

How Fucked Are We?

2010-05-26T07:48:00.004+01:00

Spotted over at Progressive Economy, this article from the Financial Times, by David Gardner.

Encouraged by venal politicians who actively discouraged regulation and provided a phenomenal array of tax breaks to builders, and in an environment of cheap money and easy credit (partly created by the lower borrowing costs brought by membership of the eurozone, partly because risk disappeared from the international financial radar), Irish banks went on a reckless lending spree. They lent, above all, to property developers. When that bubble burst – and with devaluing the currency no longer an option – it all but bankrupted the country and triggered a painful sequence of tax rises and pay, pension and public spending cuts.

When the banks started to wobble, the government, led by the populist Fianna Fáil, insisted Ireland’s economic “fundamentals” were sound and such problems as there were had blown in across the Atlantic. But when the banks inevitably crashed and the state stepped in to rescue them, every Irish citizen got saddled with many thousands of euros in debts that will weigh the country down for years to come. The current generation – the first in Ireland’s history to know real wealth and success and, with it, international admiration – is very, very angry.

Whatever politicians say, moreover, Ireland knows this was almost entirely a home-made crisis, which happened to coincide with an international credit crunch. Colm McCarthy, who teaches economics at University College Dublin, is the author of last year’s comprehensive spending review of the public sector: “300 pages, and a cut on each page”, as he genially puts it. This one-man-International Monetary Fund is no populist. But he’s clear on what brought Ireland to this pass. “This was a very old-fashioned banking collapse, nothing to do with derivatives and US toxic assets,” he says. “Until a few years ago I thought AIB [Allied Irish Bank] and Bank of Ireland were dull, boring banks run by granite-faced bastards who wouldn’t lend money to their own relatives. It seems we were wrong.”

In its report on Ireland last year, the IMF concluded: “The Irish economy is in the midst of an unprecedented economic correction. The stress exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress in post-World War II history.”

At the height of the lunacy, around three-quarters of the total lending by Irish banks – €420bn or about two and a half times the size of the economy – got bound up in property, construction and land speculation of one sort or another, a sector which amounted to more than a fifth of economic output. It became what Ireland did for a living. By comparison, investment in real estate in Spain peaked at about a tenth of national income – half Ireland’s level.

Morgan Kelly observes here:

Fifteen fat years allowed the Irish government to cut income taxes, increase spending and still run a budget surplus. Between 2007 and 2009 however, tax revenue fell by 20%, while expenditure rose by 9%, moving the state from a balanced budget to a deficit of 12% of GDP. In contrast to its inept handling of the banking crisis, the Irish government has moved decisively to reduce expenditure and increase tax rates, and appears on target to reduce its deficit to 3% of GDP by 2012.

Ireland’s government debt is still moderate. At the end of 2009 gross debt was 65% of GDP and, after subtracting the state pension reserve and pre-funded borrowing, net debt was 40% of GDP. Assuming that deficit targets are not missed too badly, gross debt should still be under 85% of GDP by the end of 2012.

This debt would probably be manageable, had the Irish government not casually committed itself to absorb all the gambling losses of its banking system. If we assume – optimistically, I believe – that Irish banks eventually lose one third of what they lent to property developers, and one tenth of business loans and mortgages, the net cost to the Irish taxpayer will be nearly one third of GDP.

Adding these bank losses to its national debt will leave Ireland in 2012 with a debt-GDP ratio of 115%. But if we look at the ratio in terms of GNP, which gives a more realistic picture of the Ireland’s discretionary tax base, this is a debt-GNP ratio of 140% – above the ratio that is currently sinking Greece. Even if bank losses are only half as large as we expect, Ireland is still facing a debt-GNP ratio of 125%.

Ireland is like a patient bleeding from two gunshot wounds. The Irish government has moved quickly to stanch the smaller, fiscal hole, while insisting that the litres of blood pouring unchecked through the banking hole are “manageable”. Capital markets may not continue to agree for long, triggering a borrowing crisis which will start, most probably, with a run on Irish banks in inter-bank markets.

