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On the Open letter of support

In response to the open letter initiated by Alberto Toscano and Peter Hallward in support of the protests in Iran one of my friends recently wrote to me angrily:

‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–2008_Kenyan_crisis
Kenyan elections -

proven electoral fraud up tp 15%
proven deaths up to 1,500
proven internal displacement – up to quarter of a million

THAT IS FAR MORE THAN ZIMBAWE, IRAN, etc

therefore why didn’t the same Secular Wank Left intellectual
respond to that in the same way

this is the perspective from which I judge the current events

look at the bandwagon
and they are comparing this event to 1789 French revolution
(O Please!)

secular elites writing their secular elite fantasies
onto the elites of Northern Tehran (don’t worry they speak English) deluding themselves!’

yes, it is quite strange to see all of them here at the same time indeed. can it be that despite being incredibly, politically important- aspiring nuclear power, axis of evil etc- Iran is also deeply wired into the oriental imagination of the english sepaking publsihing industry, its discourses (via foucault and the french connection) as well as the certain artistic/academic networks?

Yet how many english speaking artists for example did work on tshinhvali or the genocides of tamils or chechens? A minority i suppose. does it mean that those promoting the very concrete sufferings of say tibetans or palestinians into the symbol of UNIVERSAL human victimisation of all times and places are demonic? The open letter doesn’t do this however, it merely states:

‘a government which claims to represent the will of its people can only do so if it respects the most basic preconditions for the determination of such a will: the freedom of the people to assemble, unhindered, as an inclusive collective force; the capacity of the people, without restrictions on debate or access to information, to deliberate, decide and implement a shared course of action.’

‘But they are the minority elites, merely middle class students and gucci
revolutionsries of northern tehran’ – yes maybe, predominantly, but so what? speaking purely in terms of urban students as a revolutionary class, it was them, the urban youth, that Mao mobilized first for the project of cultural revolution (as well as the hell that followed from it, which I can’t discuss now), im not even talking about the the 68 in europe or greece this year, where the relatively well-off students and school schildren played the major role in galvanising the protests. In fact, in all of these cases, the general strikes and the involvement of the workers only followed later to my knowledge, which was also true of the 79 iranian revolution. Its not that the students are the vanguard, but that anyone can partake in making the world more equal. Regardless who had the majority even the clearly pro-establishment commentator like Barzegar in the guardian’s ‘Iranian Identity crises’ (in other words ‘Iranian class antagonism’) estimates the demonstrations (in Tehran) numbering hundreds of thousands, and do we actually care about the framework of the ellections in anyway or the fact that Ahmadinajad managed to buy off a large segment of the rural and lumpenproletariate with his pathetic PR compaigns of pork distribution and so on? Once again about the ‘bourgeoise’ nature of the movement: in both gramsci, marx and spivak (even though they would term it differently) there is no essentialist, moralist problem with the elemnents of the middle classes (or bourgeoise culture) it can simply be an ‘ally of the proletariate’ (or whatever) or not.

And another thing, I am not worried that the tehrani gucci revolutionaries don’t speak english, i am worried that by Secular Wank Itellectual (which would include Talal Asad as he is also one of the signatories) is actually meant Intellectuals with EGALITARIAN values, where anything that smacks of egalitarianism is meant to be ‘WESTERN’ (an utterly meaningless term)and culturally eurocentric and imperialist. By the way, neither the protesters nor the petition actually is about demanding a secular state, it demands the application of the egalitarian prinicples without in any way denying the achievemnts of poverty reduction and irradication of illiteracy by the IR (just like it was the case with the ussr), The protests are the legitimate expression of the frustration with the current bureaucratic, state capitalism, which what IR is. We should also not delude ourselves with the end of nepotism there. How is it exaclty and significant way more effective in combating wives of presidents getting into the top of the heirrarchies then the other nationalist states (and i am neither a nationalist nor much of a patriot nor a statist?). Ayatolla Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei- the prospective succesor for the position of the supreme leader and all the relatives of Ahmadinajad.. in key positions make it clear that IR suffers from all the same deseases of USSR under Breznev. Oh, but i forgot, there is another male bureaucracy called the Council of Experts, with the billioner Rafsanjani and his allies there who may block Kojtaba from becoming elected and MAY replace the position of the ‘Supreme Leader’ with another council made out of a 3 or 4 such leaders.. well, that’s ok then, what a marvlous democracy, someone else will get hand hand picked, no need to worry. I don’t need to be writing all of that, do i? this all is rather a common knowledge.

i understand some people’s indignation when the radical philosophy collective doesn’t turn up to support the SOAS cleaners, but it is simply cynical to disregard the demonstrators in Iran as merely pro imperialist, twitter yuppies and the letter of support as somehow opportunistic or whatever.

Instead of such cynicism, i hope there will be simply more solidarity with everyone struggling regardless of their class and with everyone who try to help them.

________________________________________________________

Friday 19 June 2009

This morning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded an end to the massive and forceful demonstrations protesting the controversial result of last week’s election. He argued that to make concessions to popular demands and ‘illegal’ pressure would amount to a form of ‘dictatorship’, and he warned the protestors that they, rather than the police, would be held responsible for any further violence.

Khamenei’s argument sounds familiar to anyone interested in the politics of collective action, since it appears to draw on the logic used by state authorities to oppose most of the great popular mobilisations of modern times, from 1789 in France to 1979 in Iran itself. These mobilisations took shape through a struggle to assert the principle that sovereignty rests with the people themselves, rather than with the state or its representatives. ‘No government can justly claim authority’, as South Africa’s ANC militants put it in their Freedom Charter of 1955, ‘unless it is based on the will of all the people.’

Needless to say it is up to the people of Iran to determine their own political course. Foreign observers inspired by the courage of those demonstrating in Iran this past week are nevertheless entitled to point out that a government which claims to represent the will of its people can only do so if it respects the most basic preconditions for the determination of such a will: the freedom of the people to assemble, unhindered, as an inclusive collective force; the capacity of the people, without restrictions on debate or access to information, to deliberate, decide and implement a shared course of action.

Years of foreign-sponsored ‘democracy promotion’ in various parts of the world have helped to spread a well-founded scepticism about civic movements which claim some sort of direct democratic legitimacy. But the principle itself remains as clear as ever: only the people themselves can determine the value of such claims. We the undersigned call on the government of Iran to take no action that might discourage such determination.

