Lots of related discussion in a book by someone who has looked at the
subject closely
http://www.generation-online.org/other/eotk/empire_of_the_known_contents.htm
Stevphen Shukaitis wrote:
> >From the upcoming "Revelation" issue of Fifth Estate
> (http://www.fifthestate.org), Spring 2007 Volume 41 Number 375 .
>
>
> Revelation Vertigo
> Stevphen Shukaitis
>
> Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence–virtual–let
> us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political
> movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be
> free. – Cornelius Castoriadis
>
> There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical
> political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false
> totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence
> hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the
> dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of
> an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within
> this world we must we leave behind.
>
> For the autonomist, this comes in the form of the working class for itself
> whose existence was disrupted, not destroyed, by the violent upheavals
> that formed the economic basis of capitalism (a process which Marx
> observes plays the same role in political economy that "original sin" does
> in theology). In primitivist thought, this becomes a reclaiming of a
> mythical ancestral past crushed, but never fully destroyed, by the weight
> of technological development and the machinations of alienation.
>
> As powerful as such lines of argument can be, one danger in the politics
> of revelation is that every act of revealing not only illuminates the
> existence of certain processes and phenomena, but also effectively
> conceals others that do not fit within the structure of the revelation. It
> is when revelations become dogmatic, when they become "churchly" one might
> say, that they blind the true believer to all that falls outside the
> blinkers they have placed on their intellectual vision.
>
> To question the process of questioning is to return to the etymological
> root of the concept of revolt, one based on a process of returning,
> discovering, uncovering, and renovating; one that is a state of permanent
> questioning, of transformation, of change, an endless probing of
> appearances. For it must be remembered that every act of revelation is not
> simply a discovery of what is, but also a construction of that which is,
> through a process of shared perception and understanding. Thus, to speak
> of an autonomous self-determining capacity that existed before the advent
> of capitalism providing the seeds and routes going through and beyond it,
> is not simply to uncover its existence, but also to take part in its
> collective construction. It is the presupposition of this autonomy, based
> on a perhaps mystical foundation, which enables the struggle for its
> realization.
>
> The danger, or at least one of them, contained within such a style of
> argument, is the risk of projecting back into history some sort of
> prelapsarian subject that only needs to be reclaimed to bring about the
> end of alienation and the failings of our current existence. Fetishizing
> this sort of imagined past contains very real risks, as nearly none who
> proclaim the benefits of such an existence have ever experienced it
> themselves (except those who have racked up a good bit of frequent time
> traveler miles).
>
> Perhaps there is a different dynamic at work here—a process that seeks to
> avoid the pitfalls of creating and projecting forth static utopias of
> imagined futures with no methods for attaining them in the here and
> now—although clearly this is not the only meaning of utopianism. But this
> is a process based rather on what Antonio Negri calls a "constitutive
> dystopia."
>
> In other words, a process based on the constituent power of the dysptopic
> nature of the present. A dream of a different future through the rejection
> of current constraints, and an implicit understanding of a life lived
> without those dynamics. After all, what is really so negative about this
> kind of backwards projection anyway? Yes, there might be pitfalls involved
> in that kind of mental process—but there are far worse things that could
> develop. One could argue that this sort of process involves a form of what
> postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak calls "strategic essentialism," or to
> stipulate an essence in a way that is useful to those engaged in a social
> struggle, regardless of whether it is necessarily a true statement or not.
>
> The danger of creating totalizing concepts, narrations, and frameworks
> isn't necessarily the totalization itself. There is no need to be followed
> by a Lost in Space style robot that obediently intones. "Totality, Will
> Robinson, totality!" at the first sign of one's appearance. For all
> attempts to understand the social world and its transformations, to
> participate in trying to pull this shaping in a particular direction,
> necessarily relate to some conception of totality, even if only implicitly
> stated. The level and scope of this totality, however, varies widely—from
> the often and unfortunately assumed frames of the nation-state and
> political revolution premised upon seizing power at this level—to a
> broader and more encompassing notion of social space that can vary from a
> very local to a global (or beyond) scale.
>
> The concepts of the temporary autonomous zone and the intergalactic
> encuentro, associated with Hakim Bey and the Zapatistas, are extremely
> valuable especially in how they expand the breadth and range of the
> radical imagination. From fleeting and temporary moments perhaps taking
> place between only two people (in the midst of a riot or in each other's
> arms), to possible relations with beings from other galaxies we are not
> even aware of yet, are all part of an expanding and open totality of
> possibilities. The same can be said for the Situationist idea of the
> society of the spectacle and the autonomist notion of the social factory,
> except that these operate based upon the rhetorical force of a constituent
> dystopia to work their expansion of the radical imagination.
