biopolitics vs. dialectics?

“When life becomes the principle object for political struggles, one no longer ties political strategies or analysis to conventional limit conditions. Conditioning the possible, modes of active production instead define the biopolitical field of operations. This is not of course to suggest that wretched conditions cannot be defined as unjust or intolerable, but neither is it to play by the pre-set rules of political engagement. This exposes the fundamental difference between biopolitics and dialectics. Where a dialectical logic presupposes contradictory elements within a realm that it ultimately unifies, biopolitical logics presuppose connectable elements within a field in which everything is recombinant. With complex forms of self organization therefore replacing linearity, limit conditions are efficiently seconded by a general economy of political production. that is to say, once the strategic assumption that the universe is heterogeneous firmly displaces the dialectical assumption that the universe is homogenized, power struggles become a matter of pure strategy.”

Brad Evans, “Life Resistance: Towards a Different Concept of the Political,” Deleuze Studies 4(supplement): 149.

conservative thought: reaction and ideology

“After decades of “compassionate conservatism,” “a thousand points of light,” and “Morning in America,” dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much.”

…

“Playing the part of the dull-witted country squire, conservatives have embraced the position of the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw that “it is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit.” While the aristocratic overtones of that discourse no longer resonate, the conservative still holds on to the label of the untutored and the unlettered; it’s part of his populist charm and demotic appeal. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism is an idea-driven praxis, and no amount of preening from the right or polemic from the left can reduce or efface the catalog of mind one finds there.

Others will be put off by this argument for a different reason: It threatens the purity and profundity of conservative ideas. For many, the word “reaction” connotes an unthinking, lowly grab for power. But reaction is not reflex. It begins from a position of principle—that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others—and then recalibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below. This recalibration is no easy task, for such challenges tend by their very nature to disprove the principle. After all, if a ruling class is truly fit to rule, why and how has it allowed a challenge to its power to emerge? What does the emergence of the one say about the fitness of the other?”

…

“There is another reason to be wary of the effort to dismiss the reactionary thrust of conservatism, and that is the testimony of the tradition itself. From Burke’s claim that he and his ilk had been “alarmed into reflexion” by the French Revolution to Russell Kirk’s admission that conservatism is a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men … in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation,” the conservative has consistently affirmed that his is a knowledge produced in response to the left.”

“The Conservative Reaction,” by Corey Robin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

cesaire on colonialism and fascism

“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to bruatlize him in the truest sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been ‘interrogated,’ all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.”

Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 35-36

form-of-life as post-identitarian politics

“Sometimes getting something exactly wrong is getting it almost right. For example, in identity politics we try to treat a fact of our life as our form of life, while in form of life politics we do the exact opposite: we approach our way of
life as a fact (or, much better, as what the young Heidegger called ‘factical life’ or ‘facticity’). The crucial issue here is not really what is one’s form of life (enter the farcical parade of identities) but that one’s singular life has (or partakes in) a form, and that this form, which has no need to be further defined, is always already a source of power. It can therefore be demonstrated that struggles have integrated, even unknowingly, the logic of form of life have more lasting success than battles dominated by the logic of sovereignty, rights, blood, or land.”

David Kishik, The Power of Life, 113.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

occupy the figure of the refugee

“We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual. That is what we seek to occupy. We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world. Many believe we have come to Wall Street to transact some kind of business with its denizens, to strike a deal. But we have not come to negotiate. We have come to confront the darkness at its source, here, where the Big Apple sucks in more of the sap from the national tree than it needs or deserves, as if spliced from some Edenic forbearer. Serpent-size worms feast within, engorged on swollen fruit. Here, the world is chewed and digested into bits as tiny and fluid as the electrons that traders use to bring nations and homeowners to their needs.”

From Occupy Theory.

the myth of post-racial america

Reposting in full from Salon.com.

“In the annals of contemporary American history, the power of white denialism and the “post-racial” fallacy is not to be underestimated. As race scholar Tim Wise has recounted, in the early 1960s, most white Americans told Gallup pollsters that African-Americans had equal economic and educational opportunities to get ahead.”

