yeah, totally. senor empson should probably also have his name
somewhere on that excellent piece of writing so people know who wrote
it when they stumble across it. I was going to erik a message about
that cause I was reading over bits of it again while writing this,
but I couldn't seem to decipher when you wrote down his address for
me, arianna.
cheers
stevphen
On Apr 8, 2007, at 8:53 PM, Arianna wrote:
> 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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