Some More Shock Therapy: I have met a German terrorist

Well that's at least how Wikipedia describes Astrid Proll, who used to be in the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1960s and who gave a talk at the 1968 and All That! conference at Conway Hall this weekend. She seemed quite nice. I would never have thought her capable of robbing banks, forging documents, and being an expert car thief!



The conference was good, although a bit chaotic - the sessions were held back to back with no intervals (not even five minutes), with several going at a time in different rooms, and if you weren't there early or at least on time for each one it's likely you found yourself sitting on the floor or standing, at least in the more popular sessions, which discouraged any mid-hour drifting between talks. The following disclaimer was included in the programme:

'The Organizers warn that due to the volatility of finance capital and the spontaneous manifestations of class struggle there may be last second changes to the programme...If it turns into a complete fiasco the Organizers will be found drowning their sorrows in the Guy Debord Bar in the Foyer. Please join us."

At the end of the day they brought an enormous sack of unused bagels (which prior to that were on sale in the bar) out into the foyer for general rationing, free of charge. They even provided plastic bags for people to take them home in. I packed about 10 and strapped them on the back of my bicycle.


From the final rally, left to right: Astrid Proll, Adrian Mitchell, moderator (?), Sheila Rowbotham, Alain Krivine, and Eamon McCann.

Among other highlights were Alain Krivine (French Trotskyist politician), Sheila Rowbotham (British socialist feminist theorist), Chris Harman (editor of International Socialism) and Jean-Pierre Dutueil. There was a book fair going on in the main hall, where in addition to some funky revolutionary postcards and a copy of the Socialist Review I purchased a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci. I felt very tempted to purchase a Trotsky t-shirt but then thought better. Somehow the idea didn't seem fitting. (heh heh)




At the book fair there was also a stall selling the War on Terror board game, which looks like a pumped-up version of risk, complete with an 'axis of evil' - a dial on the board which you can spin and which serves some purpose in advancing the game.



Naomi Klein is also giving a talk as part of the '68 season around London - Monday May 19, 7 pm, Friends' House on Euston Road (good old Quakers). Tickets are £7, £5 concessions (it's for a good cause!) and can be booked on the waronwant website. Full season programme can be viewed here: www.1968.org.uk.

A word from my mother on '68 in (ex-)Yugoslavia, excerpted and translated (by me) from an e-mail:

"In 1968 we had student demonstrations too. They were a sort of echo of the French demonstrations, but they were different in content. The young were rebelling against the betrayal of socialism, against injustice, poverty...Dad took part in those demonstrations.
We also protested to give support to the Czechs. Tito was the first foreign statesman to condemn the Russians for invading Czechoslovakia. The Czechs who found themselves in Yugoslavia were offered asylum and given all possible assistance.
We also protested against the war in Vietnam. In my high school we organized evenings of Vietnamese poetry and all sorts of other activities. We wore shirts with anti-war slogans..."

I might get more of these from other ex-Yugoslavs alive at the time, which I will duly translate and post here, so stay tuned.



I said ex-Yugoslavia because I wish to avoid any confusion with Milosevic's post-1990 Yugoslavia, a fraud and an abomination of Serbian nationalism which, despite the claims of many Western leftists (equally guilty of 'orientalism' in this case as their right-wing counterparts), had nothing to do with socialism or leftism but was a thoroughly right-wing nationalist diktatura. (And my mother is a Serb born in Belgrade, by the way. She grew up in Sarajevo.)

She also added, "Tomorrow is the election in Serbia. At the time of the last one someone said 'may the worse one win!' Well I think that will happen this time around."

On that note I must ask, what the fuck is happening to Europe at the moment? I'm talking about the Italian and British (local) elections. I happen to have recently visited two places that serve the exception to the current right-wing political trend: Madrid (Spain being one of only 2 remaining leftist governments in the EU, not counting Britain's Labour which is a hoax) and Bremen, which is the only remaining German city-state with a left-wing government. (Until a few years ago most of them were left-wing, I am told)

This is not a case of political/socialist tourism: in one case it was a friend's birthday/holiday, in the other case a wedding. I suppose you could say that it's not entirely coincidence, either. Anyhow, in terms of national governments we are basically left with two (again not counting Labour): Spain and Portugal. The Iberian peninsula, once the bulwark of Western Christianity and the Inquisition, is now the only remaining lefty stronghold. I am tempted to speculate cynically whether the simple reason is relational economics: both countries are among the least developed in Western Europe (Eastern Europe is upwardly-mobile and perhaps also still in the throes of post-Communism and therefore wary of lefty governments), and Bremen is apparently the poorest German stadt. When people are poor and can't afford the rent or pay for healthcare, they vote socialist. When they get rich, they vote in the government that will keep the immigrants out and keep them rich. Am I being too simplistic?



Economics aside, there are several interconnected ways one could explain the recent rise of the Right. It may be a little too comforting to think that the British election, and in particular the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, is a reaction against Labour - though there is certainly some of that involved. The fact is that turnout has gone up - by a whopping 10%. Several hundred thousand more Londoners voted this time around, compared to the 2004 election. And the turnout is up on all sides - by sheer numbers, even Ken Livingstone got some 200,000 votes more than in 2004. It's just that the conservative vote has increased more - by about half a million votes. (See results on London Elects)

One way to look at this - and I think the last two Italian elections support this view - is that we are witnessing the decline of government as such. Basically, the social and political structure of the world we live in is disintegrating. Nobody can govern, left or right, and every election the people just elect whoever is in the opposition, whoever hasn't fucked up this time. They come to power, fuck up, and the likelihood of them staying in power for another term or so only depends on how badly they fucked up. But to be even more dismal, one has to take into account the increasing convergence of mainstream political parties at the centre. I don't think this is an indication of the will of voters, but rather the result of a simple realization on the part of mainstream politicians: right-wing voters will vote right-wing anyway or abstain, and left-wing voters will vote left or abstain. If the election is critical (as the London Mayoral one was), they will vote for the mainstream candidate (Ken or Boris) rather than their true (left or right) preference, which they can list as second preference anyway. Which pretty much leaves the voters in the middle to be fought over - those who switch sides, or who have no strong left or right commitment. Swing voters, in other words.



