Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Only 'Slightly Fundamentally Wrong'

In the wake of the Boston bombings this summer, it is worth remembering that such massacres, and even worse, are a regular occurrence in places like Iraq or Syria. The Syrian rebels themselves drove the point home, expressing condolences to the Boston victims through a touching banner displayed at a protest in the city of Kafranbel:



A group of Bostonians replied with their own banner:



The beauty of these reciprocal gestures is that despite the apparent incongruity, neither minimizes the other's tragedy. They contextualize one another in a way that transcends the global political game that their respective governments are involved in, authentically approaching a kind of collective intersubjectivity. To paraphrase C.G. Jung, the closer together the individuals, the weaker the state, and vice versa. This works across national boundaries, too. True communal/collective spirit is not and should never be about negating the individual, but on the contrary - it is about making the collective, and each individual within it, stronger. Individualism, as commonly understood in the sense of 'each man for himself' - weakens and alienates us, isolating and exposing each individual to the whims of state authority.

This Syria-Boston exchange of solidarity is not an isolated instance, either - during the Egyptian protests against Mubarak, while the people of Wisconsin were in the streets protesting against Governor Walker's all-out assault on unions, there were reports of Egyptian protesters holding signs in solidarity with Wisconsin. And it is not far-fetched to imagine that the domino effect that may have played a role in the 'Arab Spring' uprisings goes well beyond the Arab world, as discontent with governments worldwide grows and protest movements are spawned, from Spain to Greece to Turkey, Brazil, Israel, just to name a few of the bigger ones.

Vladimir Putin may be a total crony proto-fascist, but it's always amusing to see crony politicians/states calling out one another over each other's doublespeak. In particular, this: “I was always appalled when our western partners and the western media called the terrorist, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists’,” Putin explained, in reference to the fact that Russian authorities had alerted US authorities to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities and links to fundamentalist groups, long before the Boston bombings.

This reminds me of the film 'Good Kurd, Bad Kurd' - which explores the baffling incongruity of the Kurds in Turkey being on the CIA list of terrorist organizations (Turkey is a NATO ally), while the Iraqi Kurds are 'freedom fighters', even though they are both part of the same national liberation movement and fighting for the same thing.

It would be trite to criticize the US media for devoting more coverage to a tragedy closer to home - however another incongruity is worth noting. On the heels of the Boston bombings, two days later in fact, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, claimed far more casualties - at least 15 killed and more than 160 injured, with more than 150 buildings damaged or destroyed - registering as a 2.2 richter scale tremor.



According to an article in the Guardian, this is largely attributable to austerity cuts to agencies such as OSHA as part of the right's war on 'big government'. Greater reliance on self-reporting following the de-funding of government enforcement is "just one more part of a cycle that began in this country with the collapse of collective bargaining, an institution that at one point created workplace safety committees, which took the place of both expansive state regulation and whistleblowing as a means of securing safe places to work...It's no coincidence that many of the worst such incidents occur in states affected by both austerity cuts and low or declining union membership."

Indeed, OSHA had not made a site visit to the West, Texas plant since 1985, despite occasional complaints.



And yet - industrial accidents in remote, rural areas are just not sexy stuff, like terrorism. You can't make spy stories or exciting terrorist-hunting flicks like Zero Dark Thirty out of that.

So the US government pours billions of taxpayer dollars into spying on the entire world and fighting a 'terrorist' threat that, according to the FBI's own statistics, claims less lives globally every year - 12,533 in 2011, virtually none in the US - than there are gun homicides in the United States alone. (14,612 in 2011)

The threat from terrorism was never particularly significant in comparative terms, even if you take an anomaly year like 2001, and factor in the deaths on September 11. The total number of deaths from terrorism in the United States, from 1980 to 2001, including September 11? 2,993. In 2007, the highest year on record since 2001? 15,732 deaths from terrorism globally, of which only 33 Americans, 21 of those in Iraq. Tom Diaz, until recently a senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center, gives similar figures: "In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide; in that same year, in America alone, 31,672 people lost their lives in gun-related deaths." That's a global rate of 0.23 per 100,000 population for 2007 (or 0.00023%), and 0.19 per 100,000 population for 2010.(0.00019%)

By contrast, here are some interesting bullet points:

• According to OSHA, there were 4,609 fatal industrial accidents in the USA in 2011 - an improvement compared to 20 years ago, but a slight increase on 2009.  That's a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 population, about 6 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, according to the FBI's 2007 figures, and 139 times greater than the rate of Americans killed by terrorists, worldwide.
• Over 30,000 Americans die in motor vehicle accidents each year. That's 9.6 per 100,000 population, about 48 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, and 900 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism every year.
• According to a Harvard study, over 44,789 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That's 14.4 per 100,000 population, about 60 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism. That's also an annual rate about 15 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism in 2001 (the year of September 11), and 1,357 times greater than the number of American deaths from terrorism in 2007, the highest year on record since 2001. Let me rephrase that, just to make sure it sinks in - Americans die from lack of health insurance, every year, at a rate about one thousand three hundred and fifty-seven times greater than the rate at which they are killed by terrorists, worldwide. Talk about death panels.
• In summary, far more Americans die every year from any one of these causes than have died from terrorism in the 33 years since 1980. In the case of annual healthcare-related deaths, based on the Harvard study figures, about 10 times more Americans die from lack of healthcare - every year - than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the last 30+ years - according to FBI figures.

Driving a car or working in heavy industrial labour jobs in America - or for that matter, just being here, especially without health insurance - poses far greater risks than global terrorism, from a purely statistical point of view.



And it's not as if all the military/intelligence spending is what's keeping anyone safe from terrorism - on the contrary, the highest annual death toll from terrorism on record since 2001, as I mentioned, is 2007, which saw the most intense fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are wars started by the US, the latter as we know on completely false pretenses, and moreover fueled by an official and secret US policy of 'divide and conquer' - courtesy of one Colonel Steele, a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s who was sent to Iraq precisely for the purpose of organizing paramilitary Shia militias and uniformed death squads, along with interrogation/torture centers, inciting sectarian violence. (explored in a BBC documentary, James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq)  Of the 100,000+ killed in the Iraq war, at least 30,000 - according to leaked documents included in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs - were innocent civilians killed by US troops. In other words, US troops have murdered at least 6 or 7 times more innocent men, women and children in Iraq than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the 30+ years from 1980 to today, including those killed on September 11, 2001. The United States government may still be, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."



