What in the hell …

I wrote about this a bit to some UK pals not long ago. This weekend it came up again. (more…)

I’ve been revising some stuff I wrote before, and had a few thoughts. I’ve argued before that, at least in the sense that Hardt and Negri use the term, biopolitics is not new. This is how I understand some of Agamben’s remarks on biopolitics too. (more…)

“Progress” is the title of an essay by Adorno written in the 1960s. (more…)

Another post of Jodi’s got me thinking, and empathizing. It’s called “why bother?” and strikes me it can be considered an iteration on the theme of deadtime. (more…)

I’m taking advantage of a little more free time than usual to do some more translating. I’m working on a piece by the Precarias a la Deriva on militant research, which originally appeared in the excellent book Nociones Communes, which collects some contemporary militant resarch materials from some people in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. (more…)

Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Fate and Character” begins by presenting a common idea: “if, one the one hand, the character of a person, the way in which he reacts, were known in all its details, and if, on the other, all the events in the areas entered by that character were known, both what would happen to him and what he would accomplish could be exactly predicted. That is, his fate would be known.” (Selected Writings v1, p201.)
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I’m told that the term ‘performative’ has a certain suspicious charge in some circles, perhaps due to (mis?)uses of the work of Judith Butler. I don’t know about that. Back when I was more analyitically minded, I got excited about certain aspects of Anglo-American philosophy of language, emphasizing pragmatics, performative utterances. At the time, a professor and friend of mine remarked that reading Wittgenstein was the way he began reading Marx. I’ve moved away from much of this in the past five years, but just recently have had a recurrence of some of those themes. Nick Thoburn writes, “[i]f the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channeling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘assemblages’ or ‘arrangements’.” (Thoburn: Deluze, Marx, and Politics, p4). There is a moment here that is problematic: the ‘at base’ implies a certain foundationalism, as if one can only attend to the temporary, contingent (to social relations we wish revised via the abolition of capitalism), if one has a certain ontology. Politics and communism are not dependent on any philosophical world view (that is, questions such as - or analogous to - that of ‘does god exist?’ are non sequitur to matters of communism). But I digress. Thoburn’s comment can be interpreted as parallel to a pragmatics/performative turn in the analytic philosophy of language: language is action, language exists in its enacting. (more…)