razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: politics

  • Relations and reactions

    Relations and reactions

    dancing+graffiti_40910987In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental.  It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism).  Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations.  He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:

    “There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real.  (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)”

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  • Interest and desire

    Interest and desire

    DSC01950_33863964Larvalsubjects has an interesting post on Marx in the academy over here which has generated a lively discussion in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of agency has risen to the fore again.  This is still something I find disturbing, something I’m not really able to get a grip on fully, since I tend to understand the problem of agency as responding to something like a desire to answer the question ‘what difference can I make?’.  “Where’s the agency“, someone might ask, “in these economic analyses of desire (D&G) or capital (Marx)?  Isn’t it all just a huge machine in which I am nothing?  And if it is a big machine, how did this machine produce it’s own auto-critique?  Isn’t it really the break, the rupture (of the subject), that we need to theorise?  Isn’t consciousness really the most important fact in reality since it is inexplicable by reality?   Me, I’m important, surely – doesn’t my analysis do anything, offer anything – don’t I have the answers, or at least the right to produce answers or the possibility of finding them?”  I’m inclined to dismiss these questions out of hand as the whining desire of a resentiment-filled petit-bourgeois who thinks they’re ‘in charge of their life’ in the first place  but have to recognise that at least some of the charge invested in this response is disproportionate and perhaps related to the other peculiar investments I find myself bound to (revolution, majik, sex).

    One of the things that I thin I agree with larval about is that the emphasis of thinkers such as Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere and Zizek seems to be inverse to that of Marx – “Don’t these positions [Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek] postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production?” larval asks.

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  • The problem of the program

    The problem of the program

    stencil+girl_135387513Notes on revolutionary Marxism

    The central tenets.

    (beginning from the ‘Founding Statement’ of the Trotskyist group ‘Permanent Revolution’ to be found online at http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=779, accessed 15.11.07)

    1. Belief in communism, “using Karl Marx’s rough guide to communism – from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his (or her) need – as its starting point”.
    2. Belief in revolution – violent revolution – because (a) the state will defend its interests and (b) wholesale change is necessary (radical break) rather than reform.
    3. Belief in the working class as the ‘agent of change’ – the only revolutionary class.
    4. Belief in the need for a revolutionary, internationalist party.
    5. Lineage – tradition (Paris Commune; Marxist wing of 1st International; Left wing of 2nd International, the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxembourg rather than the Mensheviks; 3rd International (first four congresses) before Stalinisation onset; 4th International – then debate.
    6. The need to continue to develop a program “in the light of experience, the supreme criterion of human reason”. (Empiricism) It is on the basis of this programmatic development that further distinctions are then made (i.e.; the decline or ‘degeneration’ of the 4th International – in the case of PR this involves classifying the ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’ (USFI) as having ‘collapsed into opportunism).

    This takes us up to point 6 of the ‘founding statement’, which consists of 14 points in all. The following 8 points all, to one degree or another, mark the analytical differences that then form the necessary conditions for the new move (the founding of a new group).

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  • practice of objective reality

    practice of objective reality

    (questions in note form that are partly naive and part of my current work, questions as connections, as the objective reality of a thinking practice)

    “Thus Marx, rather than Kierkegaard or Hegel, is right, since he asserts with Kierkegaard the specificity of human existence and, along with Hegel, takes the concrete man in his objective reality.” (Sartre, The search for a method)

    Jaspers thinks that “We are taught to catch a presentiment of the transcendent in our failures; it is their profound meaning.”  The death of god is the failure that reveals the transcendent (negative theology).  What’s the difference between this and Critchley’s ‘achievement of a certain meaninglessness’ that he outlines at the beginning of his little book on death? Is it that to succeed is to already be beyond ourselves?  Failure – is this the encounter with the problematic in Deleuze?  Is what we are involved in when we are forced to think by the problem the lack of ease with which we navigate and move through the world (the ease of living)?  This might appear so but this would defy the constant injunction by Deleuze against lack as a grounding or primary force.

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  • Names, categories and the limitations they impose (slightly oblique example for students in EP this year)

    Names, categories and the limitations they impose (slightly oblique example for students in EP this year)

    face+drawing+on+wall_54305003This excellent example of the way categories or names prescribe our way of conceiving or thinking through problem came through the nettime email list recently.

    On 29/09/2007, Thijs wrote:

    > “[…] In contrast to most post-modern nation states, Islamic  fundamentalism offers the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn.”

    Maybe it would be more accurate to say that words like “fundamentalism” and “terrorism” offer the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn: the ability to lump together a wide range of social phenomena that they don’t understand under a few convenient labels taken from American and European history, such as American Protestant fundamentalism and the French revolutionary Terror of the 1790s.

    Here are some possible alternatives (which I’m sure could be improved):

    Al Qaeda: Salafi nationalist guerilla network

    Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: Sunni reformist party

    Hamas: Sunni Palestinian nationalist party and militia

    Hizballah: Shia Lebanese nationalist party and militia

    Two things leap out of this sort of classification: the need to know something about Islam in order to know what the Arabic words mean, and the need to take nationalism seriously as a force that motivates opposition movements.

    Ben

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  • Greenwich, bombs and history

    Greenwich, bombs and history

    I was browsing through the Guardians’ interactive blog page, ‘Comment is Free‘, earlier today and there was an interesting article on the parallels between the current anti-Muslim reactions in the West and earlier reactions to Jewish communities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.  As part of that article there was mention of the 1894 attack on the Greenwich Observatory, just across the road from us here at Greenwich University.  Some further browsing connected me with Mike Davis’ article on the car bomb and the useful reminder of a historical perspective being necessary and vital in any attempt to develop critical thought about the world around us.  (Mike Davis is speaking in London later this month as part of an interesting series of talks being run by the ICA called ‘The new left: then and now’).

    I’ve been arguing to my first year ‘Introduction to philosophy’ students that one of the key tasks philosophy can achieve is a degree of empowerment via critical thought.  The very concept of knowledge (classically distinguished as ‘episteme’ or science as opposed to ‘doxa’ or opinion) is used to establish a certain power relation.  The claims of knowledge are more powerful than those of opinion, so goes the argument.   In one sense, of course, this seems incontrovertible – ‘that which we know to be true’ is always to be accepted before ‘that which might or might not be true’ but which, in any case, we do not yet ‘know to be true’.  The role of truth  for most of society, inevitably depends not on truth itself but on this connection of truth and knowledge.  A known truth has a power.  The ability to develop a critical skill, a critical thought, rests primarily on the development of an ability to question how we know what we know.  This, after all, is Plato’s argument in the model of ‘the divided line’ – the knowledge that knows how it is known is superior even to the knowledge that is incontrovertibly true, such as mathematical, deductive knowledge.  For Plato, such knowledge that knows itself is ‘dialectic’ or understanding (noesis) and comes above mere rational thought (dianoia).
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