Pale Fox --- in hand

Finally—the anthropological source of the popular literature on the Dogon in hand. Why do the Dogon have a calendric system based upon Sirius? What is the meaning of their mythic systems, insofar as they resemble contemporary representations of scientific phenomena from DNA to mitosis? Is it possible they knew of the hidden planets and stars of Sirius, invisible to the naked eye until the invention of 20th century telescopes? How? And why? And from my perspective, from that of a mythos that might extend far beyond its current descriptors, aesthetics, socio-political coordinates: how far back does Afrofuturism extend, insofar as it claims to embody First Contact?

All questions destined to undermine the credibility of an academic career. Excellent.

No More Potlucks 17

The seventeeth issue of the illustrious No More Potlucks, edited by Sophie Le Phat Ho, is dedicated to inducting its readers into magic — magie no. 17 | no more potlucks.

The choice of ‘magic’ as a topic came out of a concern – une préoccupation qui semble être partagée, vu la richesse des contributions présentées dans ce numéro – for what we are up against… En effet, la magie relève de la technique, de la pratique, du procédé, de l’art, de l’action. Elle est donc intimement liée à une analyse de la réalité, de l’environnement, et ne serait être de l’ordre du divertissement, de la fantasmagorie… Bref, this is serious. [Sophie Le Phat Ho, editor]

This issue features a brief piece I writ entitled Blind Signifiers in the New Age, introduced by a recent communication sent to Hakim Bey.

Blind Signifers is a condensed text on magick as the art of the slippage between signifers, the minimum distance of which constitutes consensual reality. Magick in this respect is a force in the sense that it generates effects wrought from symbolic subterfuge. Magick traverses the realms of the illusionary and the imaginary; it is precisely that viscosity that allows us to conceive of that which would puncture reality with its surreality or irreality. In this sense, magick (a) is generative through effects of signifying systems and (b) is not to be trifled with. Its underlying principle is that CHAOS NEVER DIED.

on the plains / Hakim Bey postcard

The principle point is that magick is very much in use all around us: it connects the surface of things; it is especially engaged to ensure consistency of action/reaction in systems of capitalist desire, notably consumerism. It is not magic at work here, not the mere trickery of an illusion, but magick, the technics of signifier slippage, the art of symbolic subterfuge. These be the darker arts when use to deceive.

Any such concept of magick as a praxis of symbols follows from the work of Hakim Bey, whose creative work with chaos theory (and the Mandelbrot Set), connecting anarcho-politics to the folds of physics and geography as well as the deconstruction of semiotics and philosophy some 25 odd years ago is, I would argue, indispensible to grasping semiocapitalism. Yet like all texts, including this one, it is writ with a cleaved-edge. Beware the folds.

There are many good essays in this collection (do read them) but relevant to my own work is Magic, Strategy and Capitalism: An interview with aladin by Anja Kanngieser and Leila, who pose the question “what happens to magic once it is embedded in the languages of business and industry?”. Indeed; this is the fundamental question that founds the dark art of advertising and second order cybernetics. However this question ought to be reinscribed: how is it that magick is the basis of capital? How is it that magick constitutes the language of capital itself?

To this end, I would suggest a deeper reading into the “tradition” of magick, as well as that of Marx. Perhaps magic has always been about entertainment and tricks, but magick operates at ways far more embedded into the technics of perception, which is to say, the way in which value is inscribed and perceived.

In this sense—which need qualifying—the language of magic has been, as the article suggests, “put into use for capital,” but only as a secondary effect or diversion from the magick of capital itself.  Reading Marx, magick is that operation which derives exchange value from use value. Capital operates by way of magick. It is that which makes the “commodity stand on its head” in Das Kapital. Marx often discusses capital as “phenomena” and “illusion,” as a “phantom,” but none of these are terms meant in the tradition of cheap tricks: a social relation is masked behind the relations of capital. Violent, dark magick, in other words, the magick of turning quality into quantity, humanity into slavery, world into resource, is at the heart of capital. Capital is no cheap trick; its cost is Faustian.

As Marx writes, capital’s effects are phantomic; it is precisely this haunting effect, this “specter” of capital which, according to Marx, needs to be exorcised. Over a century later, in 1994, Derrida argued in Specters of Marx that the phantom in general—hauntology—cannot be exorcised. In short, the revolutionary magick proposed by Marx (which was famously unthought) against the magick of capital cannot eradicate the fundamental principles (of magick) upon which capital is based. Why? For the principles of capital—magick—are also those of its antithesis. Any possible antithesis. One cannot eradicate the simulacra; for at base, there is only a doubling of simulacra. Or to put it another way: to attempt to exorcize capital would obliterate the very principle of revolutionary communism, the imaginative magick of a collective ideal. To attempt to practice absolute exorcisim only unleashes the violence at the core of all magicks claiming to unveil or obliterate the true origin or the true illusion (the two being equivalent in force). Once cannot exorcise ghosts nor dark magick in toto nor ex nihilio. The principle of magick is always thus always doubled: (1) magick never comes from nothing; it always draws from another power and (2) thus it always produces unintended effects and consequences equivalent to its intentions. As Derrida thoughtfully explored—in a way few have—one has to learn to live with ghosts. To speak with them. Speak to it, Horatio. Learn to speak the language of magick. One does not exorcise magick; one seeks to practice it as the art of samizdat and containment. Infiltration. And other creative arts that destabilize the easy yet dangerous magick of commodification.

Likewise, when Marx wrote that “All that is solid melts into air” as effect of capitalism, he had in mind the magick of substantial transmutation, not as trick or hoax but as the slippage of signs in which an object of use value (the table) is stood on its head, begins to walk, and becomes the commodity of exchange value—out of which evolves further signs:

 But, so soon as it [the wooden table] steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was. (Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities” in Capital Vol 1)

Magick breeds magick; we are deep now in the realm of these wooden, grotesque ideas of semiocapitalism. In the 21st century, magick has revealed itself as operative mechanism of capital in-itself; this is the meaning of the 2008 financial crisis. This is a crisis of the system of signifiers which determines valuation, a crisis of completely speculative levels of capital which are completely estranged from what Marx called “use value.” It is the beautifully complex world where negative effects (debt) are valued as positive on a completely speculative basis of future returns—returns which, as the various complex operations of debt transfer and futures demonstrate, are expended infinitely until “all that is solid melts into air,” completely suspended, and crashes. And the effects of this crash are disastrous.

Herein lies the “trickle down” effect of capitalism: all the debt from above trickles down and pools below. At the bottom, those impoverished drown in debt. This is what smiling Reagan meant when he sold trickle-down capitalism to the masses. Shit runs downhill. While all shall inherit the debts of the financial crash, those at the bottom, unable to dodge the wreckage, will reap its total effects, as all of semiocapitalism, as all that dark magick and uncollected emptiness, trickles down into a whirlpool of poverty. This is the lesson of trickle down capitalism: those above, unless clinging to the burning hulk as it splits apart, never even have to open an umbrella. The metaphors are pushed here, but you get the point.

A keyword missing from this discussion with aladin would be afrofuturism, where the dark arts of magick take on another dimension, that of the transmutation of concepts such as race. Perhaps more on this soon.

double p/androgyne: s/he is (still) her/e

I would also highly recommend the evocative Sex Magic in One Act: Exploring the Properties of Extensional Sex by Lolix. The reversal of inside to outside using sex magick’s gendered body from female to male is here rendered explicit in creative sex work. Pan/drogyne, in short. Lolix explores a shift that takes us beyond -x to +x, presence of the phallus/absence of the vaginal interiority, and into the  z/y axes to a third-eye dimensional sense of the chiasmus. This text and its images work on many layers. It brings to mind the latest incarnation of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, as s/he becomes neither male nor female, yet both, as the physical incarnation of Genesis’ now deceased partner. The signifying magick be: S/HE IS (STILL) HER/E, the permutations of which continue to unfold in the flesh.

Marshal McLuhan is a 100 year old media entity today. 100 years of ditching the academes to delve into writing and thinking without restraint, on the one channel, and yet allowing his own odd blend of Catholic conservatism to orient his thought probes into deep media, on the other. I took McLuhan’s advice on reading Understanding Media—I only ever read every second page. His ideas are prescient. The “global village” is a contradiction in terms understandable only through its elucidation of the time-compressing effects of not only electronic media, but the on-demand supply chains of delivery and just-in-time capitalism. The global village is the effect of electronic media coupled with advanced transportation— shifting what I would call the technics of perception from the identity of the “individual” to that of “tribal man.”

