This w/end, A and I reflected a little on Virno's thesis of postfordism as "the communism of capital." In other words, while it seems that many have a perfectly good critique of the fordist regularity, there's not a lot of consideration given to 'postfordist enjoyment': the injunction to consume, circulate, be a subject that Lazzarato talks about, but also Virno, where he talks about the cynicism of the multitude. The blind indifference to content that commodification gives rise to, the domination of a particular form of sociality, communication, etc as exchange and so on. This reminded me of a wierd moment during my time at Uni, where people calling themselves 'Foucauldians' -- as if Foucault himself would have felt comfortable with such a systematisation -- engaged in what can only be described as the injunction to speak about sex, all the time. What was peculiar about this, of course, is that this injunction to speak, confess, this exhibitionism of the body and 'the soul' is precisely what Foucault argued was the new form of control, subjectivation. So, these self-declared 'Foucauldians' were not so much readers of Foucault but instances of what he set out to analyse the emergence of. And it's not like reading Foucault -- assuming they did read rather than carry it around under their arms as a badge of belonging -- actually managed to interrupt that gleeful membership of the society of control. The only way I can explain this is that the dull compulsion of 'economic' relations -- which are clearly not confined to a space called 'the economy' -- are so great. Nothing new there, I guess. But I still find myself amazed at the inversion of politics that this is capable of producing. Like the small bunch of people who recently called an event 'Precari-Us?'. Unlike the article I wrote of the same name before this, the answer they give is a fairly clear 'yes', given the speakers, for one. In other words, an instance of those processes which I set out to analyse the emergence of, not give licence to. So, I guess I feel inclined to disassociate myself from that particular 'activist' niche market, whose indifference to content (to politics) has become so predictable I shouldn't be surprised.

Just read Werner Hamacher's essay "Working Through Working", on National Socialism and Work. Some of it covers Hitler's MayDay speeches, most of it is about how National Socialism pivots around the veneration of work -- specifically, work as "the being and life of our people". Creepy biopolitics at its finest. Here's part of it: "In his address of 1 May 1933, he [Hitler] celebrates Labor Day in a natural-mystical sense as the 'day of life's becoming' and 'awakening nature,' and thereby at the same time, as the 'day of winning back our proper force and strength.' As the day of return, of coming back, of recovery, repetition, and winning back, as the day of restitution and reinstitution of this 'natural' and 'proper' 'force,' May Day is for Hitler 'thereby also and at the same time,' the day of 'that productive work that knows no narrow limits, that is not bound to the trade union, to the factory and the office--the day of a work that we want to recognize and advance wherever it is executed in the good sense for the being and life of our people'." I forgot to add, but will now: at the last official/TU MayDay rally I went to, the TU slogan of the day was "No return to the 1930s, Full Employment Now". The troubling irony being that the 'solution' to the unemployment of the 1930s was forced labour, slaughter, destruction. There were some minor responses at the time, including a small bunch of black-clad kids who held a huge banner over the City Squ which read: 'Work Until You Die.' And a troupe which wove its way around chanting 'No Return to the 1930s, Colorise Films Now.'

