What in the hell …

In the mid 80s, that is. (more…)

Further notes on the concept ‘proletariat’ (more…)

Continuing the Agamben etc discussion. Toward the very end I mix in stuff from the earlier draft on flight and subjectification. I cut the references to the latter - and Badiou, Ranciere, police, etc. I’ll come back to that. (more…)

Following up on my remarks on Agamben, spurred by Ken’s questions (thanks!). Sequentially, this comes before my other unfinished remarks on Agamben here. There’s more to write on this, of course. (more…)

My new yrs resolutions.

Exercise more. Cook more. Relax more. Set limits better. Play more music. Get better at music. Be more disciplined. Be more organized.

Wish me luck!

I’m behind on some of that reading I proposed to do a while back. I read the Marx, made some notes. On that, Eric’s notes and Barry’s notes are online too, which I need to respond to after reviewing my own notes again.

I read the Lenin but got very little except I had the thought that Lenin’s remarsk on idealism applies to at least a lot of bad marxism. I misplaced the printout I wrote on so I can’t recall exactly what passage gave me that impression, if I find it I’ll post that here.

I just read Mao’s On Practice as preparation for On Contradiction (hope to read that tomorrow or Monday then get to rereading the Althusser texts). I also got very little from this. What’s striking is the bad epistemology/philosophy of mind, and how unnecessary it all is, plus bad philosophy of history. [Note to self, post link to the Mao piece.] It’s also notable that Mao thinks class struggle, politics, science, and art are “practical” but are not “material” - that gets reserved for production. It’s also notable that diamat serves the proletariat but is not of the proletariat. A bit disturbingly, one of my favorite lines was a Stalin quote - “Theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected to revolutionary practice.”

There’s this great archive of IWW pamphlets online here and here. I’d eventually like to read more of this stuff and am posting this here as a reminder.

This is a text written mainly by Paolo Virno, I believe, signed by the “Immaterial Workers of the World” which I found online here and here. The translation is by Myk Zeitlin. The text is online in Italian here and in Spanish here. It’s title is “What did I tell you?”, in Italian, “Che te lo dico a fare”. It first appeared in issue 18 of Derive Approdi, contents listed here. There’s a short preface to the text which isn’t translated. I may take a crack at that in the next week or so. (more…)