Furthermore, deaths from terrorism worldwide, comparatively insignificant as they were to begin with, have declined since Bush left office, and since the 'war on terror' ceased to be as much of a policy priority. Which is a good reminder of Foucault's dictum on how law enforcement breeds its own monsters, where a given 'vice' - [insert "terror" or "drugs"] - "may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace." (The Will to Knowledge, 42) In much the same way as Wall Street bankers are said to turn to Karl Marx for instructive tips on the functioning of the capitalist economy, this passage from Foucault easily sounds like a page from Colonel Steele's field manual.



The vast state surveillance apparatus devoted to fighting terrorism (or drugs, for that matter) is basically a bunch of grown-up kids with technology and guns living out their sick, violent fantasies, snooping on the whole world, and leaving it to the rest of us to solve the world's real problems, including the ones they create.

A quick browse through my notes on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a good reminder that neoliberal economic policies will kill far more of us than global terrorism. They already have. Far more people die every year from the combined effects of hunger, treatable diseases, industrial accidents, pollution, malnutrition, mismanaged natural disasters, etc - or from any one of these causes - than from terrorism. In other words, from the effects of deregulation, post-colonial economic imperialism, austerity cuts, the hypocritical enforcement of patent regimes on pharmaceuticals in the developing world (see my Medicine, Ethics and Law paper on the left), and so forth. Not to mention state-sponsored violence - war, terrorism, drone strikes - which in the case of Iraq, basically comes down to one big, disastrous experiment in neoliberal/neoconservative free marketeer nation-building, given what we know of the motivations that drove the Straussian Milton-Friedmanite Chicago School devotees in the Bush administration.



So while more billions are being poured into fighting 'global terrorism' with its relatively negligible casualties worldwide, and military aid to corrupt third-world regimes, a single industrial accident this summer, the last in a series of similar accidents - the building collapse in Bangladesh - killed more than 230 sweatshop workers and left hundreds trapped under the rubble. Gotta keep those cheap goods comin'. As reported in the Guardian:

'...police ordered an evacuation of the building after deep cracks became visible in the walls, officials said. But factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.

Dilara Begum, a garment worker who survived the accident, said supervisors had told them to return to work on Wednesday, saying the building had been inspected and declared safe. 

"We didn't want to go in but the supervisors threatened to dock pay if we didn't return to work."

More recently, another Guardian article reported on the deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant workers due to brutal labour conditions in Qatar, where employers routinely confiscate workers' passports and hold back wages to keep labourers from running away. Thirty Nepalese recently took shelter in their embassy to escape working conditions:

"The overall picture is of one of the richest nations exploiting one of the poorest to get ready for the world's most popular sporting tournament."



This might, I suppose, sound ironic to someone still labouring under the illusion that wealth in capitalist societies is accumulated through hard work rather than theft, lies, luck, and plunder. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the exploitation of migrants in Qatar is not news - this has been going on for years. The difference is that the World Cup preparations have drawn the world's attention to it, and perhaps exacerbated the situation somewhat.

In a recent episode of the Colbert Report, featuring Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the infamous 'spreadsheet error' in Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt's highly influential pro-austerity paper (incidentally, Herndon did his undergraduate study at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I live), Stephen Colbert eloquently and cheekily summed up the twisted logic of austerity: "we need to keep cutting the government budget, and keep laying people off until those people get jobs."


And the schtick goes on: "an academic paper by Harvard economists Rogoff and Reinhart, that fiscal conservatives worldwide used to argue for austerity, was recently refuted by a UMass grad student just because it had a few simple spreadsheet errors, and a couple of little staggering omissions, that made it slightly fundamentally wrong."

That's right. Only slightly fundamentally wrong. We don't need to worry about getting the numbers right - about the industrial accidents, gun homicides, car accidents, lack of access to healthcare, the economic stupidity of suicidal austerity cuts, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, foreclosures, exporting of jobs overseas, deregulation, drones, disaster response, starvation, malnutrition, foreign wars, state-sponsored violence, torture - as long as the borders are secure and we're safe from terrorists.



                           *         *         *

La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos.

Today, on the 12th anniversary of September 11th, is the 40th anniversary of "the other September 11th" - the Chilean coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende, in favor of the US-backed fascist Pinochet. It took place on September 11, 1973. Here is a great short film about it, by Ken Loach.



"St. Augustine said: Hope had two beautiful daughters - Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to change them."

And let's not forget the words of Allende: La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos. ¡Viva Chile! ¡Viva el pueblo! ¡Vivan los trabajadores!

Check out the complete text of Allende's last speech here. 

G20 and the rise of disciplinary power: the bankruptcy of justice

The Guardian has posted stories of mistreatment of civilians by police during the G20 protest, along with a version of the video (above) showing the police assault Ian Tomlinson, who later suffered a heart attack, as he was making his way home. The Guardian edit of the original video (the first one to surface, shot by a bystander) includes a slow-motion replay and action highlights.

This, along with the thousands of other such stories that go unreported with every protest because they do not result in deaths (take the use of harassment legislation to curb protests, discussed in an earlier post), is a good index of the rise of disciplinary power in contemporary Western society.



The fact that no major riots or anti-police actions have broken out is a measure of the effectiveness of that power, even when it exceeds its bounds. (Think of the Rodney King riots in LA) An individual officer may get reprimanded; but the overall effect is a success, the message hit home. Just as the rhetoric of freedom and democratic values in the age of the 'war on terror' and the 'clash of civilizations' has heated up, the police on this side of the fence are getting more brutal. (Incidentally, an item in the Readings section of this month's issue of Harper's details a lawsuit filed by the family of a 12-year-old black girl in Texas who in 2006 was brutally beaten by police officers on her parents' lawn for resisting arrest on charges of being a prostitute. The family "eventually learned that the dispatch call the officers were responding to reported three white female prostitutes soliciting men half a block from the family’s home.")



