Sorglose Nacht

Leo Strauss was first brought to my attention by Carl Mitcham back in 2004, by way of Harvey Mansfield’s insidious A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy. Since this time, one of two things has happened: One, a lot of people had Strauss brought to their attention, or two, I noticed a lot more people paying attention to Strauss. At least, paying attention to some people in the Bush administration who have been labeled Straussians, or labeled themselves as such. (Incidentally, it seems that even the most Straussian of the cabinet/PNAC Straussians may want to re-identify, in their interesting public stance on the “War on Terror”, as Mansfieldian, which is at least terra firma.)

Apparently, 2007 is the year where another group of Strauss apologists (this is starting to become somewhat of an American philosophical tradition, isn’t it?) take Strauss back, so to speak. Which has, I have to admit, sort of caught me off guard. Books have been released this year on Strauss and Arendt and, perhaps even more bizarrely, on Strauss and Levinas.

It’s not usually in my interests, nor is it in the interest of the way that I see the blog as a way of abetting philosophical discourse, to be topical. But I am nonetheless a citizen of this information glut, and from time to time, something like this is going to catch my eye.

I’d like to frame my piece on the late-blooming “was Strauss really not as politically-charged as the world seems to interpret him as?” discussion in terms of a piece of Derrida, this time interviewed for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies (vol. 7) in 1994. Here it is:

Thinking’s task today is to tackle, to measure itself against, everything making up this programme of contamination. This programme forms the history of metaphysics, it informs the whole history of political determination, of politics as it was constituted in Ancient Greece, disseminated throughout the West and finally exported to the East and South. If the political isn’t thought in this radical sense, political responsibility will disappear. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this thought has become necessary only today; rather, today more than ever, one must think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.

Methodologically, Strauss’ strategy (and here is the seed of his charged “noble lies”/”deadly truths” agenda) for interpreting the classics, and Plato in particular, is couched in the notion of philosophical texts offering both an exoteric teaching and an esoteric/”true”/privileged teaching, which was concealed from the general reader. Let’s look at the text:

Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relations of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and careful study.

So here’s the aporia that we can lens using the Derrida interview quoted above:

1. “On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain that one is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because one believes that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular act chosen is in such and such a situation more likely to do such and such than another possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they are strategic evaluations which attempt to measure up to the formalization of the machine.”
2. “There’s no way out…one has indeed to assume the risk of being misunderstood, continuing to think in modest terms what is after all exceedingly ambitious, in order to prepare for these responsibilities - if they exist.”

Which is to say that the way in which Strauss is styled or framed by his partisan (or non-partisan) successors, now or to come, is both entirely his fault, and was entirely unavoidable. That is, Strauss either chose an Heideggerian gesture of silence, or else paid a Nietzschean price for esotericism. And here is the point: these two strategies operate in the same register; or, in the same contaminated machine of global politics.

What Strauss fundamentally failed to do (and that which he could not fail to do) was to appropriately, “think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.” Any topical political silence in which he indulged - be it in the shameful Heideggerian order or the esoteric Nietzschean order - was nothing more than a failure on his part to anticipate the “absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of ‘thought’ and ‘action’…” (Derrida, Of Spirit) inherent within his textual gesture.

This gesture of silence, this self-insistence on esoteric meaning is what allows Strauss to be continually refigured next to Levinas, Arendt, and Nietzsche, as well as Wolfowitz and the American neo-conservatives. This aristocratic gesture, narcissistic bait, inevitably failed appeal to deceleration in a obviously accelerating world…

But of course, what we are calling the Heideggerian and Nietzschean orders here doubtlessly contaminate each other … … …

Continental Philosophy, several days ago, posted this video, for which I have taken pause several times:

The interviewer asks Cixous, “So particularity and universality are not … opposed to each other?” to which she replies, “oh, no.”

Oh, certainly no. On the one hand: Universality is “universally accessible” and particularity is “particularly located”. Nothing - which is to say no-thing in particular - is universally located or particularly accessible [JLN: “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared.”]. These adjectives are modal functors of Being separated from comparison or reciprocal measure by immediacy, access, immediacy of access. They don’t even occupy the same circuit.

Certainly not. On the other hand: One decides that in fact the difference is not located somewhere at the referent - of course, always, referents or nothing - of universality and particularity, that these circumscriptions do not describe or represent a world that is a circuit of their sameness and difference, but merely suture a gash at the heart of representation.

For instance, Ghandi’s “..way of being typical[ly] Indian was also a way of getting close to all other religions, and all other philosophies in the world…”

The strategies, the movements of any artistic or ideological work, for ontological reasons (and yes, that syntagm can only operate on an ontic register), can only get close to the irreducible difference (here: gender or cultural difference) of shattered and incontrovertibly particular being, because, although there is no being-in-general, political work must be done.

And of course, there is work (the work of representation, closure, the West), and then there is the nudge, the touch, of Being. All at once, universally in particular. Which is to say, operating here at the joint, we are all a little ambivalent.

I am having an interesting conversation “about Marxism” with my friend Auntie Vulgar, and I wanted to post it here for fun:

1. AV

The only two things of which we can be certain.

Praxis is essentially just one of those smarty-pants words for the process of doing, action, practice- practical application. It is something of an opposite to theory, or rather, it is the theory that theory must be applied if it is to ever carry much meaning. For example, anybody can theorize that a particular person is or was the child of god. However, it is not until enough people actually put this theory into practice, i.e. behave as if this person is god’s child, that the theory gains enough meaning to become ‘true’.

In some remarkable instances these truths are so widely held that they become those ‘inescapable’, seductively empirical and all too ‘natural facts of life’; they assume an existence outside and over us. What was made by humans comes to dominate humans so that in this instance a handful of creative subjects and generations of progeny enslaved themselves to, committed both acts of violence and compassion out of duty to the mass-figment of christ. Such inversions of subject and object, of society’s agents allowing ourselves to be determined by external (although human-made) structures, is what the smarty-pants call reification. Religion in general, and Christians in particular, are one of the easiest examples of this reification concept. And as far as examples go it is really not very compelling, but it is clear.

