A Brief note on the Ongoing Student Strikes

Hella Yes.

Now if only I can get my scabbing car's leaky radiator hose fixed on time for the event at UT.

Solidarity to all of those who go out today to march against the real luddites.

Antinatures

Three different conceptions of antiphysis or antinature are used by Sartre and De Beauvoir in their work, and I've been frustratingly trying to derive some consistent meanings. Here are some examples of what I mean:

(1)-“THE theory of historical materialism has brought to light some most important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action.” – Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

(2)-“About 1848 the combined actions of the Saint-Simonians, the Positivists and Marx gave birth to the dream of an ‘anti-nature’. The expression ‘anti-nature’ was actually invented by Comte; and in the Marx-Engels correspondence we find the term antiphysis. The doctrines may be different but the ideal was the same: it was to inaugurate a human order which would be directly opposed to the errors, injustices, and blind mechanical forces of the natural World. The new factor which distinguished this order from the ‘City of ends’ which Kant put forward at the close of the eighteenth century and which he, too opposed to strict determinism. The new factor was work [labor]”- Jean Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (addition in parentheses mine)

The history Sartre gives here for the term 'antiphysis' is probably dubious though the shared conception may be right. if anyone can find where Marx or Engels use it (if they really did) let me know. But finally, later Sartre...

(3)-“nature is universality, which means that, at first sight the worker is just like the bourgeois. Respectability is anti-nature. The bourgeois becomes respectable (distingue) by suppressing his needs.”- Jean Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot

We have here antiphysis/antinature used not just in three contexts but in three very distinct senses. In (1) anti-nature simply is the human reality or at least an aspect of it. By virtue of being conscious subjects, able to perform not just actions but praxis, humanity is then, by definition a sort of animal-that-is-not-an-animal. Not just a little different (smarter, able to do more) but of a whole other qualitative order. Readers of Shulamith Firestone know this is used to great effect in her work.

In (2), anti-nature is not the human reality, but a human project, something to be realized with the proper social, political, and technological machinery. Yet it does share a commonality with (1) in that the intention is precisely to create a human totality (one that reflects the intent of serving human needs), in the same sense that ‘nature’ is supposed to be the given totality.

(3), however, is the most difficult to relate of the bunch, because it refers to a kind of subject-position. A person is anti-nature in the sense that they could also be anti-waste (thrifty) or pro-family (patriarchal). The practice of suppressing the public appearance of one’s biological body and the creation of distinction is here an open display of one’s anti-natural attitude. We’re not like those “salt of the earth” people, the distinguished person says, they’re more akin to animals than ourselves.

Of the quotes, this usage I find the least interesting, partly because it only actually refers to one particular kind of subject position among the well-to-do in response to workers’ collective demands. Social Darwinism and the fad for phrenology could hardly be taken as attempts to cover up the biological, just the opposite. Sartre’s disciplined bourgeois of The Family Idiot aren’t a universal type, even in their own era.

The other aspect of this conception of antinature as a subject position that is deeply unsatisfying is how it drains the radically utopian content out of antiphysis and leaves us with a practically zero-sum choice. One is either distinguished or vulgar, that is, one either accepts nature or represses it in one’s own self. The fantastic possibility of emancipation from nature, and of natural constraints; of free subjects able to stand apart from nature by virtue of ‘satisfying animal needs’ or post-human transcendence of those needs (or both) is rendered absent.

For that reason I think I’ll focus on the two others in future writing.

Bare Death

I haven’t posted much of anything lately. I’ve taken a new job and there have been quite a lot of changes. Nevertheless, there will be more to come soon.

Background for a future post perhaps:

http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben2.htm

A London review of books article by Malcolm Bull. Many on the left have adopted an Arendtian or Foucaultian line on biopolitics, namely that by making the body an object of politics, some sphere of freedom, or subjectivity, or something, has been lost. Maybe so. Biopolitics is further conceived as being inextricably linked to racial science and the inhumanity of modern projects. On this count, at least one line from Bull has a strange insight:

"It might be possible to interpret this development [the emergence of the biopolitical] in terms of the reduced importance of fixed social roles within the public sphere and the egalitarian reduction of politics to the life shared by all, irrespective of status, gender, or even species."