Ireland may therefore present an early test of the EU bailout fund. However, in contrast to Greece, Ireland’s woes stem almost entirely from its banking system, and could be swiftly and permanently cured by a resolution which shares the losses of Irish banks with the holders of their €115 billion of bonds through a partial debt for equity swap.

I may consider emigrating. Greece looks nice.

It's Friday. Let's Do Some Filing!

2010-05-21T13:03:00.001+01:00

I,Ludicrous - Clerking Til I Die

(For Kathy)

Naming Names

2010-05-14T16:45:00.003+01:00

Just spotted this interesting diagram over at the WSM Web site, taken from the TASC report Mapping the Golden Circle.

Together, these companies employed 310,000 people and had a combined turnover (or equivalent) of nearly €80 billion. They included both private companies and state-owned bodies.

The 40 companies studied in this report are household names and include Bord Gáis, the Central Bank, AIB, Smurfit, Anglo Irish Bank, Ryanair and Aer Lingus. The total number of directors involved in managing these companies was 572.

In the period 2005-2007, a network of 39 people held positions in 33 of the 40 top private companies and state-owned bodies. Between them, these 39 – referred to as the Director Network in TASC’s report – held a total of 93 directorships.

Mapping the Golden Circle also provides evidence that there was a trend of “excessive remuneration” for the CEOs of both state-owned and private companies. On average, their pay rose by over 40% between 2005 and 2007, while combined inflation for these two years ran at just over 9%.

You can download the full report here.

David Harvey: Gentrification in Baltimore and Barcelona

2010-05-13T07:42:00.003+01:00

Just received a link to this on Facebook from AK Press.

It’s urban sociologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey in dialogue with our friend Marina, an activist and documentary videographer from Barcelona. In the video, David talks about the history of urban development and gentrification in Baltimore, and in Barcelona. It’s an interesting conversation, and a useful one, especially for those of us who are thinking hard about the nature of urban development in the United States and how that affects the work we do as activists and organizers. It’s a reminder that we need to look both inside the U.S. and outside of it to really understand how development happens, and to find models for how we can work to shape the social, political, and geographical worlds we live in.

There's also a link to Chris Ealham's book Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937, which, as you can see from the sidebar to this blog, is the book I just finished reading, and a mighty good read it is too.

. . . in some ways, the struggle for control of the city’s spaces that Ealham discusses in the context of the early industrial period before the Spanish Civil War are still going on today. A friend of mine, one of the most brilliant folks I know, and an urban activist herself, told me recently that she thought that Chris’s book was the best analysis Barcelona she’d read to date, which I take as very, very high praise.

It also points to a deeper relevance of a book like Anarchism and the City than we might realize at first glance. When I talked to Chris about promoting his book, really early on, he talked about it as not just a history, but as a blueprint for contemporary action. He told me a story about a talk he gave in Barcelona, at the end of which an activist working in one of the city’s old industrial neighborhoods came up to him, and told him that their group was using Anarchism and the City as a “manual de lucha,” a fighting manual. How many historians can say that? So watch the video, and then check out Chris’s book for some historical context.

For those who watch the video to the end, there's a site here for the Hotel Vela in Barcelona that actually uses Harvey's quote!

It's Friday. Let's Ninja!

2010-05-07T08:48:00.000+01:00

The New Pornographers- Your Hands (Together)

Revolutionary Playbook Out Now!!*

2010-05-04T20:32:00.005+01:00

We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

*At least if that idiot Glenn Beck is to be believed. I think he must be a Friend of AK Press.

The Pleasure of the Text

2010-05-02T18:04:00.004+01:00

Only just noticed this interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Raoul Vaneigem, courtesy of Wiki, from the May 2009 e-flux. Highlights:

HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?

RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?

RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.

