Re: [AUT] argot / class / becker-ho

["Aaron Vidaver" <chunk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Stevphen (and list): there are in fact two different Becker-Ho books with
similar titles. Both have been translated into English but only one has
been published (the one which you refer to, The Princes of Jargon, is the
thin $100 volume from Mellen Press, 2004: a short introductory essay
followed by a glossary). It is the second one, The Essence of Jargon (in
typescript tr. John McHale from L?Essence du Jargon, Éditions Gallimard,
1994), that contains the sustained theoretical presentation. Roger Farr
draws heavily upon the second volume in his own work on the strategy of
concealment. I believe he (Farr) is planning to serialize The Essence in
his journal Parser (the first issue, which opens with Becker-Ho, is just
out this month). There?s a page up with contact info
<http://www.parsermag.org> but I?m not sure if the contents of the journal
itself will become available online or if print publication of the McHale
typescript is happening (if anyone knows please pass on the particulars).
An electronic version of "The Strategy of Concealment" (a complete version
of the piece in Fifth Estate 42:1) is online:
<http://courses.capcollege.bc.ca/faculty/rfarr/publishing.html> (scroll
down to the end of ?Critical Work? for a pdf). Aaron Vidaver.

> uhm... thank-you very munch (sorry... it was too obvious to pass up)
>
> on a related (sort of note) there's an interesting article in the
> same issue of fifth estate about argot, the 'dangerous classes,' and
> strategies of concealment. it seems to me like the author roger farr
> draws a lot from the writing of alice becker-ho, who wrote a book on
> the same subject ("princes of jargon: a neglected factor at the
> origins of the dangerous classes").
>
> unfortunately i've never gotten to read her book because it's really
> expensive to get a copy of (like $100). by any chance might anyone
> happen to have a PDF of the book, or copy of the book, or some other
> form that I could manage to get a  hold of some how?
>
> cheers
> stevphen
>
>
> On Apr 8, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Kurasje Archive wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/munch.scream.jpg
>>
>> j.
>> www.kurasje.org
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Stevphen Shukaitis"
>> To: nettime-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: [AUT] Revelation Vertigo
>> Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 12:21:42 -0400 (EDT)
>>
>>
>> > 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
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stevphen Shukaitis
>> Autonomedia Editorial Collective
>> http://www.autonomedia.org
>> http://slash.interactivist.net
>>
>> "Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
>> created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
>> practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and
>> compulsory
>> cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of
>> welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position
>> for it
>> thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous
>> hoarding of
>> resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on
>> which these
>> depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration.
>> Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of
>> knowledge and
>> power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master?s
>> rule." -
>> subRosa Collective
>>
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>>
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