McLuhan’s concept of  tribal collectivity informs  the work of Michel Maffesoli, for example, and to this day continues to provide a lens through which to view the “LIKE” attributes of social media, where everyone wants to know what everyone else is already thinking before they think it through themselves. As I’ve commented elsewhere, the effect of social media’s advanced filtration and aggregating of like-content is that of an echo chamber, a smothering, collective identification of all-alike.

Yet listening to today’s broadcast of Ideas on CBC had me on pause. First, because I hadn’t realised that Paul Kennedy had abandoned a PhD in History under McLuhan at the University of Toronto precisely because the History department didn’t consider McLuhan worthy enough back in the late 1970s. “What would they think in the hinterlands?” asked his History advisor, if he had McLuhan as supervisor? Even after—or perhaps because of—this:

So in 1977 Paul walked across Queen’s Park to the CBC to produce an Ideas documentary on Harold Innis and his seminal work on the fur trade in Canada, in which he analyzed space-and-time compression through the socioeconomic colonization of Canada through, yep, beaver pelts.Kennedy’s The Fur Trade Revisited “took him on a 1,600 kilometer journey paddling down the Mackenzie River from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean.”

Hats off to Paul Kennedy. That should be worthy of an honourary PhD in itself.

Second reason why McLuhan is unavoidable: because I wouldn’t be undertaking my own field of study without him. My  PhD is through the two departments of Communication Studies and Philosophy at McGill. When I undertook the professional seminar in Communication Studies around 2003, we traced a lineage from the pioneering work of Harold Innis and George Grant—on the relations and effects between technologies and sociocultural, economic and political formations—to Marshall McLuhan’s work on the environmental or atmospheric effects of media.

Insofar as there is a distinctly “Canadian” Communication Studies, it is to be found in the nexus between the technology and media philosophy of Innis, Grant and McLuhan and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, imported when Adorno and Horkheimer fled to the United States shortly before World War II.

Today, what is called “German media theory” defines a distinct branch of Communication Studies. The irony is that its chief proponent, Friedrich Kittler, cites McLuhan as a significant influence. As usual, it takes a Canadian to leave this country, be interpreted elsewhere, and return to us in translation before s/he is given the gravitas he or she deserves….

Which is to say that McLuhan has always resonated outside of the academy—and perhaps with greater force than within. Several years ago I DJ’ed with DJ Spooky at SAT in Montréal, where Paul played a McLuhan video during his talk—I recall he had just acquired access to the television archives. He expected all us Canucks to be enthusiastic or perhaps to show him some kudos for his resampling of Canadian culture… but for us McLuhan is a strange figure. He is there, but like the media he studied, a background effect or an atmosphere, a shadow in the great Canadian wilderness of minds. We’re not  taught that much about him; sometimes it feels like he’s a heretic that has to be dealt with because he made some noises down South. Heck, Woody Allen liked him, right?

And though I had always been aware of the influence of McLuhan on Jean Baudrillard, more recently Graham Harman has noted his debt to McLuhan.

So, it is time for a little song in honour of McLuhan’s ghost, and his atmospheric persistence—some might say his disturbance. McLuhan would’ve liked this one. Clap along, now. From my favourite Canadian comedy crew ever:

Once upon a time there was a town
A town where chaos reigned
Lawlessness was everywhere
And there was no cohesive theory existing which properly explained the mass media and their impact on society and man’s thinking
And then one day a stranger came riding into town
And all the townsfolk gathered ’round and asked him his name…
Well, he tipped his hat and he said:
Marshal. Marshal McLuhan

Marshal McLuhan, you’re such a groovy thinker…

—Radio Free Vestibule, “The Ballad of Marshal McLuhan” (1994)

Levinas on top.

So here you have it: something of the reading program I will be ploughing through shortly. I’ve been through Levinas before, but not yet an extended engagement. As for Harman, I am indeed looking forward to Circus Philosophicus, in the hopes it will provide more varied discussion of the hidden world of objects than the rote repetition of thought that makes up Tool-Being. I find him at turns infuriating and liberating, which means I will certainly grow to like him.

I picked up Paul J. Ennis’ Continental Realism yesterday on Kindle, but it is unfortunately nor formatted properly—no hyperlinked endnotes. I did contact Ennis and the publisher, so hopefully they are able to fix this formatting error and re-upload it to Amazon (Amazon removed it; sorry Paul!).

I’ve got Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude on my bookshelf but I’ve only skimmed it. I found Meillassoux oddly authoritarian—since when must philosophers answer questions of the type “does X exist?”  yes or no? Especially under conditions when scientists and laypeople do not? If this is the new form of philosophy, it is an authoritarian one that rests disturbingly assured upon the principle of non-contradiction. I find this disturbing—kind of a philosophy as authoritarian interrogation. But I’ll get to it soon enough.

I’ll turn to it before I finish Ennis, as I have too many questions that remain quite unanswered, so far, in Ennis’ exposition. For starters, scientists are granted the privilege of answering to questions of the type “is X scientific fact true, yes or no?”, YES, but with the following provision:

These statements will not be considered complete or unrevisable. Falsification is always possible for the physicist, but until a better theory is put forward the scientist will claim that it is sensible to accept the statement as true. (Ennis 2011)

Sure, this is the scientific method, which is entirely contingent: for now, this statement is true, given it has not been falsified. This for now is necessarily open; otherwise the scientific method would resort to the hypostasis of dogmatism. And an anthropologist, as well as a physicist of general relativity and quantum mechanics will add, in various ways, the “for us” as well as the for now. So first off, it is not only philosophers who add this “for us,” but science itself. Second, this “for us” is more complex than simply designating a human observer. Third, I don’t believe that all of science operates upon the assumption that the “for us” threatens “realism”—on the contrary, the “for us” conditions it—that such positions that negate/ignore/forget the “for us” are somehow better than taking into account the complexities of the observer (including the technics of perception), the info-technical apparatus used in experimentation (the very parameters of measurement are subject to change, the technologies of experimentation, and so on), and overall, temporality in its basic open-ended form, insofar as all of these variables may change (even, in certain conditions, the speed of light).

Point being, the for now of the scientist holds the same structural  position as the for us of the philosopher; both are a fundamental position taken in regards to the open-ended futurity of temporality that recognizes the contingency of the observer. And, this observer includes the entire technical apparatus of measurement (the laboratory, the technologies involved, etc., right down to the technics of the theorem and mathemes). So there is a difference here, unthought, between the for now and the for us which is privileged: whereas scientists are granted the for now, philosophers are not granted the for us, despite that, when taken as structural positions of contingency in regards to temporality, both perform the same effect.

This can be explained in both philosophy and science. In general relativity, the position of the observer shapes time. In Derrida, différance is precisely timing-spacing for a reason: time-and-space are variables whose structural positions are contingent and relative. In sort, Meillassoux denies the contingency of timing-spacing and privileges a simple time (of future possibility) over the complex time of its positioning (spacing). Simpler again: Meillassoux privileges time over space. He does so against the grain of all 20th century science and philosophy. Why?

In any case, philosophers are not, apparently, granted the same contingency as the scientific method and of scientists themselves to include pauses or provisions in their replies. Instead, Meillassoux demands they answer like this, kind of like the Spanish Inquisition of philosophy:

“Did the accretion of the earth happen [i.e. the historical record of the Earth based upon carbon-dating], yes or no?” (After Finitude, 16)

Yes, of course it did, I would answer, and just like the scientist: for now, for us. That carbon-dating is based upon a method which was “perfected” in the early 20th century does not preclude changes in measurement or technologies of dating that might occur; it does not preclude warped theories of time travel that might change this record (hey, if Stephen Hawking can go there, why can’t I?); it does not preclude, in short, any possible temporal shift in all manner of technics which would fundamentally alter the trace of différance. To think otherwise would be to trap science (and all observations and truth-statements) into a far worse hell than that of supposed “correlationism:” absolute dogmatism.

So let’s pretend it’s the late 19th century and phrenology is accepted as a science. And someone like Meillassoux comes along and says: “So, are Negroes born criminals, yes or no?” See the problem here?