HUO: Your new book takes us on a trip “between mourning the world and exuberant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left of May ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV: Even if we are today seeing recycled ideologies and old religious infirmities being patched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed a general despair, which our ruling wheelers and dealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968. The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l'après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

RV: The agrarian economy of the Ancien Régime was a fossilized form that was shattered by the emerging free-trade economy, from the 1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabbling speculative capitalism whose debacle we now witness is about to give way to a capitalism reenergized by the production of non-polluting natural power, the return to use value, organic farming, a hastily patched-up public sector, and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The future belongs to self-managed communities that produce indispensable goods and services for all (natural power, biodiversity, education, health centers, transport, metal and textile production . . .). The idea is to produce for us, for our own use—that is to say, no longer in order to sell them—goods that we are currently forced to buy at market prices even though they were conceived and manufactured by workers. It is time to break with the laws of a political racketeering that is designing, together with its own bankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO: Is this a war of a new kind, as Page claims? An economic Third World War?

RV: We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun, and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market barbarism to live on.

HUO: In his book Making Globalization Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a reorganization of globalization along the lines of greater justice, in order to shrink global imbalances. What do you think of globalization? How does one get rid of profit as motive and pursue well-being instead? How does one escape from the growth imperative?

RV: The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the bankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right. It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shift to create communities where desire for life overwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We need concern ourselves neither with government debt, which covers up a massive defrauding of the public interest, nor with that contrivance of profit they call “growth.” From now on, the aim of local communities should be to produce for themselves and by themselves all goods of social value, meeting the needs of all—authentic needs, that is, not needs prefabricated by consumerist propaganda.

HUO: Edouard Glissant distinguishes between globality and globalization. Globalization eradicates differences and homogenizes, while globality is a global dialogue that produces differences. What do you think of his notion of globality?

RV: For me, it should mean acting locally and globally through a federation of communities in which our pork-barreling, corrupt parliamentary democracy is made obsolete by direct democracy. Local councils will be set up to take measures in favor of the environment and the daily lives of everyone. The situationists have called this “creating situations that rule out any backtracking.”

HUO: Might the current miscarriages of globalization have the same dangerous effects as the miscarriages of the previous globalization from the ‘30s? You have written that what was already intolerable in ‘68 when the economy was booming is even more intolerable today. Do you think the current economic despair might push the new generations to rebel?

RV: The crisis of the ‘30s was an economic crisis. What we are facing today is an implosion of the economy as a management system. It is the collapse of market civilization and the emergence of human civilization. The current turmoil signals a deep shift: the reference points of the old patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolating instead, still just barely and confusedly, are the early markers of a lifestyle that is genuinely human, an alliance with nature that puts an end to its exploitation, rape, and plundering. The worst would be the unawareness of life, the absence of sentient intelligence, violence without conscience. Nothing is more profitable to the racketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread by mercenary greed, in which money, even devalued in a panic, remains the only value.

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air. What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

HUO: In your writing you have described the work imperative as an inhuman, almost animal condition. Do you consider market society to be a regression?

RV: As I mentioned above, evolution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species as it breaks free from its original animality. But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress.

HUO: For you, what is a life in progress?

RV: Advancing from survival, the struggle for subsistence and predation to a new art of living, by recreating the world for the benefit of all.

A Nice Turn of Phrase

2010-04-28T15:17:00.002+01:00

Dave Zirin in the April issue of The Progressive waxes sceptical about the Vancouver Olympics and the International Olympic Committee, our bête noire for this month:

The International Olympic Committee—that sewing circle of monarchists, extortionists, and absolved fascists—likes to hide behind the pretense of nobility. It claims to care not for profit or personal gain. Just the glory of “Olympism” as represented in its Magna Carta: “the Olympic Charter.” That charter states: “The mission of the IOC is to promote Olympism throughout the world and to lead the Olympic Movement. This includes upholding ethics in sports.” On the IOC’s website, there is a quiz: “The Ultimate goal of Olympism is to a) Organize the Olympic Games, b) encourage new world records, c) build a peaceful and better world through sport. It’s perfectly understandable if you needed three tries to answer that correctly. The answer is, of course, c—although that would certainly be news to the family of Nodar Kumaritashvili.