So, from that collection of quotes Nate, do you think N&H want to have it both ways, to frame the changing relationship between production and reproduction as an epochal shift as well as note that it has always been dodgy to distinguish (as in make a hierarchy in ostensibly oppositional politics) between them? I pulled out a book from my shelf the other day by Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia, 1788-1850. It's actually quite good, lots of historical detail. But thumbing through it again, I was left wondering what the interval between the work done by feminist labour historians (such as Alford and many others) in the 1970s, and the reiteration by N&H more recently means. Is it because these themes of reproduction were waylaid in the meantime, and if so, by whom? To put it another way: does it have more to do with the specific politics of Potere Operaio and Autonomia? Functioning, therefore, as a kind of self-criticism of their own perspectives? Because, sometimes, it feels a bit johnny-come-lately to me. Or does its recapitulation have more to do with the specific arguments by N&H about immaterial labour? If the latter, it's interesting that accounts of such often tend to use male-dominated occupations as the exemplar of immaterial labour (even if the specific quotes from Hardt here suggest otherwise). Anyway, I think Hardt is wrong about this: "Force is secondary in the establishment and maintenance of capitalist relations of property; the logic of legitimation is its primary support." What a sheltered existence he must lead. Force is originary and ever-present, historically and logically. (I think this is some of what marks the differences between N&H and, say, Caffentzis. Moreover, here is where I think Hardt's US-Eurocentrism reasserts itself. No analysis of the prison regime, detention, the rise of forced labour (including in the US and EU), war, the turmoil of most of the world. The blood and shit of money just disappears. (Maybe, if we wait another decade, they'll catch up with post-colonial analyses too.) As for "legitimation" being the primary support of capitalist relations - Haven't we been down this road before, with Habermas to some extent? Habermas's argument went something like this: because of the shift to real subsumption, communication (and 'the public sphere') become the principal sites of legitimation. Sound familiar? Habermas, however, was making these arguments from the late 1960s. I thought I'd append this, post the first 'save', because it kind of informs part of the above. I've been pondering 'public sphere' stuff a bit lately, along with Brett -- we extended the short 'Physiognomy of Origin' piece into a longer article, just finished and sent off yesterday, or was it the day before ... Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the events there discussed raise a whole lot of questions about people's relationship + approach to 'the public sphere', whether conceived as a kind of ephereal but nevertheless singular space in which all public communication happens and against which it's possible to define politics and their effectivity, virtue, etc -- or whether more concretely as a question of whether to send letters to the newspaper, etc. Of course, the first has a definite relation to the latter; but the latter doesn't have to be driven by the former. Anyway, Geoff Elay argues that the notion of 'the public sphere' is 'useful for activating a sense of ordinary and efficacious citizenship today.' ['Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere' Positions: 10.1 (2002)] A fairly standard, dull commonplace of liberal rhetoricity, which is to say: a convenient, metaphysical distancing of the 'efficacious citizen' from its nationalist (not to mention 'hard working') registers. Elsewhere, Jodi Dean -- "Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture" [Public Culture 13.2 (2001)] -- argues for replacing the concept of 'public sphere' with that of 'civil society', because 'Unlike a view of the public sphere that limits the political to rational conversation among people who respect each other as equals, the concept of civil society is part of a political theory that acknowledges that politics is about unequal exchanges among people who have fundamentally different ways of reasoning, who have differing conceptions of what is normal and what is appropriate. Unlike theories based on the public sphere, those employing a concept of civil society can interrogate processes of normalization and fundamentalization that seek to bound and limit what can be understood as politics. Such theories may even be able to conceive of everyday actions and interactions as contributions to a vital democracy.' And while I think Dean's effort to shift from the Habermasian fantasy of 'the public sphere' is a good one, I'm not sure it's possible to insist on quite such a distance between 'democracy', 'civil society' and, well, the Habermasian fantasy. Which, in any case, is founded on the workings of abstract labour, equivalence, etc, even if it assumes their hierarchical, segmented aspects more clearly. Dean noted that there are problems with the 'civil society' thing: 'if civil society as mediatized cyberia is implicated in the spread of transnational corporate technoculture, it may seem as if opportunities for critique of the market as well as of new forms of colonial expansion are lost.' Indeed, but that gets put aside, ultimately in favour of upholding 'critical democratic theory' -- 'it may seem as if democracy itself is compromised as an ideal.' And what would be the danger, exactly, of setting aside this ideal once and for all? No doubt the implict, unexplored answer here is 'tyranny', but to the extent that it remains unexplored, the question of the complicity of 'critical democratic theory' with the tyranny of the market, the spread of transnational corporate technoculture and colonial expansion is well and truly set aside. One question lurking on the edge of this is the extent to which the injunction to participate in 'the public sphere' -- or even more directly, 'civil society' -- is actually the demand on cognitive labour to send itself to market. In other words: a real confusion between the pursuit of freedom and the freedoms of the market. A much better account of the rhetorics of citizenship is here. In this case, an argument by the often-excellent Werner Bonefeld about the 'repubic of debt', linking the rise of precarious work with the rise of citizenship talk. Not to mention an refreshingly good argument for why talking about cognitive labour as the exemplar of precarious labour is politically, historically dodgy. Dean does have a nice pic on her site.

