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).”

The rest of the audios from On the Idea of Communism

Finally lernt how to upload streaming audio. Here is the rest of the conference:

SATURDAY 14 March

00:00 Alessandro Russo “Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?”

40:55 Alberto Toscano “Communist Power / Communist Knowledge”

01:16:50 Antonio Negri “Communisme: reflexions sur le concept et la pratique”

01:54:00 Discussion

On the Idea of Communism (Saturday)

SATURDAY AFTERNOON SESSION

07:00 Terry Eagleton “Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?”

35:08 Jacques Ranciere “Communists without Communism?”

01:10:00 Alain Badiou ”Communism: a generic name”

02:12 Discussion

On the Idea of Communism (Saturday 2)

SUNDAY

03:44 Slavoj Zizek “To begin from the beginning over and over again”

55:40 Gianni Vattimo “Weak Communism?” 01:34:50

Judith Balso “Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible name for politics?”

Concluding Debate

On the Idea of Communism (Sunday)

Friday.

Peter Hallward – Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will

 

Bruno Bosteels – The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in an Age of Terror

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Smoke World Map – In this world 2

Instant

Laughing all the way to the Bank, and eating a Banker – Notes on Subversive Humour and Impossible Violence

Events at the G20 protest in London simulate the possibilities of violence as an activist strategy that can step out of the trappings and co-optations of the binaries set up by the media-police. How can the symbolic mechanisms that prop up a hegemonic order be effaced? A partial, potential strategy is not one of opposition and realizable violence, but of and through intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted) of defacing the symbolic order on which capitalists social power bases itself. It is a subtractive comic stance from which an impossible violence can be waged.
A suspiciously hip protester

One of the pictures on the Guardians G20 gallery shows a suspiciously, rather hip protester in the act of hurling a monitor into the already broken RBS branch . Surrounding him is an amphitheater of journalists, lined up with cameras held over their heads, their clicking drowning out the sound of glass breaking, as Charlie Brooker noted in his newswipe. It seems that every newspaper send a cameraman, or all the freelance photographers of London were seeking out the money-shot of a masked protester breaking property defended by the law. This fixation on violence fixes the protesting on the street and co-opts it as a binaric oposite to the liberal-pacificst Order. This narrow inter-play precludes violence in its symbolic dimension. The images of skirmishes only include violence as grievous bodily harm or assaults on property:  ”Journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of “violence”: something like ‘damage to persons or property not authorized by properly constituted authorities’. This has the effect that if even one protestor damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent.” (Graeber – Giant Puppets). Street Violence is condemned and easily neutralized by police violence in return.

Although this problem emerges from the strategy of the protesters on the frontline too. Their violence is a realizable violence, hurling a stone at the police or smashing a window, which folds into and reinforces the police-state’s representation of protest. The ‘Reclaim the Streets’ slogans are repetitive, predictable & waning. They are slogans of territorial occupation and usurpation “Whose streets, our streets”, which operate only in their immediate spatiality, and operate with an idea of politics as presence & declarations & as acts of reclaiming. This demarcation of the sphere of political action as delineated by the slogans during the protests, leads to a closure of reference points for attacks. They’re hysterically shouted at the police men, and are futile in a historical and strategic sense. The Big Other does not hear them. What message can assault and suspend it then?

Realizable violence, completely misses the target, if the target is the symbolic order that attempts to structure our perceptions of hegemonic categories as stable. The Red Army Faction apparently indulged in some exploratory torture of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer and industrialist. In this situation of carnal vulnerability, or on a much larger scale the Khmer Rouge, it is clear the bourgeois cannot be killed. To ordinarily perceive capitalism as a property of things or of people in themselves misses the, in rather spooky terms, the supersensous phantasmogoric ectoplasm, on which the machinations of the capitalist economy operate. In Marx’s terms these are the social relation of production which is the abstract couplet of concrete activities within capitalism. To start targeting the former, if it can make sense, an apt strategy, or its secondary effects, would move beyond only honing in on the identities emerging from alienation that political economy masks us with: ‘the capitalist’the worker’ ‘the consumer’. More or less one can’t “Smash Capitalism” or its incarnated agents as another slogan exclaims. To get to the point, and to sharpen our target, we can even quote from the Communist Manifesto “To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production…Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”