Shortest Book Review of the Year

2010-04-28T14:46:00.004+01:00

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, by Kevin Phillips

Read it.

Anyone who says this crisis was unforeseeable is either ignorant or lying. Phillips, a former Republican, wrote this book in 2006 and forecast exactly the catastrophe we're currently experiencing. The only thing he gets wrong is the date.

He predicted it would start in 2010.

Hyatt Art & Music

2010-04-28T07:40:00.003+01:00

Stop Press News from John Hyatt

Please come and join me as I’ve got two exhibitions opening in one night in Manchester on Friday! I’m going to play some songs there too.

The Free Creation of Beautiful Things

Friday 30th April 5.30 – 7.30 p.m

Holden Gallery, Grosvenor Building (School of Art), Manchester Metropolitan University, All Saints Square, Cavendish Street, Manchester, M15 6BR

The work for this exhibition finds beauty in the everyday, the habitual and the overlooked. Refresh your relationship with the universe from the stars above to the gnats in the garden through my digital photo works. Sound and video show what wonder can be still had with a child’s kaleidoscope.

Exhibition runs until 14 May

Me and the Avatars

Friday 30th April 7.00 – 9.00 p.m.

Rogue Studios, 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Exhibition runs till 6 May

These are all new works too. Photographic works bring my Second Life avatars out to explore an Indian Sun Temple and a Step Well, accompanied by a multitude of sculpted Hindi gods and my human form joins in too.

To accompany these new artworks and celebrate the two exhibitions, I have produced a new album of music, ‘Do What You Wanna Do’, in a limited edition. The album will be available at the shows and in May as a CD from my website:

http://www.hyattartandlife.com

Title track, Do What You Wanna Do, is up on Youtube with a little animation at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VxKfM0sSA

Bring a smile. Be there or do the square thing!

Soon You'll All Be Doing It

2010-04-24T12:37:00.001+01:00

Dublin Opinion shows how it's done.

Khmer Rouge Strippergram is just plain creepy.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

2010-04-23T13:14:00.000+01:00

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag

No Shoes

2010-04-22T20:28:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Aileen, I've been having a bit of pseudo-situ fun over at Xtranormal.

The New Proletarians

2010-04-22T18:27:00.002+01:00

Matthew Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It is being published in the U.K. as The Case for Working with Your Hands and appears to be in the same mould as Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, although hopefully not as long winded and obtuse.

An article by Crawford appeared in last week's Sunday Times magazine, but you know by now our aversion to that particular product and its owner. Fortunately, a version of the same article previously appeared in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago. And here it is.

I don't particularly want to get into a debate here about petty-bourgeois artisanship and the social and technological step backward implied by the retreat to small-scale production. What interested me more, and for obvious reasons, was the second part of the article:

After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Crawford goes on to wonder:

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

Proletarian indeed, but to imagine that there's no active engagement by workers on an intellectual production line such as this is reinforces the stereotype of mass worker as passive victim. Just as Socialism or Barbarism pointed out back in the 50s and 60s, factories require the active participation of their workers in order to function properly. And that still applies today. Every abstract writer knows dozens of short-cuts and ways to get round problematic articles that will make the job easier, get it done quicker without loss of accuracy or quality, and which he or she will be tempted to keep from editors or management because once management find out they'll likely change the targets. This is partly why management actually don't know how to do the workers' jobs much of the time. It's in the workers' interests to keep management out of the loop and to conserve knowledge for their own protection, something I don't recall Bourdieu ever noticing, although I'm sure someone can correct me on that. What's interesting is that it is the the nature of hierarchy itself that requires the worker to engage with the task in this way, regardless of whether or not he or she has any pride in the job. Indeed, the chance to skive can be part of the motivation.

And 28 articles a day, by the way, is piss.

Evidence of Evolution at Maclean's?