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, Università IUAV di Venezia, Venice
ALAMDARI, Kazem, California State University, Los Angeles
ALLIEZ, Eric, Middlesex Universtiy, UK
AMSLER, Sarah S., Language and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham
ANDERSON, Kevin B., Professor of Sociology and Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
ASAD, Talal, Graduate Center, City University of New York
BADIOU, Alain, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
BALIBAR, Etienne, Paris X, Nanterre, and University of California, Irvine
BALKAN, Nesecan,Hamilton College
BANUAZIZI, Ali, Professor of Political Science and Director, Program in Islamic Civilization and Societies, Boston College
BAYAT, Asef, Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, Leiden University
BEHROOZ, Maziar, Associate Professor of Middle East History, San Francisco State University
BENHABIB, Seyla, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven
BEYER, Vera, Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität Berlin
BIENIEK, Adam, Jagiellonian University, Chair of Arab Studies, Institute of Oriental Philology, Cracow, Poland
BOCHENSKA, Joanna, Dept. of Kurdish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
BOGDAN, Jolan, Dept. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, UK
BOSTEELS, Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University
BRAULT, Pascale-Anne, Professor of French, Dept. of Modern Languages, DePaul University
BRUNO, Michael, Dept. of Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR
BRUSTAD, Kristen, Associate Chair, Dept. Of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin
BURGE, Tyler, University of California, Los Angeles
BURGERS, Jan-Willem, Australian National University
BUTLER, Judith, University of California, Berkeley
BUTT, Gavin, Senior Lecturer & Programme Leader in MPhil / PhD,
CARDIN, Maryam, IUT of the University of Marne-la-vallée
CHOMSKY, Noam, MIT, Cambridge MA USA
COHEN, Joshua, Stanford University
COLE, Juan R. I., Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan
DABASHI, Hamid, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York
DE CARO, Mario, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Rome
DI LUCIA COLLETI, Laura, Conseillor Province of Venice
DOGRAMACI, Sinan, University of Texas at Austin
DOLEZALEK, Isabelle, Freie Universität Berlin
DOMINIAK, Piotr, Chairman of ASK Association in Raciborz, Poland
DORFMAN, Vladimiro Ariel, Duke Universtiy, Durham, North Carolina
DÜTTMANN, Alexander Garcia, Goldsmiths College
EHSANI, Kaveh, Assistant Professor of International Studies, DePaul University
EISENSTEIN, Zillah, Professor of Politics, Ithaca College
ENGELMANN, Stephen, University of Illinois at Chicago
EPSTEIN, Barbara, History of Consciousness Dept., University of California, Santa Cruz
FALK, Richard, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University
FARHI, Farideh, Dept. of Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
FARNOODY-ZAHIRI, Nelly, UCLA
FASY, Thomas M., Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City
FATIMA KHAN, Mahruq, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
FIELD, Hartry, Professor of Philosophy, New York University
FORAN, John, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
FRIEDLAND, Roger, Professor of Religiou Studies and Sociology, UCSB
GAJEWSKA, Katarzyna, University of Poland
GANDJBAKHSH, Amirhosseing, Research Director, National Health Institute, Washington DC
GANZ, David, Universität Konstanz, Germany
GARRETT, Don, Dept. of Philosophy, New York University
GASIOROWSKI, Mark, Political Science and International Studies, Louisiana State University
GLOGOWSKI, Aleksander, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
GODMILOW, Jill, University of Notre Dame
GOLE, Nilufer, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
HÁJEK, Alan, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University
HALLWARD, Peter, Middlesex University, UK
HASHEMI, Nader, Assistant Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics
HEGASY, Sonja, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
HERRERA, Linda, Institute of Social Studies (The Hague)
HIBBARD, Scott, DePaul University, Chicago
HOEFERT, Almut, University of Basel
HONNETH, Axel, University of Frankfurt, Germany
IVEKOVIC, Rada, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Université Jean-Monnet, Saint-Etienne
JIMENEZ, Maria, Université Paris Sorbonne, Paris IV
KAPLINSKY, Raphael, Professor of International Development, The Open University, UK
KESHAVARZIAN, Arang, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University
KHOSROVANI, Sahar, University of Maastricht
KORBEL, Josef, School of International Studies, University of Denver
KOWALIK, Tadeusz, professor of economics and humanities, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
KOWALSKA, Beata, Jagiellonian University, Poland
KOZLOWSKI, Pawel, Professor of economics, Polish Academy of Sciences
KUMAR, Victor, University of Arizona
LARRIVÉE, Pierre, Aston University, Birmingham
LEMISCH, Jesse, Professor Emeritus, History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA
MARTINON, Jean-Paul, Dept. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, UK
MASROUR, Farid, Dept. Of Philosophy, New York University
MCFARLAND, Andrew, Political Science Dept., University of Illinois,
Chicago
MCINTYRE, Michael, International Studies, DePaul University, Chicago
MEHDIZADEH, Hamidreza, Illinois Institute of Technology
MEMMI, Paul, Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense
MOALLEM, Minoo, UC Berkeley
MORUZZI, Norma Claire, University of Illinois at Chicago, Political Science, History, Gender and Women’s Studies
MOSES, Claire G., Dept. of Women’s Studies, University of Maryland
MOSHTAGHI, Nazgol, University of South Florida
NAST, Heidi, DePaul University, Chicago
NATCHKEBIA, Irina, Tbilisi University
NEGRI, Antonio, Collège International de Philosophie
NESPOULOUS, Jean-Luc, Université de Toulouse, Le Mirail et Institut Universitaire de France
NOYAU, Colette, Dépt des Sciences du langage, CNRS, Université Paris-Ouest
OBDRZALEK, Suzanne, Dept of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
PATTERSON, Ian, Director of Studies in English, Queens’ College Cambridge
PETTIT, Philip, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
PHELPS, Christopher, Dept. of History, The Ohio State University
PIRVELI, Marika, Szczecin University, Poland
POTTER, Robert, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
PRÉVOST, Sophie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
PRINZ, Jesse, Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York
PROUST, Joëlle, Director of Research, Institut Jean-Nicod, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Normale Supérieure
PSTRUSIŃSKA, Jadwiga, Head of Dept. of Interdisciplinary Eurasiatic Research, Institute of Oriental Philology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow
RAKOWIECKA, Karolina, Jagiellonian University, Cracow
RAKOWIECKI, Jacek, Collegium Civitas, Poland
RANCIÈRE, Jacques, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis)
REZAEI ,Ali, Dept. of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada
RIGGLE, Nicholas Alden, Philosophy, New York University
ROMAN, Richard, University of Toronto
ROSENTHAL, David M., Professor of Philosophy, Cognitive Science Concentration Graduate Center, City University of New York
ROSS, Eric B., Visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development Studies, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
SAHNI, Varun, Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Ganeshkhind, Pune
SANBONMATSU, John, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dept. Of Humanities and Arts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA
SCHAEFER, Karin, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
SCHELLENBERG, Susanna, Professor of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra
SCHIBECI, Lynn, (retired) Dept. of History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
SCHIELKE, Samuli, Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin
SCHRECKER, Ellen, Professor of American History at Yeshiva University, New York
SCHWABSKY, Barry, Senior Critic in Sculpture (retired), Yale University
SEDGWICK, Sally, University of Illinois, Chicago
SHAHSAVARI, Anousha, Persian Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin
SHEIKHZADEGAN, Amir, University of Freiburg
SIEGEL, Susanna C., Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge
SIMPSON, Dick, Head of the Political Science Dept., University of Illinois, Chicago
SINGPURWALLA, Rachel, University of Maryland, College Park
SOSA, Ernest, Rutgers University Philosophy Department
SPERBER, Dan, Institut Jean Nicod, CRNS, Paris
STEINSEIFER, Martin, Universität Giessen
STUART, Jack, Minneapolis, MN
Tabb, William K., City University of New York
TAVAKOLI-BORAZJANI, Farifteh, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Iranistik
TAVAKOLI-TARGHI, Mohamad, Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
TISSBERGER, Martina, Freie Universität Berlin, Dept. of Educational Sciences and Psychology
TOHIDI, Nayereh, Professor and Chair, Gender and Women’s Studies Dept., California State University, Northridge
TOSCANO, Alberto, Goldsmiths College, UK
UNGER, Peter, Professor of Philosophy, New York University
VAHDAT, Farzin, Vassar College, New York
VAN BLUEMEL, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, MA
VAN BRUINESSEN, Martin, Chair of Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, Utrecht University
VICTORRI, Bernard, Directeur de recherché CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
WATZL, Sebastian, Dept. of Philosophy, Columbia University
WEINTRAUB, Jeff, University of Pennsylvania
WHITE, Stephen, Dept. of Philosophy, Tufts University
WINANT, Howard, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
ZIAI, Hossein, Director of Iranian Studies, UCLA Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Los Angeles, CA
ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the European Graduate School
ZUK, Agnieszka, University of Nancy
ZUPANCIC, Alenka, Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Mudimbe – The Invention of Africa – and other Free Books online

Some free online-books, at multiversitylibrary.com, important works on Africa by Africans. The procedure is a little unconvetional, you put in your email, and they send you a link. It works though. Also saves typing up and makes finding passages easier!

The Invention of Africa – V.Y. Mudimbe

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – Walter Rodney

African Perspective on Colonialism – A. Adu Bohen

Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe

Decolonising the Mind – Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Democracy and Development in Africa – Claude Ake

From Colonialism to Independence – Semakula Kiwanuka

Moving the Center – Ngugi wa Thiong?o

No Longer at Ease – Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

The Asia Section is filled, includes Orientalism by Edward Said and The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy

The Latin America has only Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, and an annoying sounding book by Gustavo Esteva.

Okwui Enwezor and African Modernity

The Okwui Enwezor talk at the tate Trienalle 2009 was quite interesting as it lies at the intersection of Academia and the arts imagination and discussion around African Modernity. The issues he touched upon have been around academia for a while, this having ‘missed modernity’, the industrial revolution or expiriences of its decomposition (eg. Keith Hart, James Ferguson, Achilles Mbembe), although his literature genealogy important, like wallerstein and Mbembe, since their often overlooked in proclamations of constant novelty and the heralding of unprecedentness, wallerstein interms of economic continituies/cycles, and Mbembe for the continiuity of representations of africa, as the Lack (of modernity, of enlightenment).
Although its curious that he follows a linear-modernization model when he goes on to say that Africa has never been modern (as opposed to 1- Hyper modern west, and 2 Modernizing East). Not very theoretically interesting if you measure Modernity with industrial output and accordingly appropiate state-regimes of accumulation. What if ”we have never been modern” either (Latour), i.e. in the everyday we don’t orientat ourselves in cleansed and purged modernist spaces. Even in (post-)industrial urbanity we live in what Henri Lefebvre called “concrete” spaces, the spaces of everday folklore and meaning, rather than in the “abstract space” as envisaged by the urban planner or the engineer. And Africa has had atleast as many attempts at producing abstract spaces as England, through grand colonial mappings, the Bauhaus construction of the suburbs in Casablanca, and the IMF structural adjustment plans and the countless development projects now undertaken both by trained elites and western experts’.

