[Been making the rounds, but needs to be shared. Originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano]
Alain Badiou
The Courage of the Present
For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.
To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.
In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc.
So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms.
First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity.
Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life.
A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis.
The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis established itself on a vast scale between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The dominant themes then were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from 1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of European imperialism and the systematic plunder of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution in China) is the second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing. From 1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive stabilization, a period in which we still live, during which we have witnessed the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships created in the second sequence.
I am convinced that a third historical sequence of the communist hypothesis will inevitably open up, different from the two previous ones, but paradoxically closer to the first than the second. This sequence will share with the sequence that prevailed in the nineteenth century that fact that what is at stake in it is the very existence of the communist hypothesis, which today is almost universally denied. It is possible to define what, along with others, I am attempting as preliminary efforts aimed at the reestablishment of the communist hypothesis and the deployment of its third epoch.
What we need, in these early days of the third sequence of existence of the communist hypothesis, is a provisional morality for a disoriented time. It’s a matter of minimally maintaining a consistent subjective figure, without being able to rely on the communist hypothesis, which has yet to be re-established on a grand scale. It is necessary to find a real point to hold, whatever the cost, an ‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the law of the situation. We must hold a real point of this type and organize its consequences.
The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l'identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter.
The principal virtue that we need is courage. This is not always the case: in other circumstances, other virtues may have priority. For instance, during the revolutionary war in China, Mao promoted patience as the cardinal virtue. But today, it is undeniably courage. Courage is the virtue that manifests itself, without regard for the laws of the world, by the endurance of the impossible. It’s a question of holding the impossible point without needing to account for the whole of the situation: courage, to the extent that it’s a matter of treating the point as such, is a local virtue. It partakes of a morality of the place, and its horizon is the slow reestablishment of the communist hypothesis.
Horrors: Dog Soldiers
This Sunday. Werewolves go martial, and we go back to 2002: the excellent Dog Soliders, or before Neil Marshall descended into the caves. 8 PM, Belmont. "Six Men. Full Moon. No Chance."
In blindsight...
To readers real or imaginary:
Apologies for my recent absence/devolution of blog into fractured series of brief links to cryptic images. Storms brewing out in California, personal and obligational clouds et al, and have been feeling less proud cephalophore torch-bearer, more the fellow above: looking around for the head that never left. If he also had conjunctivitis, as I apparently do. But forthcoming writing on: why Communist love means your name permanently has an "and" bound to it, back to salvagepunk proper, what happens when you treat "surrealistically" what is already recognized as surreal, nihilism-ornament-decay, fascist aesthetics and bundled contradictions, dark anthropology, other things that end with -wolves. Return to formless is imminent.
yours,
ECW
"oh idk, Y'ALL HAD BRAINS TO THINK W/?!"
Been a bit obsessed about the notion of "the comment" recently, and the massive amount of intellectual labor (however low-level it may be) expended, across the board. The image above is from the comments section of a video of a deadly car crash on a Russian highway. If we could only harness, via intel-electrical converters, the dull flickering of minds across the globe (not to mention the pure caloric output of all those tapping, flitting fingers!), peak oil wouldn't mean a thing. The commentariat, diggers of our own graves, one unnecessary contribution at a time...
Hideous Gnosis gains material form and online purchasability
Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro. 292 pages. $20.00. ISBN 1450572162. EAN-13 9781450572163.
Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous" (Lovecraft)
“Poison yourself . . . with thought” (Arizmenda)
CONTENTS
Steven Shakespeare, “The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground.”
Erik Butler, “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.”
Scott Wilson, “BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum.”
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, “Transcendental Black Metal.”
Nicola Masciandaro, “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya.”
Joseph Russo, “Perpetue Putesco – Perpetually I Putrefy.”
Benjamin Noys, “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal.”
Evan Calder Williams, “The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
Brandon Stosuy, “Meaningful Leaning Mess.”
Aspasia Stephanou, “Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal.”
Anthony Sciscione, “‘Goatsteps Behind My Steps . . .’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal.”
Eugene Thacker, “Three Questions on Demonology.”
Niall Scott, “Black Confessions and Absu-lution.”
DOCUMENTS: Lionel Maunz, Pineal Eye; Oyku Tekten, Symposium Photographs; Scott Wilson, “Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance”; Karlynn Holland, Sin Eater I-V; Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, Black Metal Commentary; Black Metal Theory Blog Comments; Letter from Andrew White; E.S.S.E, Murder Devour I.
Black boredom
Black metal slow jam interlude. A great landscape of bad infinity: hovering synth, arbitrary drum-beats, Kenny G-esque sax noodling, and Satan's mumbles. Greek black metal, in this form, understands well that what's truly evil doesn't just dwell in the cold north or in necrotic threat. It's mundanity and drift, it's goofiness that can't sniff itself out, the purposeful not-knowing-when-to-quit. It's a shitty date too polite to end, a grocery store cereal aisle, it's the bored proximity of those trapped in a halted elevator while this song plays on and on.
