Critical-creative

This post from Permanent Crisis nicely outlines the difference between a critical subjectivity and a creative subjectivity, that is, between a politics that stresses the moments and structures of antagonism and one that stresses building new institutions and ways of living. It is one of Occupy’s innovations that it has brought these two modes in closer proximity and has created zones of indiscernability where there had been sharp distinctions. But it would be a mistake to see Occupy as being alone in this, or even the first to get there. The polyvalent struggles of sex workers, for instance, and care workers more generally, have for years brought out the intimate interplay between what used to be called the personal and the political but that could also be called the necessity of immanent struggle against actual conditions and the contingency of the forms those struggles take.

This situation is in contrast to the liberal-anarchist ideal of transformation away from capitalism being brought about by autonomous cooperation and to the liberal-socialist ideal of party building and popular agitation. Both of these operate on transcendent principles: for the former, the ability of individuals to willfully step outside and leave behind social conditions, and the latter to practice statecraft to the advantage of the people. But to the extent they can be successful, the end up validating and enforcing the very principles that underpin what they are trying to overcome: respectively, the sovereignty of capitalist markets and private property, and the nation and all its political boundaries and exclusions.

The Permanent Crisis post, I think, complicates the usual Marxist finger pointing when it comes to cooperatives (I know I tend to scoff at them) and where they might lead. Instead of the tiresome pointing out that cooperatives are productive of capitalist value (which perversely affirms capital’s iron laws), the post addresses necessary labor time and how a moving toward the reduction of surplus labor time could have a rippling effect that would tend toward the abolition of labor itself.

But still. I wonder if some of the movements I mentioned in the first paragraph haven’t obviated the main argument for cooperatives: namely, that they created and inhabited a previously nonexistent space, one that was at least notionally removed from the profit motive. But the occupations and care-worker actions have done something that was also nearly unthinkable before now: used preexistent space to bring together the critical and the critical. The actual physical dimensions of Occupy show this: the sites of protest are also the sites of creating new ways of being together — soup kitchens, general assemblies, medic stations, libraries. All without the need to create value in the way cooperatives must.

Filed under: Subjectivity

Anarchists and occupation

I’ve been a little surprised at the critical reactions by some anarchists to Occupy Wall Street and its hundreds of spinoffs. Not that there isn’t room for criticism. There’s plenty: to the extent it has a critique of capital, OWS errs on the side of the populist — parasitic finance, evil capitalists, biased governance; the 99% slogan is problematic not just because it elides difficult issues about difference but because it assumes that structural forces (the police, for example) can be overcome with shame or rational argument; some of its elements are too hasty to call for reregulation and are ripe for co-optation; and this just begins the list.

No, the problem with certain anarchist reactions, besides the fact that they sometimes fail even to make the basic points outlined above, is not criticism in general but the kinds of criticisms, which are primarily ideological and programmatic, and reterritorializing. For instance, this article from the Workers’ Solidarity Movement, which I’ll take as exemplary here, claims that “the [occupy] movement’s unwillingness to attempt to agree on a coherent set of positions” indicates a sort of generalized depoliticization. Perhaps, but isn’t the work of movements precisely to formulate those positions? Entering a struggle with already-formed positions and tactics smacks of vanguardism, with the attendant necessity of adhering to the ideological program. Acts of resistance and refusal are nothing if not the time to experiment with tactics and devise (or at least reformulate) positions and principles.

For WSM, the occupations and assemblies are problematic because they operate from the assumption that “no two people experience oppression in the same way, and thus any attempt to unite people under a political programme inevitably ends up erasing some people’s perspectives,” which in turn “produces a vague and weak politics.” While I agree that so far a sort of happy tolerance and an evasion of disagreement too strongly animate the occupations, there’s something admiral and even novel about this stubborn refusal to eclipse difference in favor of a muscular political agenda. And even though this sometimes makes the events seem like giant self-help sessions, something is being enacted that, at least in the United States, hasn’t been seen in awhile: the act of being together, the reminder that doing politics is possible only in a group, and the enacting of a politics that isn’t only adversarial. Faced with the challenges of doing that work, political programs and demands can wait.

“Bring back the working class!” WSM says: “One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world – an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs.” Well. OWS’s avoidance of this sort of reterritorialization should be praised, not mocked. Sure, the evasion could be primarily attributed to its incompetence and bland acceptance of everything under the sun, but it’s nonetheless there and it’s why, unlike, say, antiwar protests and syndicalist workplace action, it keeps open the possibility of a movement that encompasses not just wage earners but everyone who is striated by capital, and does so without curing those subjects of their singularity: the unemployed, the unemployable, the incarcerated, the homeless, students, and others.

Some anarchists, like the state-happy Marxists they criticize, assume that people gather for political reasons and then articulate political positions that correspond to the aims of that organization. There is some of that, for sure, but in many ways it also gets the relationship backwards: people organize because they already share political concerns and ideology, even when they are never articulated. What marks the work of political organization is less programs and ideology formation and more resonance and affect, the doing together and the interaction of bodies. If occupy movements have something to recommend them, it’s that they haven’t foreclosed this aspect of politics and have in fact deliberately made it their primary concern.

Filed under: Opposition, Subjectivity, Walls and Lines

The Man in the High Castle

The “hook” of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is the alternative rendering of the pre- and posthistory of World War II, with Germany and Japan winning the war and occupying nearly the entire world. But what’s striking about this imagining is how little it differs from the postwar actuality.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Control, Lines of Flight, Subjectivity, Value

Illegible

On many levels [District 9's] post-colonial society inevitably comes across very poorly – a society that continues to be shaped by whites, although key positions are occupied by blacks.

Filed under: Subjectivity

NY

Recording Surface will return in the next decade with renewed focus and vigor.

And Happy New Year to you!

Filed under: Subjectivity

Angel mutants

So here’s my schema for classifying some of the communiques/occupations/actions of the last few months: The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection is Situationist, the New School Occupation is autonomist, and the Communique from the Absent Future is anarchist.

Filed under: Minor, Subjectivity

Mapping

I’ve uploaded an article I wrote a few months ago on the politics of the 2006 protests in the United States, primarily, after the initial passage of HR 4437, the hardass immigration legislation. It was was not accepted for publication — boo hoo — but reading over it now, I’m not surprised: bad writing and inadequately developed ideas, which befits a piece I basically wrote in a day. But I think I’m interested in reworking it, so any comments or suggestions of outlets that might be interested would be very much appreciated. If you’d rather have a pdf, email me (there’s an address on the right-hand side if you need it) and I’ll happily send you a copy. Again, comments and critiques welcome.

Filed under: Lines of Flight, Subjectivity, Work

Negative

 

Setting affirmation against “the negative” to explain and argue for the latter’s persistence and necessity misses the point.

Filed under: Opposition, Subjectivity

Indeed

Rhizomes has published the essay on The Wire, Omar Little, and neoliberalism . The synopses part at the beginning probably goes on a little long, but it picks up steam after that, methinks.

It’s a little strange to see something you wrote a year ago finally hit print.

 

 

Filed under: Subjectivity, Work

Decay

From what I can gather, concepts of decay — as developed, in blogland, by Reza Negarestani, Planomenology, and Splintering Bone Ashes, among others — belong to what could be called the subtractive branch of ontological-political strategies: becoming-imperceptible, exodus, refusal of work.

Filed under: Opposition, Subjectivity