But also, its curious to unproblematically categorize the Super-modernity of Europe, as the first an utmost expression of modernity, as Enwezor does, without taking into account, that Europe celebrates itself now in the terms of post-modernity, as having superceded modernity, as the overcoming of utopian and productivist values, as the end of ideology and history ((Jameson – A Singular Modernity), and that the political discussion in the rest of the world, aswell as revolving around identity politics, still are stongly pursuing modernist visions, e.g. Bolivia and the mines or the Zambian Copper Miners (Ferguson)

The non-Avant-Garde Avant-Garde International Necronautical Society talk, Prologue 4: Borders: Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy: Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity with the fake Simon Critchley, is recomendable, for its entertainment value aswell for the occasional theorical glimpses it allows, especially on Humour).

Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Thinking Allowed – Academic Audios

Backdoor Broadcasting Company , mostly talks held at Birkbeck, including Masterclass things, e.g. 06/2009 Zizek on Communist Culture, and a better quality audio of Butlers Frames of War

Thinking Allowed BBC4 more light-hearted and mostly thoroughly interesting 15min interviews with Academics (usually Sociologists, Historians and Anthropologists), hosted by Laurie Taylor, witty and with insightful analyses of class issues. Archives has good overview on past topics.

Adbusting

This is an amazing adbusting… well suited for all those ads whith yuppies enjoying their new liquor,  their new telephone connection, coffee at a new outlet… Ahh relieving, a very Freudian Joke, you get to live out unconsious aggressiveness, but it also puts into focus the psychotic relentless smile of yuppies, who are happy about everything consumable.

‘THE END OF ISLAMIC IDEOLOGY’

Reading the chapter from Hamid Dabashi’s IRAN a people interrupted

‘The Islamic Republic is a categorical contradiction in terms- it is neither a republic nor Islamic. It is not a republic because it is a theocracy; it is not Islamic because Islam (Shi’ism in particular) cannot be in power without instantly discrediting itself. From its very earliest manifestation, Islam emerged as the religion of protest, and in its long and tumultuous history, both political and doctrinal, it has never lost that initial defining moment of its political potency. The dialectical paradox that has remained textual to Qur’ranic revelation- its Meccan chapters charismatic and revolutionary, its Medinan verses somber and institution building- has never abandoned the long and arduous Islamic
history. In these terms, Shi’ism is the quintessence of Islam as a religion of protest and can only remain valid and legitimate as long as it posits itself as a revolutionary project. The instant that Islam (Shi’ism) becomes a dominant (state) ideology it contradicts itself. This paradox is definitive to Islamic political and doctrinal history. The Islamic Republic, as a result, and ipso facto, has placed Islam in a position of tyranny, which in turn discredits and dismantles Islam itself- in the most basic tenets of its doctrinal principles. From Umayyads (661-750) to the Abbasids (750- 1258) down to all other major and minor Islamic empires and dynasties, there has never been a Islamic form of government that has not been radically challenged and opposed in precisely Islamic terms. As soon as a dynasty has come to power in Islamic terms of legitimacy, a revolutionary movement has arisen to challenge it in precisely in Islamic terms. This paradox is now the central dilemma of the Islamic Republic, in which it is trapped and from which it has no escape, except dismantling itself. A regional integration of the most progressive forces in both the reformist and the conservative camps in Iranian politics is the only way it can at once sustain its domestic legitimacy and pose a highly effective politics of resistance to the predatory demands of globalized capitalism and the empire it engendered. But it cannot do so without radically revisiting its very doctrinal basis- and thus the self defeating paradox that at once animates and contradicts it.

A radical reformulation of ‘Islam’, now incarcerated within the clerically anchored ‘Islamic Republic’, effectively amounts to (1) recognizing its own polyvocality- its jurisprudence historically checked and balanced by its philosophy and mysticism; and (2) allowing the cosmopolitan context of its contemporary anti-colonial modernity to work the dialectic of its polyvocality out- its Islamism placing itself next to to the nationalism and socialism that have historically checked and balanced it. Among the myriad consequences of such an emancipatory reimagining of Islam in its modern and medieval history is the effective abandoning of the faulty Eurocenticity of a singular modernity, by which the rest of humanity must abide. In its contemporary context, this full-bodied version of Islam will posit the terms of an anti-colonial modernity that is worldly in its roots and cosmopolitan in its consequences.’ (217/18)

‘Trapped in the charismatic appeal of that abiding memory ['the collective sentiment of the earliest nucleus of revolutionary Shi'ism], Ahamdinejad may indeed go to war- with the United States, with Israel, with any of the Persian Gulf states (or perhaps the United States and Israel may hand him the opportunity by invading Iran)- for the fire of war cleanses and purifies the evil that this zealotry sees dominant in the world […] The effective transmutation of a popular vote into populism , its alliance with the militarism will put Ahmadinajad’s presidency on a catastrophic course leading to a frightful fascism. [the book was published in 2007]…The republic of fear..will result [that] will impose draconian limitations on the latitude that has, in the past, been allowed to the social behavior of middle-class Iranians, the flamboyant youth, and the Gucci revolutionaries. [even though, I think, the recent Ahmadinajad's speeches included talking about relaxing the activity of the 'moral police'] This will scare and dishearten the middle-class Iranians and force them even more into belligerent secularism, vulgar consumerism, and ultimately escape the claws of the Islamic Republic[..] The impoverished classes will most certainly not be the beneficiaries of this exodus of capital. The Islamic Revolution never had the economic courage of its political imagination, never dared to opt for a socialist economy, even from its very ideological basis in the ideas and principles of ideologues such as Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani and Abu al-Hassan Bani Sadr. So called Islamic economics are fundamentally based on a secured niche in global capitalism. But this economics wants to have its cake and eat it too. It needs foreign investment and a robust capitalist economy, but it doesn’t want the Bourgeois International and its preference for tight jeans, loose scarves, and the democratic institutions that go with global capitalism. [although, someone like Chakrabarty would disagree: individual freedom is not a necessary condition for capitalism as it is for Marx] The Iranian economy under Ahmadinejad will thus remain heavily dependent on oil revenues. Jobs will remain scarce unless A. can transmute the oil revenue into a productive, labor-intensive economy- a critical task that all his predecessors have failed to meet. Chances are that he will not succeed, for he is very much at the mercy of the global economy, which allots Iran only a role as an oil producer […] (235)

The hope for the restitution of that cosmopolitan culture, now compromised by a militant Islamism that has no patience or tolerance for anything it deems un-Islamic, can come from an entirely unexpected corner if we consider the flowering relationship between President Hugo Chaves of Venezuela and his Iranian counterpart….Chaves has a categorical admiration for the Islamic Republic, and sees it as a potential ally across the globe. This admiration can extend beyond a mere transcontinental but vacuous camaraderie, with occasional economic benefits for both, only if Chaves uses his leverage with the Islamic Republic to have it open up its medieval gates to political dissent and institutional changes in its theocracy. The relationship is of course reciprocal- namely, if Chavez fails to raise principled questions with the Islamic Republic and thus help restore the Iranian cosmopolitan political culture, then the theocratic disregard for human rights and the mutation of Iranian cosmopolitan political culture into a clerical tribalism of the worst kind, now definitive to the Islamic Republic, will turn around and corrupt the social democratic aspirations of Chaves.’ (237)

What seems to be exciting about the Iraninan movement now is that it got organized precisely without such a benevolent intervention from the outside, but by the people, across the class lines, themselves. Hopefully, it will have implications beyond the conservative reformism of Mousavi and contribute towards the re-articulation of the cosmopolitanism of Islamic anti-colonial modernity again.

Appadurai Audio

Here is the recording from the recent Arjun Appadurai opening speech from HKW coference Beyond Multiculturalism

Beyond?! and where? Multiculturality blog has a nice review of the event

Human animal and the ethics of militant engagement (notes and thoughts)

During our last reading of ‘The Century’ several points were made worth discussing a bit further. Firstly, it was mentioned that Badiou might be an inspiration for various left-wing activist groups currently active in France, that act in disregard to the concrete circumstances and the well-being of their comrades. I think it would help to find out more about these groups, what actions they do and how they interpret the texts unless the person was not talking about Oragnisation Politique itself! This would be funny indeed… Secondly, the issue of the “human animal”, finitude and vulnerability came up. Because Badiou utterly dismisses human suffering, victims and finitude and refuses to see anything else behind them other then forms of the so-called ideological “democratic materialism”, ‘romanticism’ or ‘nihilist ethics’, he might be reinstating an oppressive, white, male, heterosexual Universalism. I think some of these can be valid, but I am also hesitant to dismiss Badiou’s project so quickly. It was also suggested to look at Karen Barad in relation to the ‘post-human performativity’. I haven’t read the Barad’s text and don’t know what’s going on there, but if the argument goes saying specificity, finitude and vulnerability of the body can be the site of resistance against the abstract machine of capitalist universalistic process of reification and the phallogocentric unification or the making into One, then a lot can be said. Anyways, an input from the ‘post-humanist, performative’ perspective would be useful. From my side, here are some study notes and commentaries on the topic. Firstly, I’ll mention briefly how Badiou’s a-humanism sees finitude (I’ll leave more for the later posts and discussions). Secondly, I’ll summarize the so-called ethics of truth, the problems that go with it, and finally, the possible modifications taken from Laclau and Chakrabarty that, I suppose, can be helpful.

