and more than that, the cows weren't even black to start. But when the night lasts so long, drags on, skips days, when thought's failed capture makes black objects out of its own darkness rather than face the terror (i.e. creeping, anticipating, tingling stench) of of gray (without value, without decision, without effect), when it demands that what is seen is what must be, pitched and tarred lightless by the act of speculation: how do the cows not start to believe? Creatures of the night? Very well. Morning has never changed a thing.
Enemy of doxa, corrupter of youth, promulgator of discomfiting intuitions. That philosophy is unpalatable to the powers that be: this is not news to Socrates and his comrades.
Today it is no philosopher in particular, but philosophy itself that is ordered to drink the hemlock, sentenced to death for corrupting the capacity of what used to be called “the University” to turn greater profits. Philosophy is convicted of impiety before capital.
The present situation at Middlesex University makes the stakes excruciatingly clear. Even “excellence”—the preferred contemporary replacement for such antiquities as learning, knowledge, or thinking—is no longer enough. Even the “ranking” of a program is no matter, nor is its contribution to the reputation of the institution. Nor does it suffice that a program should sustain itself financially, or generate revenue. The operative question is simply: could MORE revenue be generated through its elimination? Could one, for example, restructure enrollment so as to swell Work Based Learning programs that draw lucrative funding from corporate sponsors? Could one get away with simply reallocating external grant funding already secured by the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (reportedly some £1 million through 2016) while eliminating the expense of actually running the Center? According to administrative logic, neither the international reputation of Middlesex Philosophy nor its financial solvency have any bearing upon the verdict that it makes “no measurable contribution” to the University. According to the calculus of greed and exploitation—the calculus of capital—philosophy at Middlesex, as Alex Williams rightly puts it, is worth more dead than alive.
What lessons are we to draw from this example? And what sort of a response might those lessons entail?
We might insist that philosophy is essential to the university—that only an institution which includes it answers to an acceptable vision of what the university should be. And we might then demand of wayward administrators the reversal of an “irrational” or “unethical” decision: the restoration of philosophy to its proper place at the core of any university worthy of the name. Or, on the other hand, we might find in the termination of philosophy the expression of an essential truth about the university’s role as a modern institution: to reproduce the relation between capital and labor—through the production of cultural capital when convenient, through the excision of cultural mediation when expedient.
The era of such expediency is everywhere upon us. Discussions of “The Crisis of the Humanities” proliferate at a dizzying pace. How can we proffer more compelling accounts of “what it is that we do” to administrators looking askance at abstruse investigations no longer even regarded as charming? Can we compete on a level playing field with the verifiable results of science and engineering by drawing up lists of our recent “discoveries”? Can we compete with the profit margins of private business schools embedded in public universities by insisting upon our invaluable contributions to civil society, our production of a thoughtful citizenry? How can we account for the worth of our teaching by metrics that calculate the value of programs according to higher, rather than lower, student/instructor ratios? How can we justify our existence, our form-of-life, in short, amid the unchecked reign of bureaucrats whose moral compass is neither the novel nor the Nicomachean Ethics but the consulting firm?
To its immeasurable credit, Middlesex Philosophy offers an alternative to both indignant pleading and professionalized handwringing: concrete resistance.
The students, staff, and faculty at Middlesex have opted to intervene in “the crisis of the humanities” by taking a common space of thought and practice with the determination to hold it. What inspires is the escalation of their radicalism in response to administrative obstinacy. First they occupied a boardroom to protest the cancellation of a meeting, seeking a proper explanation for the closure of their program. The next day they took the entire building, demanding a reversal of the decision. Today a red and black flag flies over the barricaded Mansion House at Middlesex, and thinkers from around the UK and continental Europe are travelling to the occupied Trent Park campus to participate in an open program of art, philosophy, and politics events called Transversal Space.
This sequence is a prolegomena to any future philosophy.
We cannot rely upon the goodwill of administrators and their consulting firms to uphold the grand tradition of the Academy, nor to offer wildlife preserves for modes of critical reflection that assuredly do not serve the interests of their species. We will not secure “the future of the humanities” by the authority of the better argument nor through appeals to a higher good than goods. If the very capacity for philosophical activity is to survive, then by any means necessary we will have to make it unprofitable to destroy the time and space of resolutely unproductive thought. What Middlesex augurs is that the 21st century is a time in which the material conditions of any possible thinking will have to be constructed, expropriated, and defended by common force.