This split in Power theorized by Foucault - between the conventional form it takes in the West in the sovereign legal right, and its modern form in disciplinary power, is perhaps more real than ever. Even when police actions are questioned, they are not questioned on the basis of right, but on the logic of necessity - i.e. was it reasonable under the circumstances, were security measures that led to this shooting or that beating necessary in view of the threats, etc (who gets to measure such things?).

Even when rights are infringed (think of the De Menezes shooting), this is irrelevant so long as the measures taken are deemed to have been necessary, and the innocent casualty becomes simply the victim of an 'unfortunate accident'. Rights only come into play to cover up the bare bones of disiplinary mechanics.



In other words, disciplinary power is questioned only on its own terms, on the logic of necessity. The only question that can be asked of it is: 'is it necessary to take such measures in order to produce the desired effects/goals?' One is not allowed to question the effects/goals themselves, or their justification. One is not allowed to suggest that a particular measure is illegitimate because it may or is bound to infringe on a particular political/natural/legal right.

Yet it is clear that the real 'necessity' behind the techniques of discipline is not security from terrorism or from particular threats - this can never be achieved one hundred percent as proto-fascist security barons would believe - but the disciplining of the population, the deployment of techniques of discipline and 'normalization' without popular or democratic oversight. It is no surprise that the recent crackdown on supposed Pakistani terrorists using student visas came on the heels of the police brutality at the G20 protest - the timing was no doubt arranged to downplay police brutality and conflate the threat of 'terror' with the threat of the protesters - something which New Labour politicians have attempted to do explicitly, making statements that liken anti-globalization protesters to Bin Laden, etc. It was just oh-so-convenient that Bob Quick misplaced a memo and they had to crack down early.



With each new crackdown and ensuing security measures, i.e. no bottled water, taking off one's shoes at airports, one lighter per passenger (what is it that can be done with one but not with two?) - the 'terrorists' try something else because, of course, they won't try bottled liquid explosives or shoe explosives again; and the possibilities are endless when one is willing to give one's own life up in the process. Yet the retrospectively enacted measures stay in place, however useless they are in the long run, after the fact; because their ultimate target is the population at large; and their aim is teaching discipline and obedience to authority, regulating and corralling the mass of ordinary citizens, teaching them to execute commands without asking questions. We're all in the army now.



No doubt there will soon be new restrictions on student visas and entry clearances, allegedly for security but in reality with a view to organizing a 'reasonable racism' or 'reasonable xenophobia', to borrow a formulation used by Slavoj Zizek in recent lectures.



It is notable that in the torture debate of recent years, even those liberals who maintained their principled opposition to torture for the most part found it necessary to assert that anyway, the intelligence obtained by torture is unreliable, that people will say anything you want them to under torture. It is insufficient, in other words, to assert that torture is unethical, that 'we are becoming like them', that it infringes the legal or natural rights of suspects, etc. One must always also engage the technical point; one must question disciplinary power on its own terms, on the issue of necessity and efficiency.

And the power of disciplinary mechanics is ultimately the only real power, or as Foucault put it, the 'mode in which power is actually exercised...power at the point of its application to bodies' ; as opposed to vague or abstract notions of sovereignty and autonomy and democracy and legal right. Disciplinary power constrains and subordinates any recourse to legal action or legal right, rather than being constrained by it.

It is this same power that is at the bottom of the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession, in the form of economic disciplinary power. The goal of neoliberal economics from Milton Friedman onwards has been nothing less than to wrest economics from the domain of political sovereignty and right, and bring it fully within the scope of discipline, within disciplinary power. Disciplinary power, as Foucault shows in his analyses of various social domains (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc) is constituted by what he calls the 'medicalization' of knowledge: this is where the notion of economic 'shock therapy' fits in neatly - a term that Naomi Klein in her critique of neoliberal economics did not coin but borrowed from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal shock doctor in person. (at a time when, of course, 'shock therapy' was still believed to be valid medical science; nonetheless, it is a good example of self-incriminating statements, however unwittingly made)



And it is through the 'medicalization' - one could say de-politicization - of economic knowledge that the neoliberal 'shock doctors' were able to take key economic decisions regarding deregulation of markets and other economic reforms outside the political and democratic sphere, and into the scientific/technical sphere. There is no room in the edifices of modern government to question economic policy, because economic policy has become a matter of science, of mechanical necessity, of technical knowledge - not political decision. We are meant to take it on faith that state assets, utilities, schools, prisons and the like must be privatized or turn to private sources of funding, that taxes must be lowered, that credit interest rates must be set to suit the banks, that there just isn't enough money to cover the cost of social security and other benefits even as taxes are being lowered for the benefit of the super-rich or when - even during a once-in-a-century recession - billions are given away in a massive 'benefits package' to banks, and so forth. What should be political decisions take the form of unconditional demands, mechanical necessities.

The only good answer to this is to say, as Martin Luther King did in the march on Washington, that "we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt." We must cash our cheque. Our demands too must be unconditional.




This is a point where it is no longer even that the ends justify the means - in the Machiavellian schema one still has to justify the ends, promote a 'just' end. In the sinister logic of neoliberal capitalism, the ends are taken to be self-evidently just and fully identified with the means chosen. The relation between ends and means cannot be questioned, since it is the mechanical result of 'economic science'.

Two articles also in this month's issue of Harper's provide the most incisive critique I have yet seen of the current economic crisis and its roots in several key moments of deregulation of the US economy over the past several decades - in particular, the deregulation of interest rates and wages.

