What in the hell …

No, not the computer whatsits, getting up to no good on the internet and all that, I mean Ian. (more…)

Negatron, talking about some stuff I’ve not read:

For Simondon we experience something that is eternal in that we experience both our power and limits: we are aware that there is something in us that exceeds this moment, and something of us that is so ephemeral, disappearing the moment that it is experienced. In each case we are aware that our individuality is not the end all and be all of our existence. For Simondon it is situated between the preindividual components of our existence the transindividual relations that we enter into.

Muriel Combes has drawn out the implications of this remark in her book on Simondon, referring to the “intimacy of the common.” The common, the shared language, habits, and affects that make up the backdrop of our subjectivity, a common which exists only in and through social relations, transindividuality, is not something that we only experience in moments in collectivity, in the delusions and madness of crowds, but is always present. The reference to intimacy also underscores that what is common is not something that is exterior to our individuality, it is not some role that we play, but is constitutive. Thus, to draw the two remarks together, the eternal that we experience is perhaps the common, is the irreducible relational aspect of our existence.

This remark sent me chasing around the internet for a quote I barely remembered, John McDowell quoting Stanely Cavell, I used it in a paper in college ten years ago (I no longer remember the subject of the paper nor do I have a copy). The internet, glory be, found it for me:

“We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further context. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals, nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, oof when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation - all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’ Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.” (Stanley Cavell, “The Availabilty of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, in _Must We Mean What We Say?_, p52)

Strikes me as quite similar.

NOTE: for some weird reason this post disappeared for a while. It’s back now. It’s actually really old. I don’t understand computers and software and all that. Obviously.

ANOTHER NOTE: As it turns out, the reappearance of this post makes it post number six hundred and sixty six. Spookier and spookier…

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The LS Schmittfest bonfire’s settled down into orange and black embers. In his raking of the coals Craig suggests people reflect on nationalism and proposes privilege as a further conversation topic. (more…)

I’m having a renewed interest in matters German, partly in preparation for and partly as expressed in a plan to soon read more Kant, as a rather long detour on the way to aesthetic questions. It’s bit frustrating as I like to have a clearer map than I currently do of what I’m after, and because my German is pretty scheisse, but I think there’s a possible coherence to be stitched together later. The immediate points I can see are a dislike on my part for certain postructuralisms I’ve encountered and a dislike for certain Hegelianisms, both primarily in relation to Marxism, and a general interest in the past as contemporary with the present (a la a tesseract or perhaps a dialectical image). Two-fold interest then, put schematically, in historiography and in some specific historical contents obscured by bad accounts, with two purposes - one to disentangle from bad accounts (to not get tied up in knots), and another to clear space for moments that have their own sort of … loveliness. (more…)

Buy a copy, and then use these notes to return to it.

The stuff on urban and rural is quite like immaterial labor in those circles today, as is the stuff on language. The stuff on labor as political basis may be useful for challenging Virno’s assertion that the Arendt/Aristotle formulation has broken down in postfordism, since labor was already conceived as and functioned as political in the 1840s. Also would be interesting to compare artisan labor w/ immaterial labor, esp printers, worker-poets, pamphleteering incl Ranciere on artisans and response to him. Sewell starts the book asserting essentially the hegemony of artisan labor, rather like immaterial labor, also shows up limits of the abilities imputed to hegemonic immaterial labor (among them universalizing a nonuniversal position). Also check out the book Alberto recommended on immaterial labor and utopian socialism.

Also to return to -
p189- 193 on corps, corporation, etat,
194-200 on the July Revolution, change in idiom, change in the use of the term “exploit”
201-206 on the idiom of association, Buchez,
206-211 on association, corporation, conflict with the masters
211-215 on changes in the concept of labor and broadening the field of association
222 on the use of the term “social” (see also 143-4 on “industry” and “society”)
228 on Villerme and a moralizing bourgeois image of the workers, need for discipline (like Lenin)
235-6 on Louis Blanc, (petit) bourgeois radicalism
236-242 on worker poets and changes in the concept of labor
249 on the concept of labor
262-265 on the concept of labor, socialism, labor as providing a right to participation (the workers are the people)
267-270 on the relationship with rural and agricultural workers - a universal idiom but one which neglects important differences (universal program for association based on the experiences of urban workers). See especially 267 on “workers of thought” and “workers of the head”, and 269 on the power of speech, language as foundation

Pillage material from the bibliography on 285-290, 293, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 309-317.

Class consciousness is not a category I’ve got much interest in, insofar as I’ve encountered it. William Sewell takes it his object of study in his 1980 book Work and Revolution in France, but not so much as a theoretical category. More along the lines of “what did (some) workers think?” I’m more open to that. (more…)

A dumb idea, that’s what. (more…)