The temporality of the scientific method cannot simply be collapsed for the sake of securing some kind of fundamental assurance in things. Indeed Meillassoux seems to think that any questioning of temporality, technics of measurement, and so forth, amounts to some kind of “anti-realist” stance (known, apparently, as “correlationism”). I find the entire framework of his thesis unconvincing in terms of the discourse of science itself, which I think is where Meillassoux et. al. are on weak ground. In short, I don’t think there is a fundamental problem with contingency—nor does science. It appears that Meillassoux et. al. think this is some sort of grave error we all desperately need to be rescued from by removing the complexities of contingency and accepting an unconditional YES: it’s ALL Real! This would, it seem, merely repeat all the errors of the pre-scientific method past: dogmatism, refusal to accept change, the Inquisition, etc.

As for the for us, I have yet to read, either in Harman or Meillassoux (and I am not done yet), a questioning of the “us”, which so far, assumes that the “us” is a simplex of the human individual. The error here is not that taking into account the position of the observer, or the technics of perception of the human, is somehow a mistake—on the contrary it allows us to account for this positioning rather than simply ignoring it through the blind belief in our technologies of measurement or theorems of science as providing access to direct truth—it’s mistaking the “for us” as reducible only to the human observer in the Kantian sense.

So let’s grant Harman’s observation that all things are beings—it was already made by Deleuze, Derrida, etc. years ago anyway—and reiterate: all things are observers; general relativity applies to all. So does indeterminacy and contingency. In short, arguments of Meillassoux’s type are more anthropomorphic than they realise: they naively assume that “for us” equates to the human (and that we know what this human is, inside and out), when the more complex understandings of the “for us,” long past Kant now, take into consideration a quasi-transcendental logic, or alter-logic, which deconstructs not only the human-being, but all beings (as becoming, etc.).Sure, the 20th century was occupied with the (human) subject. I’m glad that we’re going to talk about other things now. But is branding all talk of the contingencies of the decentred subject “antirealist” at all helpful or correct? Easy answer: no, not really.

This is the same kind of argument I have so far with Harman, who also limits language to merely something among humans. If language is the trace of alterity, is alien, and is generative of the effect of consciousness (Derrida), then it cannot be said to be properly human, either. In the language of Heidegger, the things speak—and I grant to Harman that we all—dust to quirks and quarks—be things (which is to say, beings).

So far, both Meillassoux and Harman need to severely constrict their readings to rather straightforward Kantian transcendentalism or linguistic analyses which already presume language as a human construct; neither have yet dealt with the likes of Deleuze (who directly engages science throughout), Lacan (whose mathemes of the subject provide the kind of numerical basis Meillassoux champions) or Derrida (whose thinking of arkhe-writing and the quasi– provide a much more difficult challenge to a simple realism/antirealism diatribe). (I remain to read the rest of their work, so this is a provisional statement; however, so far this thesis has held for a few hundred pages now—we’ll see if there are any surprises.)

What I find particularly odd is that Meillassoux claims to be setting out to somehow defend science, and yet in doing so throws out the baby with the bathwater, trapping science in a simplism of yes/no thinking which is not how science operates (we haven’t even yet begun to discuss chaos theory). Moreover, it ignores utterly the more interesting thought from quantum physics and general relativity, which, by the way, have yet to be “unified.” Just about a century later, these two observable theories of physics have yet to find their common—how does Meillassoux handle this intractable paradox of both the yes and the no, within science?

So a proposed title of an essay, a position which is a position for philosophy itself—For Now, For Us, Yes (perhaps). Ooooh, how Derridean. Indeed: the hard Derrida deserves his return right about now. The difficult, early, very well-read, incredibly thorough, and not-so-generous Derrida. Derrida with the scalpel.

If philosophy now means, under speculative realism or OOO or whatever, being forced to answer yes/no, then all this means to me is that philosophy has been handed over to the police. I’d rather not police thought.

05 july 2011

To return to Los Angeles [following the Rodney King beatings in 1991], some people have demanded that henceforth all police activity be monitored by video, that everything be filmed, in order to submit police surveillance itself to surveillance. There would thus be “black boxes” recording the police, their movements, their actions and gestures, a constant recording and an immediate archiving of police activity, which itself consists in attempting a panoptikon of civic space—of the political, and of political space itself. If all this in turn is under surveillance by satellite, we would then see the determination of an optimal optification of what could be called the ontopolitological: the totality of what binds the political to the topological and politics to space in the present (on, ontos) would be gathered together in the present, devoid of any shadow, beneath the gaze, exposed to an all-powerful photographic apparatus: no more secret, no more private life, instantaneous totalization: the totalitarian itself, etc. —Jacques Derrida (Copy, Archive, Signature 47)

Had I know of this quote, excerpted from a short interview conducted in 1991, I would’ve included it, and a discussion of its terms, in “No More Pirate Islands! Media Ecology and Autonomy” (Interculture 6:1, 2009). At the time, I viewed the earth-orbiting eye as the ascendance of an ecotechnics, an entire surveillance apparatus, and mark the dates of Sputnik (4th October 1957) as well as Google Earth (February 8th, 2005—Derrida did not live to see the watched watch the watchers, into infinite regress, filtered and selected, ad infinitum).

Even with the possibility of totalization of the eye, from above, I retain the following possibility of the gap or glitch between map and territory, the delay or deferral between the point of the image and its taking-place, also the inherent possibilities of subterfuge, camouflage, encryption, withdrawal, exodus, hiding, etc.,  as I would, I think, Derrida—that “the TAZ [Temporary Autonomous Zone] is an event born among technics that undermines if not counters the eschatology of collapse for it demonstrates the possibilility of heterotopic autonomy within a technical worlding” (62).

Whomsoever suggests that Derrida was only concerned with “language” in the narrow sense (I’m looking at you, Harman, and your strange avoidance in tackling the hard problematic of arkhe-writing in Tool-Being) has evidently never (a) read carefully his thetic assertions concerning the autonomy, alterity, and “expansion” of writing-in-general nor (b) taken seriously the thetic possibilities put forward by the undertaking of deconstruction as applicable everywhere, as an analysis of the technics of différance, which is to say, its effects and force(s).

We can no longer oppose perception and technics; there is no perception before the possibility of prosthetic iterability; and this mere possibility marks, in advance, both perception and phenomenology of perception. In perception there are already operations of selection, of exposure time, of filtering, of development; the psychic apparatus functions also like, or as, an apparatus of inscription and of the photographic archive. —Derrida (Copy, Archive, Signature 15)

—Which is Derrida reiterating much of his work on Freud’s Wunderblock, the “mystic writing pad.” But this is not only about human perception, and the alter-logic of arkhe-writing, the trace of différance, extends beyond the human per se. In fact, as Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, consciousness is but an effect of différance (166). Indeed, language is alien. The consequences of this alterity to language in relation to Harman’s narrow insistence that language is irrevocably human will have to be dealt with improperly, insofar as it complicates Harman’s negation of all differences marked in Heidegger, and the reduction of difference itself, to the opposition between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. Insofar as the trace does not exist (OG 167), it suggests something other than the totality of Being that Harman adheres to, wherein Zuhanden/Vorhanden is taken as a difference between two modes of being.

The hard argument from Derrida is, in part, this: that language, taken as arkhe-writing, as the technics of the trace, is precisely that which articulates cucumbers, dust, and blades of grass, in which all Things speak. The nature of this articulation is that of “prosthetic iterability,” or “supplementarity as structure” (OG 167). Harman’s  desire to elevate the primacy of one difference above all others—objects and tools as first philosophy—needs to be critiqued for the dogmatic return it is to precisely the logic of a transcendental signified (“we cannot know Zuhandenheit; thus it is First, to which everything else is Second”) he elsewhere wishes to subject to an intriguing, refreshing and stimulating speculative realism. In short, Harman’s conception of the radical difference of Zuhandenheit is impoverished, and it is strange indeed that he draws so much from Levinas—who requires God to hold steady—and not Derrida, who delves much farther into the “infinite regress” to which Harman admits to (in his passage on Rorty in TB), yet with much more interesting result, namely, the thesis of supplementarity at the origin and the origin as the effect of prosthetic iterability. (Yet perhaps not so strange that Harman prefers Levinas, insofar as, in Tool-Being, Harman retains the pyramid of power in which some binary needs to occupy the top spot.)

So the second thetic effect of Derrida’s hard argument is this: language-objects-tools-etc. constitute a string of substitutions, not a hierarchy of precedence in which all differences ought to be submitted to the authoritarian pair of Tool Beings. Will Harman be able to contend with the hard arguments from Derrida, and not just the soft “linguistic turn” he posits, in the narrow sense of a consideration of language only as equivalent to human speech? Can Harman handle the trace and how its inexistence nonetheless generates “real effects,” which is to say, the objects Harman loves to offer in nice, contrasting lists, but so far in Tool-Being, has nothing to say of? (I will grant him this chance in his later work.)

