Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things. — Alexander Trocchi
Friday, August 26, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Raging Against the Machine
“The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it's a mixed blessing. Far from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him more control over our lives. They have been a blessing for snoops, con artists and market manipulators. They have turned global communications into glitchy, virus-plagued networks. Along with some highly valuable resources, the World Wide Web has brought a time-wasting flood of trivia, trash, pornography and spam. We have burdened our children with the distractions of becoming computer literate before they are just plain old literate.”
Theodore Roszak (November 15, 1933 – July 5, 2011)
@Los Angeles Times
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Solidarity Economics
“A daring hypothesis: there is a global revolution underway. It is not led by any political party or vanguard. It has no military bases and its strategy is anti-belligerent. It mobilises millions of people all over the world. We know little about it. What we do know is that at the grassroots level of its mobilisations, organisation and popular education, there are thousands of movements and millions of people who have begun weaving collaborative networks of economic solidarity, creating channels and connections with the potential to bring together and strengthen local and global struggles. They are working collectively, from the bottom up, and democratically, building consensus while respecting reasoned dissent. We see these movements and their achievements everywhere, yet we know little about the power of this phenomenon, for at first they seem insufficient in number and size to change the world. And yet, I maintain: there is a global revolution underway.
“The great political discovery of the 1990s was the idea of weaving collaborative networks among groups, movements and organisations through which to coordinate and share, not only our solutions and victories, but also our problems and challenges, our strategies and everyday practices. We were creating axes of struggle capable of bringing together the local and the global, the long and short term, as well as diversity and unity. However, while these collaborative networks were crucial, we had not understood their full potential.
“Take the example of the World Social Forums; the WSF process is the tip of a giant iceberg hiding myriad collaborative networks and processes. The limit of the WSF process is that it has not gone nearly far enough in developing world social networks. The forums are important moments connecting thousands of actors, opening up a significant flow of communication of the diversities that are inherent to these networks. Afterwards, even if participants are somehow informed by the new, collectively acquired experience, the flows of communication and actions essentially return to the previously existing plateaus.
“While clearly important, processes and spaces such as social forums are not enough. Taking the global construction of collaborative solidarity networks as our strategic horizon means finding ways of promoting, reinforcing and expanding on such moments in more spheres of life and struggle. More than simply spreading information about proposals, and thus acting on the level of ideological debate, it is necessary to operate on political and economic planes, putting some of the proposals into practice. In other words, our daily economic practices must be part of the work of transforming global economic structures.”
@turbulence.org.uk
“The great political discovery of the 1990s was the idea of weaving collaborative networks among groups, movements and organisations through which to coordinate and share, not only our solutions and victories, but also our problems and challenges, our strategies and everyday practices. We were creating axes of struggle capable of bringing together the local and the global, the long and short term, as well as diversity and unity. However, while these collaborative networks were crucial, we had not understood their full potential.
“Take the example of the World Social Forums; the WSF process is the tip of a giant iceberg hiding myriad collaborative networks and processes. The limit of the WSF process is that it has not gone nearly far enough in developing world social networks. The forums are important moments connecting thousands of actors, opening up a significant flow of communication of the diversities that are inherent to these networks. Afterwards, even if participants are somehow informed by the new, collectively acquired experience, the flows of communication and actions essentially return to the previously existing plateaus.
“While clearly important, processes and spaces such as social forums are not enough. Taking the global construction of collaborative solidarity networks as our strategic horizon means finding ways of promoting, reinforcing and expanding on such moments in more spheres of life and struggle. More than simply spreading information about proposals, and thus acting on the level of ideological debate, it is necessary to operate on political and economic planes, putting some of the proposals into practice. In other words, our daily economic practices must be part of the work of transforming global economic structures.”
@turbulence.org.uk
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Resignation
“Pseudo‑activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. . . . The disastrous model of pseudo‑activity is the ‘do‑it‑yourself’ . . . activities that do what has long been done better by the means of industrial production only in order to inspire in the unfree individuals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, the assurance that everything depends on them. . . . However, spontaneity should not be absolutized, just as little as it should be split off from the objective situation or idolized the way the administered world itself is. . . . Even political undertakings can sink into pseudo -activities, into theater. It is no coincidence that the ideals of immediate action, even the propaganda of the act, have been resurrected after the willing integration of formerly progressive organizations that now in all countries of the earth are developing the characteristic traits of what they once opposed. . . . By forgetting thought, the impatience falls back below it.
“This is made easier for the individual by his capitulation to the collective with which he identifies himself. He is spared from recognizing his powerlessness; the few become the many in their own eyes. This act, not unwavering thought, is resignative. No transparent relationship obtains between the interests of the ego and the collective it surrenders itself to. The ego must abolish itself so that it may be blessed with the grace of being chosen by the collective. . . . The sense of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking. The consolation that thinking improves in the context of collective action is deceptive: thinking, as a mere instrument of activist actions, atrophies like all instrumental reason. . . .