INFINITE DEBT: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy details how the elimination of the right to form unions in key sectors of the economy and the subsequent union-busting led to an effective pay freeze - no real increase in the minimum or average wages over 40 years, even as the economy grew - driving millions of people into levels of debt unfathomable to their parents; this, coupled with the constitutional legalization of usury - i.e. unlimited credit card interest rates - promising supernormal profit margins, drove all the capital out of manufacturing (a strong union sector but with lower profit margins) into banking and finance, lining up the key elements to ignite the crisis. This is what ensured the decline of Detroit and the rise of Wall Street since the mid-1980s.

Usury country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending is a more documentary account of an industry that, with its beginnings in the state of Tennessee, has effectively come into being as an industry and exploded across the USA since the early 1990s. Payday lending - as in dodgy businesses that lend people an advance on their monthly salary at six-figure annual interest rates when they can't pay the bills (no kidding) is rightly referred to by the author as a modern-day form of sharecropping. Or in Foucauldian terminology, another one of those techniques of disciplinary mechanics.

Talkin' World War III Blues, #8362: Assault on Gaza/Talmud in Reverse, A Case Study in Why Human Rights Are Bad For You

The military logic that emerges from Israel's assault on Gaza the past week resembles a perverse reinscription of the well-known Talmudic proverb: 'whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.' Instead of this old wisdom we are now told, in a complex and elaborate military language, that whoever destroys one (Israeli) life, destroys the world entire, and must therefore pay back in kind. One needn't go further than the revelations in the mainstream media to catch this. According to BBC online:

"Israel says its intentions are to suppress Palestinian militant rocket attacks, which have killed five Israelis since the start of the campaign."

For five killed Israelis, all of Gaza must be brought to its knees in an all-out air assault, over 500 Palestinians must die, most of them civilians, and the logic of 'collateral damage' - a myth in any modern war - must be invoked to justify the dirty deeds. The family member of a Hamas militant, anyone who supports them, anyone who happens to live near them, their friends, neighbours, their private residence, anyone in their vicinity - all are legitimate targets, which pretty much makes any Palestinian, civilian or not, young or old, a potentially legitimate military target. In the same way in which the kidnap of 2 Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah two years ago justified an all-out war on Lebanon - with thousands of Lebanese civilian casualties, the levelling of entire neighbourhoods in Beirut, etc - five Israeli dead justify the slaughter of 500 Palestinians, and upwards.

I will be accused of taking cheap shots, but this military logic is really not all that different from strategies and tactics deployed by the Nazis in WWII. It is well known that the war broke out following Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. What is slightly less well known is that Germany's invasion was a response to supposed Polish 'border provocations'.

It is also a fact that the Nazis, at least in the Balkans, had a habit of retaliating for partisan diversions by murdering 100 civilians for every German killed, unless the perpetrators turned themselves in. (In fact I believe it was the Nazis who first used the term 'terrorist' to refer to guerrilla insurgents.) Another way of perversely rephrasing the Talmudic wisdom: whoever kills one Israeli has killed five hundred, or a thousand, or more, and must pay back in kind. An Israeli life is that much more valuable than a Palestinian one.

To be fair, it is hardly the Zionists alone who are to blame: in recent years no one has been better than the Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, at playing this double game: on one hand preaching liberty and human rights, on the other openly placing openly a premium on protecting American lives, regardless of the cost to others.

But there is no contradiction here: what this brings to light in crystal clarity is precisely the dual logic of biopolitics/thanatopolitics at its purest, as outlined by Foucault: 'liberty and human rights', the moment they are proclaimed as actualized in a concrete territorial sense (the 'free world', etc), cease to exist as universal content, but become only a relative form of dividing the world and the races and territories of the world, of valuing different lives differently. Perversely enough, it is precisely the fact that Iraqis under Saddam and post-Saddam were not formally endowed with the same rights as Americans that made them more disposable, even in the eyes of American servicemen. Being formally disempowered, they are simply not treated in the same way as Americans, or those 'naturally' endowed with rights (regardless of what 'universal human rights' might apply to them in international conventions, which for all intents and purposes are of no consequence where they are most needed). The Iraqis' formal 'rightlessness' becomes tactically useful to the occupying army, all the while it is decried in the name of 'democracy' and 'liberty'.

The occupying forces, in other words, are quite happy to give the locals no better treatment than what they are accustomed to. In the process they discover that fear is the greatest weapon - just as much as the Iraq War was ultimately a war on the Iraqi people, the ongoing assault on Gaza is an assault on the Palestinian people. Notions of 'collateral damage' and 'targeting militants' lose their meaning in modern urban warfare, where civilians will inevitably die, especially in a place like Gaza, whose extraordinarily high population density owes something to Israel's ethnic cleansing and settlement policy; and what, one wonders, do the Israelis and Americans expect their adversaries to do? Gather in one convenient spot in the desert far from any urban centre with a sign saying 'Terrorist Insurgents'?



All of which is to say that there is simply nothing 'universal' about the demagoguery of 'human rights' as preached from the pulpits of Washington, or in general; the term 'universal human rights' as phrased in various conventions can only refer to a very hollow universal; it draws political street credit at home (in the 'free world') from the persistent presence of oppressed, disenfranchised, dispossessed, and disempowered people everywhere abroad. Therefore it cannot for its own sake even stir to put an end to all forms of oppression worldwide. So long as there are dictators and ruthless monarchs in the world, Americans will trust their leaders enough to vote for them and more-less toe the party line (with or without universal healthcare, job security, pay equality, etc). We live in the 'free world' - we take 'freedom' for granted, whether actual or not, we have the form or semblance of freedom - and therefore can afford to cut back a little on the content. It is in the name of liberty that liberty is denied.

There is no contradiction here, or the contradiction is only apparent. There are at stake two senses of liberty: the universal right, denied to all in the name of the particular, given to some at the expense of others. The reason is simple: the universal right pits all nations against all states, rather than nation-states against one another. And it is nation-states who are ultimately the masters of the rhetoric.

In this sense the tragedy at hand is not only the world's but a tragedy for the Jewish people. Through Zionism the Jewish people have merely adopted the collective notional structure of the modern European nation-state, which is inherently racist, whether in a biological or a formal/territorial sense. This transaction carries with it the danger of losing a uniquely Jewish identity which, in defiance of nation-states, straddles the line between the universal and the particular - the only hope for a truly informed, cosmopolitan, authentic universal humanism.