The long tradition of rioting and storming contained in it a momentum for an actualisable, realizable violent usurpation and infliction of bodily pain, which as strategy here in Europe is rather passe’. A subversive strategy in the space of the streets could be performed as an “impossible violence” that can therefore exceed the confines of momentary acts of realizable violence and affronts the socio-symbolic underpinnings that enable the power of the ruling classes to flow. Of course money and the police are the pillars of bourgeois-bureaucratic rule. But this monetary-military power, that compels workers to work for them and forces dissenters into their police vans is the acknowledged basis of their power. The ruling classes have the monopoly, both monetary and in the use of physical violence. A critique that reveals this as the source of their power (like the themes of inequality, billionaires and police-repression highlighted by demonstrators) seems to misfire, since they and everybody else knows this very well. Even the ideological legitimacy of their bourgeois values comes from this: the wealthy classes are responsible for prosperity, and the big-spending state for protecting property.

The anarchist Anthropologist, David Graeber, makes a distinction between social power based on the ability to act directly on others, and the power arising from the ability to define oneself which can convince others how they should act towards you. The first is rooted in money, or to be more inclusive in capitalist-bureaucratic (or monetary-military) monopolizations of weapons of coercion. The second has its centrifugal core in their social status of production from which spin and spew out their symbolic power. This power is based on insignia, symbolic codes that structure our perception of them, and signal us to act with deference and respect. Even in our binary opposition and critiques, in which the contours of their power are retraced, we acknowledge and reproduce its format and therefore contribute to its stability. An opposition that sustains its enemy, as a sinister conspiratorial figure, and by erecting itself as the opposition, allows the enemy, through the media, the conditions for its own legitimation, securing law and order and wealth production, as opposed to “unproductive rioting”. To deface the character masks of capitalism, a strategy that can tear the symbolic identities of their social status (the Banker, the Politician) could be attenuated by a comical analytical stance that intimates their spectrally objective underpinnings. For example:

Chris Night, the Communist Anthropologist at the University of East London, who let it slip that he might accidentally hang a banker, or start gnawing at a bankers leg rather than get a sandwich if he gets a little bit peckish ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/31/g20-protests-chris-knight ) exemplifies this effect emerging through impossible Violence. It remains outside the trappings of the binaries of the media-police (atleast for the viewer since the media took it literally… that he was actually planning to hang a banker, grab a person in a suite coming out of the office, and throw a rope over the nearest lamppost, while the 5000 police people stand by) but is still present on the streets and in streams of dissemination.

