The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy (via).

I have very fond memories of Geuss’s lectures at Cambridge, particularly (and I think I’ve told this story to more-or-less everyone I’ve ever met), a lecture he once gave on structuralist Marxism. Throughout, he adduced various positions to Lacan, and I became gradually more confused because what little I knew about Lacan didn’t really seem to match up with what Geuss was saying. As the time for the end of the lecture drew near, Geuss summed up by saying “and so, these are the main outlines of structuralist Marxism as put forward by Lacan. [pause] Wait, did I say Lacan? Of course I meant Althusser, but…” followed by an additional ten minutes in which he explained why he had always seen Althusser’s killing his wife as an exemplary case of Lacanian psychoanalytic categories.

The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its admission to the International from the General Council, but got the reply: “Already in the case of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Council has declared that it recognizes no theological sections” (Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association).

Which is interesting a) because I never realized the YMCA tried to join the First International (presumably we can now claim the Village People song as a communist anthem) and b) because the First International rejected a group for being explicitly atheist, which sheds some interesting light on debates about whether Marx was a secularist. Also:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable (“Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”).

Which is presumably the source of Negri’s celebrated line “No pity for our enemies.”

And although I don’t have too many big hopes about—because I’m naturally a pessimist—about Barack, I think that here he has, if he will be elected, some space to do—to do things, you know, small symbolic gestures, but which are not only small symbolic gestures, like—I don’t know—a [inaudible] tribunal to clarify all this Guantanamo waterboarding stuff, repair relations with Latin America, open relations with Cuba, and so on.

It occurs to me that the transcriber’s faulty hearing was rather felicitous. I’m sure that if any US president sets up a tribunal to  “clarify all this Guantanamo waterboarding stuff,” they will indeed make sure that it remains inaudible.

Anyway, Owen’s post reminded me of a locally popular cult, the Landmark Forum, which seems to be based on a slightly odd combination of CBT and Heidegger; I’d say more, but I don’t want to infringe on the trademarks they’ve cleverly registered on all their technical terms (Derrida should have done that, he’d have made a killing). A couple of my friends are fans, and invited me along to an “introduction” session. It was quite an uplifting experience, in a way; being asked to spend $500 on a course intended to sort out my life made me realize I actually don’t have $500 worth of problems. Never have I experienced the icy waters of egotistical calculation more cheerfully. Owen’s post also reminded me of an excrutiating management training course I once went on, designed to teach me to become an “Investor in People.” I posted my notes from the course on an earlier blog that’s gone the way of all immaterial flesh, so I repeat them below for posterity.

• “Success is 20% skill, 80% attitude.” Good to know it’s been rigorously quantified.
• M-C-M′: “The most important element of management is continuous improvement.”
• Why are there two Norfolk accents? My colleague Hannah (Goth Civil Servant, to my left) has a King’s Lynn accent, which is lovely. The course leader, Sarah, has a posh Thetford accent, which is fucking horrible (I think the answer is class, and so, inter alia, capitalism).
• Post-Taylorisation is hyper-Fordism: Ironically, a greater focus on training is actually a sign of de-skilling. Look at the style/content of training courses – micro-managed, full of activities/group-work which give individuals no responsibility for actually learning stuff.
• Real subsumption: “You spend as much time at work as you do outside, so why not have fun while you’re there?”
• ‘Statistics’ show that 20% of workers are disengaged and entirely demotivated. These workers are “dangerous.” See Dangerous and lazy: A manifesto for the 20% (Désœvré, Forthcoming).
• Republicanism in the workplace: It’s no good to give people responsibility that’s responsibility that could be taken away (cf Deleuze and Guattari on the society of control – it’s a kind of immaterial tyranny).
• Giving people crappy jobs “is, if anything, demotivating.” You think?
• Maslow’s hieararchy of needs: 50 year old bourgeois psychology is great. It’s also impressively proletarianised, assuming that money is only required for the reproduction of labour power (or physiological need, as Maslow cutely calls it), rather than allowing for an element of freedom outside the workplace.
• Capitalist domination and working class sabotage: A case study teaches us how to deal with desertion. Also, the Stanford prison experiment, which didn’t need to happen, just watch industry/management for the last about 100 years: “Discipline can actually be a very motivating tool.”
• Communication: “The passing on or receiving of information between individuals so that it is understood.” Unfortunately, Derrida has yet to penetrate management training.
• Is Sarah fucked on speed? This morning she was all impossibly wide eyes and ludicrous enthusiasm. Now she’s fidgetting wildly, eyes darting around the room, snapping whenever she’s asked a question. Great.
• Metonymy: The curious resentment towards e-mail. “Oh, it stops us communicating. E-mail has become a master, instead of a tool.” Presumably a redirection of proper anti-capitalist feeling.
• Yay gratuitous ableism: An exercise involving someone pretending to be blind. Also, apparently, to have the vocabulary of a 5 year old, and to be very stupid.
• Is there any circumstance in which ‘this is really common sense’ is not an exact synonym of ‘I’m an idiot (and probably a fascist)’?
• Yay racism: “The blacks are great listeners, but they miss the body language. It’s like autism.”
• A crowded field: Is the aggressiveness/assertiveness/submissiveness triad the stupidest piece of management theory? It’s like an Aristotelian analysis of virtue for the really dumb.