Kant’s project, at the core of critical modernity, was to banish dogmatism by accounting for the conditions of any possible understanding. But now it is not critical reflection but rather the dogmatic operations of capital that pose the question, quid juris?, to philosophy. To subject Kant’s critical idealism to a materialist inversion, today, is to recognize that the conditions of any possible philosophical reflection—reflection upon conditions of possible understanding, or anything else—will depend upon material powers of resistance, the construction of times, spaces, and forms of life capable of holding their own against the vacuity of philosophy’s erasure.
“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The present crisis of the relation of philosophy to capital means that philosophers will have to change the world in order to interpret it. It is not that philosophy will be obviated by the real movement of history, the coming-into-being of communism, but rather that communization is now the pre-condition of any possible philosophy.
“In the sphere of this faculty you can determine either everything or nothing,” writes Kant in the preface to the Prolegomena. From California, to Puerto Rico, to London, to Zagreb, to Greece: We Want Everything.
Nathan Brown
English
University of California, Davis
Marija Cetinić
Comparative Literature
University of Southern California
Gopal Balakrishnan
History of Consciounsess
University of California, Santa Cruz
Aaron Benanav
History
University of California, Los Angeles
Jasper Bernes
English
University of California, Berkeley
Chris Chen
English
University of California, Berkeley
Joshua Clover
English
University of California, Davis
Maya Gonzalez
History of Consciousness
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy Kreiner
English
University of California, Davis
Laura Martin
History
University of California, Santa Cruz
Jason Smith
Art Center College of Design
Pasadena
Evan Calder Williams
Literature
University of California, Santa Cruz
(featureless identity doesn't get the news that day has come and the field's revealed. What once was the flatness and indistinction of the dark stands out. A marked, mooing blot of the ex-same. For sure, owl of Minerva flies at dusk, we grasp only after the day is done, but what of the staining idiocy of the total night? The next day begins and the leftovers of thinking's death still stand about and low and wait, painted thick by a total correspondence come and gone. Once the stealth, comfort, and invasion of absent light - which isn't an absence of light, it's the feeling of being swallowed into a substance, eaten by the ink - is now an affront to space. That's the birth of difference: embarassment of what was so of its time that it was indifferent, unthought, now it's a terrible inheritance that calls out to be destroyed: a placid herd so dark they're eating the light, just off the side of the road, not just chewing cud, spat back up, but the day itself...)
Shooting dusk for night
(too grayly close to real dark. That weird zone that is closer to the effect you're trying to produce, looks more like it, but it all breaks down, no underexposure or red filter to go from blue to black. The time of near-dead light, and the longest shadows, cannot be made into no light. You need high noon for that.)
Watched Mega Pirahna, get what the fuss is about now. It is a) a weird bleeding over of Fitzcarraldo-esque - or any other time Herzog gets going about fecundity and doom - dialogue into pulpy, self-knowing retread a little too into being awful for its own good (or bad).
b) Like Transformers, it's audience-baffling, shrill, affectles experimental cinema wrapped in the guise of the popular and effective.
The more I look, the more all films start boiling down to the incoherent, muddied, and glaring friction between what kind of movie we're expecting to see and what it actually feels like to look at, listen to, and sit in front of. Feeding frenzy, blooded and threadbare pixels. And fish leap from the river, drift forward, and auto-impale on whatever they can find, breathless and desperate to get away from themselves.
In short it reduced survival to a fundamental nullity; it proposed, in a condensed version, the long-term plan that the Church had drawn unconsciously from the economic model of survival on credit. Faced with this impatience to empty life of its substance, Catholicism sent out its soldiers of deferred death until confidence in its enterprise was restored. Bloodthirsty repression by the northern crusaders lay waste to a civilization that had been on the verge of finding their own approach to happiness. The victory was a matter of real profits over the rarefied abstraction of exchange; and so, paradoxically, a slow death on the installment plan took revenge on immediate, gratuitous death.