A symbolic attack of impossible violence can step-over the cordon of bashing police men. An impossible violence, is so grotesquely overdrawn that it permeates out of the binaries of street-skirmishes & the media, into the symbolic order, such as into the figure of the overlord banker. So Chris Knights ‘threat’ to gnaw at a bankers leg when he gets hungry, is subversive because it is an image that crawls its way into the category, and gnaws at it. The humorous rather than the violent element is responsible for dividing the image of the unitary power of finance, for inserting a space of critical reflection. It has an undermining presence, dislocating the position of the banker and forcing it into a more vulnerable positions, where it can be mocked, and in a first maneuver exposed for their petty materiality as embodied in the fleshy leg or dismembered bloody hand at the end end of a pin-stripe sleeve, that Chris Knight’s “Festival of the Dead” Procession costumes contained. Since it is a symbolic assault that splits the categories of mastery in the Symbolic Order, by lodging itself within, it remains after the protest, humorously clinging onto the figure of the banker, constantly revealing its vulnerability by having effaced the confident strut of the baron. But it is in the second maneuver where a further, secondary effect can be found in this strategy of subversive humour. This effect goes beyond revealing the bankers petty bodies, beyond the simple intrusion of corporeal or economic material reality. This strategy is not a blockade, an autonomous alternative space or a physical attack that can hinder capitalist spurts. By ‘allowing’ the capitalist to continue, this strategy can merely suggest the mechanisms of its reproduction, by revealing how the bankers continue to strut in the pace of their supremacy after having been symbolically tripped by their defacement (see ‘the universal-at-work chapter in Zupancic, 2008). The Guardian reported on some personal testimony of a few bankers: “The riots, they said, were only a minor inconvenience: “We’ve been in this morning, made a lot of money and now are chilling out”” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/bankers-betting-protesters-g20).
This is what is actually funny, that after the pompous baron slips on the banana peel he is up again and walking around arrogantly, firm in “the belief of his own aristocratic Self” (Zupancic: 29-30)
“The process of joking is not only “work done with the help of the Symbolic” (condensations, displacements, playing with homonyms, and so on) but always also something that displays the “Symbolic at work” (Zupancic; 143). A bad example, from the placards at the protest “Banker rhymes with…?”. There could be better ones.

From Chris Knights performative strategy can be intimiated that the source of their efficiency exceeds their material presence, such as the banter of bankers about poker-nights and stocks over a starbucks coffee. This is revealed because of the comic stance this maneuver provides, whose effect is a distance, from which perspective we can witness the functioning of symbolic structures, as the absurdity of the individual banker who assumes and continually inserts him or herself into the position of an ordained invincibility. It scathes this symbolic order on which social power rests, through this subtraction (from symbolic hierarchies and binaric media representations). This stance then enables a subtraction, that like in the image Zizek used in the Conference “On the idea of Communism” consists of pulling out a a card from the house of cards, which leads to the crumbling of the whole structure, only from that distanced stance of course. This is a strategy unlike the declarations of temporary autonomous zones, that remains a green patch within the social order, that like Robert Owens utopian villages can idyllically co-exist and not fundamentally challenge the ruling symbolic order.
The question is then how to come up with tactics that efface social power, not by opposition, but by intrusion and subtraction, which has the effect (not for the dim-witted media) of delegitimisng the symbolic order on which the capitalists social power is based. Something like this seems pressing, because the uncanny, gruesome puppeteering can bind the opposites of Violence and Humour. This can side-step mediation through the news, which propagates the liberal myth of the feckless consciousless agitator, of the violent ones, the few trouble-makers who wreak havoc and ruin it for everyone else, those are the true ‘people’, who are peace-loving, and as the media reported share a joke and their organic cookies with police men. In this ideological deadlock the possibility for harming the police-state order is foreclosed.

David Graeber, 2003 Chapter 3 – Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value

David Graeber – ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture

http://balkansnet.org/zcl/puppets.pdf

Jacques Ranciere, The concept of ‘critique’ and the the ‘critique of Political Economy’

Alenka Zupancic, 2008 – On Comedy: The Odd one In

The Concept of Model Alain Badiou the WHOLE Book PDF

Ordered the book and then found that it is here at RE-PRESS for FREE

http://www.re-press.org/content/view/24/38/

‘re.press is committed to publishing rigorous philosophy that doesn’t give way on its desire. At once exclusive and egalitarian, re.press seeks to support and disseminate such thought worldwide.’

‘In line with this ambition, re.press is itself a new kind of publisher. Attentive to the latest developments in contemporary technologies, re.press publications are available globally, wherever there is access to the internet. We seek to make as many of our publications as possible available as open-access files, free to anyone who wishes to download them. Our hard-copy books are print-on-demand, minimizing waste and cost. Yet our publications also maximize design values, boosting clarity and aesthetic qualities.’