shoot for the head Yes, I should be doing other things (and Nate's suggestion for more specific research on biopolitics is a good point) but thought instead I'd take a short zombieshuffle down Theory Street instead -- zombie flics being excellent ways to pass the time thinking about the body, biopolitics, mass and movement -- not to mention gender, racism, sexuality and 'community', eg: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. Mark Fisher (k-punk) on use-value and zombification: "For a chilling image of how SF Capital induces auto-zombification in the master class, you only have to look at the face of our glorious leader [Blair]: that ashen carnival mask, its grim, cheerless Joker-grin flashing with ritual efficiency, its blank eyes illuminated by empty evangelism, darkened by perpetual irritation - the PM's being run by Videodrome ... and no-one owns Death TV." Eugene Thacker on biopolitics and zombie flics: "One always makes an exception for 'life.' Is there any other way? In this regard biopolitics is precisely the articulation of 'life' as an exception. There is no better cultural expression of this than the films, novels, and games that constitute the 'zombie-epidemic' genre. Having gained a great deal of popularity recently with films such as 28 Days Later, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the slapstick Shaun of the Dead, and an un-ironic remake of Dawn of the Dead, the genre has also expanded into comics (Criminal Macabre) and video games (the Resident Evil franchise). But the figure of the zombie – the living dead, the mass of living corpses that are only bodies, that are only bare life – is much older than this. [And so on] Two very different approaches in the above, but interesting nevertheless. And not quite zombie, but close: Terri Schiavo: Bride of 'Compassionate Conservatism'.

I couldn't resist filling out the Kavafis reference, because the poem is both relevant and very funny, very dry. (With thanks to Jim for the prompt.) Waiting for the Barbarians Written by Konstantinos Kavafis (anglicised: Cavafy) b. April 29, 1863 - d. same date, 1933. What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are to arrive today. Why such inaction in the Senate? Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws? Because the barbarians are to arrive today. What laws can the Senators pass any more? When the barbarians come they will make the laws. Why did our emperor wake up so early, and sits at the greatest gate of the city, on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are to arrive today. And the emperor waits to receive their chief. Indeed he has prepared to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed many titles and names of honor. Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out today in their red, embroidered togas; why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets, and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds; why are they carrying costly canes today, wonderfully carved with silver and gold? Because the barbarians are to arrive today, and such things dazzle the barbarians. Why don't the worthy orators come as always to make their speeches, to have their say? Because the barbarians are to arrive today; and they get bored with eloquence and orations. Why all of a sudden this unrest and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become). Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly, and all return to their homes, so deep in thought? Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. And some people arrived from the borders, and said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution. Also: He who longs to strengthen his spirit must go beyond obedience and respect, He will continue to honor some laws but he will mostly violate both law and custom. (from Strengthening the Spirit, 1903) By the by, does anyone know the origin of the slogan, 'Foreigners, don't leave us alone with these Australians [or substitute relevant nationality here]'?

