What in the hell …

In a recent post Jodi’s I Cite site cites k-punk on postfordism from a post that came after a post on a film about the (post)political condition post-1968. (Please note that the subject heading does not ask “what in the hell is a novel post”. As such, there is no promise here of novelty in this post, or of any discussion of novels [except to say that perhaps more research into and dissemination of novels like The Unseen would help allay some of the issues I talk about below and that there are perhaps in novels better conceptual treatments of the questions of time, history/historiography, and politics, as for instance in A Wrinkle In Time, than there are in many works of political philosophy and critical theory]. If this blog has any readers they will know that this blog programmatically (and often ungrammatically, I will refrain from speculating as to whether or not also ungrammatologically) rejects novelty, preferring to attempt the time honored mastery of banality. This post might have also been entitled “what in the hell is an attack”? Which is not to say that this post attacks anyone, certainly not Jodi or k-punk.)

Among what Jodi cites:

“there’s still not yet been enough thought about what tactics will work against capital in conditions of post-Fordism, and what new language can be innovated to deal with those conditions. Because part of the difficulty is that capitalism has appropriated ‘the new’ as its own, whereas we are largely reduced to clothing ourselves in the shabby remnants of a century ago. To reclaim the ‘new’ can’t be a matter of adapting to the conditions in which we find ourselves”

Newness is one way to describe some of key moments of capitalist production. Capitalist marketing thrives on one sense of the new - “New and improved! The latest and greatest!” etc - which pre-millenium was signified often by references to 2000 etc. (Of course, marketing also deploys other concepts, one of which is the old - “We’ve been serving X market with Y commodity for Z long duration.”) Capitalist production relies on a sense of novelty as well, several actually, including:

1/ new capital (value) must be advanced
2/ a new recouping of capital (value) advanced must occur
3/ between 1/ and 2/, new surplus value must be extracted
4/ the condition of 3/ is that new labor power appear as a commodity on the market

But there’s not any single category that is ‘the new’. The novelty under capitalism is not the only sense of the new that’s possible. Newness is subject to novel senses and instantiations. And really, the point is not novelty or otherwise, but communism regardless of its novelty or banality.

One might also note that the novelty under capitalism has a strange sort of newness to it. (Note to self: when you get around to understanding what is meant by the ‘eternal return’ see if that can be linked up with this in any productive fashion.) For instance, the four sense of novelty listed above as enabling/constitutive conditions of capitalism can be refigured as follows without, as far as I can tell, any distortion:

1/ capital (value) is ever anew advanced
2/ capital (value) advanced must be ever anew recouped
3/ between 1/ and 2/, surplus value is ever anew imposed
4/ the condition of 3/ is the existence of the commodity labor power on the market, which requires that this commodity always appear anew in the market, which requires the positing of a host of conditions which can be summed up under the name enclosures.

To engage in a bit of perhaps specious wordplay as reflection, one might say that this issue with capitalism is not so much the new as the ‘anew’. Capitalism is
a-novel, neither new nor otherwise, but rather a certain mode of relation between the novel and the banal, the past and present and future. It is in a sense the (re)production of the same instance in a way that is new from one perspective and not at all new from another: Orwell’s a boot stomping on a face forever. Of course, this is not a new observation, as I think that most everything interesting (and many things uninteresting, like perhaps this post) depend on the frame of reference, the idiom or perspective.

As such, the issue is not the novelty or otherwise of capital or the recent phase that is postfordism. There is compelling evidence to say postfordism is new (digital technology, capital mobility, etc). There is compelling evidence that it is in some ways a return to qualities like a prior era (as Ranciere notes in Nights of Labor that precariousness is the defining condition of the proletariat, rather than a new condition; the erosion of labor rights in the US puts the proletariat here in a condition very much akin to the conditions that obtained before the passage of the Wagner Act). In another sense, the present isn’t a break or a return but a reasonable extension of the past (I’m tempted to speculate on conditions in the so-called Third World but I can’t do so with any real weight so I’ll just say that others who’ve read on that subject have commented eloquently enough to convince me that things in many parts of the world aren’t all that different than they have been for a long time, I’d also note that capitalism has always relied upon the labors of producing the commodity labor power, which has occurred through a gendered division of labor and activities falling under the heading of what Hardt and Negri term affective and biopolitical).

I think the only thing at stake in these description is the utility of one vs the other. I’m thoroughly convinced by Benjamin’s remark that the task of the radical historian is to produce class hatred. Whatever does that is good, in terms of historical description, and the affect of hatred is not one that requires consistency - one can change registers of historical description on an as-needed basis, and the transitions between perspective need not be seamless.

If one wanted to pretend to a form of aufhebung deserving of a name, this perspective might be termed post-novel. It could just as well be post-banal. To be clear, though, this is also not a new perspective but rather one that has occurred in some fashion at different points in time, in criticisms of progressivism and teleology, or in Benjamin’s notes on dialectical images and materialist history. A better name, then, might be anovel.

In any case, what of any of this?

k-punk’s somber reflections on the film Grin Without A Cat describe the experience of walking out of the theater:

“Cut to now, where the images of even an ultimately failed militancy belong to a past.”

This is an understandable response to the film. Like the Weather Underground documentary, the film is depressing. It is in many ways a document and expression of the end of a cycle of struggles and the exhaustion of a mode of militancy. The problem is that the film’s treatment of the former is colored by the latter. If one sees much of that mode of militance as an error, then the picture is significantly less bleak.