THANK YOU

Description

The Concept of Model is the first of Alain Badiou’s early books to be translated fully into English. With this publication English readers finally have access to a crucial work by one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. Written on the eve of the events of May 1968, The Concept of Model provides a solid mathematical basis for a rationalist materialism. Badiou’s concept of model distinguishes itself from both logical positivism and empiricism by introducing a new form of break into the hitherto implicated realms of science and ideology, and establishing a new way to understand their disjunctive relation. Readers coming to Badiou for the first time will be struck by the clarity and force of his presentation, and the key place that The Concept of Model enjoys in the overall development of Badiou’s thought will enable readers already familiar with his work to discern the lineaments of his later radical developments. This translation is accompanied by a stunning new interview with Badiou in which he elaborates on the connections between his early and most recent thought.
Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION – by Zachary Fraser

The Category of Formalization: From Epistemological Break to Truth Procedure
I. Ideology and Epistemological Break
II. Formalization: Subtraction and Forcing
III. On Objectless Materialisms
IV. Structural Materialism
V. Ontological Materialism
VI. ‘The Chief Defect of All Hitherto Existing Materialism’
VII. From Machinic Psychosis to Subjective Fidelity: ‘Marque et manque,’ and L’être et l’événement
VIII. The Structure of Philosophical Intervention, and its Use of Formal Inscription
IX. Note on the Translation

THE CONCEPT OF MODEL – trans. Zachary Fraser

Foreword
1. A few Preliminaries Concerning Ideology
2. On the Theses to be Defended in the Sequel
3. On Certain Uses of Models thatare Not in Question Here
4. On a Purely Ideological Use of the Word ‘Model’
5. The Scientific Concept of Model andthe Neo-positivist Doctrine of Science
6. Construction of the Concept of Model
7. Construction of the Concept of Model
8. Construction of theConcept of Model
9. The Category of Model andMathematical Experimentation
10. The Category of Model and theHistorical Time of Mathematical Production
Appendix
§1: The goal
§ 2: Description of the apparatus PS
§ 3: Every theorem of PS is purely logical
§ 4: Deduction theorem
§ 5: The relative consistency of certain extensions of PS
§ 6: The scope of the completeness theorem
§ 7: The lindenbaum lemma
§ 8: The completeness theorem
[Supplement]

http://www.re-press.org/content/view/24/38/

Ranciere 2 – Preface to the new Hindi translation of ‘Nights of Labour’

from hydrarchy.blogspot.com

http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/2009/01/ranciere-2-new-preface-to-hindi.html

‘Then I read documents in which this same worker described an entire vision of life, an unusual counter-economy which sought ways to reduce the worker’s consumption of everyday goods so that he would be more independent of the market economy, and better able to fight against it. Through these texts, and many others, I realised that workers had never needed others to explain the secrets of domination to them, and that the problem they faced was having to submit themselves, intellectually and materially, to the forms by which it inscribed itself on their bodies, and imposed upon them gestures, modes of perception, attitudes and language. “Be realistic: demand the impossible!” the protesters cried in 1968. But for these workers in 1830, it was not about demanding the impossible but making it happen themselves: of appropriating the time they did not have, either by spying opportunities in the working day or by giving up their own night of rest to discuss or to write, to compose verses or to work out philosophies These hard-won bonuses of time and liberty were not marginal phenomena, they were not diversions from the building of the worker movement and its great ideals. They were a revolution, discreet but radical nonetheless, and they made those other things possible…..’

‘This is also why I am not afraid that this book will suffer too much from distances of time, place and language. For it does not simply tell the story of the working class of a far-off time and place. It tells a form of experience which is not so far away from our own. Contemporary forms of capitalism, the explosion of the labour market,the new precariousness of labour and the destruction of systems of social solidarity, all create forms of life and experiences of work that are possibly closer to those of these artisans than to the universe of hi-tech workers and the global bourgeoisie given over to the frenetic consumption described by so many contemporary sociologists and philosophers. In our world, just as in theirs, the
challenge is to obstruct and subvert the order of time imposed by a system of domination. To oppose the government of capitalist and state elites and their experts with an intelligence that comes from everyone and anyone…’