If the thought of différance can be introduced into speculative realism, it offers a fascinating bridge between the media ecology of technics, and media studies in general, and that of object-oriented philosophy. Why? Because différance, as in my essay above and Derrida’s work on photography, has offered an interesting way to take apart and rethink all kinds of fields, from photography to art, physics to architecture, politics and the political to gender; it has proven incredibly fruitful, not to introduce “language” in some narrow sense but to focus on the technical specificity of substituting difference—which is where Kittler and media theory comes in, as well as Latour, for that matter (I have yet to pick up Harman’s earlier essay and newish book on Latour).

A philosophically robust concept of timing-spacing-difference—différance—also offers a bridge between physics and other sciences of time, space, the universe, and so on. But if Harman rejects différance as “language”, then he also tosses out the very interesting correlative work between this thinking of spacing-timing and that of Einstein’s general relativity and Bohr’s quantum physics (as writ explicitly by Arkady Plotnitsky in Complementarity). I need also mention the immense work done by Deleuze and the entire field of studies surrounding Deleuze and Guattari to think science and philosophy here. But perhaps Harman’s speculative realism has no interest in correlative work between science and object-oriented philosophy whatsoever? Is such science—the thinking of numerical logic and probabilities, constants of light and relatives of timing-spacing, for example—”merely” all Vorhandenheit? Indeed, how convenient that would be, being able to leave reality behind entirely, so that philosophy can once again ensure its complete seclusion from the world. A true philosophy of the Zuhanden! I would hope this is not the real effect of speculative realism.

For many moons now I have been toiling away on Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture as the incoming Managing Editor. Lo, this is volunteer labour, and a hearty dose it has been, from taking over the reins of our Open Access publishing platform, OJS—which is a cranky beast indeed—to completely upending the Dancecult StyleGuide (DSG) so that it conforms—well, almost conforms—to the Chicago Manual of Style 16th ed.. The kind of labour I perform is exemplary of the overeducated precariat: technical server administration; web production; design and layout production and direction; editing and copyediting; technical manual writing and production; human resources; workflow management; all-around tinkering & troubleshooting.

Here’s a slice into a typical Dancecult session—begin with double-espresso and/or late-night wine. Chat with Operations Assistant Neal Thomas as I edit PHP, tinker with TPL, use root SSH to get all CHMOD, manage a CPanel reinstall and transfer, setup MySQL databases and fix CSS, and do all manner of technical support for the Journal as we try to figure out how to upgrade this stubborn beast. At the same time, I am engaged in an email storm with Executive Editor Graham St John and the Copyeditors as we overhaul the DSG, where I act as a a senior copyeditor and the last pair of eyes for every single piece of text you see published. As my mind approaches meltdown, I run next door and meet with Art Director Cato Pulleyblank. We are transferring over the existing workflow to Adobe InDesign, redesigning the entire publication layout, from fonts to margins, styles to protocols, in the process. Cato redesigns Dancecult’s logo with Graham and I’s input, drawing up visual conventions for web promotions and style protocols, throwing down hours of pro bono in the process. And that is still not all. To get this beast underway, I check in with the Production Team, which has been assembled from a call for precarious labour. I check in on Director Gary Botts Powell to see how our new Production Assistants (Luis-Manuel Garcia, Ed Montano and Botond Vitos) are doing with the HTML conversions. From their feedback I improve the HTML production guide which I have writ to explain the rather complex process involved in converting Word’s garble to appropriate XHTML (Transitional, of course). Meanwhile I carry out all of the Journal’s InDesign layout for PDF production, and draw up a Guide for that too—though I doubt anyone else will be touching it for awhile, due to the complexity and attention to detail involved. As the midnight hour flips over into morning, I edit and fix all HTML returned from the newly-minted production crew. Eventually, after a few weeks of such routines, I publish it all on OJS and fix all the broken things. Graham and I celebrate over Skype. It is early afternoon for him, and a late night for me. We virtually clink the beers.

Now that would sound like a lot of self-aggrandizing hype if it wasn’t for the fact that all of us involved do all this unpaid and yet—damn straight—produce an extraordinarily professional Journal. Meanwhile, I watch other academic funding agencies throw down bloatware cash to pay the poorly-trained to pump out some pitiful excuse for a research platform. I’m not sure what my point is here, though I am looking forward to seeing some capitalist renumeration for such a plethora of skillz. Bring on the meritocracy, I say.

* * *

DANCECULT | Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
==================
Volume 2 • Number 1 • 2011
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http://dj.dancecult.net/

Dancecult returns with two themes: the dystopian and remix aesthetics of Detroit and a special section on the Love Parade.

While you read, take a look around. Dancecult has taken a new step forward in the visualization of the Journal, with a complete redesign of our PDF publications and logo. It is also our first edition featuring the volunteer efforts of our Production and Copyediting Teams. Congratulations to all for their efforts.

Graham St John
Executive Editor

tobias c. van Veen
Managing Editor

## Feature Articles ##

Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory
– Hillegonda C. Rietveld

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture
– Richard Pope

Maintaining “Synk” in Detroit: Two Case Studies in the Remix Aesthetic
– Carleton S. Gholz

Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene
– Ed Montano

## From the Floor ##

Nomads in Sound vol. 1
– Anna Gavanas

# Special Section on the Love Parade #

Where is Duisburg? An LP Postscript HTML
– Sean Nye, Ronald Hitzler

Party, Love and Profit: The Rhythms of the Love Parade (Interview with Wolfgang Sterneck)
– Graham St John

Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade Disaster at Duisburg
– Luis-Manuel Garcia

## Reviews ##

Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Anthony Kwame Harrison) PDF
– Rebecca Bodenheimer

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Graham St John)
– Rupert Till

Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers)
– Anna Gavanas

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Graham St John)
– Philip Ronald Kirby

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Steve Goodman)
– tobias c. van Veen

Music World: Donk (Dir. Andy Capper)
– Philip Ronald Kirby

Speaking in Code (Dir. Amy Grill)
– tobias c. van Veen

===========
DANCECULT 2 (1)
http://dj.dancecult.net
===========

All innovative works in words have their devout followers. In academia, especially in the discipline of Philosophy, or in the fields that comment upon philosophical discourse, the proper name of the author is propped up by an entire phalanx of scribes who are kept busy in the near limitless exegesis.

While such interpretations may be enlightening, 90% of it comes out as so much rotten praise. At its worst, fanclub theory amounts to a dreadful repetition of unexamined phrases, and despite its rhetorical claims otherwise, produces not the unthought crevices of this-or-that, but a text of dead concepts floating in a morass of jargon, without connection to a thesis, and without hope of breaking free from its tethers.

Everyone is guilty, but for the past 15 years or so it has been Deleuze’s turn (RIP). The endless plateaus of Deleuze and Guattari have for some time now been subject to the worship of scribes more devout and vicious to protect, to the law of the letter, an apparent theoretical coherence and perfection that Deleuze himself was, with all due respect, never so assured of. (And for good reason: an assured philosopher is one dead to thought.)

One particular phrase that has been taken verbatim as some kind of mantra, a password to the club, as a maxim of morals, and positioned above the many of Deleuze’s readymade catchphrases, is the invocation to connect everything, like a rhizome, in the ecstasy of the “and… and… and…”.

(And, to wit: to connect the rhizome to an unexamined moralism of the good. This has led to the simplism that rhizomes are good; trees, or the arboreal organisation of binary classification, bad. That this in itself is an arboreal classification or binarism of the worst sort is rarely noted.)

As Deleuze acknowledged in the more difficult paths of his work, not everything is connected. Deleuze struggled to complicate the above classification of classification through a triadic notion of difference rarely read nor elaborated upon because it’s not in A Thousand Plateaus. Nor is the connected necessarily good; nor is it necessarily even contingently good (and yes there is a difference – think hard, again, about what a war machine does, if you so doubt me).

Recently I came across, rereading again Foucault’s Order of Things, a statement that should be printed & pasted, large and clear, as a bumper sticker  across the Xieme printings of A Thousand Plateaus:

Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.

Indeed.*

* Those who have read anything I have writ know two things. 1. I harbour a deep respect for Deleuze and Guattari, whom I have written about often, and whose thought is always electrifying. 2. I have conducted works of exegesis concerning Derrida, Lefebvre, the Autonomists, and countless others. Take this all with a grain of salt, but with a word of warning: enough theory lite. Dig deep, or don’t pretend to wield the shovel. (And forget about picking up the axe.) For the shovel has two edges. One to unearth the unexamined. The other to shovel the….