>
> These lines of thought employ a visceral argument about the total
> colonization of the present as a means to ferment a scream against
> existing conditions, very much in the way that philosopher John Holloway
> describes "the scream" as a moment of dislocation, critical reflection,
> and the building of vibrating intensities with the potential to undermine
> the conditions that cause the scream in the first place.
>
> The difficulty of such an argument is, if all of everyday life has been
> totally colonized, as Guy Debord and others often argued, then how would
> there be any grounds for resistance? Who would resist and how could they
> possibly resist if they had been completely colonized by the logic of
> capitalism? Similarly, if the existence of the social factory is
> totalizing, (where there is a unifying logic of command in which relations
> of the factory have extended all throughout society in one unifying logic
> of domination) from where would it be possible to contest this logic?
>
> What exists is a rhetorical strategy where force is given to the screaming
> calls for resistance to forms of domination by presenting them as
> contesting totalizing systems of control. That is to say that the argument
> is not really that everything has been totally colonized, because if that
> were so it would make putting forth strategies for contesting capitalism
> to stand on rather shaky ground precisely because it is quite difficult to
> make arguments for forms of resistance based on an analysis that
> stipulates the existence of total control while at the same organizing in
> ways that are based upon existing cracks and spaces where this control is
> not totalizing, or at the very least not to the degree that the analysis
> tends to imply.
>
> It is this imaginative move, which might indeed sometimes be of the
> necessary delusions of resistance, which is described by cultural theorist
> Gavin Grindon as the "breath of the possible," one which is premised upon
> making a certain leap of faith whose history one can trace as it evolves
> through interconnected movements.
>
> The danger of totalities is not that we construct or employ them, but
> rather that we take them for the world itself, as it actually exists,
> rather than as conceptual tools to understand the world. The risk is that
> we, to borrow from Situationist phraseology, take our totalities for
> reality. Revelations can induce a sense of conceptual vertigo, as we
> dangle far from the earth, precisely because of the distance introduced
> and enlarged by taking ideas for the things themselves. The world, after
> all, is always messier than the concepts we create to understand it. The
> danger is when such concepts, which are a part of the reality they attempt
> to describe and take part in shaping, leave us blind to existing dynamics
> that do not fit into the conceptual scheme; when it constitutes a misstep
> that forecloses other possibilities that could exist outside of these
> conceptions.
>
> Concepts are products of the imagination. That is, they result from the
> body's interaction with the world around it. Affective traces of these
> interactions compose the body and what it can do through the imagination.
> Thus, understanding them is absolutely essential as a basis for any
> adequate understanding of the world, our place within it, and attempts to
> increase our collective capacities and forms of self-determination: to
> spread forth lived joy and abundance of life.
>
> In this way, perhaps the similarities in dynamics of thought between
> strands of Marxism and Christianity is not so surprising. Both involve the
> creation of a totalizing scheme useful in making sense of the everyday
> experiences and affects upon the bodies of those involved, and explaining
> them within this conceptual scheme. For the Christian, the suffering of
> the present, this "veil of tears," is explained as a result of a fall from
> grace eventually to be overcome through ascension into heaven.
>
> For Marxism, the transformation of the pre-capitalist world by the bloody
> expropriation of primitive accumulation is a condition to be overcome by
> the eventual destruction by proletarian revolution. Both are premised upon
> what the Christian Marxist Ernst Bloch, a clever synthesizer of the two
> lines of argument, refers to as the "not-yet," which indeed operates as a
> principle of hope for those enmeshed within such a framework, but often
> does precious little for those alive in the here and now. And, just as it
> doesn't take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing, it
> doesn't take a Keynesian to remind you where we all end up in the long run
> (i.e., dead).
>
> Opposed to these worldviews that promise a brighter future "someday" to
> excuse the misery of the present one also finds bursts and outbreaks of
> demands for the creation and realization of liberated life in the here and
> now: from the English radical Christian visionaries, the Diggers, Ranters,
> and the brethren of the ever-renewing free spirit, those clamoring for the
> creation of heaven on earth now, to those who working toward creating
> spaces of insurrection, insurgency, and autonomy in the present. The
> totality and march of historical time is broken, ripped away to reveal
> modes of collective experience and joy inscribed on the bodies of those
> rising up.
