What in the hell …

(Desk on a platform rolls creaking to center stage. Our protagonist scratches his head, self-comparisons vaciliating in lockstep with volatile highly caffeinated moods - Schelling, constantly starting over in attempt to work out the same set of problems and conducting this self-education in public, or a muzak tape loop? He settles for an embarassing snippet of song lyrics from many years prior, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones: ‘Busting toasts I’m the best, and I’m a mess. I know I’m not neither. I thought my highs were giant sized, I know now that’s not so. I lay my cards on the table while I’m still able, I guess I really don’t know how to party’. As the narrative threatens to collapse under its own inertia, he chews his lip and types period close parentheses.)

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If politics is a matter of living in common, and strategy is the devising of attempts to achieve modes of politics, or at least to eliminate other modes of politics, then these notes are pre-political and pre-strategic. They mean to gesture at the importance of beginning both, and suggest that the strategy will likely be to try and always-already practice modes of politics which point toward better future modes (without denying that some scarring or loss of suppleness may occur which may later become a hindrance).
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(Fade in. Our protagonist sighs in embarrassment as his organ of communication devolves into pretensious self-narrations and the electronic equivalent of paper notes taped to the refrigerator door. He pauses, blinks, then scribbles another and affixes the adhesive.)

The thought struck me today that another (albeit highly abstract) avenue to address my concerns over historical representation and narration, which are at play in some of my reservations over Negri, might be to think again about indexicals.
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(Lights up. Our protagonist types frantically, trying to maximize the efficacy of the openness provided by the whiskey- and amaretto-sours before their total, and ultimately stultifying, effect kicks in.) And why is it on my mind so much lately? For some reason this has been on my mind. My friends Colin and Tzuchien and I proposed a panel for the SEP conference themed “What is Terror?”. I’ll say more about this later. I’ve also been checking out loads of books about the Years of Lead in Italy, with the Red Brigades and the government sponsored terror as well, and about Argentina with similar issues. I don’t know why I find it all so compelling, certainly not out of any romanticism of armed groups. Jon post recently on political violence (I would link to it but for some reason I can’t get his blog page to load, computer trouble on my end, or something strange on his?), I’d be keen to hear more of his thoughts. (more…)

Fucked if I know. This post by Spurious talks about it (via) . Interesting stuff. I’m not fluent in Deleuzoguattarian, so parts of it were hard to follow. Some of the idioms are not what I’d prefer myself - I find the language metaphors - axioms and that, which D&G-heads might insist are not metaphors - a bit offputting, as it doesn’t foreground enough of the blood and fire for my tastes. I also wonder at something - grammatically in the post ‘worker’, ‘proletarian’, etc appear most often as direct objects, terms which get something done to them, rather than as subjects. ‘Capital’ on the other hand appears as the subject of many a sentence. Not sure what to make of that. Anyway, Spurious says they will be writing more on this, I look forward to reading it.

Angela brought up the idea of visceral hatred for bosses, as something I’d said before. (more…)

This is from a conversation my friend Nathaniel and I have been having about Ranciere, though it’s not much about Ranciere here, and is slightly shaped by reading the first two pages of Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Buck-Morss says the opening bit, entitled ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’, had a big impact on Adorno).

I recently read a set of notes on Schiller, by Gary Thomas. Gary notes that for Schiller we never know a thing itself, but rather our knowing occurs filtered through historically contingent subjectivities. He goes on to say “ ‘modes of perception’ result in diverse accounts of reality, each compatible with facts and logic though incompatible with each other”. Gary says that Schiller’s book On The Sublime is an attempt to escape the compulsion to discover a fixed unalterable reality. He writes, “concepts of reality (…)” are “inventions, not discoveries about the world” or “all human constructs are (…) ‘fictions’, ‘texts’”. Later he notes that this poses a difficult demand – “that we somehow resolve the problem how to maintain our deepest and most serious beliefs strongly enough to be able to act on them, while at the same time recognizing that those beliefs have no final justification”. (more…)

Notes on Ranciere. awaiting completion in the future…

In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Ranciere reads the work of a 19th century French teacher, Jacotot. Jacotot ended up having Flemish students with whom he could not adequately communicate, as they did not speak French and he did not speak Flemish. In order to instruct them in French, he had them each get a copy of Telemachus in Flemish and in French. He had them read the book in their own language until it was very familiar. Then he had them read the book in French and compare the two, slowly, painstakingly. Over time, the students learned French. Reflecting on this, Jacotot decided that while the students had learned, it was not clear if or how he had taught them. His own knowledge of French had not been transmitted to the students, or even been relevant to the students’ learning. If the students had learned without Jacotot’s knowledge entering into play, then didn’t this mean that one did not have to know to teach? As an experiment, he undertook to teach painting and piano, which he did not know. And his students learned painting and piano. (more…)