The  ‘worldliness’ of infinity and animalist conservatism

From my understanding, there seem to be mainly two problems with finitude for Badiou:

1. The articulation of human finitude can only proceed by positing the One-All infinite as the background (e.g. God or Universe etc). One, totality and unity have religious connotations. However, we know since Cantor, that there is no single infinity, there are multiple infinities of infinities; it is impossible to construct a set of all sets or define the set itself. In other words, One is not, one exists only as an operation of counting something as this or that i.e. as one, but it is a mistake to believe that there is some wholeness, there are only operations. This insight of the worldliness of infinity, that every situation is infinite and the ability of set theory to think without totalities is taken paradigmatically by Badiou as it enables certain non-mastery in philosophy. Now, multiplicities (or situations) can be inconsistent (not counted as one and chaotic) and they can also consist (counted as one). The consistent multiplicities can however also relate between each other. They way they relate is through logics of being immersed in relational networks (always being-there). The relationality designate the way being appears i.e. through various intensities and degrees. Since, Death, for Badiou, is a consequence- it is something that happens from external causes (entropy is nothing other then processes, interactions or relations)- it means that it (and existence) is a category of becoming-appearance and not of a multiple pertinent to the ontological category of being qua being i.e. of being in its presentation. Death and existence are logical concepts, while being and non-being are ontological. I guess, it means simply that death is a ‘contingency imposed’- a possibility: ‘it is an affection of appearance [intensity of being-there] which makes one pass from an existence in a situation that can be positively evaluated (even if it is not maximal) to a minimal existence that is to say an existence that is null relative to the situation.’ (Existence and Death, Discourse 24:1, 72) In order to liberate ourselves from God or One (Universal History, phallic signifier, Whole), the argument goes, we need to tear existence away from ‘being pinned to the ultimate signifier of its submission to death” (ED, 66) and affirm that being is always woven out of infinities. An individual can partake in this infinity by attaching him/herself to something called the truth procedure. A brilliant idea suggested here would have a futurist dystopia involving armies of genetically bred and cybernetically enhanced ‘subjects to truth” who would not falter in the fidelity to their event. One can imagine the whole technologies geared at the detection of evental sites and subsequent management of the cycles of evental occurrences. All that for the betterment and multiplication of the emancipated super-humanity. Anyways.

2. This brings to the second problem with finitude. Not only is it a religious concept (event though all the secularists and atheists will deny this, the point being that there is still the Other who authorizes and enables these very discourses of the denial itself), but it is also that finitude, is seen, to be deeply subservient to the ruling ideology of ‘Democratic materialism’ of: consensus, dialogues, human rights, parliamentary routines and the unbound rule of capital and its imperialist logic. According to this materialism there are only bodies and languages i.e. cultures, races, genders, ethnic groups etc. What is the current so- called ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ if not the operation of oneing, through the worrying biologization of difference, categorization of people racially? Suddenly, there is ‘too much’ threatening diversity, they have to be all counted-as-one and made consist. It is here that politics under late capitalism transforms itself more and more into bio-management: bio-engineering, bio-ethics, bio-diversity, bio-consumerism etc. The anthropological, biological, finite body (made out of enumerable properties of : race, language, gender etc) is precisely what fits best the cataloguing logic of surplus value maximization as well as the needs of various Ideological State Apparatuses in order to reproduce themselves. However, there aren’t only languages, cultures, races, genders etc. there are also truths and events that proclaim (relative) universality, whose consequences are infinite; they fracture the existing encyclopedia (knowledge) and (can) change the situation. Because it is possible to derive infinite inventive consequences from the event and its truth one can become subject to this infinity or in a sense its ‘particle’. I don’t see why, from this perspective, the affirmation of finitude itself cant be something radical in certain, specific situations. However, in the situation of bio-capitalism the interests of the ‘human-animal’ are those of conservation, preservation and multiplication of its minute pleasures and fantasies (like writing blog entries for example.) It is also, as we have seen the totalization of a multiple, which is untotaliziable, by means of establishing an imaginary One. This has further implications because the differences are constitutive of the order of things, everything is different, ontology is difference (the one is not) difference does not constitute anything new in itself: ‘it is a law of being qua being that the least local difference entails an absolute global difference’ (ED 7) It means that the demand for particularity (where differences are different locally and globally in the logical order of appearance of being-there) as the Dutch, as a child as a woman or as a black (a universality in its own right) must not automatically lead to any progressive politics or even be counted as politics proper (differences are not different locally and globally in the ontological order of being qua being). The subaltern cannot speak not because she is not included or represented, but rather because within the whole (Eurocentric) ideological matrix, there is no way to understand what he/she is talking about because, from the perspective of this ideological situation, the subaltern simply doesn’t exist. Politically speaking, much of particularism is often conservative, since the particular can always be simply granted its demands without changing the larger state of the situation. The things are different when the demands link in chains of equivalences, to use Laclau’s term, following a certain event, where certain specific ones become the ‘surface of inscription for the plurality of other demands’ or as Badiou puts it, as the process of naming ‘attributes to a particular difference the role of naming something entirely incommensurable with itself’ (In Lacalau’s Ethics of Militant Engagement) The particularity for Badiou can be that of support for the universality, it never gets subsumed from above, as it happens in liberal, institutional Laws, it is rather the construction of the immanent universality from below: between the particular and the universal there is ‘only a relation of support, but not a relation of transitivity. You can’t go from the one to the other, even if one seems to be ‘carried’ by the other…. It is not because a term is a communal predicate, nor even because there is a victim in a particular situation, that it is automatically, or even easily, transformed into a political category (Politics and Philosophy, 118-19).

Before continuing…

I have to say now, that I don’t think that the questions of finitude are solved at all and neither does the employment of set theory frees us from God (see 1). Allah is beyond One and multiple, while at least in Orthodox Christianity God is irreducible to the Trinity or the Holy Spirit. Moreover Cantor himself believed that the impossibility of having a set of all sets is spiritual. Therefore, I tend to read Badiou more and more as a militant, liberation Theologician and less as an atheist, ex-maoist, in the similar way as one can perhaps read Ali Schariarti, Gustavo Gutierrez and perhaps Schluessler Fiorenza. From this perspective- to which I tend to be, at times, quite sympathetic- the dispensability with the ‘worldliness’, transcendence or a counter to the laws, histories, archives, identities and languages is not a problem at all, even though, of course, for many, such things are merely fantasies with the long history of oppressive connotations. As one lecture advert, that I recently encountered a somewhere on the net, maintained Badiou’s privileging of the idea, act, and form over knowledge continues the genealogy of western, idealist tradition of ‘phonocentrism’ and patriarchy that always seeks to dominate the feminine, mnemonic and the archival. I don’t know, but I can’t have much sympathy for historicism, its archives and storage rooms either. Like Dipesh Chakrabarty was saying, the anti-colonization movements had to break with ‘their’ histories and the archives written by the colonizers and their developmentalist discourses in order to assert emancipation. What does it mean to make such a break if not to assume a form of autonomy? Secondly, the issues of universality and truth procedure raise a lot of questions. For Badiou universality is incommensurable and in-different to the specificities that support it, arguably, like the birth of Christian universality that was indifferent to the differences between the Greek philosophical knowledge and the Jewish divine Law. In the similar sense, the universality of love, for Badiou, neither segregates nor fuses the sexes, but eliminates them altogether. All of these solutions have great formal, mathematical beauty to them, but, at the same time, such purities have evident problems. In terms of universals, just how much are they incommensurable? In terms of truths, how does one make true from the false? As many have already pointed out, the most evident, problem consists in Badiou’s anti-dialectical, binary structuralism as well as the denegration of relations and processes right on the ontological level.