"I became ruler through treaties; By my treaties I am now enslaved."
But if the 'German Socialists' were never socialists except in name, their allegorical transformation into the Wotan of the Ring signifies their reconciliation with the bourgeoisie: they have themselves become fathers, their anger rationalized as paternal punishment, just as their conciliatoriness is that of the father who wishes his oppressed child a good night and the world a good nothing. Their insurrection has vanished like a ghost, leaving nothing behind but its outward appearance. Wotan is the phantasmagoria of the buried revolution. He and his like roam around like spirits haunting the places where their deeds went awry, and their costume compulsively and guilty reminds us of that missed opportunity of bourgeois society for whose benefit they, as the curse of an abortive future, re-enact the dim and distant past.
[Adorno, In Search of Wagner]
Man of Iron screening
Film: Man of Iron - Occupations, strikes, romance, and the slow realization that students and workers can shape society are all captured by Andrzej Wajda in this fictional account of the real events that led to the Polish Solidarity movement.
Short Introduction: Prof. Hunter Bivens.
Kresge Town Hall: 8 pm - 10 pm, Tuesday 2/9
Horrors: The Company of Wolves
Following our Hammer double-back, we go forward in time, mid '80s to Neil Jordan's adaptation of the furrier of Angela Carter's stories:
8 PM, my house.
8 PM, my house.
automobile Barin bast shoes
Word repetition and locale cartography on Google Books. In this case, for Pilnyak's Mahogany. To be repeated with all books.
For every scalpel, a sharper scalpel
Learning what it's like to have very good editors reading over your shoulder: they force to you remove precisely those precious moments (or in my case, "clever" turns of death-oriented dialectical-inversion phrase) that you know better than to keep, but which you do anyway, cursed by a simpering attachment and distinct absence of proper self-abasement. As Laure-Anne used to tell me, you must kill your little darlings. To my third party mercenaries teaching me to steady my hand, thanks.
and the gates will open up when they see it's me and you
R. Kelly, for all his faults, is a cultural terrorist, even if he doesn't know it. Here, he yodels midway through a "sex in the morning, sex all day" song. The man cannot be stopped, in terms of full blown avant-garde weirdness hidden inside what looks like sexxx jamz. Forget his self-designation as the Pier Piper of R & B. He is the Kurt Schwitters.
Albeit a Kurt Schwitters with the decency to let his partner take a break to "wash your face, get something to eat." Thoughtful pragmatism, and the ringing echo of the yodel, which seems, disturbingly, intended to function as the radio-friendly stand-in for screams of pleasure.
Which then conjures this, with it eerie non-green screen but disjunctive video feel, as Franz Lang floats ethereal, an inflated Homunculus through the geriatric picnic...
Accelerating toward the cliff
Go read: Mr. Noys over at Mute on "Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis," an extended version of the paper he gave on our panel (with Mark K-Punk) in London this November. If you don't know him, Ben is a) a damn sharp thinker and an interlocutor to whom I owe a lot, b) the other head of our two-headed beast of Babylon, the reasoned pessimist of entropy and transition twin to my rambling/ranting apocalyptic S.I. derivations, and c) lives in Bognor Regis, one of the more Ragnarökian-named places (up there with Bad Axe, Michigan). I have a piece coming out shortly in Mute on crisis and apocalypse movies, meaning that this double-path of our opposed, and necessarily proximate, writing is doomed to continue. That's a doom I can support, almost as much as a Thunderdomed decline of the West.
Scavenger tactics, jazzy strategy
GDR insults that need to make a comeback (courtesy of Hunter):
financial hyena
boogie-woogie strategist
And, for praise, we have Müller's declarative:
I am the pontoon between the Ice Age and the Commune.
Werewolf and ornament / Werewolfian ornament
On watching Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf (and initial thoughts on mereological nihilism, following a question):
When causality breaks down, when there's no determinate linkage between instances of suffering, between the beggar made to dance and the mute servant's non-scream, when blaming the decaying remnants of the old feudal order cannot give account, in the moments before the ascendant middle-class voice makes of this drift an enclosure and narrative of temperance and wholeness to be managed, what intercedes is just ornament, joyous and fraught elaborations of distraction that promise neither new directions of form nor content that is supposed to matter: wall sconces as murder weapons, insistent Russ Meyer cleavage shoved center-screen, senseless monologues of hairy palmed bowlcut young boys, meerschaum pipes with carved intricacies we can neither ignore nor discern...
The story of the film, if any, is not that of order lost and restored, but of an invitation to look in the absence of such an order, an invitation that falls on steadily deaf ears, as the world it comes to describe is grayer, more managed, not bursting out at us, giving the illusion that it had some coherence all along, that there is reason behind the rage. The werewolf, as such, isn't the buried animalistic rage, but the elaborated gap itself - ornament's revenge at the instrumental - between the explanations given and the incoherence uncaptured.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