What makes this dismal is that this middle may well be a relative minority of voters - but it is enough to capture a sufficient number of them to win. In other words, for those of us who do have a definite left/right committment, the mainstream candidates aren't particularly after our votes, deep down - because they know that when it comes to the crunch we will not vote for the mainstream opposition. Sure, they will do lip service to whatever agenda they are meant to support, but ultimately what they are after are those voters who switch sides. In the simplest terms, Ken is after swingers who are thinking of voting Tory or who may have voted Tory last time around, and Boris is after voters who are thinking of voting Ken or voted Ken last time around. Each is after the other's game, the left is playing right, the right is playing left. They eventually meet in the middle.



In dialectical terms this can be characterized as the articulation of a hegemonic or universalized particular; rather than being what Laclau calls a 'chain of equivalences' or some shared content or thing in common between various political orientations (the universal as a constitutive lack), the case is one of a particular (the interests of a minority of 'swing' voters who are mostly, presumably, middle class, white, British, and probably wealthy or reasonably well off) which becomes universalized and comes to dominate the entire field of particulars; not through the common denominator of shared values but through a dichotomic electoral mechanism which invariably functions in such a way that those who tip the balance are those whose will is actualized by the power elite, overshadowing or even extinguishing all other particulars - not in the electoral process itself (because in the end it makes little difference who is elected) but in the actual affairs of state, in what governments do between elections. Regardless of who is elected, the political programme enacted is almost exclusively that of the balance-tippers, the side-switchers, the swing voters.

The Good News from Newsweek: Shock Therapy is Good For You

I recently bought a copy of Newsweek - figured it would be something like the Economist, which I do read now and then for informational purposes. Not so. Compared to the Economist, Newsweek is a shameless neoliberal capitalist propaganda tool, believe it or not. Or inversely, compared to Newsweek, the Economist seems an objective, balanced, non-partisan news source. In the most recent issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, who is the paper's international editor, saw it fit to include (as cover story) an excerpt from his book, The Post-American World.



One has to be suspicious whenever a token 'intellectual' of vaguely Third-World descent in the service of a global superpower engages in self-flagellation in the name of that superpower. The good news that Zakaria wants us to know is that although there are other big global players coming on the global economic-political scene (China, India, etc), America will be OK. The reason: low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, the spread of democracy and American ideas, etc. And in the final flourish we are told of this 'rise of the rest' that it is 'one of the most thrilling stories in history' as 'Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty...'

Say no more. Billions of people? There are only six billion of us, dude. Are we counting other planets? Where Zakaria's figures come from is of course not worth the asking, as this is not a scholarly journal or a serious publication in any sense (nor is Zakaria's book it would seem), and no sources are cited. Hey I'm not asking for footnotes, but sometimes it's enough to say "According to..." Billions? Give me a break.

Well, according to Mike Davis's acclaimed book Planet of Slums, which does cite sources, lots and lots of sources, including various UN bodies, the IMF, and World Bank (far from being bastions of lefty scholarship), the urban population in proportion to the rural has skyrocketed in recent decades, within the urban population the number of those living in slums is on the rise, income disparity between rich and poor everywhere (except perhaps in Scandinavia, although this is not discussed) is on the rise, and any reversal or slowing of these trends is nowhere in sight.



All this is the result of the process that Zakaria describes in these pompous, celebratory terms: "For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid to change..."

For better or worse? Needless to say, income disparity between the richest and poorest in the United States is officially closer (in terms of ratios) to that of developing nations than other developed ones (i.e. Europe, Canada, Japan), and is also on the rise - no exception. But perhaps what Zakaria means is that billions of people are escaping abject poverty, as opposed to just poverty or even destitution or slum life, starvation, or something worse. Perhaps he just means that things are changing, that's all. No harm in that! White lies! In other words, while some people are going from merely 'wealthy' to 'filthy rich', others are migrating from 'abject' to other kinds of poverty, better or worse.






But never mind all that - the global economy is growing, global trade is increasing, and as Zakaria jubilantly reminds us, isn't it great that these days stock markets no longer plummet in response to disasters and wars but rather the opposite - they soar! (on account of defense spending, etc - part of the phenomenon that Naomi Klein calls 'disaster capitalism', spread by the technique of 'shock therapy'; See the shock doctrine video) Growth, growth, growth! So we don't have to avoid wars and disasters, and can in fact cash in on them! America is no longer first - the world's largest Casino is in Macao (no democracy there) rather than Las Vegas, Zakaria tells us, The Mall of America is no longer even in the top ten, the largest ferris wheel is in Singapore (a dictatorship) and only two of the world's richest people are American - so that should at least make all the poor people in those other countries ('the rest' as Zakaria lovingly calls them) happy, even if they're still poor. At least somebody gets to spend lots and lots of money in the name of their national pride.



As for the low unemployment and low inflation in the US, an article in the latest issue of Harper's is definitely worth a read for anyone interested - 'NUMBERS RACKET: Why the Economy Is Worse Than We Know' by Kevin Phillips, which documents the the rise of 'polyanna creep' or doctoring of calculation methods in federal accounting and labour statistics by successive US governments since the Kennedy administration. An example: American officials often cite a figure they call 'core inflation' - which doesn't exist anywhere else and which, on account of volatility in prices doesn't include - get this, folks - food and housing. So when they say 'core inflation' rather than simply 'inflation' what they're really saying is 'we're not telling you the truth'. Similarly, US unemployment statistics do not include many categories included by other governments, and among them are 'discouraged workers': people who have been looking for a job for a long time and haven't found one yet, basically, aren't counted as 'unemployed'. They don't exist. The real numbers, Phillips points out, are actually much higher, and the day of reckoning grows near. Fie on you, Fareed.

A Note on Balibar, Cosmopolitanism, and Immigration

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Etienne Balibar at King's College, 'Towards a Diasporic Citizen? Internationalism to Cosmopolitics'. I have also been in Balibar's masterclass at Birkbeck College this week (two more sessions to go next week). I plan to write more about this at some point, but for the moment only a note on a point I raised during the discussion and which Balibar did not take to all that well. My suggestion was that the failure of the universal rights of citizenship addressed to the individual in the great proclamations of our times (i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and the severe restrictions on free circulation may stem from Marx's formulation that in bourgeois (capitalist) society, only capital has individuality and is independent; while the real human being has no individuality and is dependent on capital.