“Those were the results, mind you, at the height of the Jim Crow era, when discrimination and white-on-black racial violence were out in the open and, in many cases, celebrated. So it’s no surprise that with that kind of overt bigotry now underground, white denialism of persistent institutional racism is alive and well, according to new national survey data analyzed by the Greenlining Institute.”

“As the watchdog group’s report finds:

• While many objective measures of health suggest that black Americans are in worse health overall than whites, a majority of whites believe blacks’ health is “about the same” as whites. A plurality of blacks, 53 percent, as well as 39 percent of Latinos and 50 percent of people from other racial backgrounds, believe that blacks are in worse health overall than whites.
• 67 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Latinos believe that blacks make less money than whites, a view that tracks with official statistics on income, wealth and unemployment. Only 37 percent of whites believe that blacks make less money than whites, with a narrow majority believing that blacks’ and whites’ incomes are about the same.

No doubt these numbers exemplify three distinct forces.”

“First, there’s willful ignorance by hardcore bigots. As the study documented, “the higher whites were in racial resentment the less likely they were to believe that there is a lot of racial discrimination in American today” while “racial resentment was found to be related to decreased support for the beliefs that blacks are in worse health than whites, earn less money than whites and that the federal government treats whites better than it treats blacks.” In other words, white racists who hate black people and discriminate against them are also unwilling to believe (or at least admit to believing) that black people face racism and discrimination. Somehow, white racists’ own racism never factors into their perceptions of the black experience.”

“Second, there’s the success of white victimization propaganda, the kind that insists whites are being hit hardest in the economy; the president harbors “a deep seated hatred of white people”; affirmative action punishes white people; and whites are generally persecuted for their ethnicity. Not surprisingly, a segment of America exposed to unhealthy amounts of Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and political punditry have internalized these fables and come to genuinely believe that anti-black racism no longer exists.”

“Finally, there’s the more benign, inadvertent ignorance of the plight of African-Americans by a white America that rarely gets a glimpse of the real black experience. That’s partly due to persistent housing and school segregation, which often physically separates the white and black communities. It’s also partly due to what might be called “The Huxtable Effect” first seen during the heyday of “The Cosby Show.””

“Back then, University of Massachusetts studies showed white audiences that watched the show disproportionately believed that the upper-class Huxtables represented the typical African American economic situation, and therefore many in those audiences came away believing racial inequality was a thing of the past. Today, the same trend may be happening with President Obama in the White House. Many whites may see that and simply conclude that discrimination is no longer a problem in America.”

“But as Obama told the Associated Press back in 1991 upon being elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review: “It’s crucial that people don’t see my election as somehow a symbol of progress in the broader sense, that we don’t sort of point to a Barack Obama any more than you point to a Bill Cosby or a Michael Jordan and say, ‘Well, things are hunky-dory.’””

“The same could be said for Obama’s election to the presidency. But as the numbers show, his words are still ignored by parts of white America that find their inherent truth too inconvenient.”

berkeley journal of sociology – understanding occupy

Understanding the Occupy Movement: Perspectives from the Social Sciences

preliminary notes on the figure of the refugee

Giorgio Agamben delves into the ancient Greek distinction between zoe and bios in an essay entitled “Form-of-Life.” These terms, he notes, are in fact nuanced definitions for what, in English especially, we call only life: “zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings… and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group” (Agamben 2000). He offers a further refinement within bios, however, with the hyphenated term form-of-life, or “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life” (3-4). Essential to the form-of-life is potentiality or possibility:

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power. Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings – as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves – are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life as political life. (Agamben 2000)

This is a crucial distinction for Agamben, because political life is form-of-life, and human life is always already predicated on a distinction above and beyond the zoe/bios split. It is not enough that humankind are not merely biologically alive, nor that we have a “form or manner of living,” which is true for all animals. A wild dog separated from a pack is both biologically alive and in possession of a form or manner of living; an ape raised in captivity may be both bored and well fed, but is in possession of both zoe and bios. It is only humankind, Agamben asserts, that requires form and happiness to go hand-in-hand.