Humane, all too Humane: A Marxist-Multiculturalist Pastiche on the Christmas Spirit and the Phenomenology of the Border

I.

Stoke Newington Church Street a few days before Christmas: farmer’s market vibrant and bustling as ever, with yuppie couples, hippies, hipsters, pranksters, immigrants, students, and eagerly busy stall-holders smiling over jars of jam and crates of vegetables and cheeses and sold-out boxes with a few leaves of spinach clinging to the bottoms. A choir of carollers holding up a banner saying “Friends of SING for JOY: a choir for people with Parkinson’s: please give generously.” Across the street a Muslim lady in a full-face veil, all in black, walks by. Hasidic Jews, funky youngsters, artsy geeks, weirdos and town lunatics, couples with prams. I buy some jam and a chola bread and ask about the “PAPERBOY WANTED” sign at the Indian newsagent’s next to the market (aiming to supplement my meagre library income and push my solvency margin up); then stop off for some funky postcards in a second-hand bookshop advertising a large LP collection (Ocean Books) on the way to the Spence bakery, where I read a few pages of Ranciere’s The Future of the Image while sipping tea and munching on a pan di ramerino – a surprisingly tasty, chewy sweet pastry flavoured with raisins and rosemary. Next to me a seemingly mentally ill man sways back and forth while reading a book himself. Saying goodbye to the cute Italian girl working in the shop I leave, and dip into another second-hand bookshop next to Bridgewood & Neizert, the violin seller. While browsing the shelves I overhear the very English, stocky and balding, elderly bookseller enthusiastically relate to a lady of same age who has just walked in the story of Mersad Berber, a Bosnian painter and graphic artist known for his collages mixing paint on canvas with a variety of graphical elements, who apparently had an exhibition in London earlier in the year. He pulls a catalogue off the shelf and hands it to her, gasping at the prices of the works listed. My Bosnian parents knew Berber, and had a set of some very fine prints of his framed on the wall of our apartment in Cairo, years before. In the end I purchase four books: Jane Eyre, a recent Vintage edition of Homer’s Odyssey (the classic Robert Fitzgerald translation), Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and Travesties by Tom Stoppard, a play whose main characters include Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and Lenin, all of whom happen to have lived in Zurich during the Great War. Having just read Ranciere, I impulsively think of ways to link all these images together, to weave and cut out of these disparate elements a tapestry of co-presence...without a camera or any complex recording equipment, that is. Being composed of heterogeneous elements myself, I feel comfortable here. I want to record in language this moment, this snippet of history, immortalize a snapshot of this community of things placed alongside one another without common measure, this continual barbaric flow of the sentence-image in a heterogeneous industry of the mind that weaves together all the breaks and ruptures and disjunctions in a series of co-located images and presences.





II.

It is with reference to multiculturalism that I part company with Žižek - at least the Žižek of Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, who claims that although it is racist to demand an end to immigration of foreign workers who pose a threat to “our jobs”, “the influx of immigrant workers from post-Communist countries is not the consequence of some multiculturalist tolerance – it effectively is part of the strategy of capital to hold in check the workers’ demands.” (78) On a global scale, this simply cannot be the case. The fact that George W. Bush of all US presidents has done the most for the legalization of illegal Mexican workers is hardly telling – the latter event is not only overdetermined, its economic logic still rests on a fundamental exclusion and in no way entails any opening of borders, only the acknowledgment of a reality that must be dealt with, similar to a sober admission that it may be better perhaps to deal with existing drug addicts by providing rehab than by throwing them in prison. Moreover, the Bush administration has brought about the most extreme tightening of immigration policy and oversight in years - largely on the pretext of September 11, but as with the case of Afghanistan and (especially) Iraq, we should not be deterred from the conclusion that September 11 was, in the end, no more than that - a pretext.

The global position with regard to immigration is in fact quite the opposite – doesn’t the machinery of global capital at its most fundamental operate precisely by the imposition of borders and walls – not in the sense of economic protectionism per se but in the fluid contemporary economic logic of free trade zones, cheap labour, and global economies of scale? Isn’t the most basic indictment of globalization precisely in the fact that it is not true globalization, that it is unidirectional and does not comprise the opening of borders so much as a one-sided penetration of developing-world markets by the corporate conglomerates of the developed world? Beneath the surface-logic of a globalization premised on removing barriers to trade, there is a more elemental founding-logic concerned only with a different way or method of constructing barriers, one which maintains the status quo of global capital. It is not, after all, the threat of EU expansion and the hiring of newly arrived east-european workers that German automakers usually deploy in order to extract concessions from unionists in collective bargaining agreements; the key threat is the dismantling and moving of factories elsewhere, and whatever short-term benefits may be reaped by capital through EU-style expansion, in the long run the global picture would be one of neither falling nor rising wages, but one of an economic and juridical equilibrium which leaves no particular incentive to move production elsewhere. It is paradoxically and fundamentally not the lifting of barriers – economic, legal, political – but a specific technique in their imposition that functions to produce disparity and accumulate capital in the hands of an ever-shrinking global elite. It is in this register, in the struggle against the border, that the true economic interests of workers from the developed world are at one with those of workers from the developing world.



The problem of course is that any system of inter-penetrative globalization with clearly defined borders such as the EU nevertheless leaves a category of the excluded – its internal inclusiveness, however universal and expressed in the notion of ‘citizen’, is by definition a form of exclusion. ‘Citizen’ always implies ‘non-citizen’, and it is here that the fundamental paradox of the modern liberal state is to be found, the paradox of Herrenvolk democracy on which Losurdo, in the same volume as Žižek (Lenin Reloaded) expounds. It is this ultimate form of inclusion – the universal citizen of the liberal state with universal human rights granted without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, etc etc – that is also the ultimate form of exclusion, with no blurred boundaries, no indeterminacy: one is either in or out. Here we may recall as significant Badiou’s work with the sans-papieres in France…The mistake is perhaps in aligning multiculturalism with liberalism and ‘tolerance’. True multiculturalism is not about tolerance – tolerance implies a kind of grudging acceptance along the lines of ‘ok, you can live here, but…’ Real multiculturalism can be rendered neither by tolerance nor by the liberal notion of the citizen as put into practice…


III.