A respondent to k-punk lists counter-examples to say that militance has not ended, including the 2002 general strike in Spain. This is an instructive example. I don’t know enough and I’ve already gone on too long so I won’t go into the general strike, but it was during that time that the Precarias a la Deriva constituted themselves. The Precarias have since carried out an impressive and inspiring set of activities spanning the overly neat demarcation of theory and practice. And their relationship to the general strike is one to be admired - their response was to say to the event called by a rather traditional political form and political ideology, ‘how does this event relate to those of us in so-called nonstandard work, for whom skipping work today only defers the work until tomorrow and doesn’t threaten capital?’ The answer was not any kind of defeatism, however, but to begin asking instead “what is your strike?” with the implicit questions “what could it be?” and “how can we begin to organize it?” This is a case of a relationship between present, past, and future, or between received/traditional political ideas and practices, that is to my mind exemplary and to be emulated.

This gets to something Jodi wrote:

“what surprises me is that there are so few attacks on (hacks of) corporate networks, financial trading markets, etc. Or, maybe there are these attacks, but they are hidden. These sorts of tactics seem to me to be well-suited to the present arrangement.”

That’s very interesting. Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer might be a good resource for this. I think what Jodi’s talking about is very important. But I think there’s an ambiguity here about what the word “attack” means. It’s a similar ambiguity that lies in the “anti-” in “anti-war” and “anti-capitalist”. (Less so, however, in “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist”, despite any number of things one might say about anti-fa and their effectiveness against racism or fascism, they are certainly on occasion effective against racists and fascists.) One sense of “attack” and “anti” is moral and communicative: it involves the articulation of critical statements about X. This is valuable, but I think limitedly so. Criticism alone doesn’t accomplish much. This is the fallacy behind a certain vision of political education. (A friend of mine who is a member of some groupuscule or other one prosletyzed for his [revolutionary] party while at a [birthday] party of mine. He talked about the work his group was doing, providing political education to students. I think there’s some value to that, but limitedly so. I asked him what next, what happens after the political education is done? I said “hypothetically speaking, let’s say all the political education is accomplished, what next?” He refused to get on board with that hypothetical, was actually incapable of imagining it: he kept repeating “but how would that even happen?” I said something like, “I don’t know, it’s your goal not mine, and so it doesn’t trouble me that you can’t imagine succeeding at your own ostensible goal but it probably should trouble you.”)

At a minimum, forms and practices of rupture deserve more attention and thought, and should be elaborated. What’s needed is a anti- and an attack that is not rhetorical and disapproving but organizational and disruptive. Anti- in the sense of an antibody that kills a parasitic organism, attack in the sense of an act that produces and exercises the power to slow or stop onslaughts like those k-punk identifies. Or, at a minimum, a mode of thought that takes these questions at it’s problematic, one that occurs within rather than abstracted from movements. (To be unfair and reductive, there is a reason why trade unionists in Colombia get murdered regularly, and no one has yet to kill Chomsky or Zizek or any number of people who I really do respect and take seriously but whose importance is only relative.)

* *

I want to get back to k-punk for a moment, in case it seems I’ve been harsh or uncharitable. To be fair, k-punk does note that his bleakness was “more an emotional response than a rational assessment”, and one that I think is hard to avoid after watching Grin Without A Cat. (This is why the dinosaurs should not be allowed a monopoly on the portrayal of their history if we mammals are to have any use for them.) But in a sense, k-punk’s invocation of the Gramscian slogan of ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ is indicative of a type of error: optimism of the will is hard to keep alive in the face of a thoroughgoing intellectual pessimism (hence the bitterness and lack of political imagination one encounters around certain parts of the left, particularly those given to certain intellectual perspectives and activities). I think a better methodological principle would be to start from the struggles of the working class and the affect of class hatred - to look at where activity happening and to see what to learn from it, rather than to start from conditions of decomposition.

That said, this position has its own problems, not least of which is left tourism. And decomposition is the political starting point for the majority of people, certainly in the US. The point of research, though, should then be moments when recomposition has occurred and the contours of the present composition (not its status in relation to the past as a decomposition) in order to begin recompositional efforts.

K-punk strikes me as absolutely right when he writes “the third way is not entirely a phantasm, an ideological dupe. There is in fact a reality to the third way, and it is the reality of bureaucracy.” But while I empathize greatly with this feeling:

“Is there a way to challenge or roll back the slow, implacable, rapacious proliferation of bureaucracy? Only by a collective action that seems inconceivable now…. Only by a change in the ideological climate…. Only by a switch in the cultural atmosphere…. Where to start? While we search, desperately, for cracks in the Possible, bureaucracy, that steel spider, patiently spins its grey web….”

This intellectual and affective pessimism strikes me as expressing and leading toward a dead end, exhaustion, just as does Grin Without A Cat. The answer to the question is first the declarative “yes” and the interrogative “how shall we start?” The seeming inconceivability of collective action limits collective action’s possibility (though not as much as many of us fear - it primarily limits those of us who need to conceive of things before doing them) and so serves the bosses. Theoretically combatting this perspective is worthwhile and important. But given that it’s as much or more affective as intellectual, another avenue is combatting this perspective at that level, by research into/search for cases which challenge the inconceivability of collective action, which is to say, research into examples and modes of collective action (commons) that are not simply possible but that have existed, or better, do exist.