Decadence is neither the winding down of an empire nor the wearing of fur in the summer while eating a whole bird who drowned in cognac. It's pedigree dog breeding. For decadence isn't a question of consumption, either burn-it-down excessive in a time of plenitude or weakly trying to still play the game of excess in a threadbare time of dwindling resources. Rather, true to its etymology (from decadere, to fall apart/down, i.e. to decay), decadence is a rotting off. Like near all things that interest me, it implies the persistence of what is already undone, or undoing. Not decaying, per se, but what happens otherwise during, or because of, the condition of decaying, the state of decay that itself produces not just the disappearance of this, but a whole host of patterns and trends, strange versions of that.
Hence the dandy, held up as decadence incarnate, isn't just the guy who owns an excessive number of suits or who owns suits made excessively well. No, he wears the signs of decadence: gaudy mockeries of good taste, silk-lined armor against Protestant usefulness. And in that case, it's usually talked about as artifice, playing dress up in costumes, style without depth or illusions of authenticity below the stripe and paisley surface. An artifice morbid, chafing, and strutting.
But something else going on in decadence, that finds its figure and hits its seriously horrifying stride in pedigree dog breeding. Watch as much of this video as you can handle before following below:
(it's near impossible to recreate in writing the effect this documentary had on me, the accounts of eugenics and intentional mutation to the point of organ failure. Full disclosure: I get weird, deep, intensely physical bonds to dogs - I am a "dog person." I didn't know about this BBC piece until a friend recommended it recently. An accurate version of my internal response would involve this entire blog swallowing itself and devolving, or evolving, into an inchoate string of words, bilious loathe, Oulipo without rules, just total day-eating black mouths of misanthropy, and a stream of, the end deserves to be extremely fucking nigh...)
"the cavalier's skull is now too small for its brain", and the bugging eyes, the scratch and constant pain, that frozen, sclerotic stupid terror. It goes on, the whole thing a near taxonomy of what's wrong with the entire project of civilization as registered by the demand that its companions, the "pure ones" in a time of hybrid mixing, register what is monstrous and can't be seen. Like a portrait in an attic marked by evil from afar, the evolution of purebred dogs is the inverse hypothesis of the advance of the human species: we live longer, get healthier, and all become capitalists, while the jowls of bulldog twist and sink, the head swells so large that it can only be born by caesarian.
Now and then
The central fantasies behind a "purebred"?
It's pure: no mongrel hybridity in this time of mixed and blurring world. It's total racism on the part of those who wouldn't admit that in the case of humans. But when it comes to their precious pooches, they need to see the papers, make sure nothing impure got in there. They go online and whine and fret over the prospect that their pet might have "a bit of mixed in him." And when the puppies don't have the correct characteristics (i.e. Rhodesian Ridgebacks with not quite enough ridge, they are "culled"/killed).
Nature can, and will, be infinitely tampered with: walking your pug around town is like walking a thesis from Dialectic of Enlightenment. It's talking a stroll with domination over nature and the capacity to make of it an enfeebled, constantly sick, dependent little monster whose infirmities you will then bemoan as if "impossible to foresee," cruel nature taking her revenge. Shaping a creature to the point that it becomes internally contradictory, as thought materially, corporeally, brutally presses against its shrunken skull.
It is singular and singularly expensive: Veblen (who hated dogs and hence shouldn't be trusted) wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:
This remains true, and all the more so for "purse dogs" to be carried by all who dream of being shitty shallow socialites. The dog isn't, in fact, just "one more accessory." It's a weird, bug-eyed, hotly panting version of reification, the portable commodity treated as a "little person" and vice versa. (What's lost in the equation is some dog-ness of the thing, and for any who've stared close at the face a pug as it grunts and farts and licks it own eyeballs, "thing" should be taken in its full Freudian horror.) More interesting is the particularity of breed. It's an insistence of a dog belonging to this breed, not that breed. Yet in such an operation, the real work is a perversion of the gap between breed and species. Singular comes to mean not the singularity of a mutt (the unreplicable combination that also leads to an actually healthy, potentially pleasure-taking dog) but the generic singularity of an instance of a breed that is no longer a member of its species. Drawing out the snout in a certain way takes precedence over both the consistency of the animal as a whole and over the genetic otential of future instantiations of that breed ever escaping total decline into congential disorders and recessive traits. In short, the characteristics for which the dogs are bred are those that distinguish them from the set of all other dogs. And so making into "boxer" now means making into "not-dog."