Political economics and economic ‘reality’, how a society organizes its reproduction, is a lot like religion. It is a system of ‘truths’ come ‘facts’ we accept so often in thought and action as the ‘natural’ order of things. To use a crude example, the cliche about the only two certainties of life being death and taxes is based upon a reified notion of the state. It presupposes a particular form of state as always and forever existing, like the inevitable sorrow of death. Of course, to see beyond the reified state does one little good, for the state, like the Spanish Inquisition, will come looking for both confession and cash.

Money and the roles we allow it to play, indeed the entire structure we call capitalism is a reification of far greater power, violence, longevity and reach than anything we know of which predates. How many question the money, the market and all their categories? Who questions how it is that things come to carry a price? And yet in the mind it seems there is not much that money can’t accomplish, and little some will not do to posess it in abundance. It becomes natural to conceive social reproduction only in terms of needing a ‘job’ and shopping for entertainment, services, or things (as though entertainment and services aren’t things!!), we allow ourselves to believe that only under a system of profiteers, exploiters of our work can society have pop-songs, pubs, ipods, cream cakes, and fruit smelling body scrubs.

It seldom occurs to us that money, ‘in-fact’, has no ‘real’ value at all, or when such a thought is entertained it is all too often finally and quickly silenced as unrealistic, wishful thinking. It is dangerous and subversive thinking, for to question the universal character of the money commodity is to jeapordize, on the one hand, what may be an otherwise materially comfortable existence as a skilled labor commodity, and on the other hand, to endanger the very mystifications which underpin the ‘reality’ of the system itself. To use a late example, as more people become aware of the rather arbitrary assignation of price to song; of culture as exploitable property, the ideological edifice of capitalism comes under tension. As people become use to a truly ‘free market’ (that is non-market- the negation of the market) of songs (to use only one example) it may be that they become more ready to accept free market education, free market housing, free market food, free market pubs, free market mediation channels, and a profusion of voluntary, edifying, and non-exploitative labor. In ‘reality’ such a restructuring is only a question of social norms, skill development, and methods and tools for the reorganization of social reproduction.

Economists and those in schools of business are the most extreme example of this reification of capital, for their entire discipline is dominated by a myriad of market functions. It forgets that their market is presupposed; taken as natural and given. Economics loses its transitory and historical character. It forgets that its object of study is entirely and utterly of human construction, and therefore potentially entirely and utterly subject to alteration by our collective will and hand. Economics does not study humans, it studies the creation that dominates humans and then presents it as that which makes us ‘free’.

‘As in religion one is governed by the products of their own brain, so in capitalist production they are governed by the products of their own hands’ (Marx in Fromm: 51).

The challenge for us as victims of this entire process is to figure out how to re-assert our governance so that the necessaries and luxuries we need and enjoy need not mean an indentured creative servitude in the workplace - a commercially colonized leisure for the lucky end of the global division of labor; any variety of mindless mechanical tasks for the less fortunate many; and of course endemic sickness and defeat for the non-elite rest. From the richest of board members to the poorest of urchins, all in this process have their humanity effaced, and there is no argument worthy of wearing humanist clothes that can justify the indefinite existence of such an economic mode; that cannot argue that we begin here and now to respond to this with praxis.

Praxis. It is through praxis that we organize our will and turn our hands toward change. The type of change we desire will not just happen, for we are its eventual agents. And it is with this in mind that I begin this here blog.

2. Pt

AV,

Here’s something for you to chew on in reference to another reification, namely, of the logos: that is, the question of the transcription of justice from ontology (or the just from the true). Here is Lyotard commenting on “the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive” from _Just Gaming_ (Minnesota, 1985)

“[In] not only Plato but Marx as well, there is the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”…
But this passage from the true to the just raises a problem, because if one were to ground it, it would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if … the addressee of the statement is able to put himself in the position of the sender of the statement … in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing.”

Your friend,
Paul

3. AV

“Here is Lyotard commenting on “the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive’ from _Just Gaming_(Minnesota, 1985).” [In] not only Plato but Marx as well, there is the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”…. But this passage from the true to the just raises a problem, because if one were to ground it, it would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if…the addressee of the statement is able to put himself in the position of the sender of the statement…in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing.’”

I would like to begin with this ‘legitimization of commands’ and the agency of the receiver in meaning construction. To legitimize a particular structure is a choice, though often a passive or structurally coerced one. It is not only a ‘true being of society’ whose prescriptions must ‘bridge the abyss’ to legitimacy and receiver response, but the inherited society as well. People constantly legitimize certain prescriptions of action in favor of others, for the most part (and perhaps necessarily) unaware of the reasons save the most apparent. Society is a complex of de/legitimizing discourse. Something as simple as watching a particular commercial broadcast or purchasing a new pair of shoes is legitimizing discourse - in the former instance because you and I have our meaning making capacities and projected purchasing power sold to advertising agents, and in playing that role become complicit in current uses of monologic media channels; and in the latter case the purchase of shoes realizes the goal of a particular production process so that at the moment of exchange an entire complex of social structures are legitimized: the global division of labor, particular concepts of ownership and exchange, branding and a culture of self bound intimately with the commodity fetish - image as commodity, and of course the functionality creative and mechanical activity to which so much of our labor is devoted when sold. One could also suggest that a simple conversation with another person is a legitimizing discourse in that it will more or less adhere to certain learned, accepted, and anticipated patterns and norms of dialogic activity. All Lyotard observes here, it seems to me, is the jurisdiction the receiver of a message can claim in terms of meaning construction, and the extent to which they choose to permit the ‘abyss’ between the meaning constructed and the level of receptivity to the prescription for action if any there be. Inherited structures, inherited prescriptions, however, come with a bridge largely and already intact. Such prescriptions, which obviously vary in type and degree from person to person based on demographic and personal experience, can be and often are followed either automatically or out of compulsion.