Of course there are various reasons why rights fail in their implementation and why free movement and circulation is restricted. But in the end, they are all trumped by capital. Example: as a matter of official policy and immigration law, if you invest $100,000 in the U.S. economy, you get a green card automatically. It doesn't matter who you are or what passport you hold. The usual restrictions don't apply. In the UK, the story is similar, though even less formal, but still a matter of official policy and law - here the Russian and Middle Eastern millionaires who buy up houses in Hampstead simply claim what is known as 'undomiciled' status, which is a way of saying "I'm filthy rich and I want to come and buy a house and live in your country", and the UK government just nods and says 'OK'. In fact, following the resurgent boom that put the City back on the map and made London Europe's (if not the world's financial capital), Peter Mandelson, a key figure of New Labour, was noted as saying "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."



What all this amounts to is that aside from all categories of immigration and citizenship, and all restrictions and borders, the underlying assumption beneath all the various forms of exclusion that categorize humanity in the eyes of immigration authorities is that the immigrants, the huddled third-world masses knocking on the doors of developed nations, have no money. If they do, or in the case of those few who do, it doesn't matter what nationality they are, where they come from, what passport they hold. So yes, Marx was right. It can all be reduced to one primary distinction. Only capital is independent. The universal rights addressed to individuals are ours to have in the measure in which we have access to capital - often not only as a matter of practice, but as a matter of law and official immigration policy.

My corollary point was that Deleuze and Guattari's formulation in Anti-Oedipus expresses precisely the paradox of the border: the idea that capitalism through its process of production strives continually toward its limit (globalization, full development of means of production, accumulation of capital) but at the same time expends a massive amount of energy to avoid reaching this limit - one might say, because it would be a step further toward socialism; because while the accumulation of capital requires free circulation, it also requires the restricted circulation of labour; therefore the border must be maintained at all costs, even while it is continually chipped away.

Six degrees of separation and the art of ap-RAP-riation

I received an e-mail recently from a Bosnian painter friend who lives in the states, with a link to the review of a new album by Bosnian rapper Edo Maajka. (think Eminem, Balkan-style...'Maajka' is a play on 'majka' - 'mother' - so...'mutha'?) The album cover, designed by Ideologija ('Ideology'), a collective based in Sarajevo, depicts a boy wearing a blue cap and red scarf, trademark of the pioniri - Tito's pioneers, a communist youth group we all took part in at school in ex-Yugoslavia - photoshopped in the colour pattern of the U.S. star-spangled banner.



Namik (that's my friend's name) sent me the link (www.menart.hr/index.php?news_id=4396) asking if I could tell who was in the picture. I thought perhaps it was one of his own paintings, and that perhaps the boy was he himself, since he often uses photos as source material for his paintings. (There is even a painting of me playing guitar somewhere in his collection...)

As it turns out, it had nothing to do with him - the photo is of a mutual friend of ours, Emir, who knew nothing about it. None of us did. Mr. Maajka presumably stumbled upon the photo on the internet, perhaps on Emir's home page at Rice University where he is a postdoctoral research fellow in computer science - homepage.mac.com/pasalic/p2/personal.html - and decided to app-RAP-riate it for his album cover. Perhaps he googled 'pionir' and it came up in the image search - the name of the file is pionir3.gif. In fact, when I performed the same google search, I found his image on another totally unrelated site - sistermadeleine.blog.hr.



Maajka's album, titled 'Sjeti se' - 'remember' - in the pre-release phase, is now officially released as 'Balkansko a nase'. ('Balkan but ours' - doesn't really make sense in literal translation, can't explain here).

It just so happens that a conversation I had recently (before Namik's e-mail) over dinner with a friend in London reminded me of an article published last year in Harper's magazine concerning art, politics, and copyright. ('On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context', February 2007) Being employed in the art world, my friend mentioned she was reading a law book on art and copyright, so I shared some of my own thoughts as a law grad and later sent her the article - and in the process re-read it myself.



The piece, culled from a symposium held at NYU last year, takes the form of a conversation between two artists, painter Joy Garnett and photographer Susan Meiselas, concerning a past copyright dispute between the two. Garnett had inadvertently plagiarized a celebrated photograph taken by Meiselas of a Nicaraguan Sandinista rebel lobbing a grenade at one of the last outposts of the Somoza regime, and had used the resulting painting on the announcement card for her new exhibition. After some threats from Meiselas' lawyers and informal squabbling, Garnett dropped the image from the announcement cards, which led to an all-out internet war in a solidarity campaign with her use of the image after she posted comments asking for advice on rhizome.org. The story went global and pretty soon bloggers and artists around the world began posting their own appropriations/renditions of the same image elsewhere, many speculating that Pepsi was behind the threatened lawsuit because of the bottle used for the molotov cocktail in the photo. In the end, Meiselas never sued and they came to an understanding.



In the Harper's article, Garnett concludes her contribution with the question: 'Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?' Meiselas turns this claim around, insisting that it is precisely her subject's struggle that is at stake for her, that what she resents about the appropriation and decontextualization of the image is precisely its reduction to an 'abstract riot':

'My own relationship to this picture obviously is very different from Joy's. No one can "control" art, of course, but it is important to me - in fact, it is central to my work - that I do what I can to respect the individuality of the people I photograph, all of whom exist in specific times and places. Indeed, Joy's practice of decontextualizing an image as a painter is precisely the opposite of my own hope as a photographer to contextualize an image.'



So she provides the context for 'molotov man' Pablo Arauz, telling his story, and along the way recounts various other appropriations of the same image she has tolerated in the past, from matchbox covers celebrating the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, to the cover of a magazine published by the Nicaraguan Catholic church (they noticed 'molotov man' was wearing a crucifix), to sprayed-on stencil graffiti in a Sandinista recruitment campaign - and even down to the Contras themselves in a recuitment campaign against the Sandinistas. She concludes on the following note:

'There is no denying in this digital age that images are increasingly dislocated and far more easily decontextualized. Technology allows us to do many things, but that does not mean we must do them. Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context...I still feel strongly, as I watch Pablo Arauz's context being stripped away - as I watch him being converted into the emblem of an abstract riot - that it would be a betrayal of him if I did not at least protest the diminishment of his act of defiance.'



