Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

The Voices in my Head tell me that on 4/12/05 12:23 AM, Eduardo Navas at
eduardo@navasse.net wrote:

> Hi, 
> 
> Intense exchange.
> 
> I want to comment on the contention with Capital that has been prevalent
> throughout the discussion.

I agree, and I would like to build on your discussion. Disagreement is
encouraged. Ruffled feathers are a good thing.

>  While, yes, there are currently many forms of
> resistance out there following notions of ruptures, "interventions"
> "problematizations" within the paradigms of Foucault or Debord and any other
> theorist that is relevant to issues of global politics, the one thing that
> they all share is that they are not able to work together like Capital does.

This is because there is a distinct difference between cultural production
and political economy: cultural production is an influencing subset of
political economy. Capitalism is a form of political economy. Barking about
the "movies" is not.

> While Capital is extremely different from place to place, it is extremely
> prevalent in its purpose--it is homogeneous.

I disagree. I think Capital is identical from place to place - that's what
makes it so effective. Different places and different people have different
responses and uses for it.

Example: an instrument of capital : credit.

People loan each other money all over the place. How "interest" is acquired
varies between culture, but money is still loaned and capital is still
formed. How people deal with it varies.

People can take deep breaths of the living world air spirit, people can
convulse and gasp mightily for their last dying breath, people can calming
inhale and exhale in meditation: but:

 the exchange of oxygen in the lungs is the exchange of oxygen in the lungs

- and like "breathing", capital is as transparent (in a Marxian sense / the
obviousness of the physical activity) as it is Opaque (in terms of finding
effective alternatives to it, as a mystery or a puzzle is opaque)

>  This is the strength behind globalization.

First, I would like to be clear: the whole contemporary notion of
"globalisation" is absurd. People have been trading goods and services over
enormous distances for a very very long time. The English invasion of North
America was, in no small part, instigated by a corporation: the Hudson Bay
Company. And that was 200+ years ago.

Intercontinental trade was accomplished by the Esquimaux even earlier.
Humanity's invasion of the Americas even earlier still. So, when I hear
people whinging about "globalisation", a bunch of detectors in my head send
warning signals saying "misunderstanding of the big picture".

People have been travelling all over the place for a very long time and have
been bringing things with them. So-called globalisation is simply the
contemporary manifestation (and insane amplification) of a process that has
been going on for an extremely long time.

Note: Neolithic hunter-gatherers were not using sweatshops to make sharper
spear points cheaper.

But: if you take the same urge to travel (proof: we're everywhere) and
combine it with an equally old urge to survive more easily using "low cost"
resource banks (proof: technological intensification of both the
sophistication of tools and the acquisition and consumption of resources)
and an abstract wealth economy of credit and wage slavery sitting on a
system of class and privilege via mystified justifications (i.e. capitalism)

the math get simple: our contemporary understanding of globalisation is a
(but not the) logical result. And therefore completely off the mark.

> Capital knows to do one thing: expand.

No, it also knows how to create wealth ex nihilo, among other things...

> It does not care for any cultural
> issue that any resistance movement can claim.

10 points. Very good.

>  Yet, differences within
> movements separates them from each other and often leads them to weak
> positions.

This is because "movements" see themselves as separate from capitalism.
Capitalism is Part of the Problem.  However: as Marx even noted: Capitalism
is a DRAMATIC improvement over what earlier obtained. The socio-historic
conditions for the arrival of capitalism are well documented.

Hence: Capitalism USES opposition to improve itself.

The conclusions from that are So Utterly Fucking Depressing, I don't even
know where to begin - because then we're tossed back to earlier slave states
methods of social hegemony - the classic "bread and circuses".

Art (and cultural production in general) is part of the circus.

Bread is brought to you by ADM.

Note: their website is http://www.admWORLD.com

Going there is like visiting some brave new world...

We are all part of the "System". Even when we critique the "System" we're
part of the System. Getting outside of it is like asking:

"Define The Universe: give three examples..."


 
> The bottom line is that since Marxism fell to the wayside there has not been
> any other cultural paradigm that can claim a strong position against
> Capital. 

Marxism did not "fall to the wayside". The Soviet Union, which had evolved
into a state capitalist system, failed. When it all hit the fan, the only
people who knew how to run a market based econoy were the people engaged in
Marketing: the Black Marketers, and the Mafia surrounding it: hence the
present suituaion today, where Russia is dominated by looses affiliates of
different corrput and corrupting gangs (the former communists being one of
those gangs...) China saw the writing on the wall, and followed suit, but
with typically Chinese intensiveness. They saw the efficiency of the Soviet
Union's tyranny and one upped it, by combining it with bloodless capitalist
economics. The result?

The Soviet Union dissolved, and China is now the second most powerful
economy in the world. And they are deeply afraid of what the USA will do as
it deteriorates.

For more on that I recommend this:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/pills2/

It's 5 years old, and pre-9/11, but political economy sees things like 9/11
as round bumps...

The American imperialists have responded to the above report and one
theoretician is getting a lot of notice by the neocons:

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/

and his terrifying vision in his own words:

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/media/interviews.htm

Note: I found out that he indoctrinates each "class" of new Generals in the
Army (and Admirals in the Navy) with his lecture. I saw a video of his
lecture. Be. Afraid.

But: Marxism never failed. It was pressed into service for which it was
ill-equipped (it's hard to run a country wit ha theory that has no notion of
exactly how to organise the State.) Marxism was always a predominantly
"critical" notion  - ut was always weak on prescriptions, a preferring to
punt this into the notion of historical necessity.