>
> And, as one of Flannery O'Connor's mad, wandering prophet outcasts might
> correct her (emerging from the warped realm created by her gothic Southern
> Christian imagination), all that rises up does not necessarily converge,
> even if the patterns of strange attraction of the gravity of Eros to tend
> to warp time and space around them. A total and unitary frame of
> reference, time or experience—whether the spectacular time of the
> commodity or the spectral time of religion—is shattered and begins to
> become replaced by what Debord describes as the mutual federation of
> freely reversible forms of time. It is striving towards creating
> conditions for the realization of autonomy as the independence of social
> time from the temporality of capitalism.
>
> This is the movement of movements, or the movement of movement itself; the
> constantly shifting and transforming of the radical imagination, social
> relations, compositions, and affections. And, this is not just the
> movement of what are usually considered as forms of social movement (which
> tends to give too much emphasis to the technicians and specialists of
> political action, the seeds of tomorrow's bureaucratic class) and their
> recognized forms of visibility, but social movement as just that: the
> movement of the social. Transformations occur constantly and in
> often-imperceptible shifts, minor revolts and mutinies that disguise their
> importance beneath their seemingly insignificant forms.
>
> This movement of an infinite totality, composed of many elements and
> machinations of desire that in many ways can be regarded as totalities in
> their own right (this is the exact point made by Hakim Bey when he argues
> that we begin as the sovereigns of our own bodies, but that this is a
> sovereignty which is socially constituted in a relation between bodies),
> is described with great skill by none other than Spinoza.
>
> Beneath the veneer of what seems to be an overwhelming religiosity, the
> framing of his argument that nothing is possible without god, is his
> heretical view of what that means. For Spinoza, god or nature, is this
> infinite totality of which we are all parts. The foundation of his
> argument is an understanding our position within and in relation to this
> all-encompassing and infinite totality. From this he proceeds to describe
> the joyous and happy life, the blessed life of liberation, which is
> founded upon such an understanding of what is possible for the free
> individual. This sort of argument finds great resonance with the ideas of
> someone like Raoul Vaneigem (as well as Deleuze, Guattari, Negri,
> Castoriadas, and many others), who, like Spinoza, see desire as the
> essence of humanity. Whether understood as the living of happy life or
> increasing affective capacities through the liberation of desire, the
> unfolding of the everyday life of revolution, of liberation, is built upon
> how the everyday connects and relates to, as well as embodies, the
> totality of social relations and processes.
>
> Whether a statement or conception is in itself true or false does not mean
> that cannot be useful to ongoing struggles. There are times where a claim
> of an argument being false, particularly in relation to core notions, what
> one might call the myths we live by, is not even necessarily an objection
> to it. Indeed, for false judgments themselves often are still
> life-advancing and necessary. As that old German malcontent Nietzsche
> argued, "To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that is, to be sure,
> means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion, and a
> philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone,
> beyond good and evil."
>
> To live the everyday life of revolution is certainly a dangerous task, one
> fraught sometimes with very necessary illusions, allusions, and delusions.
> The presumption of an already existing form of autonomy that Castoriadis
> describes in the quote that opens this article might indeed not have
> existed until those acting based upon it already existing by their actions
> take part in creating it. Whether this autonomy really existed is not
> necessarily important compared to how this presumption, resting on a
> virtual and undetermined capacity for autonomy, takes part in the process
> of its actualization.
>
> Such a process is not necessarily positive or negative, but depends on
> other processes and dynamics involved, and from whose perspective this
> judgment is being made. The task then is to work through how these
> formations occur, and whether they tend to move in directions we want them
> to go, or whether they come to be objectified and turned against us, where
> the tools and notions that once were helpful are nothing more than baggage
> at best, and phantoms and specters that continue to haunt us.
>
> You and I return to the scene of the crime
> Let's go out and wash our sins away
> Everyone's an actor in this play
> Trading lines with broken phantoms
> – Mission of Burma, "Fever Moon"
>
>
> References
> Gavin Grindon (2007) "The Breath of the Possible," Constituent
> Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization. Ed.
> Stevphen Shukaitis + David Graeber. Oakland: AK Press
> John Holloway (2003) "In the Beginning Was the Scream," Revolutionary
> Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics. Ed. Werner
> Bonefeld. Brooklyn: Autonomedia
> Antonio Negri (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State.
> Trans. Maurizio Boscagli. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
> Friedrich Nietzsche (1990) Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale.
> New York: Penguin Books
> Baruch Spinoza (1949) Ethics. New York: Hafner Publishing
>
>
>
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