That is to say, biopolitics might be inextricably linked to egalitarianism, or at least a kind of egalitarianism. The demands for universal rights to healthcare, nourishment and shelter, are often overtly biopolitical. But how do we avoid the absurd merger of a biopolitics which reduces some to the musselman, and another which in taking bare life as its object, liberates subjects from bare life? How does one combat the grotesque blurring of distinction between an NHS Hospital and a Nazi Death Camp from a perspective that sees biopolitics condemned from the start? It is doubtful that Agamben would allow for this equivalency, but neither does he or others provide sufficient means for rejecting it.

On another note, Bull's statement does bring to mind that eccentric friend of animal(ized?) life, Jeremy Bentham. The same Bentham presented by Foucault as the exemplar of what we may call bourgeois biopolitics. The relationship highlighted by Bull is especially clear in Bentham quotes like these, concerning the plausibility of animal rights:

"It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?"

But what relationship could this have to an emancipatory biopolitics, I don't know. The answers seem to appear more in shadows, that is, in a negative form. An example of this would be John Maynard Keynes. In Keynes’ mind, whatever the historical Bentham believed in (Bentham was pro-business, writing a defense of usury) Benthamism was not the epitome of bourgeois humanism, but a kind of “worm” gnawing at its civilization through it elevation of “economic criterion” and threatening to reduce it to the level of the philistine economic calculation, Marxism was for Keynes “the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism” a symbol of his civilization’s self-destruction.

Yet Bentham’s self-chosen but fate as a stuffed-straw “auto-icon”, a most useful way of death, could point us in a promising direction to answer the dilemma raised earlier. Perhaps the problem with Agamben and the possibility of a totally absurd conflation between the biopolitics of human services and that of Nazism may lie in the fact that while we have a full terminology for a Zoë and Bios, for gradations of life, we entirely lack one for dealing with gradations of death. If indeed, there are any.

This, I admit, is a stab in the dark, but perhaps there are some conceptions of this in existence already. In some of Neve Gordon’s Foucault-inspired analyses, for example, the term “politics of death” (or ‘necropolitics’, we could say)is used and differentiated from a colonial “politics of life” by virtue of the fact that it seeks to reduce or deliberately destroy, rather than employ strategically, the means of life (infrastructure, crops, water resources). The aim is not to produce living ‘pliant bodies’ but externalized corpses.

In this respect the auto-icon, other than its possibly ironic intent of spoofing religious imagery by a militant atheist (there’s a “sacred man”, for you), is also an attempt to continue participation (actively, through a written will) in living society even after the process of decay has taken the body far beyond ‘bare life’.

On Salvagepunk, Cyberpunk and the Obama Aesthetic (PART 1)

Recently I've been immersed in the writings from Evan Colder Williams' blog Socialism and/or Barbarism, which explores the apocalypses of fiction and those that have occurred in real life already, teasing out their political subtexts and even their progressive potentials. I confess I am instinctively skeptical of some of this musing, as the American left seems overstuffed with apocalypse cultists from Peak Oilers to Deep Ecologists all waiting for a massive crash in industry or technology so things can go back to their 'natural state' in other words--a billion or so people must go to the wall so things can get right back to normal. But Sa/oB is quite different, the apocalypse it seems is often just outside our doorstep and is in fact the kind of 'man behind the curtain' moment for reigning social order (think New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and by burning down, washing away, eating away of the old society by monsters, the possibility of a new society is converted into necessity and this radicalism with a hard-edged feel for the terrifying is exactly what makes the blog so damned cool.

That said, I find I'm in real disagreement with the blog over the author's concept of Salvagepunk as a new progressive aesthetic that in his view moves beyond both what he sees as the no-holds barred Thatcherite neoliberal futurism of cyberpunk and the trite soft-edged neoliberal society of Barack Obama's kinder, more adaptive politics (and we might add here Blair and Brown's New Labour) which he sees in Steampunk. Instead, Salvagepunk moves toward a kind of radically different aesthetic which he associates with the kind of patchwork, jerry-rigged, functionalism of Howl's Moving Castle or Mad Max films. Salvagepunk, then is a way of envisioning how people might take the remains of a society devastated by disaster and reconfigure it for servicing their direct human needs ad-hoc. It needs to be said that, as other bloggers like Owen Hatherley has that despite its connotations of (mere) survivalism where society and nature give individuals a direct order "things are scarce, become a cannibal or die" Salvage punk as described seems to have the world as having a sense of childlike-optimistic vision of a free sandbox of rusty and grimy abundance, and no more security guards or state officials to tell you that it can't be simply taken and used for...whatever! So what's the problem, then?