> All we have, even today, are ruptures, interventions,
> problematizations, go down the line with more trendy terms.

In a post that never made it's way here, your point was well covered byt the
Red Crayola with Art and Language in the song "A Portrait of VI Lenin in the
style of Jackson Pollock part 2" where Mayo Thompson sings:

"If you think culture's revolution
If you think culture's revolution
If you think culture's revolution
you can stick it up your ass."


>  People only
> function with small moments of resistance.

Because they get distracted by bread and circuses.

> In the end, what is the real
> purpose in resisting and is there a vision for a new type of culture?

I htink the whole notion of a "New Type of Culture" is so weighted down with
early 20th Century notions of the role of culture it's not useful.

> Today, people are not willing to take a harder stance and instead stick to
> short term interventions.

No no no no. No. Oddly enough, an example is Hezbollah. I *detest* the fact
that they recruit people to strap ordnance to their bodies to blow up buses
depots, cafes, etc. BUT: they also run clinics. They teach people how to
read. THINGS LIKE THAT.

Twittering about "transgressive art" does nothing for the vast majority of
people who's concerns are much more immediate.

To the left:

Are you feeding them? No.
Are you assembling a global network of food distribution and acquisition
that can feed 10 billion people? No.
Are you helping them have babies? No.
Are you taking care of Grampa as he drops dead in the hospital? No.
Are you even changing his bedpan? Hell no.

Does capitalism?  Yup.

Food? Be a wage slave and buy some. All things as they are, most people get
enough to live long enough to reproduce their labour.
Having a baby? hire a doctor.
Grampa? put him in a hospital.
Bedpan? Part of the "hospital care plan".

It doesn't do any of the above really well, but it does it well enough that
(for now) there aren't too many food riots.


> The politics of the artworld since conceptualism
> have turned into an extreme form of conventionalized institutional critique,

By necessity. Art is not Political Theory. All it can do in terms of
critique is discuss its attachments to the dominant political-economy. Same
thing with the samizdat in Soviet Union. Its meaning as a literary form was
entirely conditioned by it political repression. this doesn't mean that
everything that came out of it wasn't more than propaganda - on the contrary
- there was some very fine writing there - but its meaning as a mode of
expression was determined by it being "in opposition" to the political
economy.


> and new media circles, thanks to their dependency on institutions, are not
> too far behind this situation--if not already in it.

Gee - not too great of an understatement....

>  That it is not brought
> up is another issue, because those in such circles can always focus on the
> new possibilities of communication...  Much easier to suspend politics by
> focusing on the constant development of technology.

In fact, I see much of New Media's "formalism" as one of its greatest
weaknesses. That and the criminally myopic notion that New Media must
devolve in terms of computability.

> This is the reason why I was wondering about Aliette's take on Wark's book.
> I personally hate to discuss a book when there is no decent summary put
> forward by those who bring it up.

I completely disagree. This list is already wordy enough. Full on critiques
of referenced texts I would find burdensome.

>  It often leads to abstract soundbites
> around the actual content, and is always easy to misunderstand what the book
> may actually be about.

People do that anyway.

> Or people during discussion can perform incredible
> sleights of hands.

*People do that anyway.*

> I am not going to describe the book in detail here, but I will say that as
> many on the list know, it proposes hackers as a new type of class resisting
> yet another class: the vector class (a global form of the bourgeois adept to
> information).  The book has been proposed as a reproposition of Marxism and
> has been praised by many.  I, however, admit to be a bit skeptical because
> the book fails to deal with a major problem with class--its hierarchy.

I go back to the basics: Political economy. To quote the Gang of Four:

" who owns what you use, who owns what you do?"

To which I would paraphrase a quote from Sokal:

"I... never quite understood how (critical art theory) was supposed to help
the working class."



> So where to look?  I would say Benjamin.  He knew better than to speculate,
> even though he heavily relied on Marx for his critical position, he
> certainly knew better than to predict.

Benjamin's failure wasn't his fault - he knew what he knew at the time. He
couldn't see culture as part of a primate species mating ritual. He was
completely caught up in the intellectual process of Art. He didn't
understand that Art was the creation and plaything of social elites.

Proof: a painting by Van Gogh sells for millions. The aura isn't lost: it's
fetishised and amplified. The aura becomes a Halo you can play on an xBox -
all fascist blood and gore.


> This is the real border we need to cross.  Where to or with what
> methodology? 

No. The border is one that needs to be crossed when the moment is opportune.
That was the realisation of Lenin and Mao: you take an opportunity when
history provides it, and then force the hand of history. The problem with
that, I see as mostly having to do with Chaos Theory and the laws of
unintended consequences. Pareto (nutty fascist screwball he was) saw this
clearly as a cycling of elites.

I see the problems we face today as inherently catastrophic. At some point,
catastrophe will be preferable to the Weberian chokehold of bureaucracy or
the self-exhausting battle of globalised superstates or both, and then it
will suck to be alive.

What happens next, at the catastrophe, is what matters. What's happening now
is simply disgraceful.



HW


IMHO: Frankly, unless the planet gets a big fat clue, we're looking at a
slow extinction (without issue) in a few hundred thousand years as a
neolithic race of warlike primates. Metals exhausted, the only thing left
are rocks, and chasing the buffalo until our dwindling numbers are wiped out
by a Natural Transgression. Whether it is an asteroid, a disease, or a
supervolcano - doesn't matter.

Eventually, a couple of neutron stars will collide and sterilise the planet,
like the last time...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1456594,00.html