Inspired by these words, I decided in this post to reclaim my friend Emir's context, following the careless app-RAp-riation of his image for Edo Maajka's album cover, turning him into a poster-boy for some kind of new-fangled whiteboy rap cultural critique of post-communist Balkanism. Emir, who hails from Prijedor, Bosnia (scene of the most notorious concentration camps for Muslim prisoners during the war) is a genius, if I ever met one. Think Zizek to the nth power (beard and gut included), with (proportionally) more jokes and less Lacan and Hegel. And more poetry. And totally unknown.

In Emir's own words:

'The Young Pioneer, having sworn an oath that involved hard work, study, and general if vaguely defined benevolence toward one's fellows, finds himself in Texas some twenty years later. Point A. Point B. And along the way: goetterdammerung of Brotherhood and Unity, war, exile, friendships and books, families of choice or of necessity, "new countries, new idiocies of men or of the gods."'



I would only contest Emir's loyalty with regard to the first part of the oath in question. I lived with Emir for about a month at his bachelor pad in Beaverton, Oregon (a post-industrial quasi-suburb of Portland) and found him to be an inveterate slob, even by my own fairly lax standards. When I arrived, apart from the general chaos in his tiny flat and the fact that - literally - every single dish in the kitchen was dirty, there were pots with leftover rice and beans on the stove, unrecognizable for the layers upon layers (I mean it) of multi-coloured mold growing on the inside. A micro-cosmos unto itself. The living room coffee table was piled high with stacks of dirty plates, cups, utensils and candy wrappers, and there was not a square inch of the floor or carpet visible for miles around from all the clothes, books, papers, and random paraphernalia strewn about. In the evenings he would come home and for weeks on end consume only a box of satzuma oranges for dinner until either he or I gathered up the courage to wash up.

Apart from that, the rest is more or less true and he has held his oath to Marshal Tito without exemption.



As for music, although Emir did on one occasion, years ago, submit me to a Maajka-listening session and even knew many of the rapper's lyrics by heart, his eclectic taste can hardly be summed up. If you didn't know him and you heard him playing Bach on the piano, you might be slightly jarred to also hear him rapping along to Public Enemy's 'Fear of a Black Planet' or 'Anti-Nigger Machine' while driving the beat-up old Toyota Corolla which we had to do minor claptrap repairs on from time to time. In both cases, he played and rapped with gusto.



And it is owing to Emir's frequent unannounced visits to the duplex my ex and I shared in Portland, and his temporary appropriations of my computer during these visits for the purpose of 'sailing under the flag of piracy', that my digital music collection includes items as varied as Leningrad Cowboys, Italian songsters Conti and Guccini, Beastie Boys, Weird Al Yankovic, a small compilation of Welsh folk choral music (including a rendition of the Welsh national anthem), and about ten different versions of 'Waltzing Matilda' by everyone from Tom Waits to Harry Belafonte to a choir performing it as the Australian national anthem.

Again, in his own words:

'I once categorically declared: "I don't like music. Of any kind. Period." But that was under duress. So, I do like music, all kinds. I'm a big fan of Karen Zoid, They Might Be Giants, Lou Reed, and, of course, the amazing tractor-driving superstars that make the tundra rock and make the Ulan Bator girls scream, the Leningrad Cowboys. In classical music, I have a great weakness for the renaissance masters, especially Palestrina [my Dum Complerentur in the shower makes the shrubbery wilt for miles around]. Also, somewhat soppy, I know, but Bach's passion oratoria are the coolest. Oh yeah, and Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, though I could never do it justice in the shower.'

Well, that's about it for now. I only wanted to expose the reduction of Emir's image to the post-Communist emblem of an 'abstract pionir' of the Brave New Balkans and protest the diminishment of his act(s) of defiant and subversively profound laziness, taken out of context in the service of a new-fangled critique of a new-fangled Balkan society. Nobody owns the rights to the fungous micro-cosmos that once blossomed on the stove of his bachelor flat in Portland - but neither does anyone have the right to strip it away from his image without protest and re-appropriation.

Some Notes on Cultural Theory, Zizek Masterclass, and Disko Partizani

'Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain top where she is found...By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought."
-Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

I. From Z to K: Crucifixion, Monotheism, and Killing the Buddha the Materialist Way

I was reminded of the above quote while wandering down Stoke Newington Church Street this afternoon, passing by the Fox Reformed, a very red and rustic (and highly recommended by yours truly) wine bar and eatery which occupies the former site of a school attended by Poe himself as a wee lad, then called Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School...

Was Poe a budding poststructuralist?

What is most striking about Zizek's 'materialist-atheist' reading of the crucifixion (most recently presented in a masterclass at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities, feb 18-22) is that it reproduces a notion of divinity already implicated - long before any echoes of it in Protestantism and Christian heresies - in Muslim and Jewish mystical traditions: most notably in Sufism and the Kabbalah (both of which are discussed in one of my November posts). One should be precise about the meaning of the term 'mystical' here, which designates neither 'Julia Kristeva mystification' (as Zizek calls it) nor some general mystification of meaning: the origin of the term is political, serving only to implicate these prima facie heretical schools of thought within the mainstream religious corpus as a kind of 'obscene supplement' without explicitly denouncing them as heretical. In this sense the Crucifixion - as the death of (God as) representation and the birth of (God as) the Idea that actualizes itself through us - is not the point of origin or genesis of this notion of divinity, but perhaps only its most concrete material-historical culmination. Even before it emerges in Sufism and the Kabbalah, it emerges in Buddhism, in this case not as an 'obscene supplement' but a mainstream doctrine - the injunction to 'kill the Buddha' if we see him (or her) - for any Buddha we see, any representation as such, is false. The true Buddha is unconscious, organizes itself through us, or in Deleuzian terms - it is the Idea that actualizes itself through us. In a similar vein, the Buddha of the Diamond Sutra advises his followers to 'practice charity without abiding in the notion of practising charity'. Inversely, as Zizek puts it, "the moment democracy is no longer 'to come' but pretends to be actual - fully actualized - we enter totalitarianism." (DSST 155). To reinscribe this Messianic (Sufi/Kabbalist) logic back into the Buddha's formulation, the only possible actual democracy is to practice democracy without abiding in the notion of practising democracy.