Well for one, what are all those idle and ruined means of production going to be used for, will they simply be disassembled and reasssembled? Why can't the brute material of the old society by melted down and something greater rebuilt without the weight of the ruins on it's shoulders? To state things more plainly, Salavgepunk does indeed provide an optimistic vision of how to react and cope with the world a disaster (like that of the recession) would leave humanity with but it gives us no guide as to what to build anew. For a really satisfying answer to that I think we would need to turn again to the aesthetic of Cyberpunk which, I will argue later in this post, was not the accomplice of smash the unions and raise the stocks neoliberalism as he and others make it out to be. But for now I'd like to turn back to salvagepunk.

Anticipations of Salavgepunk: Real and Imagined

The popular Manga Barefoot Gen is well known for its true-to-life biographical descriptions of apocalyptic devastation wrought by the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it's vision of the protagonist Gen's struggle for survival, but for our purposes the important thing is the real background setting, that of a Japan where society has been essentially dissolved and the people whose actions were during the war organized rigidly (report for rations, report to the bomb shelter) now wander aimlessly through a chaotic landscape. Children become hardened criminals, victims of radiation wander with with wounds like the mutants of some pulp dystopia--the post-apocalyptic vision of the game Fallout had nothing on the reality of millions of Japanese. Nevertheless the depictions of Gen and the actions of ordinary Japanese people at the time seem to me anticipations of salvagepunk. For Gen, the old relations of deference to the Imperial state and the old social hierarchy no longer apply he lives in a shanty of salvaged tin and wood with his mother and a (salvaged?) orphan boy who is made a part of the family and scavenges the wastes for everything they need...when not looking for work (a scarcity that allows the old relations to reassert themselves). Parallel to this story is that of the production control movement among Japanese workers, wherein with their owners either caught up in the anti-fascist purge or worried that they might be, more radical workers seize control of the shop floor and turned it to other uses. Some uses presented themselves readily: the printers and journalists of one of Japan's conservative newspapers used production control to print agitprop and political criticism of the ultranationalists who led Japan into war. In another case on the Keio electric railway (I don't have my source in front of me on this, the name could be wrong) the seized the line and allowed passengers to ride free, which built up support for their struggle against the company.

All of this would lend support to a progressive side of salvagepunk, not just one depicted in fiction but perhaps in reality as well. Yet we can't lay to rest the fact that the story doesn't end at that point in history, the Japanese workers involved didn't only want to rearrange the pieces of the remains of their old society but to bring into being a new one. More to the point, the idea of salvage couldn't really assert itself in a conversation about what to build upon the firebombed ruins of cities and overgrown wastes of abandoned fields. In one sense this might be simply a problem of what Evan Calder Williams might have termed the disastrous Salvagepunk scenario of too many mouths to feed after the old world is turned into a junk heap, as opposed to the more ideal situation of a huge abundance of junk. But in another sense, it's about rasing new functional structures (unions, states, hospitals, cafeterias) to serve people's needs and wants, particularly those repressed by (especially in Japan's case) the prewar capitalist social order wherein masses of workers did tedious dangerous work for extremely low wages, like much of the textile industry and on the other social pole wealth was extremely concentrated in the ownership of megacorporate Zaibatsu by a few families. Japan remained a capitalist country, to be sure, but one of a very different type wherein private wealth owners had very little say and wages and consumption were made to rise every year through the unions "spring offensive" putting intense pressure on managers pressure to move up the technological ladder. The proto-salvagepunk of this period didn't endure, the postwar Japanese order that evolved out of the union-corporate agreements and political party battles of this period, in particular those related to the MITI resulted in the built environment in society that would be the key inspiration for cyberpunk writers, particularly William Gibson.