Some automobile owners in the United States, for example, might opt not to own or regularly drive such a vehicle (for any number of reasons) were it but for their country’s largely auto-centric urban and interstate planning. The rationalization of automobile ownership in this case may be that I must work and enjoy particular forms of recreation and consumption, and that there is only one means of transport through which these are accessible. Or, I may truly believe, as the advertisements suggest, that automobile ownership endows me with greater freedom or prestige, or maybe I just really actually like driving a car. Or, and most likely, it is an over-determination, with any number of subjective, cultural, and political-economic factors - determined and determining ‘in one and the same movement’ (Swingewood: 189) a mass of individual legitimizations, i.e. the prescription of car ownership bridging the abyss.

This is dangerous ground, and if not careful I may not be as lucky as the car. Although both I and my example have talked along the lines of Althusser’s relatively autonomous levels of society combining to form the ’structural complexity’ of a social formation; thereby achieving an over-determined structural causality (Swingewood: 190), the remainder of my response to Lyotard’s statement runs less with Althusser and more along the lines of critical-theory, Gramsci, and Marxism as rooted in subjective and inter-subjective praxis. The essential difference is that while Althusser suggests there is no prescription other than the eventual unfolding of structurally over-determined events, Gramsci and school suggests humanity writes its own history both backward and forward in time.

That a ‘deep conviction of a true being of society’ is in Marxism is very much the case. Marxism implies a cache of normative views on power relations in society. In essence, Marxism advocates that the present mode of social reproduction is unjust and exploitative, and suggests that human kind can and must struggle to achieve alternative social norms of the ‘just’. In some instances these views do take on an almost messianic character, at which point the Marxist ‘logos’, if you will, is reified; moves from critical-theory to a ‘quasi-religious system’ (Swingewood: 113). Such occurrences are unfortunate since the essential concern of Marxism as a critical theory is the extent to which particular structures and Weltanschauungs, specifically those of capitalism, ossify, reign hegemonic and assume an existence seemingly outside the realm of human influence or choice. What Kirkpatrick and crew call ‘an alienated society’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). It practically goes without saying that Marxism as a closed discourse, as a set of particular theories to be accepted or rejected ad hominem, assumes the status of an ideology, very much in the Althusserian sense of the term, and in so doing negates itself as a theory of the practice of emancipation. This is the problem of orthodoxy and dogma.

However, this relationship between orthodoxy and Marxism should not be over-stated, nor made into a behavior singular to the Marxist approach. The purpose of the above discussion on legitimacy and structure was to demonstrate that a given mode of reproduction can only survive so long as the correct demographics continue to act in a legitimizing manner in accord with a particular rubric of ideologies and norms relatively non-threatening to the status quo, or as Gramsci would say, in ‘active acquiescence’ in the persistence of bourgeois society (Swingewood: 118). In our particular situation capitalism continues to persist in part because the bourgeois Weltanschauung’, its particular iteration of truth and its particular movement from the true to the just, (”the rule of law”, “liberal representative democracy”, “an honest day’s work”, “the free market”), successfully bridged, and unless actively challenged, will continue to monopolize the bridge between the denotative and prescriptive. So, while Marxism runs risk of orthodoxy, the bourgeois Weltanschauung is for us and many other people orthodoxy a priori.

While I agree with Lyotard, on a purely functional level, that there is an endemic problem, for whatever reasons, of Marxism’s ability to actually cross the abyss, to actually move more active agents into a different theoretical and practical frame that challenges capitalism’s ‘truths’; question notions of social reality limited in scope to the realm of the ‘objective’ and empirical. However, I would strongly disagree with any implication that the problem is Marxism’s attempt as such. The greatest strength of the Marxist discourse has been promoting an understanding that truth lies not in the facts of the given reality, but in the negation or transcendence of those facts…in our attempt to change the world, in our critique of the established reality’ (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Marxism, at its best, is not merely an attempt to change the ‘facts’ of world capitalism, but a perspective which asks always “what is a fact?” (Kirkpatrick et al: 2). Truth is inter-subjectively constructed, and as such Gramsci’s immediate ancestors, Labriola and Sorel, are right to suggest “there is no truth waiting to be discovered only a truth which must be made.” (Swingewood: 115). The use of the indefinite article, ‘a truth’, very much implies the subjective, mutable, and fluid conceptualization of ‘truth’ in the tradition of critical theory. The ‘true being of society’ is not, in this iteration of Marx, one particular structruration of society, but rather it is any number of possibilities, imminent realities, for which humanity must actively struggle to make real. “Reality is not a given datum but created through human activity; the goal of socialism is not lying in wait in some distant future but results from praxis.” What is the goal of socialism? An inalienable society, a society actively determined by its agents in a democratic and non-exploitative manner. How do we arrive at this? By “making the critique of alienation speak for popular needs and lead to concrete actions against the capitalist commodity relationships within historical possibilities” (Kirkpatrick et al: 3 my emphasis).

While it is clear that Marxists cannot afford the naïve assumption that their messages are constructed by those who receive them in such a manner as to engender and encourage a new Weltanschauung … and the elitism in Bolshevism or otherwise will certainly not do. However, it is also naïve to suggest that society is either so utterly fragmented and subjective or structurally determined (objectified) that any attempt at change via ‘human will organized into collective forms’ is doomed forever to lurk in the abyss. In the first instance, the relativist thread in post-modern thinking can be seen very much as a positive development, as it does encourage a mode of thought conducive to identifying and questioning reified forms, even if that questioning is not, strictly speaking, Marxist. In the second instance, structures evolve as agents work through them. The observation of the Frankfurt School, that “capitalist societies are closed systems with monologic modes of social communication as a simple one-way process of cultural indoctrination” (Swingewood: 132-3), could start to ring less true. The monologic structure of the culture industry has the potential for further significant change; the diffuse nature, interactive and productive potential of the new tools of cultural production make praxis in general, and Gramsci in particular, more relevant than ever before:

“All revolutions are preceded … by an intense work of cultural penetration’ as the rising class aims to subjugate allied and subordinate strata to its ideas. A dominant class is…defined as one which saturates civil society with the spirit of its morality, customs, religious and political practices: ‘The foundation of a ruling class is equivalent to the creation of a Weltanschauung.’ If the working class is to constitute a dominant class it must establish a culture that commands the support of other strata; its world view, Marxism, is thus not a class ideology as such, but the expression of the immanent structural trends of history. Cultural hegemony prior to the act of revolution is created through collective action” (Swingewood: 118).