What Zizek seems to be infinitely approaching, circulating but never quite articulating or acknowledging in his critique of democracy and multiculturalism is Deleuze's critique of negativity and the subordination of difference to identity - this is why the populist Right ends up being the negative legitimation of the liberal-democratic-capitalist consensus, and why the Left is blackmailed into participating in that same consensus (i.e. the French Socialists' defection to Chirac in the election two years ago in order to prevent a Le Pen ascendancy, Chirac's landslide victory, and Le Pen's subsequent self-congratulation at this victory for the Right)...Rejecting the ideological drift of 'us against them' Zizek insists on the line of division within, the 'split within each group' - on how democracy 'struggles against itself' and is internally repressive, a dimension disguised by its negative definition against an external otherness. Is this not precisely Deleuze's modality of 'internal difference' or 'difference in itself', the formulation of a difference not traced from the negative or subordinated to identity? This is where Deleuze indexes the transition from Marx to Hegel - Marx replaces Hegel's categories of contradiction, opposition, and alienation with a positive differenciation at the heart of the social body (i.e. the division of labour). "The negative is the objective field of the false problem, the fetish in person." (D&R 259)



Zizek's reply to this is, of course, that Deleuze is more Hegelian than he admits. I would counter that Zizek has mistaken Deleuze's notion of negativity. In one of the lectures this week, Zizek described the different versions of capitalism (liberal-democratic, authoritarian, protectionist, etc) as different ways of dealing with an impossibility at the core of the notion of capitalism. This is precisely the Hegelian negative - at the core of the Idea is an impossibility, a negative void. And it is also where Deleuze would insist that what is at stake are different actualizations of the Idea, which at its core is not an impossibility, lack or void but a positive virtual multiplicity - and where he explicitly rejects the conflation of the possible and the virtual: "one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition...the real is supposed to resemble the possible...[the possible] is produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it. The actualization of the virtual [Idea], on the contrary, always takes place by difference...Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate." (D&R 263-264) Is this not precisely how, in Zizekian terms, democracy/human rights in their actualization become the form of appearance of their opposite? Not by way of the negative/identity as a dialectical necessity (as Zizek might claim), it is not necessarily subverted in its actualization but in a contingent way, precisely as the result of a distortion caused by the dialectical/Hegelian/negative thought which confuses the possible (identity of the concept) with the virtual (Idea)...


II. Investigations of the Philosopher as a Young Dog

On the last day of the masterclass Zizek developed this point in a somewhat odd direction, claiming that what distinguishes us from animals is not what we can do (make machines, think philosophically, etc) but how we relate to a 'point of impossibility'. I couldn't help but think of the Kafka story 'Investigations of a Dog', which accomplishes in some 20-odd pages what Kant's Critique of Pure Reason does in - well, far more than that. In Kafka's story, an aging dog ponders the meaning of a dog's life and the various philosophical questions concerning dogs. "All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the canine race." Throughout, the dog's musings are structured around an impossibility - in this case the impossibility of conceiving humanity and its (from our human-reader perspective) God-like role in the lives of dogs:

"I began my investigations at that time with the simplest things...I began to inquire into the question of what nourishment the dog race subsists on...What has scientific inquiry, since our ancient forebears began it, of decisive importance to add?...[T]his rule will remain for as long as we are dogs...we find our main diet on the ground, but the ground needs our water, it draws its nourishment from our water, and only for that price does it give us our own sustenance, the emergence of which, however, and this should not be forgotten, can be hastened by certain recitations, songs, and movements..."

The thinking dog in Kafka's story effectively does not even acknowledge the presence of humanity as such: 'nourishment' (food) comes from the ground, which responds to 'watering' (saliva) and 'certain recitations, songs, and movements.' We are, in effect, the impossibility of thought (i.e. God) around which the dog's world is structured. One can conceive the glimmer of truth in this, however jocular: rather than being what distinguishes us from animals, our way(s) of relating to an impossibility at the core of our being are precisely what sustains ideology through the work of the negative, of negative identification, or 'filling in the void'. By filling in the void of the other, sustaining a relation to 'what we are not' or what we are incapable of thinking in this way, we open the space for the fetish-object that sustains ideology. The negative here operates not only at the level of the non-being or 'what I am not' (and this is the crucial point I put to Zizek) but also on the level of what is impossible to think, the non-being of thought.



III. Detectives of Ideology: Disko Partizani and Ciganizacija

By way of an example (or 'playing by' in Hegelian terms) of 'ideological regression' over the past 50 years Zizek notes the four versions of I Am Legend, from Matheson's novel to the three successive film versions - Vincent Price's, Omega Man, and the most recent version, I Am Legend with Will Smith. What is gradually lost in these successive stages, Zizek claims, is the progressive multiculturalist message of the ending in the novel, summed up in the recognition that 'just as the other is a monster for me, I am a monster for the other.' In the most recent version, the ending is so altered that this message is totally eliminated. It is here, Zizek claims, that we can detect the operation of ideology. As an addendum, while agreeing with the basic premise I disagreed with Zizek's assessment of Tarkovski's Solaris: I formulated a 0-level - before even the progressive multiculturalism of the first version, before we even get to the point of recognizing "I am also a monster to the other" we must get to the point of recognizing "I am a monster to myself". By way of analogy to Solaris I mentioned the ending of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: the human family who arrive on Mars in the first wave of colonization visit a Martian lake and the children keep asking if they will get to see 'Martians' until, looking at their reflection in the surface of the lake, the family realize that they are the Martians...Zizek agreed with the formulation but disagreed that Tarkovski accomplishes this in Solaris, claiming instead that his is purely an 'inner journey' of one man coming to terms with his guilt, and the planet in Solaris is effectively reduced to a 'fantasy frame' for this inner voyage. But can one really draw such a clear distinction between 'inner' and 'outer'? Does the one not always imply/necessitate the other?