Tropical Mysteries, Luminous People – Die Filme von Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Der thailändische Filmemacher Apichatpong Weerasethakul (geb. 1970) ist einer der herausragenden und eigenwilligsten Vertreter des internationalen Autorenkinos der Gegenwart. Seine einzigartigen Filme entziehen sich herkömmlichen Kategorien: nicht eindeutig der Fiktion oder dem Dokumentarischen zuzuordnen, halten sie sich nicht an erzählerische Plausibilität und narrative Logik, sondern arbeiten bewusst non-linear, mit Leerstellen und Momenten der Irritation: Oft sind sie zweigeteilt, wobei das Verhältnis beider Teile meist undurchsichtig bleibt; Credits oder Vorspann laufen bisweilen mitten im Film; es gibt Zwischentitel, sprachbegabte Tiere oder plötzlich ein schwarzes Loch im Bild. Diese traumwandlerische Freiheit des Erzählens führt dazu, dass Weerasethakuls Filme eine faszinierende hypnotische Wirkung und große imaginäre Kraft entwickeln. Neben der dokumentarischen Basis seiner Ästhetik und der Arbeit mit Laien ist für Weerasethakuls Werk das Interesse an der thailändischen Oral History charakteristisch sowie der Rückgriff auf bestehende populäre Formate (Soap Operas, Sagen, Hörspiele, Comics, alte Filme), um diese in seinen Filmen neu zu kontextualisieren. Zentral für seine Arbeit ist der Topos des Dschungels, Ort einer anderen Intensität, einer anderen Bewusstseinsstufe, Ort einer Utopie oder auch eines mythischen Reichs, das der Ordnung der Realität entgegengesetzt ist. Seine Imaginationen beruhen auf Mythen und Erinnerungen, haben bisweilen aber durchaus politische Konturen, denn das Reale ist bei ihm für das Übernatürliche durchlässig (und umgekehrt).
Weerasethakul ist einer der wenigen Filmemacher Thailands, die außerhalb des strengen thailändischen Studiosystems arbeiten, und er ist schwul, was er wiederholt in seinen Werken thematisiert und was ihm – neben den latent regimekritischen Anspielungen in seinem Schaffen – beständig Probleme mit der Zensur einbringt. Mit seiner 1999 gegründeten unabhängigen Produktions- und Verleihplattform “Kick the Machine” fördert er den unabhängigen und experimentellen Film

http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/de/arsenal/programmtext-anzeige/article/1537/304.html?cHash=c706fd81be

anti-NATO protests and the politics of joy

The last few days were waterfalls of physical, political and imaginative experience. The debates and practical issues of organization and militancy were fusing organically with hippy, vegan consumerism and playful, symbolic gesticulation. It seems, there is a relatively widespread endorsement of thinking about political engagement generally, in terms of what Michael Hardt called the ‘activism based on joy’ i.e. on collective work instead of the sacrificial commitment to a certain economics of guilt towards the other. The reality of the recent anti-NATO protests, however, seems to show, that such affirmative, positivity could also be a comfortable excuse for the gentrification of the anti-capitalist movememtn and can, if taken crudely, occlude important analysis of the role of the dubious political subjectivities within it.

On the one hand, there was all the solidarity and collective action during the recent anti-NATO days, one of the most exciting things was probably the locals and migrants joining the protests and rioting. People cheered us from all over the place: waving from out of the windows or applauding. The workers at the train depots smiled brightly and raised their fists into the air, while the migrant youth danced around the demonstrators on motorbikes and enthusiastically joined the smashing and burning. At some point little girls ran out on the streets and started jumping on the loan chanting: ‘antifa!’, ‘antifa!’ On Thursday, the rioting in the suburbs sparked by the demo seemed to be hardly controlled by the police. The robocops were running around after migrants shooting at them with tear gas and beating some with their rubber clubs. At one point a window opened and a hand threw a metal teapot or something like this on the head of one of the cops, who was violently handcuffing someone. He got really mad and found nothing better to do than to just shoot his teargas grenade into the window!