* And I full well know Foucault uses the above statement to launch the proposition of the episteme as a near-absurd gathering of the and. Yet, the episteme itself situates the in, halting it short of absurdity. That’s the point, and the difference, between philosophy and comedy.

the gonzo academics of soniculture return

Without too much further ado I would like to point you toward issue 1.2 of Dancecult, which features – among other gonzo academic explorations of soniculture and the rave underground – “Technics, Precarity and Exodus in Rave Culture.” This piece of mine, under works in various forms for approximately a decade, explores rave culture from the perspective of political theory of autonomia, the political economy of contemporary labour, and philosophy of technology, proposing that rave culture – which I consider deceased as of 2000 – be considered one of the 20th century’s greater movements of exodus from the constraints of consumer capitalist monoculture, by way of precarity of labour and the technics of its soniculture. Undoubtedly this thesis requires all the more exegesis. La lutte continue.

===
DANCECULT: JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC CULTURE
edition 1.2
===

// FEATURED ARTICLES

Making a Noise – Making a Difference:
Techno-Punk and Terra-ism
*Graham St John

Technics, Precarity and Exodus in Rave Culture
*tobias c. van Veen

The Aesthetics of Protest in UK Rave
*Ramzy Alwakeel

Memory and Nostalgia in Youth Music Cultures:
Finding the Vibe in the San Francisco Bay Area Rave Scene, 2002-2004
*Eileen M Wu

// CONVERSATIONS

The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate
*Simon Reynolds

“Let’s Have At It!”:
Conversations with EDM Producers Kate Simko and DJ Denise
*Rebekah Farrugia

// FROM THE FLOOR

Sound System Nation: Jamaica
*Graham St John

Capturing the Vision at California’s Symbiosis Festival
*Pascal Querner

// REVIEWS

Reggaeton (Rivera, Marshall and Hernandez)
*Alejandro L. Madrid

Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene (Anderson)
*Beate Peter

Club Cultures: Boundaries, Identities and Otherness (Rief)
*Fiona Hutton

Review Essay: Run Lola Run and Berlin Calling
*Sean Nye

—————————————-*—–
Dancecult would like to thank:

Karenza Moore, Reviews Editor; Pascal Querner who took the cover image used in this edition, and Alex Canazie, whose images we continue to use in the journal. Our international board of reviewers.

And, with special thanks to Eliot Bates, Dancecult’s outgoing Managing Editor, for his hard work editing, typesetting and the performing the OJS management for the first two editions. Eliot’s dedication has been instrumental to Dancecult’s emergence.

—————————————-*—–

Semiotext(e) have recently published the text Introduction to Civil War by the pseudonymous authorial collective Tiqqun. The text is number 4 of the Intervention series which has set for its mission the publication of recent works in political philosophy and political economy, including Christian Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism (a crucial analysis of the recession) and The Invisible Committee’s manifesto of contemporary insurgency, The Coming Insurrection [download here].

These texts should not be taken lightly – or rather, these texts weigh heavily on the paranoia of the French state. In France, the alleged author(s) of The Coming Insurrection were violently arrested under “preemptive” measures that identified them as “pre-terrorists”. What is striking – and frightening – is that the Tarnac 9 by all accounts were not a revolutionary cell, but a small alternative commune living off the grid. Apparently such existence, outside of a few norms, is enough to invite the living nightmare of State hostility. Whether Julien Coupat wrote The Coming Insurrection is irrelevant. The text resonates with the zeitgeist that exploded in the banlieu riots of 2005. It is rightly anonymous as its claims are that of a world. Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War suggests the experience of the Tarnac 9:

Spectacle’s genius is to have acquired a monopoly over qualifications, over the act of naming. With this in hand, it can then smuggle in its metaphysics and pass of the products of its fraudulent interpretations as facts. Some act of social war gets called a “terrorist act,” while a major intervention by NATO, initiated through the most arbitrary process, is deemed a “peacekeeping operation.” Mass poisonings are described as epidemics, while the “High Security Wing” is the technical term used in our democracies’ prisons for the legal practice of torture. Tiqqun is, to the contrary, the action that restores to each fact its how, of holding this how to be the only real there is. (Civil War §82: 189).

The State response to these texts has only highlighted what Tiqqun outlines with so much clarity: the frightening reality of a military complex that operates in a world of pre-emptive strikes and precognitive assurance in preventative measures. Never has Philip K. Dick’s short-story-turned-Hollywood-epic, Minority Report, rung out with such unfortunate resonance. The world is now temporally adjudicated before the act. You are accused before you commit – and this you is the general you, the Blooms, the interpellated subject in all of us – and committed to imprisonment before acting upon the accusation. Orwell called it thoughtcrime, but the current manifestation is all the more insidious, as the outward signs of State repression are not nearly so theatrical. Instead, as Tiqqun analyses, we live in a nonsociety of atomistic “Blooms”, or “citizens of Empire” that, in the mode of Foucauldian discipline and biopower, self-censor and self-regulate the mechanics of subjectivity.

Giorgio Agamben observed that Tiqqun managed to radicalize and blur the two strains of Foucault’s later work: the analysis of techniques of governance and the processes of subjectivation (see video above & here; this translation here). Agamben (roughly translated):

Thus, as demonstrated by Foucault, in a microphysics of power, power does and always has circulated in mechanisms of all kinds; legal, material, etc. For Tiqqun, power is nothing more than that. It doesn’t stand as a sovereign hypostatic entity in relation to civil society and life; it coincides internally with life and society.

Power cannot be understood as having a center anymore; it is a mere accumulation of mechanisms into which subjects, or in Foucault’s words “processes of subjectivation”, are entangled.

In this context, Tiqqun tries to cause the two plans, the two analyses kept separate in the work of Foucault – mechanisms and techniques of governance, subject – to fully coincide with one another. There is a text in one of the essays published in the book called “métaphysique critique”, and it says it very clearly: “a theory of the subject is only possible as a theory of mechanisms.” [from the translation]

The subject is a mechanism. Clearly, this position accords with Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on the subject as a machine (or an assemblage thereof), and perhaps more intriguingly, with work in philosophy of technology that articulates the subject as technically constructed, or rather perpetually reconstructed through technics (such as in the deconstructive work of Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen, or Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory). With Tiqqun, subjectivity is likewise kept in a state of perpetual reconstruction through the reactionary forces of Empire, which is not a positive object (and certainly not a sovereign entity or even operation of sovereignty). For Tiqqun, Empire is a wholly negative and reactionary force; it only comes into being through its policing actions. The place of the sovereign Prince is now occupied by the Principle:

Empire exists “positively” only in crisis, only as negation and reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because it is impossible to get outside it. [...] This is why Empire is not only without a government, but also without an emperor: there are only acts of government, all equally negative. In our historical experience, the phenomenon that comes closest to this state of affairs is still the Terror. (§51; Gloss B, 125-126).

If Empire is a negative policing operation, existing positively only in the moment of its negativity, which is to say in a perpetual state of emergency, then so is the subject. The subject exists only when interpellated. The difference with Althusser is, however, that Empire only exists within the same logic of interpellation; the microphysics of power reveals only the apparatuses of its circulation. There is no centre to this power, nor to the subject; it is this core of absence which upholds the transcendent violence of the absolute Principle. So it is that the subject and Empire come into effect through circulations of force, and that Tiqqun’s absent-centre at the heart of both Empire and the subject remains profoundly indebted to Derrida: the subject as a feedback loop of consciousness through a nonsovereign other constructed through the technics and force of the sign is explored throughout Of Grammatology.

In this respect – and remaining exterior to the French cliques that unfortunately segregate radical discourse – I find it utterly senseless that Tiqqun attacks not only deconstruction as the “weak thought” of Empire (145) but Toni Negri in his “ridiculous hope for a global democratic state” (159). I would tend to unfortunately agree that all too often deconstruction has been reduced to academic exercises in pseudonihilism and the soft ethics of hospitality. That said, the force of Derrida’s work cannot be said “to dissolve and disqualify all intensity, while never producing any itself” (§57, 145). On the contrary, Derrida’s work, through its interplay of exoteric to esoteric discourses, intensifies and accelerates the texts it comes into contact with through its affirmative acts of parasitism.  And as Tiqqun likes asking “what X has actually done” (160), then Tiqqun must account for the fact that Derrida as a figure intensified debate to the boiling point throughout the world, adhering both followers and detractors, and causing entire upheavals within disciplines and departments (like, I should add, Foucault, who remains sanctimonious and unchallenged in Tiqqun’s work). Further, Tiqqun must also account for its own erasure: we cannot ask, in turn, what Tiqqun has done (other than to anonymously write texts).

