FW: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

[Eduardo Navas <eduardo@navasse.net>]

Dear Christina,

For some reason one of the quotes I made in my last post did not show up
completely.  Below you will find my complete commentary.  Could you please
forward this message I write to you instead of the one I sent to the list.
I appreciate it.

I  am also Ccing the list in case posting with that address is easier.

Best,

Eduardo


------ Forwarded Message
From: Eduardo Navas <eduardo@navasse.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 22:40:19 -0700
To: Empyre <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>, soft_skinned_space
<empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

Hello,

I will respond to Henry's comments below.


On 4/12/05 10:20 PM, "Henry Warwick" <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> 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.


Happy to hear this.  Let's try to connect it to Kate's interest in Matrixial
Encounters.  I will attempt this below.


 
> 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.

No disagreement here.  Thanks for explaining that clearly to all of us.

> 
>> 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)


My comment could be rephrased "functions differently..."  The point being
that I do explain that Capital is homogeneous.  Note that I do point out
homogeneity.  We are essentially saying the same thing: Capital is the same
(homogeneous), but " functions differently" from place to place.  Again, no
disagreement here.


> 
>>  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.


I could say that I become suspect of someone who becomes suspect of the term
Globalization... In fact, I do.  While yes, it is true that the dynamics at
play in globalization have been around for a long time, it has not been
until recently that they became developed to the point that individuals are
more or less immediately affected by political and economical events in
different parts of the world.  Essentially, the term is related to the
homogeneity that corporate activity has put into play in the last, say...
Fifty years, but many people would contest that the dynamics of
globalization in relation to international corporate marketing did not kick
up until around the seventies.  Now, that is something we could contest. The
point being that globalization with a big "G" is specifically recent. Taking
it back way back, back into time is a null point.

Your argument has a structural flaw that can best be understood when
considering Capitalism on the same terms of exchange. (shall we call it an
equation?  I here now plug in the new variables).  As you yourself pointed
out, Capitalism is something that could not have happened before it
happened, certain cultural developments needed to take place for the current
state of living to come about.  I could claim that exchange and use value or
a rather different version of them have been around forever, but this, as
you will agree based on what you have already written on your response is
not true.  These concepts take on very specific roles under Capital.
Pre-capitalist gift economies, for example, cannot be easily claimed to be
Capital with a big "C."  You could argue for the structure to be there
however, but not Capital itself.  This is the situation with Globalization
with the big "G."


> 
>> Capital knows to do one thing: expand.
> 
> No, it also knows how to create wealth ex nihilo, among other things...

We keep certainly keep adding.  No argument there.

> 
>> It does not care for any cultural
>> issue that any resistance movement can claim.
> 
> 10 points. Very good.

I appreciate the points, phew!!


>>  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..."


No argument here, I take this to be a clarification.


> 
> 
> 
>> 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.


First, I never mentioned the Soviet Union when I said Marxism fell by the
wayside.  But I admit that the fall of the soviets is a big elephant in the
room that I should have acknowledged.  I will be more specific here and do a
little exegesis for the sake of clarity.

When I stated the loss of force by Marxism, I was referring to its position
as a critical tool.  I am not alone on this, and in fact, Lyotard and
Habermas, among many many others like Baudrillard, have renegotiated their
particular Marxisms to come to terms with the ideologies many shortcomings.
For Lyotard, it would be in the books Libidinal Economy:
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-33614-7.shtml
And his now famous, The Postmodern Condition:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/lyotard.htm
Bio:
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~spoons/lyotard.html

And Habermas' theories of communication.
Find a concise summary of his position here:
http://home.cwru.edu/~ngb2/Authors/Habermas.html

But to go to the point, I will cite Terry Eagleton's latest book, After
Theory, where he writes:

"Western Marxism's shift to culture was born partly out of political
impotence and disenchantment.  Caught up between Capitalism and Stalinism,
groups like the Frankurt School could compensate for their political
homelessness by turning to cultural and philosophical questions.
Politically marooned, they could draw upon their formidable cultural
resources to confront a capitalism in which the role of culture was becoming
more and more vital, and thus prove themselves once more politically
relevant.  In the same act, they could dissociate themselves from a savagely
philistine Communist world, while immeasurably enriching the traditions of
thought that Communism had betrayed.  In doing so, however, much Western
Marxism ended up as a somewhat gentrified version of its militant
revolutionary forebears, academicist, disillusioned and poiltically
toothless [...]" p. 29
After Theory
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20040216&s=deresiewicz

And so on.  You get the idea.  This is the outcome of a well-kown pluralism
called... Postmodernism that as we all know Lyotard some twenty plus years
ago used to dissent from his Marxist roots; he states:

"Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's
Captial) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society are used in
one way or another as aids in programming the system. [...] We cannot
conceal the fact that the critical model in the end lost its theoretical
standing and was reduced to the status of a 'utopia' or 'hope,' a token of
protest raised in the  name of man or reason or creativity, or again of some
social category--such as the Third World or the students--on which is
conferred in exttremis the henceforth improbable function of critical
subject." p. 12
The Postmodern Condition:
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/lyotard_text.htm

This is what I meant with falling by the wayside.  I believe it is now
clear.  Now I would also like to contest your proposition that Marxism did
not go wrong.

Such statement implies that Marxism is like a monolith that is stable and is
untouchable by ideology.  This in fact is a misunderstanding that makes the
ideology quite vulnerable to misuse.  In a way, such a statement positions
it on terms of how the Holy word functions for religions.  I here cite
Foucault on his understanding of Marxism as a discourse quite different from
how the natural sciences function:

"[...]one defines a proposition's theoretical  validity in relation to the
work of the founders?while, in the case of  Galileo and Newton, it is in
relation to what physics or cosmology is (in its intrinsic  structure and
"normativity") that one affirms the validity of any  proposition that those
men may have put forth. To phrase it very  schematically: the work of
initiators of discursivity is not situated in the  space that science
defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity  which refers back to
their work as primary coordinates.

In  this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields
of  discursivity, for a "return to the origin." This return, which is part
of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not
a  historical supplement which would be added to the discursivity, or merely
an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task
of  transforming the discursive practice itself. Re-examination of
.Galileo's  text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics,
but it will  never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand,
re-examining  Freud's texts modifies psychoanalysis itself just as a
re-examination of Marx's  would modify Marxism" p.156
http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Foucault.htm

In other words, Marxism is a discourse that can be changed.  It is not an
untouchable law following the mechanics of science.  So, has it failed?
This is not an issue for me.  How has it functioned historically, however,
is.  And that it fell by the wayside because of its discursive
interpretation I believe has been proven above.

I will stop here.  The rest of your post is quite constructive but I have no
contentions with your position.  This does not necessarily mean that I
disagree or have a particular critical position.

Now, I would like to redirect this dynamic back to Kate's current discussion
on matrixial Encounters.  Anyone want to jump in on from here on?  I am
ready to read for a bit, to see what else I can contribute in a few days.

Peace,

Eduardo

------ End of Forwarded Message