Yet this presents us with a curious paradox Cyberpunk are Steampunk were depicted as the hadnmaidens of the neoliberal restoration of the old social hierarchies disturbed by all of that 'excess' and 'utopianism' in the 1960's and 1970's. Salvagepunk is given as a successor which reappropriates the pieces of these old failures--rather than to mask their failures. Leaving us with a sequence that looks roughly like this:

1-Cyberpunk (Thatcherite neoliberalism's trimumphant phase)
2-Steampunk (neoliberalism's pragmatic 'preserve the social order' phase)
3-Salvagepunk (the phase that allows for radically different arrangements)

But with Japan it seems to go:

1-Steampunk (the old emperor centered, Zaibatsu-controlled system, with family ownership and steam-centered production)
2-Salvagepunk (the postwar phase of chaos and rearrangement)
3-Cyberpunk (a weird hybrid system state-centered and capitalist, loathed by most neoliberals)

What is this supposed to prove, not much other than the association of Salvagepunk as a new ground to stand on may not be the case. In addition maybe the relationship between Cyberpunk and neoliberal economics and social relations is strained as well. It might be that all three of these are simply ways we conceive the productive and technological forces of our time as shaping our total social relations, at once revealing their present trends and obscuring actual social relations and alternative possibilities.

In might be possible then to conceive of a cyberpunk premise on egalitarianism or a Salvagepunk premised on brutal (but still playful) exploitation and hierarchy (see Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). But even with these pitfalls there still might be grounds for preferring Salavgepunk if it offers a kind of immunity towards being sucked into futile efforts to shore up a perpetually failing system- something Socialism and/or Barbarism sees most of all in an Obama capitalism, a little more homely, a little greener, a little less alienating but otherwise the same old crap.

But if it could be shown that even Salvagepunk could fall into this trap, than perhaps the reasons for prefering it aren't so appealing. In my comparison of the Salvagepunk aspects I see in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, I believe such a trap can be shown. The problem I would argue is that for all the promise of recombination and change in Salvagepunk it doesn't serve as a negation of our existing order, but a pragmatic ad hoc transformation. This may in the end turn out to be a wholly different social order, but if it is, Salvagepunk will simply be discarded as a vestigial remnant as it was in Japan. We might find ourselves saying the same things about salvage punk that we have said about Obama, sure change is good--but what sort of change?

A final tangent on Cyberpunk:



The cyberpunk world need not be a Neoliberal one. Leafing through the works of William Gibson we find a hyper-exploitative Chiba City which seems to be like a sprawling warren of 'informal' sector activities and a stateless zone of fierce and unregulated capitalism--like the Victorian East End suped up with 21st century technology. Many authors of Cyberpunk fiction seemed to What is this but the blending of Victorian social relations with the most futuristic visions found in Japanese society? This is neoliberalism par excellence, but in other authors like Bruce Sterling we find totally different, and far more progressive possibilities for society fleshed out from the same technology and even much the same aesthetic.

Cyberpunk put forward the promise of humankind breaking loose from the shackles of biological nature through radical life extension, human-machine interfaces, global information networks and near-total automation of menial tasks. All of this, without the added dictates of the social-engineers and technocrats presented in Golden Age and New Wave science fiction: with their positive and negative valuations respectively. Instead, the individual can modify themselves to their own needs. Unfortunately these needs are themselves controlled through institutions like megacorporations and shady thugs. People are given (collectively) the means to autonomy, but don't have it (individually).

Yet all of the potential of these possibilities is constrained and redirected towards an exploitative order. Rather than mass immortality and the radical diminishing of fear it promises, we have corporate clans perpetuating their ownership is suspended animation. Rather the 'abolition of labour' we are presented with unemployment and innumerable tertiary industries like 'black clinics' and cybernetic chop shops. We can envision, however, far more optimistic uses of this technology, and indeed many have, notably Ken Macleod and Bruce Sterling. In Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net and Distraction, Capitalism is faced with the pressures its own technology engendered towards a ludic society without labour, and the democratization of technolgical goods. Here we have Anti-Labour parties Leisure Unions and Consumerist Communists with virtual networks, providing the means to organize and expropriate the cornucopian future. Our vision of the future has been dulled by the realities of today but a Cyberpunk Utopia is not an oxymoron, though it hasn't been created yet.

About Red Notebook

There is little to say about red notebook, other than to state the fact that the name is not of any symbolic significance. Red notebook is called red notebook because most entries are written in a notebook...which happens to be red.

While my views on politics are decidedly left-wing, the blog will not solely be about politics. It will say, hopefully, what others haven't said already, or as well.