The ‘historical possibilities’ have seldom been potentially more conducive to the cultural penetration by ‘ordinary people’ into the culture industry; a growing awareness of these possibilities is reflected in the growing activity and discourse surrounding ‘new media’: “There is a battle for the soul of the internet, and if a greater democracy is to claim this soul it will only do so through the work of ‘ordinary people’, entering, shaping, and governing these new means of production, these new communication means,” (Coleman 2005a: 280). Given the quite real and very vulnerable nature of these new opportunities for cultural penetration, to reject collective action a priori is a futile and worthless act. Relativism is preparing collective actions of its own. Making symmetrical the power relationships in narrative production is critical praxis; a grand narrative of subjective experiences, a great many voices communicating the local as globally shared - a de-localization and democratizing of cultural production, of message and construction - potentially. Already the bourgeois Weltanschauung takes root. “Technologies are never neutral: they are designed, shaped and socially modified in accordance with discourses that are often profoundly political and hegemonic” (Lessig in Coleman 2005b: 185). Already some give up: “the internet will be ‘free’ only where this serves the purposes of commercial development” (McQuail: 140). Unless we can claim it.

4. Pt

AV,

Let me respond to your response first by making what I believe to be an absolutely critical point. I cannot underestimate the importance of this: the calling into question the possibility of translation between two modes of discourse is not tantamount to espousing some kind of ethico-political relativism. This is an accusation regularly and wrongly levied against writers often grouped under the heading of “post-modernism.” The process of de-centering the diagnostic or prescriptive ability of a certain range of discourse should not, but seems to in some circles, imply a belief in a generalized political inefficacy and a subsequent disinterest in civic or social responsibility. The epithet of one who “reject[s] collective action a priori,” certainly does not refer to Lyotard - furthermore, we can all agree that such a position is almost tautologically “futile and worthless”. So let’s do that.

“…it is also naïve to suggest that society is either so utterly fragmented and subjective or structurally determined (objectified) that any attempt at change via ‘human will organized into collective forms’ is doomed forever to lurk in the abyss”: I also can’t think of anyone who would disagree with that. It seems that the referent of this message is not Lyotard in particular but a sort of caricature of the prevailing misinterpretations of the more infamous “post-moderns”, I am thinking here of both Lyotard and Derrida, each of whom are occasionally misinterpreted as rejecting in principle “any attempt at [political] change” because of their resistance to a pre-packaged ethos vis à vis the mode of change. (Lyotard started his career as a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.)

On the prescription for the struggle: What I see at stake is the question of whether or not there exists a kind of writing that would be, again as you suggest, a “theory of the practice of emancipation.” Can the practice of emancipation /be theorized/? Or are we already in an incompatible register of discourse entirely? Does Marx or anyone else ever “build a [semiotic] bridge”, or is there, as Lyotard suggests, an abyss (an abyss, unbridgeable)? The question is not how an element or which one inside a mode of speech or writing (to use the Wittgensteinian parlance, a “language game”) allows for the successful bridging of the abyss between the denotative and the prescriptive - for Lyotard, it is decided in advance that these two modes of writing are already always passing each other over, that is to say, they must continue to “miss” one another, precisely because in each game one of the poles of address is fundamentally obscure: translation is impossible /first/. Which is to suggest, as a second-order consequence, that the “a priori” is not some given or particular mode of theorizing the political (tacitly or expressly, as you correctly note) but instead the belief in the possibility of theorizing the political as such.

Let’s also take a moment and try to stake out some ground with reference to the registers of “the true” and “the just”. Your motion to recognize a multiplicity of truths is in keeping with the spirit of “the post-moderns”, but may provide an unexpected consequence for the ability for intercourse between modes of dialogue in general. All concerns aside with regard to the supposed coextension of truth and facticity, the proposed abyss of the political and the ontological comes down to a question of duration and of the ability of a certain “class” of statements to properly address the variable dimensions of duration. To focus for the moment on Lyotard’s argument, let’s get back to the question of the poles of a mode of discourse. I think your quote from Kirkpatrick etc. most succinctly illustrates the point I am going to try to briefly make: “truth lies not in the facts of the given reality, but in the negation or transcendence of those facts…in our attempt to change the world, in our critique of the established reality.” Now, we immediately recognize this as a form of political dialectics, aka. that an attempt to change the world is partially constituted by a series of denotative or critical statements viz. “the established reality”, and the notion that the truth lies “in the negation or transcendence” of the set of prescriptions that constitute a given social or political “reality”. Negation, transcendence: What could be more properly ontological (Hegelian)?

There is the law and then there is the law. In the (”religious”) prescriptive register, there is a law, called the law of being but it as its first fact relies on a mode of communication forgotten from our understanding of discourse (in which we concern ourselves with a message as primarily from somewhere) insofar as it is a law sent from an incomprehensible (transcendent) source and its addressee is all of us here. This is a Jewish (or, more properly, Levinasian) mode of discourse: the sender is obfuscated, permanently, and whatever is left for our intercourse with the law it is understood that “it is not known who obligates…/it cannot be brought over to the narrative pole of the referent/.” (71, my italics) The bush burns, amen amen. As to the register of political discourse, Lyotard correctly cautions against a sense that, “one can draw prescriptions from a description that is…correct” precisely because in this paradigm, the “correct” (or “true” in the sense that you used it above) description of society serves as a grounding discursive praxis for the obligation married to the prescriptive mode of discourse. The notion to which Lyotard refers in my first quotation, that which he finds carries through from Plato to Marx, is that there is some sensible distribution model for society that is based on the true, that is, the way things are - in other words that some occulted subject (the spectre of Marx, Plato, god) has provided a moment of relay from the descriptive register (the register of knowledge of being) to the prescriptive one. Because of a certain theoria, then, philosophers have historically put themselves in the position of political advisors, “as if a good theoretical description of the problem is what a prince needs to be able to produce correct commands.” (24) This is what is under question, not the “correctness” of any philosophico-political assessment in general and especially not of Marx’s in particular.