I said I'd do a review of Elizabeth Grosz's new book, The Nick of Time, for API. Not because I've got much from her work, but because it's always seemed to me to display the worst aspects of academic labour generally, and CultStud more specifically: canonical, textboook production, position, position, position. And this is another chance to talk about the forms and limits of cognitive labour. Although, I was hoping it would be more than just this. I've been trying to come up with a way of being less dismissive, but it's difficult when someone begins by writing that "This book functions primarilly as a reminder to social, political and cultural theorists ... a rememberance of what we have forgotten. ... the nature, the ontology of the body, the conditions under which bodies are enculturated, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency." It's difficult to not be dismissive because I don't feel particularly interpellated by this "we" Grosz talks about. I mean who was it that 'forgot' about these things, other than Grosz? Yes, there is a minor attempt to note this, to talk about the book as a corrective of her own past work, but the form remains the same (canonical, textbookish), and the content is kind of peculiar. Like, talking about Nietzsche and Bergson as "negelected" writers? Neglected by whom? Or, worse, talking about 'race' as a given -- no historical, contingent sense of 'race', let alone much engagement with the vast amounts of materialist theories of 'race': Balibar, Guillaumin, etc. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that Grosz was (is?) such a keen anti-marxist that materialism vanished along with it. Which she feels the need, now, to remember. But the form of the rememberance continues the forgetting. And the forgetting is so ivory-toweresque that I get antsy. So, trying to write a review, I've been trying to find other reviews of The Nick of Time, of which I've found none. Well, people mention the book, reiterate the flyleaf blurb and quotes from friends, but I haven't found anyone who engages with the book itself. In other words, all I've found are markers of circulation, empty citation, where the only thing at stake is the market, niche market in this case. Though, trawling the web I did find an interview with at least one fan who carefully reflected on the terms of the specific fandom at work: "What do you dislike about Elizabeth Grosz? - I find myself recoiling from that question, because I do dislike what she does in her book production, but she does it well and I buy her books. So, at some level, I resent the fact that books like hers have a market at all, and more than that, that I am her market. What she does is, she takes *bites* on conceptual issues, and puts them into fashionable thematic categories, her books are analogous to compilation albums where music samples from old favourites make up the seed idea of each song. I can see what she is doing, dealing astutely with a readership, giving us what we all want - a position on things." The rest here.

The recent edition of CultureMachine focusses on the themes of biopolitics, nomos, bios, etc. Part of the editorial: "However interesting these variations on the theme of biopolitics [those of Virno, Negri, et al], one obvious problem lies with their insensitivity to the moments of rupture and divergence that Foucault's historiography sought to foreground. In all of these accounts, the 'bios' of biopolitics is in danger of becoming as expansive a term as Marx's concept of social reproduction - a black box where everything that had previously been discarded from economic and political philosophy is conveniently recuperated. What gets lost in the process is the temporal precision of Foucault's account and its attention to the minutiae of institutional practice." I'm still reading my way through the edition. But, along with Nate, I'd been pondering the conflation of 'biopolitics' and 'labour power', and (for my part) trying to articulate some concerns, which are perhaps a little different to those raised by Thacker. Anyway, maybe the essays in CultureMachine will help to clarify some of the issues. Also in the same edition is another discussion topic, that of Subject versus subjectivation. Of which Bifo has this to say: "It is thanks to Michel Foucault that the theme of subjectivity has definitively been freed from its Hegelian and historicist legacy, and thought again in a new context – that of biopolitical discipline. The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived."

Baxter05 -- sublogo: "a convergence for human rights" -- begins with a quote from John Pilger: "Places like Baxter belong in totalitarian countries, not democracies. They take away the basic human rights that ought to be the cornerstone of a democratic state, and their presence diminishes every one us. They should be closed down." Leaving aside that Pilger is a paternalistic git (and I'll get on to why he's so wrong later), I'm not sure why "human rights" and "democracy" have resurfaced (after a thankful respite) as the preferred rhetorics of mobilisation. Of course, Baxter05 is politics-as-recycling, but just that little bit worse: politics-as-makework, politics as the aggregation of bodies-as-consumers of leftoid product. I'd be surprised if there was a protests (by those outside Baxter) within 5kms of the Baxter internment camp -- as the trotocracies try and persuade themselves that they're the true representatives of the working class by representing protesters to police. So, the prospect that events -- some kind of encounter between detainees and those outside the fences, beyond the ritualised megaphones, passivity and spectacular -- will reconstitute the horizon of politics is slim. But all the conflicts over centralisation / decentralisation won't really confront some underlying assumptions (about representation, unity, etc) unless notions of "human rights" and "democracy" are contended with. And, more importantly, without escaping the political horizon of "human rights" and "democracy", there really isn't much prospect of responding to the internment camps in any significant way. Pilger is wrong: internment camps are the necessary counterpart of democracies, the point at which those who are excluded from definitions of the demos ['the people'] are subjected to the reign of the kratos [the state]. There's no such thing as a consistently anti-racist democrat: at some point the democrat will place a limit on who belongs and who has rights, and in order to rationalise the denial of human rights, will dehumanise those whose rights have been denied. There are not many ways to get around Aristotle. But in the immediate context of the organisation of the protest at Baxter, there's just not much thought about relating content to form. Decentralised, disseminative forms of organisation aren't just a question of which brand-name you follow: trot v anarch or autonome. It's a question of which form of organisation doesn't reproduce the problem you're setting out to confront. In this case, the politics of "democracy" and "human rights" are part of the problem of the internment camps, not just in form, but in content.