As for Negri, his utopianism is palpable in attempting to rethink a telos of the multitude, or rather, prescribe a telos to the content of multitude in such texts as The Porcelain Workshop. Yet, this is no reason to discredit multitude as a useful descriptor of global interconnectedness stemming from precarious and cognitive labour. Paulo Virno has offered several analyses of multitude that think the multitude without content, which is to say, sans the telos of a definitive positive class (a.k.a. the digital proletariat). Yet Tiqqun appears to pay no attention to the accuracy of these socioeconomic analyses, all the more surprising given their accuracy in dissecting the global economic crises post-2007.

It is also frustrating that Tiqqun attacks Negri’s work with the ridiculous charge of “aspiring to hold institutional positions” (161). Here Tiqqun descends to a fruitless level of name-calling that lacks respect for Negri as a political prisoner.

Moreover there is a greater point at stake here that undermines Tiqqun’s own position, or rather reveals its lack of coherency. In brief, Tiqqun at times wavers between contingency and determinism, positivism and negativism. Tiqqun does not clearly distinguish between what is and what should be (or what ought to be) nor between its own means and those of its proclaimed enemies.

To take one particular, though telling example: Tiqqun claims that as Empire and the subject are negative and thus reactionary effects, deconstruction, as such a negative operation, must be complicit with the operations of Empire. Indeed, apparently deconstruction operates as the officious discourse of Empire. (A similar critique has been advanced by Zizek of Deleuze and Guattari: the dazzled reader of D&G advocating nomadic deterritorialization has just swallowed transnational capital’s modus operandi — hook, line & sinker. Tiqqun uses D&G and Foucault without question in this respect. Such claims tend to lead nowhere. What matters is what one does with the tools — including their reshaping or repurposing. Everything is complicit. Nothing is outside Empire.)

In associating all of deconstruction with Empire (as a discursive network, series of texts, and a mode of inquiry), what Tiqqun implies is that its own discourse is not reactionary nor weak thought of Empire. By contrast, it is – and must be, unless qualified – positivist and actionary. Yet, and somewhat ironically, it is this very positivist force that Tiqqun charges Negri with not only holding in his theses concerning Empire, but as projecting from a positivism of his own self (!):

The entire Negrian perspective boils down to this: to force Empire to take on the form of a universal State, by staging the emergence of a so-called “global civil society.” Coming from people who have always aspired to hold institutional positions, who thus have always pretended to believe in the fiction of the modern State, the absurdity of this strategy becomes clear; and the evidence to the contrary in Empire itself acquires historical significance. When Negri asserts that the multitude produced Empire, that “sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule,” that “Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world,” or again that “[t]his order is expressed as a juridical formation,” he gives an account, not of the world around him, but of his own ambitions. (§63 Gloss B, 161-162).

Many would agree with Tiqqun’s critique, which is precisely why Virno’s account of a multitude without content – and its exodus – appears all the more significant for articulating power without a sovereign centre. On the contrary, Negri explicitly argues for the telos of potentia (however contingent), and this unfolding of quasi-determined historicity nonetheless ensures the inevitable revolution of the (proletarian) multitude. Even if Tiqqun decontextualizes much of Negri’s complexity on these points, and descends into a personal attack, their critique accurately reflects the contestable elements of Negri’s position. That said, what can Tiqqun offer? Tiqqun appears to pose a theoretical bind: deconstruction on the one side, Negriism on the other. Yet the more one advances into a reading of Tiqqun, the more it appears that Tiqqun remains unsure of their strategy:

(a) After denouncing deconstruction as weak thought of the Empire in §58, in §59 Gloss A Tiqqun adapts the very procedure of deconstruction and the substantive form of one of Derrida’s most well known theses:

Because no one is ever depersonalized enough to be a perfect conductor of these social flows, everyone is always-already, as the very condition of survival, at fault in the eyes of the norm, a norm that will only be established after the fact, after the intervention. We call this state a blank blame. It is the moral condition of the citizens of Empire. It is the reason why there are, in fact, no citizens, but only proofs of citizenship.

What Tiqqun has described is the law of the supplement articulated in its political negativity. One could rewrite the last sentence in its logical form: there is no positive X, but only its signs or effects, its force, which is why a supplement, added after the fact, is always added to that which must appear whole, even as its substantive content is lacking. This is precisely why there is no X, but only its always-already effect after-the-fact. The temporality of the supplement is such that it provides the content after the fact through the delay and differal of signs. Mark the Derridean language: always-already, survival (sur-vivance), the fault, etc. This entire thesis is not only deconstructive, it is the thetic form of deconstruction itself. Later, deconstructive articulations inhabit Deleuze’s war machine in the observation that “the war machine has a supplemental relation to war” (§79, 186) — a marked convergence of D&G to Derrida’s strategy that has been oft ignored.

(b) While denouncing multitude as a general abstraction akin to that of “society”, and taking its meaning directly from Hobbes without considering its rearticulation by Autonomist thought, Tiqqun claims that its enemy is not Empire itself (as there is no positive content to Empire, no subject) but the formidably abstract hostis, “a nothing that demands to be annihilated, either through a cessation of hostility, or by ceasing to exist altogether” (§19, 47). Tiqqun sets as its enemy a nothing which demands its annihilation. The entire means of how – which forms the essential question of the essay “How Is It To Be Done?” – is moreover thrown into confusion. How does one combat nothing? At first, it would appear that this is to be answered through the reclamation of violence as “what has been taken from us” (§11, Gloss A, 34). Yet, annihilation above is expressed in a cessation of hostility. Is hostility, then, not equivocal to an operation of violence? Is Tiqqun advocating Ghandi-esque methods that nonetheless reclaim violence? Later, in §71, we read that

For us, the hostis is this very hostility that, within Empire, orders both the non-relation to self and the generalized non-relation between bodies. Anything that tries to arouse in us this hostis must be annihilated. What I mean is that the sphere of hostility itself must be reduced.

The means of this reduction are again unclear. Furthermore, how can a nonsovereign, nonsubstantive Empire compose and enforce an order? The negativity of Empire here is often articulated in a positivism that appears not within the policing actions of the State of Emergency (this or that operation), but of a general condition in which Empire would, then, be perpetually positive in its negativity. The positivity of Empire would, of course, serve justification for Negri’s position in regards to Empire’s substantive qualities that Tiqqun despises. Moreover, this dialectical relation of negativity/positivity would also lead one to consider with more weight a deconstructive analysis of these operational concepts.

In regards to reducing the sphere of hostility, the dividuals that are supposed to accomplish this act appear to unite only in their abstraction as near-essentialist “forms-of-life” which are not “cultures” or “styles” but communist relations to “how I am what I am” (§5, 22) that form the core of their ethical relations, a relation situated before politics. In short, forms-of-life are contingent in their communality; they are constructed as ethical relations before political ones. However, this raises questions, even traditional ones, concerning the ethical construction of contingent communism, or, in philosophical terms, of how we know that we have the good life, how we know that we are acting ethically, and so on. Indeed, is not the collective inquiry into these questions precisely that of politics? Yet, Tiqqun dismisses such avenues of questioning thought in §6 as “meaningless” and as betraying “only a rejection,” if not a “fear of undergoing contingency.” On the contrary, such questions embrace contingency as inherently malleable in their content and means and advance their questioning as essential to the ethico-political relation. If forms-of-life are contingent, then should we not inquire how to create, share, and remix them? Is this not the ethical question par excellence? The problem here is that Tiqqun has severed the relationship between ethics and politics while nonetheless claiming communism as an ethical good.