This belief, and not its particular content, is what I personally perceive as dangerous. The supposed register of discourse under which this translation is possible is violent to begin with and allows groups of “philosophers” or descriptive agents (say, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, The Project for the New American Century, or the group of Straussians in the White House right now) to use a grounding ontological or theoretical discourse - one in which the sender of the transmission necessarily leaves no return address - to subject this register of language to a violent translation into one in which “reality is not a given datum,” (which is to say a discourse in which the /referent/ is occulted and which is, by the very nature of the relay, received en masse in the second person). In short, one must “dissociate the true from the just so that the just not be subject to the critique that you have leveled at the true.” (Thébaud, in JG, 24)

I think this fits nicely in line with your point that “making symmetrical the power relationships in narrative production is critical praxis” which is, in a certain way, exactly my point. The reification of the logos that is absolutely contaminated with philosophico-political writing provides exactly the same enabling situation for Marx, Leo Strauss, and Pat Robertson, and the fundamental belief that the prescriptive can be drawn forth from the descriptive is what remains to be addressed first. The “leap of faith” which is required to imagine a bridge between these registers of discourse (the transubstantiation of the reasonable or true into the just), in my mind, bears rethinking. Consider this, only as an example: That one might think of justice on the model of prayers or requests, and not on the model of the Idea in the Platonic sense…”Requests are not, and cannot be, obtained, either through deduction or implication, from denotative statements, nor calculated by means of propositional functors.” (25)

Your friend,
Paul

1. Ask me how I became a pirate…

I recently ran into something that happened about a year ago (this not being my area of interest, I am a little late with it): Namely, a usenet post:

Information from microsoft.public.windowsmedia.drm
Posted by Satoru Koshiba (JP):
“As far as I survey at this time some popular DRM Protected Video
Providers’s contents were cracked…
Many many unlocked video files were distributiong with no payment…
And …at 17:00(GMT+9:00) anonymous cracker named ‘lark’ upload source code of ‘DRM crack software’.
Software name is “DrmDbg.exe” and “DRM2WMV”.

DrmDbg.exe will pick up “KID” and “Seed” from PC’s memory when user playback DRM Protected contents , and make “xxxxx.key” file. DRM2WMV will unlock ProtectedFile using “xxxxx.key”.”

I located and downloaded application, tried it on a sample DRM’ed WMV and it worked gangbusters. Which, of course, was not surprising - it makes a sort of intuitive sense how this works when you see it in action, and we are all used at this point to every ludicrous content-security attempt by corporations (heretofore referred to as "Microsoft" as a sort of cute nickname for "corporations forced into a specific model of software/content creation and distribution perpetuated by operating system monopolization on behalf of the Microsoft corporation") being cracked in half. So, fine. I went to sleep. I don’t really download any DRM’ed content anyway: I don’t like it. Zzz.^*

^* Please note that I slept emphatically.

The following day, today in fact, I happened to have some time to browse the internet, and I had developed a nagging interest in how Microsoft took the news of Satoru’s discovery. To my surprise, they virtually ignored it. I will learn, very soon, not to be surprised at things like this. At this point, however, I need to backtrack.

DRM (digital rights management) is a system that applies to digital media, which, as we all know, is for all intents and purposes infinitely reproducible at zero degradation. This means that I can email you a copy of a document, still have the document, and both of our copies will be identical within a reasonable scope. This as opposed to a photocopy of a book, or a copy of a vhs tape, which lose quality with each successive copy. This fact has lead to a widespread phenomenon called piracy, which is quite similar to the undisambiguated phenomenon.

Traditionally, pirates are those who rob or plunder at sea, or sometimes the shore, without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation. They are now also those who commit acts of copyright infringement against sovereign coporate bodies, many of which own audio recordings or other media produced by artists and entertainers (human beings). In this way, and in sympathy with Marx, sovereignty in both cases boils down to owning human labor. We will return to this.

Now: Digital/copyright piracy has become such hit in the so-called bit-economy, that it has caused a major brouhaha in what might be called the dominant world order. This is a powerful phenomenon and very rich white men are losing sleep over it. Zzz.

To protect the sovereign bodies of those corporations now wildly threatened by this new breed of pirates, many zany schemes have been hatched. It has often reminded me of Rube Goldberg, who was famously incapable of doing very simple things like opening a door without the aid of preposterously complicated machinery.

To be fair to our corporate overlords, however, the task set before them is substantially more difficult than you or I would find opening a door. In fact, given that the program of stamping out human creativity and ingenuity has not been going nearly according to schedule, many have been so audacious as to suggest that their task is impossible. As a kind of funny joke, and keeping in the spirit of corporate creativity, a series of independent like-minded corporations developed systems of mandatory access control to protect things such as television commercials and pornography.

None of these systems, to date, address in principle (that is to say, some may address some elements on accident) what is called in the archaic fashion fair use. This queer expression is part of United States copyright law which is meant to suggest that:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. ¶ 107

2. Ouroboros

Which is all to say that if you or I were to purchase a song from the iTunes music emporium over the internet, we would be able to play it on exactly one specific platform, namely, the one we authorized. So, if we were to perchance have a non-Apple network music player attached to [our] stereo(s), we would be out of luck. This is a nonsensically limiting phenomenon, which has irritated a great many legal purchasers of music and or video content. Almost across the board, these "fair use"-related restrictions have lead to the technological breakthroughs which open the door for a flood of piracy on the so-called protected files.