On the other hand however, there were certain problems with the concatenation between the population in the area and the activists in the camp. Firstly, none of the farmers or the migrants from the suburbs was to my knowledge, present at the plenums. Talking to them there and then would have been important e.g. the organization of the demonstrations and the blockades etc. True, the organizers of the camp were locals, but it seemed that much of the communication with the rest of the people was done through them and not through some kinds of broader meetings or plenums as part of the regular meeting-program in the camp.

Secondly, despite all the self-affection by much of the black blockers about themselves, they were a problem. The rest of the demonstrators often ran into trouble as they pointlessly escalated the situation with the police starting to shoot tear gas almost indiscriminately. Their seeming obsession with ‘marking of space’, ‘territorial control’ and paranoid quest for ‘security’ as well as for the much beloved ‘spontaneity’ (which meant practically smashing things up like: the post office, pharmacy, cars and bus stops etc as well as the quite legitimately hateful targets e.g. the military barracks, old border control building etc). did at many point brought tension into the relationship with the local population.

The prognosis that one sympathizer at the nettime mailing list recently made about the bb movement, actually corresponds quite well to how many ‘militants’ actually seem to want to see themselves: ‘(…in a tendential hyphothesis) as a potentially emerging …european liberation army of sorts’ (my edits) Seeing such a self-organized militarism on the left, which seeks to ‘liberate the oppressed’, is a cause of concern. It seems, to think that you can smash the state and its structures by simply physically destroying buildings and controlling the space with the help of a ‘liberation army’ is to live in a one dimensional dream-world of military strategists. It’s because the bblockers rarely attended any plenums, didn’t really take part in the collective decision and acted mostly ‘autonomously’, that they often separated themselves from the movement and started to act as a sort of caricatured, headless vanguard party, aparantly, mostly interested in doing actions resembling some kind of street ‘outsider art’.

The creative aspect of bblock’s militancy, which was quite revealing about the movement as a whole. Before going to the demo they had actually erected the ‘barricades’ on the streets leading to the village. To see this amazing piece of ‘autonom’, infantile imagination was utterly fascinating. That construction had no utilitarian function whatsoever. It was art and ‘pure’ art, much better then the john bock/hirschhorn sculptures. To believe that it could really stop the movement of a police van or the robocops one would need to do a rather brave leap of faith, like that they would suddenly want to attack the camp barefoot. The ‘defence’ consisted of: the actual barricade made out of furniture looted from the house near by, with something like a Christian cross in the middle, the quite carefully separated rows of broken glass- presumably imitating the spikes that police uses against the vehicles- and the various metal rods, rather aesthetically arranged. Several Antifa Flags were hung from the houses on either side of the barricades so that one got a rather well balanced composition when one was approaching from the direction of the enemy. Here and there you could see groups of shabby teenagers dressed in black holding sticks or stones. On Saturday, the disused, building of the old border control between France and Germany together with a hotel and a pharmacy were smashed and set ablaze. It produced very familiar, majestic images of apocalyptic rioting and discontent, which made it to the media.

To end these notes, I’ll simply ask these questions.

Does the aesthetization of the political by South Park seems to show capitalist contradictions going mad to the extend, that even fashion trends (bb aesthetics of violence) become capable of mobilizing significant numbers of young people to against it?

Or is it simply, that in the absence of the significant power to prevent yourself from being ‘kettled’ by the police, the only way to resist, in this context, is to resist symbolically, meaning sending signals and images to the Other (the imagined people, workers of the world etc.) who might benevolently Answer if enough agitation is made?

If this is the case, then to what extend does it hollows out politics proper as everything is directed at signalling and demonstrating and not at say broad forms of civil disobedience?

What does it then mean to insist that there be a distinction made within the so called ‘joyous machine’ of protest and insurrection between the ‘politics of joy’, which contains aesthetics as the political and the self-indulgent, militant hedonism, which aesthetisizes politics and directs its seeking eyes towards the Other?

an

Solidarity with Greek Movement Structure In Progress

To be carried around and used at pickets.