In this respect Tiqqun seems to fear strategies that would elevate questions of contingency to a political level, given its repeated emphasis on the ethical dimensions of its positions before politics – an “ethics of civil war” (§31, §95). Tiqqun would appear to avoid addressing how it is that its contingent, though fundamental theses concerning forms-of-life are precisely that: forms without content, and thus without ethical content nor foundation. What constitutes “an ethics of civil war” if forms-of-life are contingent, and war is advanced before politics? Such questions are meaningless in this schema; no ethics can exist in a war of all-against-all. It is a war not even of ethics, but of the free play of power itself. As Tiqqun writes, “Civil war is the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of their coexistence” (§10). Yet this play is free only insofar as it would be unequal and ruthless – which is to say, without ethics it would operate without constraint. Surely Tiqqun is not trying to convince us Blooms of Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage? And are we really supposed to believe that the State impoverished an ethics of civil war by translating it into economic (or class) war? For Tiqqun, it is a question of

how the “war of each against each” is instead the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the universal reign of hostility. (§42)

(c) In regards to the state of civil war, and Tiqqun’s mission to seek it through communist forms-of-life, these communes of unquestioned sameness (§13) must be pursued in an ethical capacity, which is to open oneself to other forms-of-life. If there is an ethical dimension, it is usually sought in the relation to the other: the ethics of hospitality. For Tiqqun, our capacity to be affected by other forms-of-life appears not in our relations to the other, and the choices made in relation to the other, but by abdicating the Bloomesque notions of freedom and choice and following one’s form-of-life “right to the end, to the point where it vanishes” (§6, gloss B, 25). In short, one must take up a form-of-life and pursue it to the end in order to be affected by others. The more one pursues the communism of a form-of-life to the point of its disappearance, to the point of forgetfulness, to the point of incorporation without memory, to the point wherein one forgets one is pursuing a contingent ethics, the more one is affected by others. There is a deeply troubling aspect to this thesis, for it is a position that wishes to bury, without memory, the contingency of its form. One is reminded of every attempt to start at Year Zero.

Surely the autonomist language of exodus develops a contingent position from which to articulate a new political relation much better. Through exit or organised retreat a collectivity can reset the parameters for a new republic. Rave culture demonstrated such a movement. Exodus organises the parameters of its  alternative world (the latter a term that Tiqqun also uses).

Yet Tiqqun’s articulation is troubling also in its linearity – its simplism of relations to the other. Here, the ability to be affected by others (and one would suppose this includes empathy) follows from the linear yet forgetful development of one’s form-of-life in relation to those whom one is already affiliated with (here one is somewhat reminded of Stirner). In this logic, the ethical capacity is suspended or reduced until one’s form-of-life has reified to the point of its disappearance. In short, after shaping one’s form-of-life to the point of its absolute introjection (to put it in psychoanalytic terms), the other can no longer trouble it: one’s contingent foundations for ethical relations is no longer open to question. Is this not precisely the policing operation of biopower and self-regulation that Foucault investigates? Is this not precisely the methodology of indoctrination, of all forms of unconscious programming?

For Tiqqun, ethical relations are not relations of disagreement, but of political hostility through civil war (§12). All encounters with the other are hostile until proven innocent. Unless the other is the same – and thus not the other – the encounter is always one of hostility (§18). This means that each encounter is not open to questioning but only to hostility and by necessity takes place within a politics of civil war (§12) without recourse to an ethics of hospitality. The “capacity to then be affected by other forms-of-life” is only a capacity to enter into hostile relations. Other forms of life that appear as nonhostile are not other forms-of-life, but the same forms-of-life that serve to reinforce reified power through the strengthening of the same community (§13, §16). This is perhaps why Tiqqun ends up with civil war as the point of view of the political, rather than seeing the contingent construction of ethical relations as the genesis of the political to begin with. If Tiqqun did see it this way, then the relation to the other would always already be at stake in the perpetual – and necessary – renegotiation of ethico-political relations.

Finally, Tiqqun’s position admits only a pure, positivist subjectivity without unconscious alterity. There can be no schizoid subject, no heteronymous multiple, no incorporated ghosts. All of this must be forgotten in the indoctrination of one’s form-of-life. This is the precise point at which Tiqqun defeats itself. No subject is functional, nor seemingly whole in its holes of memory, without alterity. What Tiqqun desires is an isolated subject, a cloistered subject raised without exposure to otherness, so that when otherness is encountered, it is viewed as hostile, and its relations to it, those of civil war. Without question. This is precisely the agenda of every authoritarian State that constructs its New Youth through the means of erasure that eradicates of alterity. If this is so, then how are Tiqqun’s means at all different from those of State biopower?

(c) Civil war (§12). Even though this term is qualified throughout, Tiqqun views the political perspective of the world as one of competing forms-of-life held in a perpetual state of Civil War. Tiqqun’s view is militantly anti-Statist (without question, even). Moreover, Tiqqun holds an entirely romantic view of what preceded the State:

In the West, the unity of the traditional world was lost with the Reformation and the “wars of religion” that followed. The modern State then bursts on the scene with the task of reconstituting this unity – secularized, this time – no longer as an organic whole but instead as a mechanical whole, as a machine, as a conscious artificiality. (§35, 74).

Political theory always fails when it takes up such hopelessly lost narratives, and Tiqqun is no exception. Even as forms-of-life are the perfectly contingent communities of Civil War prior to the State, the State itself is viewed as a new form — a construct. Are not the preceding nonStatist forms also constructs? In any case, the State is apparently a machine that disrupts the organic whole of the nonartificial unity of the world. This line of theorisation never fails to win its adherents among those who enjoy all the benefits of the State. At its worst, such positions are a justification for contingent violence. Moreover, I fail to see why the State is not merely the most successful community of the same in this schema.

Secondly, why Tiqqun accepts Hobbes’ polarisation of the State vs. Civil War remains unclear. Tiqqun dislikes Hobbes, so why accept his schema? Tiqqun’s apparently radical thesis is to wholeheartedly embrace Civil War over the State, and thus to render the contingency of the communities of Civil War into a positively ethical dimension. How a contingent form-of-life wrought in a community of the same can only contain ethical content is again unclear. A deconstructive analysis would question – which is to say intensify – Hobbes’ dichotomy to begin with. I have no real desire to fight an impossible struggle against the State. Exodus offers precisely an abdication of such heroic naratives. Nor would I desire to blindly accept a violently idealist vision of civil war that reeks with all the musk of patriarchy, the kind of vision that casts about with homoerotic dreams of warrior nomads.

/ exit /

There is more – much more – to be writ in response to Tiqqun’s text, which despite its romantic idealism contains many cogent theorisations of Empire and organisation, especially where it turns toward exodus. When Tiqqun write that “To begin again means: to exit the suspension” (201), they begin to articulate the means, the very how, of what has already been taking place. When Tiqqun deconstruct Lenin’s question “What is to be done?”, asking instead “How is it to be done?”, they reset the stakes for political strategy. Yet their fundamental theses remain flawed — if not marred with the same inadequate and romantic theorisations that have long plagued weak anarchist thought.

Nowhere does Tiqqun speak of political economy beyond thinking it as impoverished Civil War (§42); everywhere the question is of the subject and the State, and even when Empire is the prevailing condition, it remains the Liberal state turned inside out (§53). Nevertheless, many intriguing theses remain: whereas the modern State attempted to eliminate Civil War, Empire attempts to manage it (§58). Of course, this calls into question the very strategic direction of Tiqqun in advocating Civil War.

And the question of political economy remains. Are Empire’s economics reactionary and negative, or only its military force? According to David Harvey, financial capital has been entirely innovative – in the sense that it seeks to transcend its barriers – and not reactionary. Marazzi, Berardi, Negri, Virno and others have  already outlined how capital commodified the very schizoid & nomadic forms of resistance dreamt up by the likes of Deleuze and Guattari as an antidote to Freudian repression (to give Deleuze and Guattari credit, they address this development in their last works, as well as in various passages of A Thousand Plateaus that don’t receive nearly enough attention).

A question then arises: if the economics of capitalism – a phrase not to be found in Tiqqun – do not operate merely or only as a negative impoverishment of Civil War, then what precisely is to be made of the substantive violence and innovative workarounds of global economic capitalism? In Tiqqun’s schema, what is the relation of the global capitalist economy to Empire’s military-policing operations? Or: what is the relation of the positive to the negative? Is economics a double negative, a shadow of Empire’s negativity? Or: how Hegelian is this all, really? For Negri, capitalist economics are reactionary and this is precisely why he argues that the multitude produced Empire, or rather that Empire formed as a reaction against the organisation of increasingly globalized labour. Negri retains the dialectics of the negative — a dialectics of history that is, at points, even deconstructive. But Tiqqun?

interstellar tones transport Sun Ra offworld

But in reality, it is the inherent failure of representation, both in the visual and the political sense, that continually leads activist-artists to abandon their works and their familiar skills, and to dissolve once again into the intersubjective processes of society’s self-transformation.