Drawing on the Lavalas movement in Haiti as a positive example, Zizek claims that any revolutionary struggle against ideology must 'maintain the threat of popular violence' - and this popular violence in turn must take the form of Benjaminian 'divine violence'. Here he provides a clarification, having been accused in the past of supporting religious fundamentalist violence: the matter is quite to the contrary, he claims. Divine violence means to 'subjectify the impossible (objective) Thing' - to confront objective systemic violence with subjective (divine) violence. (Religious fundamentalist violence is of the former variety) The crucial example here is Frankenstein - the monster (impossible, objectivized Thing) who is 'humanized', subjectivized - whose violence is no longer simply that of an (objective) monster...Another addendum: this is what Victor Erice covertly performs in The Spirit of the Beehive, a deceptively apolitical, subversive Franco-era Spanish film screened recently at the NFT about two young sisters who become obsessed with finding the Frankenstein monster after seeing the film in their local village cinema. The subjectivized monster happens to be a fugitive Republican soldier who jumps off a train near the village in what is by then Fascist-controlled 1940s Spain. Highly recommended by yours truly, and I reckon Zizek might enjoy this one too - all the favourite Zizekian themes are implicated...(there is a fake death, one of the sisters is a melancholic/Antigone/unconditional loyalty, the other a cynical subject of ideology, etc)



On that note, recalling the rock n' roll moniker famously applied to Zizek (the 'Elvis of cultural theory') one could speculate that perhaps the way to sustain Zizek's revolutionary call is, as with ideology, to maintain a cynical distance: join in the dance of Zizek's 'disko partizani' (to use a term coined by Shantel and the Bucovina Club Orchestra) and ponder whether true multiculturalism may be expressed by what in the song is referred to as 'ciganizacija' - 'gypsyfication'. Same old rhizomatic Hardt-Negrian multitude? So be it. Perhaps the difference between 'ciganizacija' and multitude is in remaining on the surface, in not abiding in the notion of multitude. Truth is not always in a well.

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.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Disaster Capitalism’, PART 1

The Productive Unconscious, The Ahistorical Dialectic of Capitalism and the Second Law of Marx’s Virtual Thermodynamics

My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
-Bob Dylan, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit'

‘Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.'
-Nietzsche, The Gay Science , aph. 109.

One of the key and most clichéd insights of Einstein's theory of relativity is known as mass-energy equivalence – the sum total of mass in the universe is proportionally equivalent to the sum total of energy, as expressed in the formula E=mc 2 , or Energy equals Mass x Speed of light(squared). Energy equals mass, in other words. The effect of this formula or one its most significant philosophical implications is that no mass can be created or destroyed; it can only ever converted from its ‘matter' form into a ‘pure energy' form; the only possible transition is from an ordered state of energy trapped in matter to a ‘chaotic' state of pure energy. Between ordered and chaotic mass, one can only ever shift quantities from one side of the equation to the other, and only in the direction of increasing entropy, which means that an isolated system will over time asymptotically approach heat death - the possible final state of the universe where no free or useful energy remains. This is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the universal law of increasing entropy.

Do we not find in this positive equivalence a correlate of the Freudian unconscious? Could we not say that the two are ‘actualisations' of the same Idea, ‘cases of solution' emerging in different disciplines of knowledge from the same transcendental horizon, the same virtuality? In ‘mental life…nothing that has once taken shape can be lost…' Freud tells us. “We cannot forgo anything, but merely exchange one thing for another; what seems like a renunciation is in fact the invention of a substitute, a surrogate.” What appears to be an elimination of a thing present in the conscious mind is only the shifting of quantities from one side of the equation to the other, the ‘conversion' of contents from a conscious state to a (chaotic) unconscious state, where they are manifested only in a different form – the chaos of dreams, obsessions, anxieties... Adding to this Deleuze and Guattari's account of desire not as lack but a productive force (or Deleuze's account of the unconscious – ‘it is always the unconscious that acts' or produces real movement) we may generalize the process of sublimation and substitution as one of conversion into mental energy . The unconscious mind is pure, unordered mental energy not trapped in the ‘matter' of conscious rationality, mental energy in a state of productive-potential chaos.

This analogy is not meant to suggest that any local or concrete answer to the question derived from the problem posed by physics (i.e. ‘can entropy be reversed?') should tell us anything definite or concrete about the unconscious. But the correlation points to a definite characteristic of modern thought on divergent levels: its discovery, in various mechanisms and through diverse disciplines, of being as fully positive , a being of pure difference not conditioned or determined by the negative . “Opposition teaches us nothing about the nature of that which is thought to be opposed,” as Deleuze puts it. ( D & R , 256) Matter and energy are not opposites, but only two forms of energy (‘ordered' and ‘chaotic'), which together form a system in which one is progressively converted into the other; energy is not not-matter, for it is immanent in matter; and matter is not not-energy, since it is precisely the material form of energy; similarly, the conscious and unconscious, far from being opposites, are two halves of a symbiotic totality, between which ‘nothing is ever lost' – what is ‘unconscious' does not lack manifestation, it is only manifested in a different way ; (and this perhaps leads us by a side route to Foucault's critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis' in the History of Sexuality )…Therefore ‘conscious' is not the negative limit of the ‘unconscious', and vice versa – they are simply two different but non-opposing forms of manifestation of the mind's contents.