"the deformed, congenital dwarf"
For decadence is not slowdown and gluttony. It is the acceleration of caricature. Insofar as it is a rotting, it is a rotting away of the common. Not what is unnecessary. The first to go aren't the parasites of form, not the added flourish or the recent addition (that is, monstrous subtraction of utility) to the breed. Just a barely held together assemblage of parts at the expense of wholes, from the holes in the hearts to the throat that can't stop barking. Decadence is the roar of speeding toward a world in which all things are not equivalent, interchangeable, homogeneous, but desperate imitations of specificity. Of something not being like all things else, not transmissible. And in this pathetic flight toward the security of being special, what's left behind and actively denied is the prospect of something that might persist, the mongrel's vitality of some tooth and love and force.
What barer fact of the foggy and shrill stupidity of our species than to willfully breed another into obsolescence. That is our caricatural misanthropy, cast out onto the seemingly more minor and furry, held up and photographed, the blazing lights of the show and the judge checks the jaw line. Glossed fur wrapped over those failing joints and self-consumptive guts. Forced to be what we already are, a set of distinguishing characteristics without any referent, a forced secession from the species. We make the world in our own image. And in pre-selected couplings, stretch that image, pull it out. Ruin its teeth, close its breathing channels. Erase it, rearrange it, and cram it back together to make of its pathetic, whimpering collapse the present's loathing of itself and all it touches.
This basically sums up my time at Cornell last week: rusted overgrown ornament gates that open to hell, nature that may try to eat you (and the fake barbed wire bridges needed to hold one back from leaping into the void/shallow stream), and the best new adjective: CONTEMPTY. Meaning: a sneering vacuity.
Over at Variant, Marina Vishmidt interviews me about the year of occupations and strikes so far, lessons de-learned, and what kind of solidarity means what kind of attack. (And me weirdly reiterating the phrase "that's to say" again and again. Barring a subtle - and false - excuse about my answers delineating themselves from the "that's to act" asserted collectively in actions that happened this year, it mostly comes down to the fact that my head has been clearer than when I responded to the questions. Oops.)
If you haven't seen yet, the joke that's been voiced by us all many times - Icelandic volcano as ultimate faceless demandless anarcho-saboteur! - gets a consummate version here.
"Instead, paraphrases the volcano, we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed tourists and airline workers into a declaration of war.
Now, sorry for the harsh interpretation – it was the radical students in California who spoke of war, and went surprisingly unnoticed by the global media. EJ is far more sophisticated in its approach, not saying a word, so not a word can be misinterpreted."
An anti-symbolic manifesto composed in silicate ash, cloud-writing to haunt and ground the skies. We've got a long way to go, apparently...
Briefly: been on oxymoronic theory vacation, my apologies to those who've written me and to whom I haven't replied. Third day at the Theory Reading Group in Cornell, something like an alternate-universe frat boy party where people talk about the "piety of thought." Really interesting conversations through, particularly an ongoing, somewhat accidental focus on counter-factual reasoning. Got me thinking about what happens when "testing" your faithfulness to a project doesn't just end in the self-destruction of that project, but when faithfulness itself is only a ruse to "have to try and test it out." More on this soon, and I'll put up a version of the talk I gave - on ornament, decay, and the horror of wallpaper made of hair - when I turn it into something more than just scattered notes. For now, back to the cave and to the pleasure of face-to-face.
However, we do present an ultimatum: for every utterance of the word "Evental" or the phrase "the global Left," a hostage will be killed. The blood's on your hands, Mr. President.
In order to save functional architecture from moral ruin, a disintegrating preparation should be poured on the clean glass walls and smooth concrete surfaces, so that mould can settle on them.
- Hundertwasser, "Mould Manifesto against rationalism in architecture"
Object lesson from Ferreri's Dillinger è morto: the sign of being truly ruling class isn't just employing a private cook. It's employing a cook, throwing out her cooking, and slowly, deliberately making a meal yourself instead.