NOTES: Chakrabarty – When and What was Postcolonialism

Intro by Archeologist…
The title of his book ‘Provincializing Europe’ is so good that it is
sufficient to just read the title.

I’ll strart with the ‘When’ of the question, then move onto the What, and
hopefully there isnt’t enough time left for me to discuss the controversial
‘was’ of the title.

$B”# A good historian messes up Periodization & Chronology

●Anti-Colonialism and Decolonization movements of the post WWII were stuck
in a binary, what Bhabha called Difference without Hybridity. This was the
Pan-Africanism period, where ‘race’ played such a crucial part, in for
example the writings coming out of the Carribean
●Postcolonialism – emerged as a critique to make liberal-capitalism (or in
todays terms Globalisation) more democratic, include the hitherto excluded
and marginalized subjects,
●Latin American post-colonial theorist (Mignolo) have raised important
questions, such as what are the implications, that countries in Latin
America gained independence in the early 19th century, for seeing
postcolonialism as part of recent globalisation narratives.

Ill start with the Asia and Afrika Conference of 1955, or what is called
Bandung Conference.
●Richard Wright, African American Author who attended the confernce, wrote
that the “elites are more Western than the West”, partly because they took
European idealism to literally.
●The conference managed to create a “shared anti-imperialism” even though an
“alliance” was spurious. China was not allowed to join until the last
minute, and lots of countries were rather por-American.
●The desire to catch-up. The Engineer emerged as the eroticized image of
developmentalism. The new national hero and symbol.
●Leaders, Sukarno, Naseer, Nyere, Nehru, were all Pedagogical rather than
Dialogical, but I dont have time now to pursue this distinction.

The Nation

●During colonialism , the nation was made through street mobs, through
songs, rituals and poetry (except for collaborator-buerocrats in the British
Empire). After Independence, the nation became administrative and
bio-political
●After Charisma – After the death of leadership figures was dissilussionment
●In the 60s, the elite emigration, “brain drain”, signal of disillusionment
with the State
●Working-Class Migrations existed since the 19th century, but
Post-Colonialism impossible without the “chattering classes”, a
multi-culturalism.
●=> Emergence of Post-colonialism
●The circulation of anti-imperialism: For example how the figure of Ghandi
travelled, in USA in the 60s and during Anti-Apartheid struggle.

Post-Colonialism emerges
●Why was Vietnam rather Kurdistan the focus of international solidarity.
Because Kurdistan was a national issue.
●Issac Julian (made film on Fanon), with Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha in the
70s, organized a Conference on Fanon
●Also this was when writings of someone like Charles Taylor were emerging
around the issue of recognition. Its not co-incidental.
●Stuart Hall, at the Birmingham Cultural Studies, emerged 1st as a critique
of E.P. Thomposon & the History Workshop Journal

Recognization of Post-colonialism
●Anti-essentialist (not “white & black”)
●Suspicion – That the Man of the Universal is “white” (Fanon)
●The Man of the Universal does not know how to deal with difference
●Post-cololianlist went to look in the colonial archives, and developed a
critique of sameness (the sammeness of the catch-up impulse of
developmentalism
●But writings were no only about asserting difference
●Differences as Real, but not stable enough to stabilize into Disciplines
●((How to reproduce market functions, without its institutions))
●Theorized difference, after post-structuralist thinkers- Derrida, Irigaray,
for example Bhabha in his concept of mimicry
●=> But this doesnt mean that Post-colonialism is simply indebted to
European Thought, as critics such as Arif Dirlik like to point out.
●The alternative i’m proposing is that Post-colonialism is more influenced
by anti-colonialism.