Ethics of Truth(s)

The criterion of truth and its ethics, seem to be the most problematic aspects of Badiou’s work. Truth here is not the truth of knowledge established through confirmation, coherence or correspondence, but rather a hole in knowledge, an innovation, which demands a long end persistent work of fidelity to the event of its occurrence in order for it to come fully into the world or rather to transform it altogether. Because it is such a shuttering innovation, there are no parameters with which one can prescribe how or when it can occur, since such prescriptions would always be made from the normativity of the current situation. I guess there is a resemblance to the way anomaly functions in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As the recognition of the anomaly plunges the Normal science and its paradigm into a crisis and eventually gives birth to a new paradigm, while destroying the old one, the scientific community does become split into the Badiouen Two. On the one hand there are those who pursue the radical implications of the inconsistencies or those who at least recognize the problem and see that there is no going back (relation of connected to the event) and those who cling to the old paradigm and maintain that the anomalous inconsistencies can be integrated into the old scientific worldview, in other words, persisting that the event did not take place (relation of disconnection). As the individual(s) engages with the process of maintaining the fidelity to the evental occurrence he/she becomes the collective we-subject (of a truth).The we-subject doesn’t mean some uniformal zombification and conformism: ‘in the same situation and for the same event there may exist different criteria of connection that define different fidelities’ (Being and Event, 258). There is also no universal framework of justice and normative ethics (as for example in Rawls Theory of Justice) there are as “many subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as there are procedures of truth” (E 28) Truth pronounces the void of the situation, what is the Same or universal (no doubt offensive words for many concerned with difference and specificities) in a given situation, which is in-different to the differences of the multiplicities. As Hallward sums up: ‘every universality is exceptional, has its origin in one point, is assembled step by step, is the consequences of a decision, is a category of the subject, is a matter of being true rather then of knowing’ (Badiou: a subject to truth, 251)

Directionless evolution

Just to make some terminological points clear, for Badiou, the void permeates every situation, it is included in its every sub-set, but it is impossible to identify or localize it. Thus, in the capitalist situation, the void is the generic humanity. We cannot know what this generic humanity is, in our daily lives we only relate in terms of particularities (profession, gender, race, ethnicity etc.) classified by the disciplining apparatuses (epistemes, paradigms, archives etc.) Nevertheless, the unrepresentable void can be named in the process of subjectivization through the (collective) truth procedure of the event. Some situations can also contain elements, which maximally border on the void; they are on the ‘edge’ and the situation counts them as purely nothing. These elements (groups or an individual) are indiscernible from the perspective of the sate-of-the-situation, which dismisses them as simply ‘barbarians’, ‘terrorists’, ‘mob’ or ‘hysterical femisnists’. The inhabitants of this space constitute the ‘evental site’ from which an event can, but does not have to occur. So, in the capitalist situation, to use Marxist vocabulary, the void would be the generic humanity, the edge of the void is inhabited by the ‘working class’ (whatever this is) and its name is ‘proletariat’. In the similar sense the intersexuality or “third sex” can be the name articulating the void of what the normative situation would recognize only as ‘abnormal’ or simply nothing. Hallward interprets the Truth exactly as the process that ‘exposes and represents the void of a situation’. (my italics) With this emphasis on representation it is easy to imagine the Civil Rights movements, South African and Palestinian uprisings. I think one can also perhaps misunderstand the event and its truth procedure as- in the political situation- being about the self-empowerment of the oppressed people, while ignoring the a-humanism of the event and its transcendent, virtual dimension: ‘event is a multiple such that it is made up of, on the one hand, all the multiples which belong to the [evental] site, and on the other hand the event itself.’ (Being and Event 179) Therefore, in order for the event to occur there has to be a breakdown of the ontological reproductive system of a particular situation itself i.e. the eruption of the evanescent event as the multiple belonging to itself, which also mobilizes the ‘inhabitants of the void’ for the production of the new knowledge. It is the inhuman supplement of self-belonging outlawed by the ontological machinery and irreducible to the human efforts and unrelated to the situation, which despite all of its anti-dialctical problems and miraculous connotations is something very much worth maintaining for the reasons I hope to express later. At the same time, when Badiou says the ‘universal singularity is unfinishable or open [...] indifferent to our mortality and fragility’ it resembles again the idea of Kuhn’s directionless, evolution of the scientific progress away from the existing paradigms, but not towards and closer to any objective, total Truth, since this objective Truth and what we tend to think as facts that define it are always continuously redefined by the emergence of new anomalies, discoveries and paradigms. (SSR 184) (The possibilities of the non-paradigmatic science, which Kuhn himself detects in Chinese medieval Astronomy, but eurocentrically disregards as unscientific (even though it made important discoveries way before the European so-called ‘systematisation’) can be another interesting area to link with Badiou’s notion of the truth procedures.) The question then that Kuhn asks is: ‘what does it mean for progress and development to have no aim’ can be asked of Badiou as well. Where does the subject sized by the truth procedure actually go if the direction of this truth procedure is not transcendentally guaranteed as ethically good, how to distinguish a true event of say the Intifada, the Russian revolution or the Zapatista uprising and their authentic truth procedures from a pseudo-events like National Socialism?

Three forms of evil

In Ethics Badiou says that the distortion of truth- something he terms ‘evil’- can take 3 forms: betrayal (the abandonment of fidelity to the event), simulacrum (the nomination not of the void of the situation, but of the positive fullness e.g. community), and disaster (the totalization of a truth). I think the betrayal of truth, is simple enough to accept, but the things are quite complicated with simulacrum and disaster. In the case of simulacra, Badiou’s solution to distinguish the “Hitler” pseudo-event from a true one would be to say, that a pseudo-event does not articulate the void of the situation, which is universal, but rather names the substantial, positive particularity i.e. the German Volk, ‘its soil, its blood, its race’. (E 73) The name therefore has to remains empty because what it proclaims through the event, does not correspond to anything that is representable within the counting of the situation. This is the reason why Badiou uses the declaration of belief in Christ’s resurrection by the early Christians to make the point about the extreme subjective nature of the truth procedure. As Ernesto Laclau puts it, the name is ‘a signifier without a signified’ (Ethics of Militant Engagement, in Think Again. 123) The disaster occurs when the indiscernible element of truth (its void), called the unnameable, is named and forced to be discerned e.g. Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the attempt by the Avant-guards at the total integration of art into life as well as I guess, a scientist taking a creationist turn seeking to explain out the uncertainty principle with the divine design. Therefore, the truth procedure must show certain restrain (!) and moderation (!!) by not naming the unnameamble, or in other words, not fully objectify the subjective, if it is not to collapse in a disaster. In the political sense (and judging from some reports on the activities of Organisation Politique) that would mean resisting the institutionalization of the movement into a party or certain non-possessiveness in the love. The whole point of The Century is that ‘the passion for the real’ got overdone, too little restrain and moderation. It seems there is no way to ensure that Truth will remain incorruptible and it may even resemble a Russian roulette since: “all the formal traits of a truth are at work in the simulacrum. Not only a universal nomination of the event, inducing the power of a radical break, but also the ‘obligation’ of a fidelity, and the promotion of a simulacrum of the subject, erected’ (E 74). This intuitive horror is of course exactly the horror of confronting the madness of the Real itself, which Badiou seeks to uphold and not foreclose. The politics of Truth consists in the acknowledgement of the immanent possibility of this danger and not of trying to cover it with normative rules and prescriptions. The ethics would be to equally resist making into an identity or an object the generic subjectivity. After Beckettian imperatives of ‘Continue’ and ‘Go on’ such appeals at ‘management’ of the unnamenable seems surprising as it seems to point towards some other not-fully theorized principle. How is it possible for the subject pursuing truth to restrain? As several commentators have noted, Hallward, Gillespie, Critchley, Laclau and others there seems to be a problem in Badiou’s treatment of relations; the void and its relation to the situation is nothing, which is difficult to imagine in the real situation, while the situations themselves remain in a kind of splendid isolation from one another. If we come down from the heights of mathematic abstractness, what would it mean for example, for communism to resist institutionalization? We might consider all the anarchist-autonomist prescriptions in this matter, but then maybe we should also stop playing the ‘beautiful souls’ in certain contexts and consider the matter of the State (of the situation) and the situation in its presentation, just as well as the evental site and the situation dialectically? In the recent conference at Birbeck Bruno Bosteels applied exactly such a dialectical reading.