Which brings us to Goethe’s theory of colour that so captivated Wittgenstein. (The link will eventually become clear) It has been claimed that Goethe would have rejected both the wave and particle theories of light (generated in classical physics by Huygens and Newton, respectively), asserting as he did that light refracted through a prism and as perceived by the human eye was not composed of different colours, but that colours were rather generated by the interaction of light and dark edges between reddish-yellow and blue-cyan. Darkness therefore is not the absence of light (rejection of the negative!) but is polar to and interacts with light. Most modern physics rejects Goethe’s theory; however Goethe’s is not so much a theory as an empirical account of how the human mind perceives light, and modern physics does not normally concern itself with how the mind comes to perceive ‘redness’ or ‘blueness’, but rather with the mathematically expressed mechanical processes that underpin our perception but are external to it, and do not have any explanatory power with regard to the human mind. Is this not precisely the Žižekian ‘parallax gap’ – the “confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible” such as that between the brain as matter and the meta-substance of mind? Nothing about the ‘scientific’ notion of light as composed of different wavelengths disproves Goethe’s empirical account with regard to perception. Even if light is broken down into particular wavelengths that in some way relate to colours, is it not still possible that our perception of 'redness' is indirect; that the only two colours we can perceive as primarily arising out of light itself are those named by Goethe and that our perception of ‘redness’ is the compound result of a mingling of light and dark edges between them? (Goethe’s theory has in fact received some support from brain researchers studying human perception of colour and light.)

Moreover, doesn’t the quantum-mechanical paradox of wave-particle duality go toward restoring Goethe’s account to a certain extent, or in the least leaving breathing room for it? Light, according to quantum mechanics, is in fact neither wave nor particle, and all matter exhibits properties of both waves and particles. This alone indicates the possibility of a ‘parallactic real’ behind the visible phenomenon of light. An article in the 20 October issue of New Scientist (‘I’m quantum, therefore I am’) supports to an extent a suggestion I made in a previous post, vis-à-vis the structural homology between the Freudian psyche (as divided into conscious/unconscious) and space-time as expressed by mass-energy equivalence or E=mc2. According to a ‘quantum model’ of consciousness developed by Efstratios Manousakis of Florida State University, the ‘image flips’ performed by the human brain when faced with an ambiguous image (below – chalice or two faces) – the switching between two incompatible ways of perceiving the same image – can be explained by quantum mechanical processes. What has fascinated psychologists especially is the fact that the human brain cannot perceive both versions simultaneously: “a particle such as an electron does not have clearly defined properties. Rather, it exists in a multiplicity of mutually contradictory states represented by a wave function. It is only when an observer measures a property that the wave function collapses into one of these options.” (10) In Manousakis’ model of consciousness, the wave function is analogous to ‘potential consciousness’, while its collapse into one of a multiplicity of potential states is analogous to ‘actual consciousness’. The viability of his model even received some empirical support in experiments comparing the neuron-firing rates in brains of people taking part in ‘binocular rivalry’ experiments, and similar experiments on individuals tripping on LSD! According to Manousakis “the potential-consciousness state corresponds with our experience of the subconscious mind, which we tap into in dreams.” (11)


This on one hand brings into play Deleuze’s notion of the Idea and its actualization(s), while simultaneously buttressing Deleuze’s proto-Marxist claim that consciousness is by definition ‘false’, that it is always the unconscious that acts; and what we may take as Žižek’s corresponding claim that the nature of the real is ‘parallactic’. The real, as Deleuze again claims, is not actual but virtual. The unconscious or potential-consciousness state refers to the Idea or the real (virtual) which is therefore only fully perceived unconsciously; while actual consciousness, in being able to perceive only one of a multiplicity of potential-consciousness states at a time, is by definition ‘false’, given that the parallactic real (the Idea, virtual) is thus inaccessible to it. (Anyone who has ever watched The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in place of the soundtrack while stoned would get what I am talking about.)


IV.

Is this not the way to view what Žižek calls the ‘two faces of humanitarianism’, or what Agamben would (following Foucault) refer to as biopolitics-thanatopolitics? Isn’t humanitarianism the ultimate glimpse of an ambiguous or even antinomial ‘parallactic real’ that we may barely trace but hardly fully and consciously perceive in all its simultaneous and concomitant duplicity? In a talk at the Historical Materialism conference at SOAS last month, architects Eyal Weizman and Eyal Sivan expounded on precisely this element of recent developments in Israel’s occupation policy in the West bank and Gaza. Humanitarianism, according to Weizman and Sivan, has become a strategic category of Israeli occupation. They note several related phenomena in this regard, from the Israeli military’s co-opting of the language of humanitarianism and the incorporation of ‘humanitarian concerns’ in designing checkpoints, to the formation of a Humanitarian Division of the Israeli Defence Forces. Among the methods used in addressing ‘humanitarian concerns’ at checkpoints is the integration of a panoply of humanitarian staff, from representatives of Israeli human rights organizations to medical professionals from the Red Cross whose task is to vouchsafe that the same procedures carried out at these checkpoints in the past are carried out with the appropriate concerns in mind. One cannot help but recall Foucault – is this not precisely the transformation that takes place in European penal systems in the modern age: the incorporation of humanist ideals in the new technology of power, the slackening of the hold on the body and the attendant articulation of a ‘soul’ in the disciplined subject, the move from mere incarceration and physical punishment to the continuity of a whole network of institutions (schools, prisons, hospitals) and the introduction of doctors, psychologists, criminologists and other previously extraneous staff into the prison environment, which serves only to make the production of ‘docile bodies’ more effective and perfect the technology of power over the body to make it “the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man”. (Foucault, D&P, 23) … “[T]he most important effect of the carceral system and of its extension well beyond legal imprisonment is that it succeeds in making the power to punish natural and legitimate…” (Foucault 301) Humanitarian organizations in Israel, as Weizman and Sivan put it, have as their goal the improvement of Israeli democracy, not questioning Israeli democracy. A complementary point made by Losurdo renders this even more starkly: “The international press is full of articles or attitudes committed to celebrating, or at least justifying, Israel…it is the only country in the Middle East…in which there is a democratic regime operating. In this way a macroscopic detail is suppressed: government by law and democratic guarantees are valid only for the master race, while the Palestinians can have their lands expropriated, be arrested and imprisoned without process, tortured, killed…” (245)