This formulation of life, as form-of-life, is what allows Agamben to trace the originary relationship of sovereign power to be the state of exception, wherein the sovereign decides on the life or death of the subject. Form-of-life is effaced in this relation, and the power of life (its potentiality) is interrupted and disrupted by various apparatuses (Agamben 2009). He notes:

The Marxian scission between man and citizen is thus superseded by the division between naked life (ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the multifarious forms of life abstractly recodified as social-juridical identities (the voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that all rest on naked life.

Agamben is concerned with this trend, in that it separates human action from happiness (politics), redirecting the realm of action towards questions of mere survival or the lessening of exploitation rather than towards the “good life.” This concern leads him, in several works, to insist on a non-Statist politics:

A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting from the emancipation of such a division, with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty. The question about the possibility of a nonstatist politics necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of power available? (Agamben 2000)

What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself? … The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. (Agamben 1993)

This brings Agamben directly into conversation with a multitude of contemporary authors discussing community (i.e. Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida, Esposito) and the common (i.e. Hardt and Negri, Zizek). Form-of-life is contingent upon a relation between “common power” and thought:

Intellectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life. In the face of state sovereignty, which can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked life from its form, they are the power that incessantly reunites life to its form or prevents it from being dissociated from its form. (Agamben 2000)

Ultimately, form-of-life is neither the State-form, reliant upon sovereignty and therefore zoe, nor is it mere “community,” reliant upon identification and distinction; form-of-life is, rather, the potential or possibility of the good life as life, where means and ends are in and of themselves indistinguishable, where life and happiness are entirely co-incidental. Form-of-life is explicitly Spinozist, then, in that the particular form of expression is entirely incidental to the being-together of bodies in action. The coming politics, therefore, is not an identitarian politics, but a multitudinous politics, governed by affect, directed by singularities (of whatever kind…).

Understanding politics in this manner, though, brings a kind of absent presence to the center of any analsysis of the political: the figure of the figure of politics. The figure of the figure of politics… Agamben mobilizes a series of figures in his essays that each in their own way works to disfigure the political. In his early works, the figures “the man without content” and “infant” are mobilized; his later works are marked by more explicitly ‘political’ figures: homo sacer, the sovereign, the Muselmann, the whatever singularity. The figure of the figure operates throughout Agamben’s work as a sort of deconstructive force that in its ambiguity, opacity, critiques and complicates, or disfigures. He is slippery, unable to be pinned down to a positive politics; indeed, his most political text, The Coming Community, does not put forth a positive project as much as it poses a series of exemplary figures culminating in “Tiananmen” with the figure of “a herald from Beijing”: the nameless, faceless image of the man with a shopping bag standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square (Agamben 1993).

The figure of the coming politics, however, does not end with the “herald from Beijing,” and in fact comes to a rather pointed assertion in “Beyond Human Rights.” For Agamben, the figure of the figure of politics, par excellence, is not the citizen, nor is it man, the worker, sovereignty, the people, or rights (Agamben 2000). The ghostly image of the political is thus the figure of the refugee:

It is not only the case that the problem presents itself inside and outside of Europe with just as much urgency as then. It is also the case that, given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee. (Agamben 2000, 16)

occupy theory

PDF here.

Communiqué 1
Step 1: Occupy Universities. Step 2: Transform Them by Conor Tomás Reed
An Occupier’s Note by Suzahn E.
General Strike by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
On Power by Anteant
On Celebrities by ND
On Outdoor Space by Thomas Hintze and Laura Gottesdiener
Collective Statement from the Men’s Holding Cell, 1st Precinct
3 poems by Jed brandt
For and Against Precarity by Judith butler
The power of the People to Stand and be Counted by Michael Premo
Power in the Movement by Alex C.
Matrix as the Core Element by Rira
Possibility, Universality & Radicality: A Universal Chorus of Emancipation by Isham Christie
99%, a poem by Najaya Royal
The Ninety and Nine, a poem by Rose Elizabeth Smith