Multiplicities of sites/chains-of-equivalences

In EME Lacalu introduces certain useful displacements of Badiou’s thought that help overcome: structuralist binaries, lack of relationality as well as the problems to do with ethics, even though he brings a moral ingredient in the end as well. First of all, Laclau redefines the event to a certain extent. It is not as we have seen the presentation of the unpresentable plus an innovative component that erupts, but naming the unnameable through a plurality of linked, equivalent particularities and the reconstruction of ’the principle of situationality [ordering or count as one] as such around a new core’, since, Laclau writes, ‘what confronts us [in the case of what Gramsci called organic crisis] are not particular sites defining (delimiting) what is unrepresentable within the general field of representation, but rather the fact that the very logic of representation has lost its structural abilities’ (125). Taking these points into account has important implications for the theory of the event and its ethics. The first implication is that it is impossible to differentiate within Badiou’s system between the simulacrum and the true event on the basis of the void/plenum distinction, because the void in the real situation is never pure, but is rather always filled by particularities. In other words the distinction between Nazism and Communism on such basis alone is not tenable. In the workers’ Solidarnost movement certain symbols served to represent a large set of democratic demands they became the embodiment of the universality as such. The demands of the sans-papiers are also particular demands and it can also be the case that the hegemony can grant them certain concessions and that they would become simply normal members. This means that there is no single evental site of universality and no natural name of the void in a situation. The universality occurs when many other elements (e.g. individuals) from different evental sites link up in ‘chains of equivalences’ having certain particularity to stand in for the universal. The generic truth-procedure now becomes much more complicated. It is not simply that the elements in the situation are split in the post-evental time into the binary of the unconverted (unconnected) and the converted (connected) as Badiou’s strict adherence to the laws of logic maintains, but that this process of the construction of truth involves deliberation: various struggles, dialogues, half-converted and the oscillating subjects between connection and disconnection. Again, from such perspective it is not possible to differentiate between Nazism and Communism on the basis that some addresses the particular and the other the universal void precisely becaus, Laclau argues, the hegemonic-universality (not a negative term) consists of chains of particular equivalents. Now, how would we differentiate between Nazism and Communism then? Laclau suggests there is a difference between the ethical (ontological) and the moral (or ontic), between the principle of ordering and order. It is because, as we have seen, with sans-papiers and Solidarnost the binaries contaminate each other: the situation contaminates the site, the universal the particular, the pre-existing individual is not fully replaced by the subject and event and truth do not erase the pre-evental world. They rather allow the individuals to engage in the process of ontological ordering to transform the situation around the new core through a ‘radical ethical investment’. This investment should be thought in two ways: ethically and morally. Firstly, ethics (of truth) itself, does not have any normative content, but because the subject is not pure, is ‘a part of the situation and of the lack inherent in the letter’, it would have to have the moral reference of the situation (as well as liberal legalism?), where the truth procedure would ‘involve a radical investment, where two terms have to be given equal weight’. (134) It sounds reasonable, although I would suspect that the contingency of each situation would also involve, at certain points, one being stronger then the other. This however brings up another important issue, which is the problem of the multiple, competing universalities: Muslim, Bhuddist, Christian etc. Badiou’s does not seem to give any satisfactory answer, since for any particular situation there can be only one truth, which in the situation of world religions is a pure madness. Perhaps, the way out of this is not the recipe of a secular, liberal state as the solution to all problems, but rather the practice of translation, which would allow for the inter-contamination of the universals.

Translation without the third term and counter-universality

In Provincializing Europe Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests two models of translation: one being performed through the third term like for example the H2O formula or the abstract labour in capital and those that do not require such a homogenizing middle term. Now both Badiou and Laclau have the preference for some names or signifiers to ‘represent’ the others. In Chakrabarty’s second model this does not happen. This type of translation resembles barter rather than the exchange of commodities: ‘based on very local, particular, one-for-one exchanges…There are no overarching censoring/limiting/defining systems of thought that neutralize and relegate differences to the margins, nothing like an overarching category of ‘religion’ that is supposed to remain unaffected by differences between the entities it seeks to name and thereby contain. The very obscurity of the translation process allows the incorporation of that which remains untranslatable’. (PE 85-6) Such model of translation is something we can learn from the ‘non-moderns’, Chakrabarty argues quoting Eaton: “the sixteenth century poet Haji Muhammad identified the Arabic Allah with Gosai (Skt. ‘Master’) Saiyid Murtaza idnentified the Prophet’s daughter Fatima with Jagat-janani (Skt. ‘Mother of the World’), and Saiyid Sultan identified the God of Adam, Abraham, and Moses with Prabhu (Skt. ‘Lord’)” (84) These local ‘one-for-one exchange’ practices of translation without-the-third-term that maintain the untranslatable ‘obscurity’ are indispensable for the post-evental generic procedures, but also the pre-evental phase that would happen on the level of particularity and locality. Such work would prepare ground or produce names (but also practices) that could be later used to link together various chains of equivalences (i.e. evetnal sites) or/and nominate an event, but also act in the post-evental process by establishing equivalences between various different universalities. We do need the universal term, void, or the empty signifier nevertheless, in order to crystallize various chains of equivalences in a counter-universal that would mobilize various elements for the construction of the new generic set (new society, new knowledge etc). Since, we have the ‘ethical investment’ of universality consisting of two parts: of the moral and ethical, we can now say that the moral part would need to heavily include not only the possibilities of moral judgment alone, but also the practices and archives of translation without-the-third-term. Now, the meaning of Badiou’s evil of the totalization of truth become much more clear: it is simply the ‘interruption of the process of equivalential construction [which] turns a single site [from the plurality of sites] into an absolute place of enunciation of truth’.(135) We can add that such a totalization also means the subsumption or integration (overtones intended) of the ‘obscure’ and untranslatable element.

Back to ontology

Laclau goes further to sketch out how his modify Badiou’s ontology in order to finally include relations, something Badiou’s set theory lacks as we have already seen. Such ontology would be based on linguistics. This means that the situation would be constructed through the differential relations ‘consituting the objective field’ of combinations on the one hand, but the evental sites (and their universality) on the other hand, would be constituted through the relations of analogy or the relations of substitution: “in example of Solidarnosc the ‘event’ took place through the aggregation of a plurality of ‘sites’ on the basis of their analogy in the common opposition to an oppressive regime. And what is this substitution through analogy but a metaphorical aggregation? Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche (and especially catachresis as their common denominator) are not categories describing adornments of language, as classical philosophy had it, but ontological categories describing the constitution of objectivity as such. (137) Laclau’s essay finishes abruptly by saying that set theoretical ontology can be integrated into the wider one based on rhetoric (relations of substitution and combination) and that the sequel is in on the way. Since the EME was written in 2003 it seems worthy having a look at how things have progressed since then, even though I seem to have an instinctual preference for the dominance of the maximally de-anthropomorphised mathematics in this domain, rather then the ontology based on figures of speech, which would, I think, send us back into the psychoanalytical/deconstructionist hell of the Other, metonymy of desire and joussance. Having said that, I am naturally glad to read that metaphor, metonymy etc. receive ontological credentials as it gives my ‘visual aphorisms’ some reassurance of philosophical legitimacy, not being merely about a religious, evental-simulacra, passive nihilism, sublimation or humanist phenomenology, but the ‘constitution of objectivity as such’. To be continued...

VIDEO MODELS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 1977

a classical phase on VIDEO, black and white and everybody smoking! – http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ssrc/ssrc1977.html

Bloch

Godelier

Goody

EP Thompson

Leach

Session 1: Historical and Anthropological approaches

Dr Sally Humphreys (Univ. College, London) ‘Models of social change with particular references to Greek history’
Prof. Ernest Gellner (L.S.E., London) : Introductory comments
Raphael Samuel (Oxford) : Further comments

Session 2: Anthropological and Marxist Models

Prof. Maurice Godelier (Paris) Ideology
Dr. Maurice Bloch (L.S.E.) Introductory comments

Session 3: Models of change in economy, social structure and ideology.

Comments on preceding papers by
Prof. Arnaldo Momiliagno (Warburg)
Prof. Keith Hopkins (Brunel)
E.P. Thompson

Session 4: Models of social change

Comments on preceding papers by:
Prof. Edmund Leach (Cambridge)
Prof. Jack Goody (Cambridge)
Prof. Tom Bottomore (Sussex)

This is what social science presumably looked like before the postmodern turn. The field of questions are still very interesting and largely unresoved:

- what is the difference, if any, of ideological and scientific knowledge, and what are the problems of relying on abstract Truth? (Godelier and Bottomore debate)

-What is the hierachy of causes for the for the function and evolution of socieity (as Godelier and Gellner debated, class, economy, coercion or ideology), is there a prime mover (such as elite values, whether Obamaism or ideas of the Demos, or the means of production and the means of violence) or just different analytical entry points into understand a layered generative social totality?

- how are the limits to the variations of social life set (Bottomore), Leach’s topographical ideas of system and how does the new emerge has interesting links to both Badiou and Bhaskar… what causes the cracks for a reevaulation of the system? Blochs response was that there are available concepts to the antagonistic group in societies that do not serve to reproduce the dominant order, i.e. are non-ideological. Leach responded that new is an unpredictable burst out of existing social order, but the new cannot be integrated back into it (also Kuhn).