So whatever, this point has been talked to death, and it seems clear at this point that one side isn’t going to change the other’s minds. The technology cycle is also obviously ouroboral (is this a word?). The question I want to insist on at this point is whether or not this dialogue has ever been allowed to play out on something like fair terms. Let’s take as an example of what I’m talking about a famous dialogue between the American philosopher John R. Searle and Jacques Derrida. Ostensibly what happens here is this: These two guys have very different thoughts about the world, and about language, which they are talking about specifically in this case through the lens of the analytical staple (this is a mixed metaphor) J.L. Austin. The content of this bitter exchange is not what interests me so much as something that I percieve to be an underlying incompatibility or better, a disinterest on the part of Searle that leads to something like a dogmatic barrier. Here’s how it goes:

Derrida writes an article about J.L. Austin, like I said, and it’s called Signature, Event, Context. Searle, who feels himself an heir of Austin, comes in to defend him against the "lunatic fringe" (he literally refers to Derrida and the estimable Richard Rorty in this way here). Ok: The point, and skipping right to Searle’s first response to SEC: (SEC itself is a complicated text and I don’t really think we can do it justice in the scope of this document - suffice it to say it makes considerable headway in the "reframing" of Austin). We are going to quote Marcel Dascal here, who says this very well:

In his ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Searle makes it quite clear that he doesn’t want to play the game in the ground and by the rules introduced by Derrida’s reframing of Austin. He presents his task in terms of ‘correcting’ Derrida’s mistakes - particularly those that led him to present a picture of Austin that is ‘unrercognizable’ (p. 204). He undertakes to do so by pointing out Derrida’s equivocations, by returning to well-established and familiar distinctions, and by denouncing invalid arguments. In so far as he, along with other analytic philosophers, assumes that these requirements form a universal and neutral baseline for any serious philosophical debate, seeing to it that they are fulfilled is an operation that might be properly called ‘deframing’. For those who doubt the assumption of a frameless neutrality and universality, the operation might be seen simply as an attempt to return to an arena considered (by Searle and others) to be the appropriate frame to discuss Austin, an arena where Searle’s proven skills can be put to full use.

"How Rational…" International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.9(3), 323-24.

Now, it seems clear to me that anything like "frameless neturality and universality" is at the bottom line dogmatic, but this actually ends up not making a difference as Searle’s first reply is fraught with allusion to "rules" - it begins and ends with such allusions. Dascal again: "It is because the proper rules for understanding and stating Austin’s position are not followed that Derrida’s confrontation with Austin ‘never quite takes place’" (326). In other words, according to Searle, Derrida’s engagement with Austin "never quite takes place" precisely because it does not follow some preset guidelines for the way a thinker might interact with Austin. Radically novel thought is excluded as a possibility from the start: Dogma.

3. The Zero sum

I have heard some variation of this idea dozens of times in relationship to computer piracy: "Intellectual property theft is (or is not) a zero-sum game." In general, when corporate types say: Computer piracy is a zero sum game, what they are really saying, as I understand it, is that the loss of the owner of the stolen copyrighted media is equal to the gain of the pirate. And what is this supposed to tell us? Let’s take an example: If you were to purchase a copy of a compact disc, which I recommend that you do at some point, you would ostensibly be making this trade: $15, say, one half or one or two or three hours of your labor for a piece of musical media. The reason that trade works in general is because this is categorically not a zero-sum gain - which is to say, that both you and the producer of the purchased disc feel like you are getting a positive deal. (Elementary arithmetic: a positive number plus a positive number never equals zero.) Again, the suggestion of major retailers of media is that computer piracy, much like piracy on the high seas, amounts to a zero-sum game in favor of the pirate - the company loses as much as the consumer gains. And of course, there have been many very fine rebuttals to this argument and either side may or may not seem whiny or silly to you personally.

Now: Is any of this "zero sum" stuff even reasonable in the scope of the discussion? Why or why not?

But first (and really, this is my answer to that question), why are we allowing the scope of this dicussion to be so insanely limited? In other words, isn’t the possibility of the zero-sum gain extant entirely in a de jure economic plane of immanence, or, isn’t it that an actual zero-sum situation occurs only in an arbitrarily Cartesian (or whatever the economic equivalent of that is, Smithian?) economic setting, a setting, I should note, that is defaulted on even in the most likely candidate at least ontologically-speaking, the math machine itself - the computer. The evidence of this bankruptcy seems clearly provided mutatis mutandis the possibility of p2p technology itself! That is, in an economic climate of competition between digital piracy and drm technology, an economy decidedly unlike the one that produced a certain economic "rule set" that favors and protects copyright holders, this rule-set is still the only model we use to think this problem. It fails to question, from the get-go, the legitimacy of an entire model of trade and ownership (a model that things like p2p and open source software undermine on technological merit alone) - a rule-set which has, I might add, become the watermark for the entire world-currency system to begin with in a "virtual" economy extending far beyond the reach of networked technologies. The zero sum is, in other words, basically an extremely complex and internally differentiated concept in an economy in which value is assessed arbitrarily based on dollar hegemony.