The lesson here is perhaps that humanitarianism as an ambiguous quantum-object of consciousness is not to be outrightly dismissed, but rather treated as such, as ‘parallactic’ – an ‘empty signifier’, or an instance of what Derrida, drawing on Plato, calls the pharmakon, in its poly- or equivocal function as both ‘poison’ and ‘medicine’; in Foucault’s terms, a discourse that functions as a ‘tactical element…operating in the field of force relations’, that can be used both by us and against us, both incorporated in the strategy of power-knowledge and in our own strategy of resistance to it. The answer is neither multiculturalist ‘tolerance’ nor the liberal melting-pot notion of ‘citizenship’; rather what is needed is a radical multiculturalism that entails a multiplicity of allegiances, an emptying and re-coding of the self, a dual participation in political and social life that embraces simultaneously the particular and the universal, a humanism that on one level goes beyond the liberal conception of ‘citizen’ and ‘state’, beyond even the simply human perhaps in order to capture the truly universal – a humanism, perhaps, that no longer calls itself humanism. To this end it would appear crucial to address what Balibar calls the ‘phenomenology of the border’ or what, following Foucault, he more specifically calls ‘the border as heterotopia’ – a place that secures the existing system of power in place, but also makes the confrontation with it possible – what I have elsewhere referred to as a ‘locating device’ akin to the polished bronze shield that enables the Greek hero Perseus to slay the Gorgon Medusa. Goethe’s theory of colour, as the empirical antidote to the scientific rigidity of classical physics, curiously insists that light refracted through a prism in human perception is not composed of the various colours, but that colours arise from the interaction of light and dark edges, at the margins or boundaries where the edges of the only two true or primary colours, reddish-yellow and blue-cyan, come close enough to overlap – differences (other colours of the spectrum) generated by the repetition of elements (two primary colours) drawn from a field of potentialities, as Deleuze would have it. This, then, may be a good starting point for a phenomenology of the border: to treat its exclusionary juridical legitimacy, the particular ‘colour’ according to which it includes or excludes, as ‘fake’ or an optical illusion – to see beyond all subsidiary or compound colours, beyond and through all conceptions of the ‘citizen’ and all particular citizenships and to fundamentally and a priori qualify all 'noble' political ideals that legitimate states and citizenships and revalue them through the operation of the two primary forms or ethical categories that distribute all borders and all citizenships: inside and outside.


B.K.

Praxis and Prognosis: Notes on Zizek Lecture Tuesday, Biopolitics, and the New Fascisms in the News

Some notes and ideas, new directions, junctures, commentary...

Mr Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture Tuesday at the BIH (Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) - 'Kouchner in Lampedusa, or The Two Faces of Humanitarianism'. One is humanitarianism 'proper' (if one may call it that) which, in the guise of Bernard Kouchner (the chosen target of the lecture, precisely because he is meant to be a 'true' humanitarian, unlike American neocons and British Blairites) is telling us that 'we' should prepare for war with Iran; the other, Žižek claims, is exemplified by the bringing to trial in an Italian court in Lampedusa of a crew of African fishermen - their crime, rescuing a group of African refugees from certain death on the high seas. We should read these two events together, Žižek tells us - 'the "we" who should prepare for humanitarian war is the same "we" who enjoins us to let the helpless refugees drown.'

Is there not another way to 'read' these two events together though - not as the 'two faces of humanitarianism', but as two perfectly consistent sides of the coin of the biopolitical or 'biopower' - what Agamben, following Foucault, refers to as biopolitics and thanatopolitics, respectively. On one hand, the ancient sovereign power of the state as the power over life and death, the power 'to make die and let live' (thus concerning life only indirectly, as abstention from killing, what Isaiah Berlin might call 'negative freedom') which in our time, in the modern liberal-capitalist ('humanitarian') state, is progressively transformed into the inverse formula - the power to make live and let die ('positive' freedom)... "now death instead becomes the moment in which the individual eludes all power, falling back on himself and somehow bending back on what is most private in him."(Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive, p 83) There are moments when, however, this modern biopolitics paradoxically coincides with thanatopolitics.' This is a result of the necessity felt by biopower to 'fragment the biological domain whose care power had undertaken' by the 'opposition and hierarchy of races, the qualification of certain races as good...' Racism, in other words, which allows biopower to reintroduce "a principle of war into the system of 'making live'". Is not the radically different treatment of Turkish and Iraqi Kurds by the West (the former being on the CIA's list of 'terrorist organizations'), despite their common goals and nearly identical methods with respect to their nation states, the best example of this, and of the cold, technical absurdity behind it? Or, take for example the difference in 'humanitarian' terms in the value of the life of a European, an Iraqi, and a Congolese - the latter being the worst off, given the West's 'humanitarian' indifference to the perishing of 4 million human beings there, and its obssessive concern with places like Iraq and Afghanistan. An even better (or more disturbing and directly indicative) example came to us in the news just yesterday, with DNA biologist and Nobel Prize winner James Watson's scandalous declaration that Africans are genetically less intelligent than Europeans. (The Independent article) Notably, he even explained the difference in IQ levels between black Africans and African Americans (!) in evolutionary terms. The real tragedy, however, isn't that some racist old white fart had the guts to say this publicly, or even that he happens to be a Nobel Prize winner. The real tragedy is how this is processed in the media - that it becomes an acceptable topic for debate - no harm in talking about it, right? And what's more, on BBC's 'The Moral Maze' last night, someone - I don't believe it was Watson himself (the webstream is unavailable from the website 'due to unforeseen circumstances'...hm...) - defended at least the 'validity' of research comparing IQ levels between different races on account of the poverty and instability plaguing the African continent, for instance - a 'humanitarian' crisis, to put it in those terms - and that this might help us explain why - why the poverty, the fighting. And that is not yet the real tragedy. The real tragedy is that in response to this, no one - not even the host of the programme - made even a passing suggestion as to the fact that Europeans may have had something to do with not only the immediate problems afflicting Africa, but even with IQ levels - for instance, the fact that not so long ago, in the 1930s, during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (a decade ago, if not still, Africa's poorest country), the newly-established colonists executed - shot, point blank - an entire generation of Ethiopian schoolteachers, intellectuals, professors, etc; anyone with high IQ, in other words. Or the fact that, around the same time, or in the two or three decades preceding, the native population of the Belgian Congo was reduced to about one-quarter of its size. How long does it take, and what does it take, for a continent to recover from such ravages? Mind you, there was no Marshall Plan for Africa. Nice way to go - you whack someone on the head with a sledgehammer and then give them an IQ test. Conclusion: genetically stupid. It just proves that Nobel Prize winning scientists, radio announcers and public intellectuals are no better than football managers - the game is rigged.