- E.P Thompson debates Godelier on Ideology ” As Marxist Anthropologst i have to understand thew way relationships are organized, the way people think of themselves, the way they act on themsevles because of the way they think of themselves, THAT IS THE DIALCEIC OF SOCIAL LIFE, but the way they think of themsleves is part of social structure too… the role of representation in the dialectic of change”

- Godelier on Marxism “An Ancient Greek does not produce to produce material goods, he is producing to reproduce himself as a citizen.. there is no such thing as maximizing material goods… Even Capitalists deal in profits, in money, and what is money? Power… MATERIAL INTERST AS SUCH DOES NOT EXISTS…..”people dont live to produce, but they produce to live” as Marx said .. people not only produce goods, they produce to produce status, to reproduce the society (( sounds like Graeber, 2006 Turning Modes of Production inside out, or why Capitalism is a transformation of slavery) –

Most of these issues are explicitly addressed in Session 4: Models of social change… the most rivetting, exhilarating session of them all, where formal presentation is dropped for an all out ruuuuuuuumble. Atleast for  polite academic society, except Godelier, he’s unabashedly bashing

VIDEO to stream or Download!!! (Alan Macfarlane’s webpage is very good, contains Cambridge Anthropology video lectures (recommend the course The Symbolic and the Real: Culture, Ritual, Time, Food, Animals, The House, The Body, Cognition and Culture). and other Goodyies, including interviews with the ancestors,- retiring and renowed academics

Beyond Multiculturalism? HKW Internationaler Kongress starts Tomorrow 17:00

Beyond Multiculturalism? 04.06.2009 – 06.06.2009 Fragen an die Einwanderungsgesellschaft Internationaler Kongress – Eröffnung <!–Genre: Gesellschaft / Wissenschaft–>

Do 04.06.2009 17:00h Teilnahme frei http://www.hkw.de/de/programm2009/beyond_multiculturalism/veranstaltungen_30155/Veranstaltungsdetail_1_32652.php

Tag 1 | Tag 2 | Tag 3 Begrüßung durch Bernd Scherer Enführung und Moderation durch Susanne Stemmler, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Eröffnungsvortrag von Arjun Appadurai, New York University Beyond Culture. Constructions of Community in Contemporary Video Art. Film-Lecture von Hito Steyerl, Berlin Die Gestaltung von Einwanderung wird in den meisten Staaten immer noch national gedacht, obwohl Fragen von Migration und gesellschaftlicher Diversität im Kontext der Globalisierung nicht mehr im Rahmen einer Nation verhandelt werden können. Angesichts von weltumspannenden Migrationsströmen und zunehmender sozialer Ausdifferenzierung werden Vorstellungen von homogenen Bevölkerungen obsolet, Grenzen zwischen Mehrheit und Minderheiten immer verschwommener. Führt das einerseits zu neuen, hybriden Identitäten, so auch andererseits zu sozialer Unsicherheit, die sich punktuell in Rassismus, Ausgrenzung und Gewalt entladen können. Der Abend zeigt Zusammenhänge von Globalisierung, Migration und Gemeinschaft und sucht nach einem neuen Verständnis sozialer Formationen. Arjun Appadurai, weltbekannter Anthropologe, thematisiert in Werken wie „Modernity at Large“ oder „Fear of Small Numbers“ die kulturellen Dimensionen von Globalisierungsprozessen. Arjun Appadurais Website | Arjun Appadurai beim Suhrkamp Verlag Hito Steyerl, Filmemacherin und Videokünstlerin, Autorin und Hochschulprofessorin, war mit ihrer Arbeit u.a. 2007 auf der documenta XII zu sehen. Susanne Stemmler ist Kulturwissenschaftlerin und Leiterin des Bereichs Literatur, Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft am Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The pre-metaphysics of Things through Iranian Cinema

 

It is all because of my fascination with perhaps arguable and no doubt problematic ideas of pre-metaphysical, non-cultural and a-human givenness of objects and things and of life stripped down to its minimum, that I suggest we watch some of the Iranian masterpieces, which i think presisely deal with the issues.

Here are some films to chose for our screening as well as the quotes from Hamid Dabashi’s seminal book on the Iranian cinema ‘Close Up’. let me know what you prefer cause I’ll be seeing those again in anyway 

 

Abbass Kiarostami: ‘Through the Olive Trees’ or ‘Close Up’ 

Kiarostami presents us with  ‘a different kind of ‘morality’, a ‘countermorality’ emerges here that is entirely contingent on the reality of the event itself and not on abstract ethical imperatives.’ CU p. 55 ‘Kiarostami’s cinema, from its very inception, is an aesthetics of the real, a countermetaphysics of the factual. It is here to filter the world and thus strip it of all cultures, narrativities, authorities, and ideologies.’ C.U P54

‘Close Up’

 

‘Through the Olive Trees’

 

 

 Rakhschan Bani-Etemad ‘Gilaneh’(2004)

‘If Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf’s cinema are two visual modes of rereading Iranian culture in order to tease out its virtuality and thus negotiate a creative emancipation from it, the cinema of Bani-Etemad is a visual assault on that culture’s Achilles’ heel, namely, its conception of femininity…Her work has a much wider spectrum of implications than the condition of Iranian women. What is at stake in her project is the constitution femininity as the weakest and most vulnerable point of a much wider pathology of power, cultural constituted, socially institutionalized, economically based and metaphysically theorized. Bani-Etemad’s cinema is a visual theorization against that violent metaphysics.’ C.U. P. 223

‘Bani-Etemad launches her destruction of patriarchal constitution of sexuality from the depth of her documented reading of Iranian society…The result is a cinematic cosmovision that renegotiates the whole colonially militated culture of capitalist modernity and its colonial consequences.’ C.U.23

 

‘From Iranian filmmakers Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (NARGESS; OUR TIMES) and Mohsen Abdolvahab comes a searing anti-war film presented in two parts. On the Iranian New Year of 1988, Gilaneh (Motamed Arya), a woman from the country whose only son Ishmael (Bahram Radan) is fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, takes a perilous trip into besieged Tehran with her pregnant daughter. Fifteen years later, on March 20, 2003, as another New Year approaches, fatigued Gilaneh cares for her bedridden son as TV newscasts cover America’s opening attack on Baghdad.’

www.imdb.com/title/tt0450428/ 

 

 Samira Makmalbaf. ‘Blackboards’

  

 

‘Everything is on the verge of happening in Blackboard; everything is in a critical moment of expectation…The constellation of these emotive urges of expectation and urgency, accentuated by the imminent danger of an Iraqi gas attack, splits open the plaster of normalcy in the appearance of the real and pulls every aspect of the evident culture out for negotiation. The most critical moment Samira chooses for this negotiation is the pre-moment of naming, when things are still things and have no name. When the band of student-less teachers are wandering through the rugged mountains, desperate for students, we witness something more than Samira getting back at her teachers. In a brilliantly choreographed scene, a young woman who is milking a goat gives some milk to a teacher. He has finally persuaded a single boy to learn to write his name, and when the boy takes in this knowledge as the teacher drinks his milk. In this epiphatic scene, the camera oscillates between the milk and the chalk, between a living white substance and the dead, white knowledge…Instantly, a gunshot rings out and the boy falls dead. As the teacher is revived by his drink, the boy dies the moment he learns to write his name’ C.U. 274

 

 

 

the Opening Counterrealism meeting !

 

It was fun and rigorous, with Dipesh Chakrabarty joining us for a Q n A, which put some issues into focus and rather opened a lot more questions then we had time to discuss.

 One of the most interesting things that came only in retrospect to me was Dipesh mentioning his current work on global warming and the postcolonial perspectives on the issue of environment. I don’t know how it happened that we didn’t ask him to talk more about the exciting prospects of the postcolonial philosophy of science, which to my knowledge (and I still feel quite new to the debate, so let me know of any useful literature) is a rather underdeveloped and not widely discussed topic.

 Because of the pre-analytical ready- to-hand breaking into our everyday present-at-hand of the technology (the mic’s batteries ran out) we recorded only around 10 min of Dipesh talking. So, it seems, we’ll have to rely on the tradition of typing. My and Enrique’s thoughts and reflections are on their way and should be up in some time soon.

Anna suggested we do some other session on Chakrobarty again in June to finalize some points. We could read some of his more recent stuff then!

an

How to do things with farts: Factory Work and Subversive Farting

I work part-time in a Factory in Berlin, on a traditional assembly-line. Its 12hours shifts so i thought there would be plenty of time to think about what occurs according to Marx’s theory of value. Although the occassional mental reliefs when one can gasp at the theoretical implications of work were rare. So i sought mental relief not in a theorized rationalization but in reflections on the concrete activities of working and farting (or rather the burned sulfur smell on the assembly line), through a Benjaminian ‘Profane Illumination’

Marx writes of work: ‘He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. (Capital Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value)

This was quite obvious when subjected to traditional disciplnary assembly-line procedure. It is an insight that doesnt emerge in service-jobs where your communicative personality is subsumed into some sort of production process, since the labour-activity is expirienced as an authentic ‘being yourself’, like a bartender or something. Although the line is thin, call center jobs involve an equal mechanization of bodies, minds and voices. Alienation it seems should be a self-evident concept, but i suppose its out of fashion since yuppie/media jobs involve now some sort of project of self-realization, of the pursuing of the prescribed inner purpose, like being a creative and autonmous market actor.