2010-04-22T18:18:00.003+01:00

Not exactly Canada's most enlightened or intellectually challenging magazine, Maclean's tackles the hefty subject of evolution in the only way it knows how:

What might our granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter look like? Shorter and stouter, says a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If current trends continue, its authors predict, then by 2409 descendants of the women in the study will have evolved to be one kilogram heavier and two centimetres shorter than their 2010 foremothers.

For years, some scientists heralded the end of human evolution. The post-industrial homo sapiens, they argued, was free of the kinds of “survival-of-the-fittest” pressures that could drive large-scale genetic change. In 2008, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, gave a much-hyped lecture entitled “Human Evolution is Over.” “Not so,” says Stephen Stearns, co-author of this latest study, professor of evolutionary biology at Yale University, and founding editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. “The basic take-home is that humans continue to evolve,” Stearns told Maclean’s.

You see, survival fitness has become less of an issue for humans. What matters more is reproductive fitness. However:

The hitch, Stearns warns, is that predicted changes might not materialize. For instance: while evolution is literally pushing women down and out, environmental factors, like better nutrition, allow them to grow taller and stronger. The result of these battling inﬂuences is impossible to predict.

Got that? Impossible to predict. Well done, Maclean's.

And Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

2010-04-22T18:10:00.002+01:00

Or possibly not, but here's an interesting article from yesterday's New York Times by David Brooks, in which he discusses research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business into purported ideological separation online.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.

If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

Of course, you've got to get online first.

So, Where's Doofus?

2010-04-22T18:02:00.002+01:00

courtesy of MM.

3, 8, 4, 6, 6

2010-04-16T11:49:00.000+01:00

Can you complete the sequence?

The Adventures of Flannery

2010-04-14T14:13:00.003+01:00

The Adventures of Flannery from Jessica Fuller on Vimeo.

A very enjoyable profile of the wonderful Cathal Coughlan, former frontman of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, as he goes about constructing the show Flannery's Mounted Head (which draws on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project) for Cork's year as the European Capital of Culture in 2005.

Counago & Spaves

The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity

Aftermath Network: Metamorphosis of a crisis

Mamgmanimity Revisited

A Question of Degree

Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011

The Usual Pun About Class

By Way of Explanation

Postscript on Insignificancy

Does It Seem Like a Long March to You?

Coming Soon!(ish)

John Gerassi Interview

If It's March It Must Be Lanzarote

*Ahem* Happy International Women's Day

Social Media and Social Change

What is the Secret of Great Comedy?

Suze Rotolo 20 November 1943 – 24 February 2011

The All-New One-Line Book-Review Quiz Competition Contest!

You're Wired

You're Weird

Capital as Power

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923–2010)

Watch It, Assblood

We're Just Biased

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Manuel Stimulation

It's Friday. Let's Boogie! (Part 2)

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!!

Lost Text: David Brown Resigns from Solidarity

Swell Maps

Thank You for the Music

One for the Plinth

On this weekend of derbies

It's Friday! Let's Boogie!!

Reeling in the Ears: The Irish Top Ten 2010

Better Than Fine

The Thrill of the Kill (or Kill Your Pet Lion)

Provocative and Thoughtful

Liza with a Die

Kill Your Pet Puppy

Presents of Mind

A Happy New Year to All Our Reader

My Brilliant Blogging Career

Books on the Fly

Some Future

A Society Adrift

Bigger Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From

Explicit Book Pr0n

It's All Gone Very Quiet

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Urban Wanderings

Give Em What They Don't Want

Capitalist Provides Rope

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

He's Also a Naturell Kokbar

Define Sad

Eco Eco

Anarchist Writers

Frank's Fantastic Send-Off

Readings #6

It's Friday. Let's Bounce!

Telling It Like It Is

It's Friday. You Know It Is, It Really Is.

In Memory of Frank Sidebottom & Chris Sievey

Bobbins News

Ish Friday . Lesh Boogie!

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #3

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part Two)

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #2

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part One)

"These two need to spend six months in a third world country building schools."

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Cognitive Surplus

Irish Anarchist Review

Always Interesting

Erm . . . Mirage

Listen!

Persons Unknown Trial

Ahem Happy International Women's Day