“By contrast the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. . . . Open thinking points beyond itself. . . .Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought. . . . The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such. Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.”
Theodor Adorno Study Guide
@www.autodidactproject.org
“This is made easier for the individual by his capitulation to the collective with which he identifies himself. He is spared from recognizing his powerlessness; the few become the many in their own eyes. This act, not unwavering thought, is resignative. No transparent relationship obtains between the interests of the ego and the collective it surrenders itself to. The ego must abolish itself so that it may be blessed with the grace of being chosen by the collective. . . . The sense of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking. The consolation that thinking improves in the context of collective action is deceptive: thinking, as a mere instrument of activist actions, atrophies like all instrumental reason. . . .
“By contrast the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. . . . Open thinking points beyond itself. . . .Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought. . . . The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such. Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.”
Theodor Adorno Study Guide
@www.autodidactproject.org
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“It is the schizoid’s ability to scramble and decode that Deleuze and Guattari associate with contemporary capitalism. Like the schizophrenic, capitalism can insert itself anywhere and everywhere as a decoder and scrambler. Although,
“Mobile, flexible capital is capable of inserting itself into any cultural milieu. In countries as different as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, capitalism is able to take advantage of the local symbolic order (Harvey 1989). The forms that capitalism takes in these various countries reflect the symbolic order that the capitalist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary, it does not have an ‘I’, an ego, or a unified identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that create territories and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘[c]ivilization is defined by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’ (244).
“It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are making a move similar to Jameson’s by asserting that schizophrenia resembles and is associated with the logic of late capitalism. ‘Yet it would be a serious error,’ assert Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of... decoding’ (244). Capitalism ‘produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars’ but the schizos are not salable. (245) Indeed, the schizophrenic is locked up in institutions, and turned into a ‘confined clinical entity’ (245). If the schizophrenic really exemplified the culture of capitalism, why aren’t schizos celebrated as heroes and heroines in contemporary capitalist society? Deleuze and Guattari conclude that:
“As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus, and repressive bureaucratic and symbolic regimes. The schizophrenic never reaches such a limit. S/he resists such reterritorialization, just as s/he resists the symbolic and despotic territorialization of the oedipalizing psychotherapist.
“Thus, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Jameson’s argument that schizophrenia reinforces and contributes to the hegemony of capitalism. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism’s exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should ‘learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs’ (Seem xxi). Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire. This ‘desiring-production’ brings the unconscious into the real, and unleashes its radical world-making potential. Productive desire need not be solipsistic, and includes the ‘group psychosis’ induced by radical postmodern artistic creations and political movements. Neither is desiring-production limited to clinical schizophrenics. Desiring-production marks the schizophrenic potential in everyone to resist the power of despotic signifiers and capitalist reterritorialization.”
@Negations
[o]ur [capitalist] societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes, codes foreign and exotic...this taste is destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function (245).
“Mobile, flexible capital is capable of inserting itself into any cultural milieu. In countries as different as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, capitalism is able to take advantage of the local symbolic order (Harvey 1989). The forms that capitalism takes in these various countries reflect the symbolic order that the capitalist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary, it does not have an ‘I’, an ego, or a unified identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that create territories and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘[c]ivilization is defined by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’ (244).
“It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are making a move similar to Jameson’s by asserting that schizophrenia resembles and is associated with the logic of late capitalism. ‘Yet it would be a serious error,’ assert Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of... decoding’ (244). Capitalism ‘produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars’ but the schizos are not salable. (245) Indeed, the schizophrenic is locked up in institutions, and turned into a ‘confined clinical entity’ (245). If the schizophrenic really exemplified the culture of capitalism, why aren’t schizos celebrated as heroes and heroines in contemporary capitalist society? Deleuze and Guattari conclude that:
schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit....Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death (246).
“As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus, and repressive bureaucratic and symbolic regimes. The schizophrenic never reaches such a limit. S/he resists such reterritorialization, just as s/he resists the symbolic and despotic territorialization of the oedipalizing psychotherapist.
“Thus, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Jameson’s argument that schizophrenia reinforces and contributes to the hegemony of capitalism. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism’s exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should ‘learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs’ (Seem xxi). Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire. This ‘desiring-production’ brings the unconscious into the real, and unleashes its radical world-making potential. Productive desire need not be solipsistic, and includes the ‘group psychosis’ induced by radical postmodern artistic creations and political movements. Neither is desiring-production limited to clinical schizophrenics. Desiring-production marks the schizophrenic potential in everyone to resist the power of despotic signifiers and capitalist reterritorialization.”
@Negations
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