QUESTIONS & ANSWER -
Q: What is Dialogical you mentioned?
●What I meant by Dialogical in terms of Pedagogical. Dialogical is basically
without imperialism. e.g. Enligh becomes Kreole through appropiation
●Quote from Cesaire “I am not a prisoner of French Language, Language is
arbitrary, I use the language to express my ideas” vs. Language of Empire as
Imperialism – Anticipates Debates on Globalization
● Leopolod Senghor vs. Hardt and Negri. For Senghor man is incarnate, always
already, positioned. Hardt and Negri use words like “placelessness and
nomadic” and emphasize the free movement of people

Q: What about the WAS of your title, is post-colonialism over?
The WAS of my Title (hope ive answered the when and what)
● Latin American Post-colonialism is based on the Renaissance (e.g. Octavio
Paz)
●Indian Post-coloanilism is more based on the Enlightenment
●West Remains Post-colonial. As Etienne Balibar has tried to address -
“Question of cultural and historical difference and how to respond”
theoretically. e.g. The police in Paris riots 2005 was a colonial police

Q:
●Fanons gesture of Double-Conscioussness in 1961, where he says Marxism is
indispensable, but simultaneuolsy reaffirms that we need to scrap Marxist
categories

Q: You haven’t mentioned Said
● Said, mh, he was quite different from people like Spivak and Bhabha. First
he signals that he’s influenced by French post-structuralism, by mentioning
Michel Foucault, but he does not remain very loyal to Foucaults notion of
“Discourse”. Also he does not intersect this with “Difference”. This is the
opposite of Bhabha. Also Said, who was older than Bhabha and Spivak, often
looked down upon them, seeing them as the children, dabbling with French
theory.

● There is a difference between post-colonialism done in history Departments
and in Literary Departments. In the first, theres the need for specifictiy
and context. Also theres the underlying idea that Language does not mediate
the past, the task of the historian is to represent the past. The Literature
branch of post-colonialism centeres upon the ‘singularity in poetry’. They
see language as the event. The play with Language and do all sorts of
wonderfull things with it. This is not accepted at History Departments, for
the better, since my prose is only capable of being that of the Historian

● In the 70s USA – Identitiy Politics
UK – anti-rascism and activism (Fanon big in France)
● Post-colonialism came from the left, but now moving to the right,
possibly… The 80s was the Right moving into the White House, and the Left
moving into English Departments
●My friend Sandro Mezzadra has been writing about Post-colonialism and
Politics

Q: On Palestine, and whether it is a colonized place.
A: Post-colonialism can be 2 things. One a metaphoric level, so to say,
which links different countries in History, Palestine can be said to be
colonized, thereby tracing some continuity with past expriences of
colonialism. But Post-Colonialism is also much more specific, in its
configuration as emerging in the 70s from an expirience of the British
Empire. Here context is more important.

Q: About Marxism, Post-colonialism an effect of economics of colonialism.
● If we relinquish Universality it leads to political paralysis, the
breaking down…black feminisits, 3rd world feminists… Leads to a politics
of Suspicion. This did not produce a poltics of dialogue
● vs. Zizek though, who thinks the Universal is only European
●Marxist Historiography failed in India, because it did not realize what
kind of politics caste gave rise to
● You can have difference, without having to essentialize it
● The Historian Ginzburg argue against expirience, such as Biographies, this
was challenged by feminsits in the 70s.
● Now the recent bestseller the US, is called “The trouble with diversity”,
which moves from a discussion from race to class.
● Intellectual Tradition, comes alive, when you debate as if they were
alive. Marx is still relevant, not consigned, or contained within the 19th
century context. Marxism needs to be renewed from & for the margins. Marxism
might be exhausted, but it is not invalidated
● Transfer- My intellectual trajectory as combination, for a non-eurocentric
Universalism, that is how to recombine, re-engage in contemporary
intellectual deadlock

Michael Hardt On the Production of the Common (4parts)

On the Idea of Communism

Part 1 00:12-00:27 The book Commonwealth is announced

Alain Badiou: Introductory remarks

On the Idea of Communism

Costas Douzinas: Welcome

On the Idea of Communism

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