To wit: The value of a widget is assessed at x dollars. The value of a dollar is assessed based on keeping the strength of a certain nation state’s economy afloat. This value translates into other values, y euro, z yuan, etc., but the dollar is the rosetta stone for this translation - there is no actual good or service-based value involved. Value here is pure politics. So, we are used to purchasing one widget for x dollars, where for us, as the consumers, x dollars has the value of b hours of work. Our piece of the bargain is that we work b hours in trade for, in the end, one widget. The owner of the copyright’s assessed value of the one widget, again, x dollars, is based in a sort of nebulous space whereby they determine what how big x can be without causing us to stop thinking that it’s a fair trade. “X” is apparently to be set at a higher value in the instance when a company’s profits suffer from the supposed loss based on piracy - that is, people who steal media with no intention of ever purchasing it. So who suffers? The legitimate consumer, and the company: namely, if, to prevent piracy, a company revalues its widgets at a higher cost to the consumer, what is the incentive for an extant pirate to start purchasing widgets? Hence, DRM: In which companies try to protect their intellectual property by creating software that basically walls off dozens of legitimate uses in order to prevent the few illegitimate ones. Which, if you remember what happens back up at the top of the page or about a year ago, doesn’t work in the first place. Anything like whether or not this all amounts to a "zero-sum game" would have to be worked out on an impossibly large scale.

So it’s not that it’s "wrong" per-se to argue one way or the other about whether digital piracy is (not) a zero-sum game, it’s just that it’s the wrong argument to have. The argument is really, in the first place, about the world economy and the status of the arbitrarily assessed value of a widget versus the actual labor cost to the legitimate consumer. It is unrealistic and unreasonable to think that people are going to put up with this forever, which is what digital piracy stands for - we will note here that almost as soon as the technology became widespread, it reached critical mass. Which is not to say that I advocate piracy - I don’t - but rather, that I’d avocate a discussion that steps back once or twice to take a look at the real issue here, the same absolutely political issue that we’ve always had: a hugely disproportionate assessment of the value of thing a, an seemingly insatiable desire to eradicate fair use and property-ownership by the individual, and of course, a set of not only archaic and corporate-friendly but completely unfair copyright laws.

Closing this (now getting long) document up, let’s say that framing computer piracy in terms of a fair economic model renders it ‘unrecognizable’, as was Derrida’s Austin to Searle. Of course piracy is wrong, but it is only wrong so decidedly in such a ‘recognizable’ economic framework - that framework where a corporation’s skills can be put to full use.

No doubt, you will have at least heard of the Three Gorges Dam project. Initially conceived by Sun Yat-Sen in 1919, it is now scheduled for completion in 2009. If built (and it is already under construction), it will be the largest hydroelectric project the world has ever seen - 60 miles longer than Lake Nasser behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam. Thirteen cities, 140 towns, more than 300 villages, and 1,600 factories will be submerged - leaving 1.5 million people to be relocated, and destroying evidence of human habitation that extends back to the Paleolithic era.

From an historical/archaeological perspective, the list of what will be lost is too long to even begin. One small town, Dachang, well-preserved from the Ming and Qing period (AD 1368 - 1912) will be moved to higher ground - a recovery of sorts, but it’s not even the one tenth of the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure. Beyond archaeology, there’s the tremendous environmental concerns. An article in Foreign Affairs says, “The environmental effects will be comparable to those of damming the Grand Canyon or diverting Niagara Falls.” Some suggest that the Chinese alligator, the finless porpoise, the river dolphin, and the Chinese sturgeon, which exists only in the Yangzte and dates back to the age of the dinosaurs, will all be endangered or wiped out. Seismologists are worried about the effects of a body of water this big, and thus heavy, on a region that is earthquake prone.

Naturally, a series of smaller dams would be equally efficient. But world governments, and particularly communist ones, always want to go large.

From Mr. Anderson

Clearly in the throes of what has been called by some “the El Salvador option”, the American-trained Iraqi counter-insurgency has developed its second front in an dishearteningly unsurprising place: television. Unsurprising, that is, if we accept the notion of an El Salvador style drama currently playing out in Iraq, from whence by definition the so-called counter-insurgency is little more than an American-funded and trained death squad. Death by television: it’s in the American modern war manifesto.

Incidentally, the propaganda piece/reality show “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” is apparently quite popular in Iraq, though this is at best hearsay coming from me. TGJ is aired on the state-run Al Iraqiya network, akin to public television in the US. It is apparently the only source of televised news in Iraq that does not require a satellite dish. Now, Al Iraqiya is part of a media conglomeration called The Iraqi Media Network, created by the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, which later became the Coalition Provisional Authority, after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. However, the IMN, apparently now in the hands of the Iraqi government (see the editor’s note in this Christian Science Monitor article) has since its inception “faced credibility issues and was too closely associated with the CPA…As early as June 2003, the CPA was engaging in censoring Iraqi media, issuing ‘guidelines’ for all media outlets in Iraq, forbidding them from inciting violence or opposition to the occupation authority…Several seasoned journalists were reported to have quit the IMN out of frustration with CPA oversight. ‘Critics say the network’s mission is weakened by its contradictory goals. So far IMN is touted as both the voice of an occupying military force and an inspiration for Iraqis to produce fair and balanced news coverage. But many Iraqis have already dubbed the network a propaganda organ.’” (@sourcewatch)

The show itself consists of detainees confessing to various crimes; not only to terrorism-specific style crimes such as murder, but also to being homosexuals or paedophiles [source], sometimes showing obvious signs of having been recently beaten, and almost always before being taken to trial.

An extremely interesting account of this show-device comes from Peter Maass, who was in the room with General Adnan Thabit, the leader of Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force, the Special Police Commandos, and creator of TGJ:

Those being interrogated on the program do not look fearsome; these are not the faces to be found in the propaganda videos that turn up on Web sites or on Al Jazeera. The insurgents, or suspected insurgents, on ”Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” come off as cowardly lowlifes who kill for money rather than patriotism or Allah. They tremble on camera, stumble over their words and look at the ground as they confess to everything from contract murders to sodomy. The program’s clear message is that there is now a force more powerful than the insurgency: the Iraqi government, and in particular the commandos, whose regimental flag, which shows a lion’s head on a camouflage background, is frequently displayed on a banner behind the captives.

Before the show began that evening, Adnan’s office was a hive of conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military’s top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country’s brutal civil war in the 1980’s. Steele’s presence was a sign not only of the commandos’ crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. ”He’s obviously a natural type of commander,” Steele told me. ”He commands respect.”