When it gets to the stuff that lies outside of the so-called “information economy” - when it comes to the relatively minor items like a roof over your head or food on the table or a stable income, I’ll be damned if I can see how non-market social-sharing systems are going to help a whole lot.

Now this is right and, as the post and comments emphasize, open source is no threat to capitalism. But the important point of Hardt and Negri’s analysis of immaterial labor is to look at this the other way round; it’s not that open source will provide us with food and housing, but that the things that deprive us of food and housing are increasingly overlapping with issues of control over information. The science of biofuels and genetically modified corn are immaterial components in the current very material food shortages; likewise, new forms of finance capital are the immaterial specificities of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is kicking people out of their homes. On international politics, Empire remains accurate, too; indeed, the discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in making all wars in Empire interminable could have been written to describe the choice between Hilary “Bomb Iran” Clinton and Barack “Bomb Pakistan” Obama.

So, why the fall in Hardt and Negri’s stock? Adam is probably right that they rather made themselves irrelevant by failing to stick to their guns after 9/11. However, I wonder, too, if the problem isn’t partly that Hardt and Negri are, well, too political. Jodi has been writing about the circulating drive of left academia, in which the concept of the political is put forward precisely to prevent anyone advocating an actual program. Žižek manages to stay in this game because his programatic statements are bound up with his ironic Stalinism (though I think the real irony is that he actually is a Stalinist, just as I ironically like Britney Spears in order to cover up the fact that I’m a fan non-ironically, too). Hardt and Negri don’t have that ambiguity and perhaps for that reason have been less effective than Žižek of late.

Happy International Workers Day.

I think the only thing that could make Girls Aloud better would be if they started filming their videos in Britain’s decaying industrial heritage.

In other music news, two great Alabama 3 remixes.

Leaving aside the fundamental flaws in the social/political distinction, and the more specific idiocy of thinking that the current administration’s policies have nothing to do with matters of economics or class, this move to the Constitution, which is the signature of the American Arendtian, is, I think, one of the fundamental enabling fantasies of liberalism. One of the favorite tropes of The West Wing sees one character (it doesn’t matter which) give a long, eloquent, impassioned speech defending the vital moral importance of some policy or other; pragmatic objections by the speakers interlocutor are sharply brushed aside; just as the speech reaches its moral climax, the speaker turns again to his pragmatic counterpart and says, “but of course you’re right, we can’t implement this policy.” The point being to draw a sharp distinction between the inherent ethical goodness of the characters, and the unfortunate pragmatic business of actually existing politics.

The idea of the autonomy of the political is precisely this kind of West Wing ethics An autonomous political realm is posited, allowing for a contrast with the actually-existing corrupt and self-serving “politics” of today. But this is just a mystification: the politics that is inseperable from the social and the private is the essential form of politics, and if such a thing as a politics separate from capitalism is possible at all, it is something that has to be imagined and constructed, not something that already exists as a regulative ideal.

Now, interestingly, I wonder if we don’t see much the same kind of structure in Badiou’s claim that all ethics is situational. I find Badiou’s own example of medical ethics inherently plausible, but I know wonder if I should. Is there an ethics of medicine, strictly separate from the enmeshment of medicine in social structures? An example that seems much less plausible for Badiou’s thesis is that of journalistic ethics: as the history of journalism is coextensive with the history of capitalism, the interlinking of the two, and hence the lack of any journalistic ethics separable from (and opposable to) capitalism, seems to me undeniable.

And of course Badiou also asserts the autonomy of the political (although in a rather different way from Arendt), and rejects the category of political economy. I need to think more about this, but these two moves strike me as deeply suspect.

Of course, this particular piece of art didn’t actually involve any abortions; but it did a great job of highlighting fault-lines among those who consider themselves pro-choice.