As a third case of solution we may add the dialectic in Marx's Capital – doesn't Marx (as others have claimed) transform the Hegelian dialectic based on opposition into one based on non-opposing differences ? And is not the relation of capitalism to socialism itself in Marx's account one of non-opposing difference, an antagonism not determined by opposition, the two forming instead a virtual (that is, neither historic, circular, nor inevitable, yet still real) continuity in which one is transformed into the other, not by way of opposition but by way of contingent ‘actualisations' of the Idea, according to its virtual content? One could argue that it is precisely the drive to opposition and the purely Hegelian dialectic grounded in the negative that keeps capitalism in position, that ‘freezes' the progressive development or ‘actualisation' of the Idea – among other methods, through the modicum of the democratic election. (In this sense, both the dialectic of Marx and that of Hegel are perhaps ‘forms of actualisation' of the same problematic ‘differential virtuality' or Idea and neither is historically given of inevitable, in spite of being real; and even if the latter, being within capitalism actual in the form of ‘consciousness', which is by definition false, produces only the illusion of movement…)

This may be precisely the key flaw of democracy, and precisely the reason why the choice we are presented with is often ‘false' (as yours truly suggested to Zizek at the recent Historical Materialism conference) – it is internally driven by what is, in Deleuze's terminology, the ‘false movement of [Hegelian] dialectics' – negativity and opposition. It is no coincidence that Scandinavian countries (who have a more ‘social' than ‘liberal' democracy), also tend to have proportional representation electoral systems, with a far more diverse political spectrum (and actual as such), rather than the UK and US (among others) ‘first past the post' system. Proportional representation, at least on the level of local politics, suggests a certain exclusion of negativity or simple opposition – every vote in principle counts and has a direct impact, there are no clear ‘winners' and ‘losers'; the parliamentary map is drawn more-less according to how the votes are split. In the ‘first past the post' system, on the other hand, the ‘dualism' that often results (along with the declining turnout rates, compared to the social democracies) is precisely the effect of the ‘first past the post' or ‘winner takes all' system – negativity and opposition, the principle of not-that .

It is this false movement or illusory transfer of power by democratic means that simultaneously ensures the continued triumph of capital with the support of state mechanisms, and the real transfer of power from the state to private capital. In an article in the October issue of Harper's , Naomi Klein, among other troubling revelations, points out one particular recent trend: the conventional wisdom has always been that war, natural disasters, major political upheavals, and the like, wherever occurring (but the closer to the centres of capital the worse) have a negative impact on stock markets and trade. One informal economic indicator known as the ‘guns-to-caviar index' illustrates this in the simplest terms: when sales of fighter jets (guns) increase, sales of executive jets (caviar) slump. “After September 11…the Dow Jones plummeted 685 points as soon as markets reopened…” But in the past few years the military-industrial complex has undergone such an extraordinary expansion, absorbing in its wake a panoply of related industries from private security to reconstruction and civil infrastructure construction and maintenance, disaster relief, transport, and a growing number of conventionally ‘state' operations (as demonstrated amply in the contracts doled out in the Iraq aftermath) – to the point that this is no longer the case: “…on July 7, 2005, the day four bombs ripped through London's public transportation system…the U.S. stock market closed higher than it had the day before…” This has been repeatedly confirmed since, in the wake of wars and disasters worldwide…This new development, debated extensively at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has been termed the ‘Davos Dilemma', as summarized by Klein: “Put bluntly, the world was going to hell, there was no stability in sight, and the global economy was roaring its approval.”

Are we not witnessing the formulation by capital of a higher ‘rational principle' that turns a state of affairs into its very opposite, or that resolves the apparent contradiction between two terms, in this case ‘markets' and ‘instability/war/terrorism'? Certainly the very opposition of ‘market performance' and ‘war and instability' may have been false from the outset, but it was nevertheless actual in producing real-world effects. The movement of dialectics may be ‘false' but here it is nevertheless killing us (and now, and in the ages to come, literally so). Moreover, is it not precisely Hegel's point that the resolved contradiction is, all along, apparent or ‘false'? Isn't the notion of its own falsity already included in the resulting perspective - the Hegelian (capitalist) dialectic is precisely about this cyclic falsifying and unmasking of the false opposition in consciousness (‘boom and bust' economics comes to mind…); where it falters is in failing to see that consciousness is by definition 'false' as Deleuze claims. Therefore it is irrelevant what the particular terms are. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy…it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit …[it] institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons…Everything returns or recurs…That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.” ( Anti-Oedipus , p 37)

To recode, rechannel – is this not a consequence of Freud's dictum that ‘nothing is ever lost', that in the system of the unconscious, as that of space time, only conversion, sublimation, transformation is possible? It is only possible to recode the contents of the conscious as unconscious. And it is only possible to recode mass from an ordered to a chaotic state. The key question then becomes: how are these ‘cases of solution' interrelated, and what do they tell us about the virtual, the Idea they actualize?

In Asimov's story The Last Question , the question ‘can entropy be reversed?' is repeatedly posed over several epochs by various concerned individuals to a giant supercomputer that gradually acquires ever greater control over human life; the answer given by the omnipotent machine each time is that there is ‘insufficient data.' As the story progresses, all humanity is gradually transformed and finally sublimated into one big undifferentiated conglomerate bio-entity:

‘Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable…one by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.'

To the very end the blunt mathematical answer given by AC is ‘insufficient data'. ‘Man' repeatedly instructs the machine to ‘collect additional data' until finally, “Man's last mind fused and only AC existed…in hyperspace.” Finally it is only at this stage, when all possible data is collected and no further actualisation can take place, in the ‘Absolute', that the calculation can be performed; only ‘all possible data' is ‘sufficient data' for all questions to be answered. Having thus learned how to reverse the direction of entropy, AC proclaims ‘"LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light----'…

The subversively Messianic notion that triumphs here is neither historical necessity nor contingency, neither the one nor its opposite or negative . The absolute is not absolute – it is not an absolute finality , but only the completion of a phase (absolute only within itself), the total actualisation of an Idea that gives way to a new Idea. In becoming Absolute, the Idea annihilates itself and is no longer Absolute. The phase-transition (i.e. from capitalism to socialism) is, in a fully positive sense, neither necessary nor contingent but rather the ‘actualisation' of a ‘differential virtuality' (Deleuze) which in itself is necessary or real , even if never actually ‘actualised'. It is the Proustian ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.'