Things quieted in the office once the episode of ”Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” began. First, a detainee admitted to having homosexual relations in a mosque. Then several other suspected insurgents made their confessions; two of them had been captured by Adnan’s commandos in Samarra, and their confessions were taped, just hours before, in this very office. Adnan sat smoking Royals and watching the show like a proud producer.

”It has a good effect on civilians,” he had told me, through an interpreter. ”Most civilians don’t know who conducts the terrorist activities. Now they can see the quality of the insurgents.” Earlier he said: ”Civilians must know that these people who call themselves resisters are thieves and looters. They are dirty. In every person there is good and bad, but in these people there is only bad.”

After letting it sit in my inbox for almost a week, my sense of love for comics finally overtook me. Camouflage comics is a monument of comics to Argentina’s “Dirty War” of 1976-1983. Briefly, in 1976, Argentine army commander-in-chief Jorge Rafael Videla and others (Emilio Massera, Orlando Agosti) overthrew then-President (and Videla appointer) Isabel Martinez de Perón and installed a military junta at the helm of Argentina.

From Wikipedia (here):

By mid-1975, the country was in chaos. Extreme right death squads used their hunt for far-left guerrillas (like the Montoneros) as a pretext to exterminate their ideological opponents on the left and as a cover for common crimes. In July, there was a general strike. Wealthy, conservative landowners encouraged the army, which prepared to take control by making lists of people who should be ‘dealt with’ after the planned coup. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure,” Videla declared in 1975 in support of the death squads.

The junta was responsible for the slaughtering of an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 Argentineans, mostly trade-union members, students and people thought to espouse left wing views. Camouflage Comics notes in its own mission statement that it rides dangerously close to founding the (Argentinian) Holocaust Entertainment Industry, which it does, but some of the comics are quite beautiful, and the collection introduced me to a lot of exciting Argentine comic-creators. Case in point, from Dante Ginevra and Diego Agrimbau…

In old news, French voters rejected the EU Constitution [See also: this at CNN] a week ago Monday. In the last eight days, this somewhat surprising turn of events has elicited the commentary of a fairly wide variety of intellectual-types, notably (at least for me) the infamously outspoken Slavoj Zizek, as well as a somewhat clairvoyant pre-party commentary from Alain Badiou (nod in this direction for the link).

Five days after the fact, and in what can only be called classic Zizek form, Lacan’s most popularly supposed heir had some interesting things to say:

The voters … were not given a clear symmetrical choice. The very terms of the choice privileged the yes lobby. … People were called to ratify the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology, between post-political administration and the old political passions of the left and the right.

So although the choice was not a choice between two political options, nor was it a choice between the enlightened vision of a modern Europe, ready to embrace the new global order, and old, confused political passions. (sic)

There was a positive choice in the no: the choice of choice itself; the rejection of the blackmail by the new elite that offers us only the choice to confirm their expert knowledge or to display one’s “irrational” immaturity. Our no is a positive decision to start a properly political debate about what kind of Europe we really want.

Now compare what Baidou said on May 18:

In the division between the ‘yes’ vote and the ‘no’ vote there has appeared - and it is a relative novelty - the argument from authority. In other words, the correlation, which Foucault would have appreciated, between knowledge and power: the ‘yes’ is the choice of enlightened people (experts of all sorts, without forgetting journalists), the ‘no’ belongs to the ignorant. The criticisms levied against Chirac on the choice for the referendum overlap with this argument: it is not a good idea to entrust matters as important as Europe to the decision of an ignorant mass; one could, or rather should, put the ignorant fraction of the population outside the capitalo-parliamentarian system (a theme which is already explicitly in circulation in the U.S.A. where grosso modo only half the population takes part in voting).

Baidou claims he will not have voted…

My personal view is that Europe, Europe as Idea, is already dead; voting for Europe is voting for a corpse. As far as I’m concerned, I won’t vote. There are only two ways of envisaging Europe as a singularity: a) conceiving it in the framework of inter-imperialist rivalry (Europe versus U.S.A.) - but this is a schema that belongs to the past; b) thinking it as a heterogeneous power, i.e. both heterogeneous vis-à-vis the U.S.A. and as a new type of power.

Zizek:

To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the American civilisation and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no then the only alternative is Europe. The third world cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American dream. In the present world constellation, it is only Europe that can do it. The true opposition today is not between the first world and the third world. Instead it is between the first and third world (ie the American global empire and its colonies), and the second world (ie Europe).

Baidou:

If the ‘no’ wins, we are threatened with a possible regression with regard to Europe. But I think that this backward step is necessary. What is on the agenda is effectively a ‘beyond’ of the national sphere … with the difference that this beyond must be subjectivated on the basis of what exists in the national sphere itself. We reencounter our question: the necessity of the identification of a figure of the adversary. The question of a power of a new type, of a power opposed to U.S. hegemony and which would not be symmetrical vis-à-vis U.S. power … a decisive question, which today largely remains open.

As it happens, back in 1960, Elias Canetti noted, "A man can evade commands by not hearing them and he can evade them by not carrying them out. The sting - and this can never be too emphatically stated - only results from the carrying out of a command. … [One’s] defence against new commands then becomes a matter of life and death." (Crowds and Power, Penguin: 1973. 373.) In fact, the last words of his one-score-year-consuming work are as follows:

The system of commands is acknowledged everywhere. It is perhaps most articulate in armies, but there is scarcely any sphere of civilized life where commands do not reach and none of us they do not mark. Their threat of death is the coin of power, and here it is all too easy to add coin to coin and amass wealth. If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting.

…and finally…

WE’RE VOTING no. It is a constitution for the bourgeoisie, for multinationals, for bosses. It is only about the economy, competition, profits, the market and capitalism. We are against all that; we are communists. There isn’t any progress for workers. Most workers want to say “merde”, to stick two fingers up at them. We are fed up with saying yes to politicians.

- Thomas Meurnier, a 32 year old history teacher (quoted in the Guardian 28 May)