Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

No hope for the future

I used to hope for the apocalypse. Now there is no hope at all.Some Marxists have seen the current financial crisis as a vindication of catastrophism, as proof that capitalism will be brought down by its own crisis tendencies. But as faithful to the line points out:

Years were spent refining an analysis of capitalism that, in the broad, stressed the improbability of debt-fuelled boom continuing forever; noted the underlying weaknesses of, not just British capital, but capitalism globally; and highlighted the continuing instability of the system, precisely so that at just this moment they could be poised to offer solutions. Yet the arrival of a genuine and epoch-making economic crisis – of the properly old-fashioned kind (bank runs, fraud and larceny on a grand scale, insolvencies, mass unemployment… you know the score) – has found them largely blinking in the headlights.

The financial crisis, indeed, is the final refutation of catastrophism, making clear the fantasy that sustained it. Read more↴

Bridging the class divide

Christ, this is repulsive. An organization focused on ending classism by “bridging the class divide.” Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t set up by some old lefty to demonstrate the limitations of the theraputic model of identity politics. I’ve sometimes been worried that certain discussions of, for instance, white privelege, end up being about allowing white people to feel good about themselves, but surely this is the nadir: “because of intense class segregation in the U.S., we don’t benefit from each other’s strengths and grow past our limitations.” Oh yes, because that’s the problem with class society; we don’t get to “grow” from the splendid diversity of poverty. Read more↴

“An imperialism that spreads out and puffs up”

The world of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is in no way the world of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in which we were “compelled to face with sober senses” overwhelming objective developments taking place or unfolding before our very eyes. This world is replaced in short order…by a world inaccessible to our “sober senses,” a world where illusions exert real force and are in fact the conditions on which action is based…. The external world no longer carries any obvious meaning; we are faced instead with the inscrutability of images that are impenetrable to the underlying reality to which they are supposed to refer, or which they purport to represent (Paul Thomas, Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved, 101).

Benjamin quotes a contemporary opinion that the crinoline represents the "spread out and puffed up" imperialism of the Second Empire This description of the Second Empire as a world of masquerade and appearence reminds me of Benjamin’s Arcades; but it also reminds me of Marx’s description of the state in On the Jewish Question. Read more↴

On Shia LaBoeuf and the Big Other

screenshot1 I saw Eagle Eye on the plane back from England; it’s not as good as Singh is Kinng, which I also watched, but it’s not bad (except for Shia LaBoeuf’s acting; he’s like an ugly Keanu Reeves). I thought there was something kind of interesting about the central premise, which involves the Boeuf receiving orders from some mysterious agency that appears to have complete control of all electronic systems; sending text messages, looking through security cameras, derailing trains. The falsehood of this premise is pretty obvious; there is no homogenous system of “electronic equipment,” but a vast range of unconnected and incompatible electronic systems. The vague category of technology provides a materialization of the paranoid fantasy that is the traditional support of the conspiracy thriller, but it’s not less (and, I would imagine, no less obviously) a fantasy for all that. Read more↴

Bureaucracy and biopolitics

The English people today are addicted to the rhythms of their own industrial and imperial valediction: they like saying goodbye to the past, and saying goodbye to the past is the single biggest thing they can’t say goodbye to.

screenshot-jamies-ministry-of-food-learn-to-cook-pass-it-on-jamie-oliver So wrote Andrew O’Hagan in the Guardian last weekend, and he was accurate at least as regards his own article. He’s unfortunately not alone in expressing regret about a supposedly backwards-looking working class by looking back nostalgically to the future-oriented proletariat of years past. There may be something right about his description of today’s working class cut off both from their commonality and their common history (although the exact time of this common past seems unclear; was it the ’70s, or some time before George Orwell?); but nostalgia, I think, is always and necessarily false. Read more↴

Barack Obama, neo­conserv­ative?

When Žižek wants to support mainstream leftish politicians, he argues that they make clearer the essential indistinguishability of mainstream candidates; when the right is in power, the superficial differences make arguments for the necessity of radical change appear false (we certainly saw this with Bush). But when Žižek wants to oppose these politicians, he argues that they, precisely because of their left-wing appearance, are better placed to implement right-wing policies than right-wing politicians. How might this look in the case of Obama? Read more↴