Should this not tell us that Foucault's ‘analytics of power' is the true successor to Marx, being profoundly relevant in the present strategic geopolitical-economic map of the global system – does this not follow from Klein's account of ‘shock' or ‘disaster capitalism'? On one hand, the situation on the ground presents us with a ‘fragmenting of the biological domain' of biopower – the institution of ‘class racism' (involving doubly both the strict ‘racialization' of economic class, and the re-deployment of social effects of race - taken in the literal sense - in the construction of economic classes) inherent in, for instance, the growing implementation of systems where even access to essential services such as ‘disaster relief' is based on ability to pay (is this not a logical consequence of the privatization of state utilities?)…But on the other hand (and more importantly perhaps) doesn't the very encroachment of ‘privatization' and the exponential increase in the exercise of governmental functions or ‘governmentality' by private corporations (previously in schools, prisons, reconstruction contracts, and now even functions such as ‘interrogation', as in Abu Ghraib, and disaster relief) indicate that the ‘juridico-discursive' representation or ‘theory' of power is thoroughly outdated? What this shift proves is that power is not in the ‘state' or ‘law' or any particular institution to be targeted as a site of power around and which we should build long-term strategies, but rather it is

‘…the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization…the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them…Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere…power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society…Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared…power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations…Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter…' ( The Will to Knowledge , 92-94)

Is this not precisely the reality of power-knowledge that Chavez is confronted with in Venezuela? He may have grabbed state power and have at his disposal all the key instruments of the law and state, all the elements of the ‘juridico-discursive' model of power; but something is clearly missing, and it is this that we must turn our attention to. It is here that we find the crucial difference between Chavez and Allende: in the global geopolitical landscape of the 1970s, the power balance inherent in the ‘strategic situation' on the ground still perhaps favoured the state. In spite of the economic downturns and slumps orchestrated by the masters of capital, Allende remained popular and gained re-election; no-one knew what would happen, and it became necessary in the interests of global capital to arrange a coup d'etat, and follow it through to the end. The situation today is clearly different: power, which is everywhere and ‘comes from below', has shifted away from the state; it is this that Chavez's kidnappers perhaps realized when they returned him to the people – this was not a ‘concession' in any sense, not a repentance and negation of a strategy, but rather a positive continuation of the same strategy by other means. (It cannot be a mere irony of history that Allende was overthrown under the direction of the last ‘realist' administration in Washington, while Chavez was ‘not-overthrown' under the most extreme neocon, neoliberal-interventionist administration of hawks to date…)

Far from being an indication that the discourse of democracy and humanitarianism is stronger today than in the 1970s, we should take all this to mean that, while this discourse has certainly proliferated, it has also grown ‘weaker', its true hold on power has lessened: those in dominant positions, with more power, are often the ones who are most insistent on the democratic discourse precisely because they increasingly exercise power from innumerable points and using ‘tactical elements' external to ‘democracy' itself, as such; in fact, one could even say, in light of the various hypocritical rhetorical deployments in the ‘war on terror' that even the discourse of democracy and human rights as deployed in the struggle is itself a tactical element external to democracy itself, to the democratic Idea…

The point at which the analogy between the Freudian unconscious, entropy, and Marx's dialectic (as mentioned at the outset) ceases may at first appear to be their respective directionality with regard to the question as posed by each in relation to their shared Idea: in a state of entropy the movement of energy is unidirectional (ordered>chaotic); in the unconscious according to psychoanalytic theory, however, it is not (what is repressed returns, or can be teased out, we are told); while the real status of Marx's dialectic on this point is unclear, but the answer appears to be that it is ‘virtual', and that therefore its progression is perhaps linear and unidirectional at the level of the virtual, but not inevitable – and therefore not linear and unidirectional - at the level of the actual. All three cases are nevertheless differenciations of the same Idea, actualisations of the same virtual content in different fields of enquiry, and appear on the same transcendental horizon.

The notion inscribed in the conclusion of The Last Question - is this not what we see at the end of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey? Does not Dave Bowman encounter a metaphorical 'heat death' in the monolithic alien universe he reaches through the Star Gate - progressing symbolically through stages of aging, seeing himself aging (Deleuze's "unconscious of thought" or "fracture in the I, which means that another always thinks in me...") only to pass through the final monolith and become the Star Child gazing at Earth? Is this final scene not precisely another form of Asimov's 'let there be light', the universal sky beyond the Absolute? The reversal of entropy at the point of 'heat death' which means that, as Deleuze (again) puts it, "In going from A to B and then B to A, we do not arrive back at the point of departure as in a bare repetition; rather...the description of the whole of a problematic field." (D&R 262) There is one crucial difference - in Odyssey, the human protagonist does away with artificial intelligence (HAL) before making the final step, while in The Last Question, 'only AC remains' at the end. This may be precisely the difference between Marx and Hegel: Man and Machine. Or, the virtual and the mechanical, the Idea and the negative or representation. ("There is no Idea of the negative any more than there are hypotheses in nature..." D&R, 253) Still, the point of both of these metaphors may well be this: from a fully universal perspective, a univocity of being that entails history, time, science, etc, but also fundamentally transcends these as ephemeral moments or actualisations of itself, nothing is ever completely determined; it is neither finite nor infinite but virtual , and every end is a beginning, even if what ends is self-contained: the entropy of a singular finite physical totality or physical system may be unidirectional , but this tells us nothing about the overall transcendental-empirical continuity of a virtual plurality of total or self-enclosed, isolated systems succeeding one another in a virtual time. The absolute is not absolute, and a totality is never total, or there is and can be no totality of totalities; each totality is only total as a self-contained system, fully immanent within itself without reference to any externality. The Absolute is a turning point, a completion of a system, not a final end of everything. The three cases of solution - universal mass, the unconscious, and actual human history - as instances of a virtual multiplicity may well be structured in the same way, actualizing the same virtual structure, different only in the timing of their epochs and reversals, their turning points: in universal time, in contrast to the time of the unconscious or the historic-actual time of humanity, reversals take place in a space of intervals far larger and within an actuality that may be too vast for comprehension, too large (neither finite nor infinite) for a thought limited by the negative totality of life-death, by death as the limit not only of being but of thought. The negative notion of 'Totality' (all opposed to not-all) may only be an expression of this failure to comprehend another totality that lies beyond, another positive sky beyond the sky that is our limit. We may nevertheless take as a starting point the question posed to universal time and re-transcribe it metaphorically into the other two realms (the unconscious and history): ‘can entropy be reversed?' Or, what strategies, and in relation to which tactical elements, are necessary in order for the sought after transformations to take place? Is it possible to formulate a resistance premised on the goal of pushing the system toward 'heat death' - and does this entail a turning point as its own annihilation in the Absolute? The question of the unconscious and that of actually produced human history are closely interlinked in this respect.