Biopolitics - Thanatopolitics. What we are witnessing is precisely the transformation of biopolitics according to Foucault's pattern, its intersection with thanatopolitics, the stabilizing of a 'caesura of a biological type inside a domain that defines itself precisely as biological'. But most disturbing of all perhaps is where the intersection and integration of these two powers may lead, on a historical reading - "In Hitler's Germany, an unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics."

I don't think I am being paranoid here. Take PM Brown's new 'Business Council for Britain' as reported in Tuesday's Guardian ("Brown gets down to business with his captains of industry") - is this not a decisive step towards fascist 'corporatism'? The council, which will 'advise the government on business issues' and whose advice will be 'private', excludes from its membership representatives of small businesses, or the Federation of Small Businesses - on the ground that 'self-made tycoons such as Sir Alan and Sir Richard would have an affinity with the interests of small entrepreneurs." The FSB replied, naturally, that many small business owners have no interest in growing into large 'Virgin-like empires.' But the Mind of Capital does not concern itself with such contradictions - everyone wants to grow big, naturally, whether we admit it or not. And just to quell our fears, we are told that the council "'is not a lobby group, like the CBI..."It is more of a thinktank of senior business leaders to advise ministers about policy issues. This body is designed to have a long-term dialogue with the government and to shape its policy."' Great. Phew - what a relief. So long as it's not another lobby group...

So we have another indication that the democratic electorate is becoming increasingly superfluous - that the conduit for expressing choice is increasingly becoming the market, and our role reduced from citizens and voters to consumers. The inclusion of Richard Branson is especially moving - the very one who spoke of his project as transmitting to the consumer a 'set of values' through the product, exemplary of what Naomi Klein describes as the shift in modern corporate culture from producing 'things' to producing 'images' or 'brands' - described by one corporate mogul as 'helping corporations find their soul' - coupled with the consequent rise of outsourcing and the decline of manufacturing in the developed world. Elsewhere I have argued that this process situates the modern corporation in what Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) calls the carceral archipelago, the network of institutions - schools, prisons, hospitals - that, by instilling a 'soul' in the subject (a 'set of values'), "transports the penitentiary technique from the prison to the entire social body". And just to drive the point home and quell any signs of protest we are reminded of China's 10% growth rate and blasted with a massive photo (Guardian article) of a superbly futuristic Shanghai.


Biopower

Which brings us to another topic of Žižek's lecture on Tuesday - that Chinese capitalism, rather than being an 'oriental perversion', is the wave of the future - capitalism without democracy, in other words. I did raise the point that the culprit may be the state itself - that analogous to Marx's vision of the modern corporation without the 'increasingly superfluous' owners as a socialism within capitalism, the modern state, without the increasingly superfluous electorate (think of the dropping turnout rates, for instance) can be reduced to the effect of a capitalist corporation enveloping whatever political programme it claims to represent. Now, I don't want to sound like an anarchist or libertarian: Žižek also mentioned Naomi Klein and her new book on 'Shock capitalism', and incidentally I am just reading her article in this month's Harper's which arrived yesterday, where the idea is re-tooled as 'disaster capitalism'; and since in the immediate present context one has to take sides, I will qualify all my anti-state comments by saying that in the struggle against privatization and for preserving the public sector and the welfare state, I am for the public sector and the welfare state, even if it is a losing battle. What worries me, however, and what I don't think enough attention is being paid to (even by the likes of Žižek and Klein) is that even this battle - for the state, for state power, for the 'public' sector - has to be fought and is being fought outside the state, and has to be organized from out side as such - through trade unions and other (perhaps new, or supplementary, and more intensive) forms of social organizing - through our power (if we have any) as 'consumers'...That we have to (among other things) put pressure on government in all its forms through channels other than the ballot vote...



Klein's 'distaster capitalism' (in the Harper's article) also brings up the issue of 'racialization', here in the context of security and disaster relief, connecting seamlessly with the notion of biopower and thanatopolitics. From Iraq to Hurricane Katrina (and one could now add the recent fires in California, perhaps, although it looks like things aren't quite so bad over there - yet), the theme behind the various forms of outsourcing of government functions is: those who can pay, get relief - in the form of security, disaster assistance, and so on. (Just as an aside, after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA - the diaster relief agency - had to hire a private contractor to perform the function of awarding contracts to contractors. Hey, these people even have a sense of humour.)

In the article Klein cites a report published last year by the Council on Foreign Relations (and peopled by corporate moguls) which in arguing for privatization of emergency relief states, "...the compassionate federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims of disasters affects the market's approach to managing exposure to risk...if people know the government will come to the rescue, they have no incentive to pay for protection."

Well, that's it folks, we're screwed. I think it's time to pack our bags and look for another planet.