Steven Shaviro writes about post-celebrity celebrity while NBC is running trailers for the new American version of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (regrettably, due to the intervention of the courts, not starring Rod Blagojevich). The arrival of this show from the UK disappoints me a little; American TV, with the respectful celebrity reporting of Entertainment Tonight and the always-suited late-night talk show hosts, seemed like the last redoubt of the aura of celebrity, which the celebrity reality genre decisively does away with.
It’s not a surprise that the celebrity reality genre arrived in the UK so much earlier than in the US; as with so much else (Thatcher, financialization), the UK exhibits the tendencies of late capitalism in a purer form, with celebrity having been abolished over there a long time ago. Read more↴
There have been a number of great posts recently at Object Oriented Philosophy about being a grad student and/or academic, and the writing process in particular; but this latest I find utterly incomprehensible:
I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez, maybe 2 hours, maybe 3 hours…. The point is…I paid no attention to style. That’s for later.
Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve read or heard advice like this, but I’ve never understood it. What does it mean to write without paying attention to style? What is writing without style? Isn’t writing the process of taking something that doesn’t quite exist, the content of ones thoughts, and making it exist by supplying it with a form? So to write without paying attention to style would be to not write at all.
Graham Harman’s written quite a bit about the importance of style, as a matter of essence rather than mere decoration; so it’s odd to see him suggesting the virtues (indeed, the possibility) of writing without attention to style. I wonder what he means by it.
I’ve quoted William Morris from A Dream of John Ball before:
But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
I was reminded of it when reading this passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire last week:
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success. Their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds; ecstasy is the order of the day. But they are short-lived; soon they have reached their zenith, and a long hangover takes hold of society before it learns to soberly assimilate the results of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own cours, and return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew. They deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts; they seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever. They recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: “Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here.”
Poulantzas calls the state “the material condensation of…a relationship among classes and class fractions.” What I think he means by this is something rather complicated and interesting. Poulantzas’s point, as I understand it, is not simply that the state is necessitated by class divisions (which would be functionalism, which he rejects) or that class divisions cause the state (which would require a causal relationship between the base and the superstructure, which he also rejects). Rather, I think Poulantzas sees the state as a real abstraction. Class divisions are reflected at an ideological level, and this ideological reflection itself has a material form: the state.
I’ve been trying to pin down more precisely the logic of this position, because it strikes me as an extremely powerful form of materialism. I’m reminded of Damasio’s attempt to understand the mind as a physical reflection of the state of the body. The advantage of Marxism, though, is that the physical instantiations of the mental are no longer arbitrarily limited to the individual human brain. Here Marxism is also light-years ahead of eliminative materialism, as eliminative materialism is cartesianism in scientistic drag, still looking for mental phenomena somewhere inside the pineal gland. But thought doesn’t happen in brains, it happens in hands and throats, and pots of curry and flywheels.
…and I’d like to take a minute just sit right there I’ll tell you how I came to advocate a liquidationist position in the Communist Party of Great Britain.
After I’d stopped laughing at Rowenna Davis’s description of Martin Jacques as a “credible leftist advocate,” I realized the story of the erstwhile Marxism Today section of the CPGB is not really very funny. When Tony Blair and people decided that an electable social democratic party would have to make some rapprochement with neoliberalism, they, eventually, ended up in government. Martin Jacques made the same ideological move, and ended up writing newspaper columns tailing whatever New Labour had just done. So little reward for such ideological upheaval.
The other interesting thing in that article is the way it depends on constructing two fantasy figures of “the left.” Read more↴
It’s not a surprise that the celebrity reality genre arrived in the UK so much earlier than in the US; as with so much else (Thatcher, financialization), the UK exhibits the tendencies of late capitalism in a purer form, with celebrity having been abolished over there a long time ago. Read more↴