I was reminded of this excellent article by Jon Beasley-Murray, "Ethics as Post-Political Politics". Which concludes: "As much as a re-examination of Spinoza means 'abandoning the last vestiges of teleologism' in its refusal of the dialectic (and its emphasis on subjective constitution), we must beware of the re-inscription of faith performed by Negri in the course of his analysis. Although Negri's turn to ethics is a useful dislocation from the ritual of political rhetoric, in Bourdieu we see the continuing presence of unconscious investments in the apparent certainties of belief and the limits beyond which expansionist coalition politics and ethical constitution dare not go: 'like legitimate culture, the counter-culture leaves its principles implicit (which is understandable since it is rooted in the dispositions of an ethos) and so is still able to fulfil functions of distinction by making available to almost everyone the distinctive poses, the distinctive games and other external signs of inner riches previously reserved for intellectuals.' " [There are many problems with Bourdieu (his nationalism for one), but his accounts of 'distinction' and academic labour, I think written quite early in his career, are very sharp.) Beasley-Murray refers in that essay to Eugene Holland's essay, "Spinoza and Marx", which takes up the debate between Macheray and Negri over Spinoza, and is also worth reading for thinking about Negri's (and Balibar's) argument that there is a difference between 'early' and 'late' Spinoza. The stakes of which are whether 'absolute democracy' is a particularly radical proposition. I keep pondering the question of how ostensible critiques of vanguardism (and teleology) can re-inscribe the dynamics of such a politics without a sense of either what's at stake here or what vanguardism might mean beyond its particular (or simply explicit) leninist variants. And I keep coming back to the specific character of 'cognitive labour'. Plus I keep having to remind myself (or be reminded by others) that it's not a matter of will every time I get amazed (sometimes angry) at the propensity of so many to re-assert a vanguardist politics (often this vanguard looks a lot like, well, an idealised version of themselves). ... If a triangle were to conceive of God, God would be a triangle -- Spinoza was right about some things. Maybe I should be more thorough in abandoning a notion of the Subject, whose acts and politics are a apparently matter of will, unconditioned. But there are surely limits to this: not simply because I reckon there's such a thing as responsibility (an ability to respond to the call of the Other) -- which is traumatic, but ethics is traumatic or it isn't ethical (Levinas). But also because a critique of subjectivism doesn't licence an objectification, treating people as if they are mere cyphers of social processes and locations. All this would could ever produce is a paternalistic, manipulative (yes, Machiavellian) tone which treats people like they don't understand anything very much and so need to be spoken to as if they are always mired in superstition. An aside: I think this is kind of what Negri does at times, a perfectly proper Spinozian writing strategy, I guess you could say -- though not what it should be possible to take from Spinoza unless you thought philosophy should be confined to, as Spinoza thought, the priestly caste. Whatever else there is to say about Spinoza, he thought the 'multitude' were dangerous, superstitious clods who couldn't understand complex, radical philosophy if they tried. Or, it would mean a great big cop-out -- no one is responsible, can respond. An impasse, which seems to me is only broken by specific encounters which shake up the ossified senses of 'I' or 'we' and make ethics (and politics) possible, whether in the case of border struggles or organising around precarious work. Aside from creating these kinds of encounters, and messing up a sense of 'we', I'm not sure 'activism' -- or publication -- is capable of confronting the kind of politics which reinscribes vanguardism and teleologies as the performative aspects of cognitive labour.