Im posted at the sulfur-section of the solar panel assembly line. A group of 3 workers waits every 5 minues for a box containing the panel-to-be to come out of an oven onto a portable conveyor belt, that looks like a foosball table. Someone weighs a few grams of Sulfur, which are distributed on the side of the box that will contain the next unprocessed panel that will be inserted in at the front of the conveyor belt oven. A second worker takes the hot panel, where the sulfur has been burnt onto to the next station in the assembly line. I was mostly unscrewing and screwing the bolts of the box after the processed panel had been replaced by a new one to be inserted into the front.

I made some jokes to entertain during the occasional free minute. But i aimed to deploy a humour that employs its immediate surroundings, that designtes the immediate symbolic surroundings through their materiality. This strategy emerged, as a counter to the jokes of another worker, who put a piece of black tape on his upper lip and did the hitler things. I also passed through a stage of conservative joking. There was an air-brush to blow away dust, and while waiting i used it to fan my sweaty forehead and made the same joke “Im in a convertible car, or on the Titanic”. This joke like the Hitler makes external references and introduces them to the immediate surroundings, but doesnt challenge them, they are just a prop like the square bit of black tape to put on your face. Its an escapist joke, wishing to be somewhere else, more bourgeois (The joke wouldnt work as an escapist relief i had said “Im in a hurricane”)

A subverisive joke would have as its butt the concrete, or more specifically the arbitraryness and fragility of what we assume to be the concrete. A made a fart joke that brought in the materiality of the situation, not of the general economic materiality, which people there were quite aware of, but of what we were up to. When the boxes were opened for the processed panel to be taken to the next stage, there was sometimes still a wiff of the burned sulfur, so i said “Either someone farted or someone has been burning sulfur nearby”. The fart is just a signalling to the joke and its butt, because if someone had actually farted it would be embarassing rather than funny. If the joke had just been “Did someone fart” it would have been incomplete, what was added was the concrete dimension, the literal incorporation of the surroundings: that we were burning sulfur. The comic signalling of the fart allowed a suspension of what we were seamlessly and continually doing. It brought to display our material surroundings, momentarily bringing the activity of burning sulfur into a fragility. This seemed clear since one of the workers quickly responded in a serious tone “No, the smell comes from the burned sulfur in the box”, in order to performatively reassert the taken for grantedness and self-evidentness of our material undertaking, in order to pull back the symbolically suspended material process of the assembly line that was the butt of the fart joke.

Might a Fart be something subversive (if we read it into “bodily collective innervation” and “revolutionary discharge”)
“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto”" (Walter Benjamin – Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia)

I have a Marxist Fart-Joke:  What does one do when “all that is solid melts into air”? Fart

Yes Men Workshop

Andy Bichelbaum from the Yes Men was in Berlin for a workshop, where he discussed with activists their plans for actions in a YesMen tradition. In the evening we went to see his new movie ‘The Yes Men Fix the world” and here are a few thought about their strategy.

This is fantastic, spoiling the glamour of the red carpet and shifting the spectators gaze onto the rotten core of the glamourous spectacle, bringing into focus the absuridity of the festivity and its pomp.

The YesMen exemplified this intrusion and subtraction well that i talked about in my previous post on the G20 protest. Their innovative strategy is revealed when their at their comic best, when they play the corportate exaggerations (like WTO representative, McDonals, Halliburton and the Survivaballs), rather than in their simulation of Corporate Social Responsbility (like Hurricane Kathrina or the infamous 300 million viewed Union Carbide Bhopal disaster intervention, that is when they’re strategy is “identity-correction”, where they demask and denounce the individual corporations negligence, putting up logos of corporations and personifying the cause of troubles). In these latter Corporate Social Responsibility stunts, the aim is somekind of positive project, an alternative agenda/possibility. In the first variation of YesMen stunts, exaggeration and grotesqueness’ are the main techniques. I think they differ from Billionares for Bush and the like, because they go through the process of intrusion and therefore undertake the work of breaking the binary to get at that non-binaric stance momentarily reached by the subtraction. For Example when you see those security / weapons manufacturers ask questions about how the new Halliburton Survivaball suite could withstand biological attacks then you witness their state of being duped of their dupidity, which shows how the whole weapons industry depends on the nodding support and forced awe and applause directed at positions of power (also in the classic WTO example of the yesmen, where people still clap at the end). Somehow the systems symbolic power is revealed, to the viewer, or the non-dimwitted. But it seems its not so much a matter of wit, as the fact of not being materially immersed in the structuring envirments that ritually calls for your mental and bodily obidience to those with the sceptre and crown. But by switching these insignias of power in the immersed environment (the survivaballs at the Conference-Hall for Corporates listening to the hotshots) they reveal the relations which sustain the corporate fests. As with the survivorballs suits when the crash the BMW gala in Berlin (the video above), the grotesqueness of the gowns and all those bodies dressed in suits is amplified.

So the intrusion is the mimicking /performing of the e.g. Corporate-Capitalist symbolic identity, but the attendees dont notice these impersonations, for them it would be ‘buisness as usual’”. This is more destabalizing than ‘denouncing’, since it allowes a momentary burst of laughter, an incredulity and anxiety that contains an awareness of the fragility and arbitraryness of the Symbolically based mechanism of corportate power.

(Ill try to post radical jokes at the end of each post)
Stephen Colbert – what happens if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it – then my illegal logging buisness is succeeding

a (non) formalist film or a play i’d like to make one day

 

the cast and stage directions:

 

thebes and oedipus (both at the same time):

 

Reading greek tragedy through marx e.g. as the allegory of capitalist s collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

The forsaken u.s. military radar i. e. the pinnacle of overproduction, hedonism and imperialism is the blinf oedipus And the buerocratic strong hold of creon 

creon himself: image (or visibility, perceptibility, and..the ‘human animal’ ?)

polynices: sound (and how do the unburried dead sound? Maybe, various ’ internationals’ slowed down  to the point where its just an indesernible, inhuman sound  playing at the same time out of  sync)

ismene: time (her indecisiveness makes the film go on)

chorus: nothing (absent) no morality

antigone: montage (only one cut , every image is contained within the other before antigones  act)

and i want another character to appear after the cut

the raven from passolini’s  ‘the hawks and the saprrows’ to walk inside of the derelict radar interiors

starts in 1.3 minutes

he will say something wise and silly and look out of  the window

and there will be all the multitudes of people from the anti G20 anti Nato

protests marching together

(:

 

Terry Eagleton Berlin 4th May 18.15

TERRY EAGELTON – “The Death of Criticism”
Der Vortrag findet am Montag, den 4. Mai 2009, um 18:15 Uhr im Großbritannien-
Zentrum der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mohrenstr. 60, Raum 105, in englischer
Sprache statt. Alle sind willkommen, der Eintritt ist frei.
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/gbz/downloads/pdf/PM_Eagleton.pdf

Harun Farocki: Image in Violence

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/kue/en4375269.htm

julia wrote: ‘around 40min. farocki makes the point about the use of re enactement strategies nowadays
by pointing at that it is often defended and used as the only mimesis possible to get access to realism.. which can/shall be criticise..some interestings connections are made between participation and
immersion.’

Spivak Other Asias, Butler Frames of War, Audio of Lectures, Berlin Feb 2009

Gayatri Spivak – Other Asias February 14 2009 Berlin WIKO

Judith Butler – Frames of War – February 2009 FU Berlin

Political Power and the Kings Magic – Graeber and Lacan

short passage ( which expands the point of power’s symbolic base in my previous post)

from

THE SADNESS OF POST-WORKERISM
or
“ART AND IMMATERIAL LABOUR” CONFERENCE
A SORT OF REVIEW
(Tate Britain, Saturday 19 January, 2008)
http://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/graeber_sadness.pdf

by David Graeber
It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won’t make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.)
This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one’s power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one’s power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything—
divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But “make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader” is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.

In this sense politics is very similar to magic, which in most times and places—as I discovered in Madagascar—is simultaneously recognized as something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works. For this why magic, whether in ancient Thessaly or the contemporary Trobriand Islands, always seems to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between poetic expression and outright fraud. And of course the same can usually be said of politics”

————————————————————

also the Lacan and the Crazy King thing, from  “Everything Politics is, Chomsky is not”  by Henrik Jøker Bjerre
http://www.wittgenstein-network.dk/home/papers/Everything%20Politics%20is,%20Chomsky%20is%20not.pdf

This is why Lacan famously stated that the madman, who thinks that he is a king, is no crazier than the king, who thinks that he is a king. In as far as the king identifies with his symbolic mandate to such a degree that he doesn’t see that that is all it is, or in other words: in as far as he believes that there is no difference between his position of enunciation and the content of what he is (described as), he is as crazy as the madman. Another Lacanian paraphrase of the cogito could thus be: “I don’t think, therefore I am (the king).”