This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the capacity for a movement to appear, to intervene and to disappear again, before changing names and recommencing the same struggle in a different way. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 185)

Exodus is a movement — defection from the State, exit from the state of things, toward the formation of a “new republic” (as Paolo Virno puts it). While Virno and other Italian-based theorists of the Autonomia/Operaismo movement have traced exodus as a response to the factory regime of Fordist labour that saw its dismantling in the ’70s and ’80s, Brian Holmes has placed exodus within the artistic lineage of interventions and occupations, in which the fluidity of art, and of art as an occupation or role offers an exit strategy from institutionalized engagement. Holmes’ historical references are those of the alterglobalization movement, notably the public sonic occupations of Reclaim the Streets and the deployment of carnivale tactics in general, but also in specific art projects such as Nikeground. Here, art (and the artist) move through an interzone of activism and art, a zone in which intervention and representation are no longer distinct sides or sites of the work.

Significantly, Holmes writes how the passage toward exodus opens in the breakdown of representation. One can think such representation in (at least) two ways: the representative politics of the democratic order and the politics of representation of the object and identity, or rather the ordering of representation in which art is supposed to traffic (albeit at a distance). When representation fails, or rather proves itself inadequate through its persistent failure (some might say its planned obsolescence), then strategies of exodus come into play.

And quite literally — exodus as a myth of resistance is also a time of play, a site in which the play of representation can be remixed, through exit from its confines, into a new scenario. For the artist, exodus from an institutionalized art world changes the play of what it means to respond to a Call — no longer a competitive call for new works, but now a Call for collective action, in which art becomes the performative habitus for an alternative republic, a “non-state public sphere” (Virno).

Exodus is thus a spacetime of energies; a site of withdrawal in the gathering of force. Nor is this performed alone. Play takes at least a few, if not the many. Exodus is a collective gathering of experience:

…exodus seems to designate an existential reserve, that psychic space where fragments of artistic, poetic and musical refrains are inseparable from the wellsprings of action, but expressible only as a kind of myth. To touch this intangible space is the ultimate intervention on social material — something no individual can do, because it is only achieved through a collective experience, by a multiplicity that has no authority, no signature. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

At times, Holmes risks representing exodus as a near mythical or “intangible” sign — which is perhaps due to a received idea of engagement or rather perspective upon the appearance of engagement that remains within either declarative art (despite its activism) or activism (despite its  aesthetics). This is surprising given that exodus, as a withdrawal or disappearance, would seem to call into question the appearance of things, and consequently of of activistism and art as being the only hybridity that registers exodus’ passing. In some forthcoming work for Dancecult: Journal for Electronic Dance Music Culture, I have set out to think rave culture as an embodied, collective exodus that performs all the ambiguities of its play, from its sonic interventions to its interruptions of politics, within the broader schema of a worldwide alternative network of soniculture.

In short, exodus needs to be thought beyond or rather before the realm of myth. Exodus happens. It occurs; it is a strategy of the cultural unconscious manifest in collective and energetic desire. It organises and disorganises vast collective actions in tandem.

In this respect Holmes is entirely correct: exodus can only be experienced through collective passage. But to say this collectivity has no authority nor signature leaves many questions concerning its manifold of structures, signs and play. The multitude that is rave culture has its many signatures, even its signature of a soniculture, qua rave culture; and it too has its authors and its authorities. In this respect, exodus as the pure flight from authority or signature remains a myth – but as such a myth, it loses much of its efficacity. I am more intrigued by the taking-place of exodus on the ground, so to speak (and I might add, like Holmes, who spends much of his excellent book detailing “activist aesthetics” and delineating the heritage of the 20thC avant garde).

And so Holmes leaves us with:

Exodus is an expression of process politics. It points beyond the distorting mediations and structural inequalities of capitalism toward a strange sort of promised land for the profane, which is the immediacy of the everyday, the direct experience of cooperation with others. The carnival that sometimes breaks out in the midst of concerted political action is a way to celebrate the occasional reality of this powerful and persistent myth. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

I would like to reverse the proposition: it is protest that breaks out in the midst of carnival, it is political action in the realm of appearance that interrupts the exodus toward disappearance, it is the coming into the light of Reclaim the Streets that was the anomaly to rave culture’s occupations by night. Exodus has more to do with the collective unconscious of the everynight than the everyday — it has more to do with creating the alternative habitus of a place to sleep and to dream without fear, then to awake and, with a shit-eating grin, make that which is desired take place — regardless.

This reversal stakes out a different terrain. Exodus, or the exit strategy in general, is a priori to (as its qualifier phoneme suggests) representation. Exodus does not take its place after the fact; it is the escape which something has come to capture. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari were correct; even if the State is a priori (arising always), exodus is that which the State arises against.

Secondly, it reinforces my intuition that exodus, like Virno’s contentious theorisation of multitude (and much to Negri’s discontent), is without content. Exodus is the state of most States. Most “people of the State” are in a state of exodus; they do not vote, they do not participate. Rather, they flee to various safehouses and wait it out. Unfortunately, this form of exodus – properly, perhaps this is not exodus as liberty but as confinement – is not collective but individual, even as it is the dominant form of being-together of so many. The political apathy of overdeveloped nation states of the 21C is an expression of this collective exodus. So is the collective experience of consumption. However this exodus is not energetically collective; it is collective without connection, a disconnected exodus, a passive escape from exodus itself. Various traces of its potential are found here and there in technological infonetworks, particularly with data piracy (music, film, software, intellectual property). However few P2P downloaders have connected their bits & bytes to a connection with their peers in the flesh, or with an organised attempt at its force (such as open source, hacking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Pirate Bay – all of which signal the new republics of data and property).

In this respect, we might consider “downloadable data piracy” the capitalist answer to the challenge that remixing/sampling and rave culture provided to infotainment as a containment apparatus. By this I mean that data piracy, even with all the publicized hype surrounding its damage and its prosecution, is a contained strategy, or rather an attempt to contain what could express itself in a global cultural form and network of the likes we have not seen since the rave/alterglobalization convergence of the 1990s. (Music industry executives and the defenders of intellectual property will of course disagree with this premise, pointing out that infopiracy is truly a threat to IP; however in this respect capitalism itself is far ahead of them. Capitalism always cannibalizes its own.)

Third, exodus is a cultural strategy that has already shaped the 20thC. Though Italian Autonomist theorists such as Virno, Marazzi, Negri and others theorised exodus as a response to Fordism, I believe that its force was already well underway as a cultural strategy of transformation thanks to Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism as cultural exodus

Holmes mentions several key concepts in relation to exodus: myth, collectivity, transformation, metamorphosis, and the blend of direct action and art. Perhaps we should look no further than the mythical corpus of Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism plays out an abundance of interstellar exits from planet earth: alternative alien origin myths, the power of sound to transport us beyond prejudice and conflict (if not space and time itself), transforming the forced exile of the Middle Passage into an interplanetary and cosmic exodus.

Afrofuturism demonstrates that all humans are in some way or other fundamentally alien. What Marx thought through labour (like the Autonomists) Afrofuturist artists, musicians, poets, writers, sci-fi writers and prophets have lived through the exploitation and cultural memory of  of (post)slave labour. We are all alien in this alien nation. This is an accurate myth, precisely attenuated to the truth of a reality constructed upon the myths of racial origin and supremacy.

Afrofuturism has engineerd various exits (not the least of which is an exit from philo sophia – but this will have to wait for a future post). At the very least, we can speak of the Afrodiasporic exappropriation of technology and mutation of the cultural viruses of sound and rhythm that engendered jazz, hip-hop, techno, electro, disco and house – not as musical genres but as cultural interventions that changed the dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, autonomy, carnival, and liberation — up to and including the cyborg heteronymy of the human form itself, from becoming-alien (Sun Ra) to becoming-machinic (Model 500).

One can think the vastness of these interventions: within property (sampling, riffing, remixing, improvisation), white culture (the dance Twist, the disco fix, the funk phenomenon), politics (what is Afrofuturism other than the mythus to black power?). All the Greek conceptual categorizations (polis, mythus, tekhne) are remixed through Afrofuturism. In this respect Afrofuturism plays out an exodus from the default culture (whose colours until recently have been Imperial White). Afrofuturism is not constrained by soniculture, however. It has its articulation (Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, Alondra Nelson), its literature (Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler — only to name a few), its science fictions and phonofictions.

Significantly, Afrofuturism was an alterglobalization network before activist-artists, high on a rave culture directly engendered from black gay disco, Chicago acid house and Detroit techno, decided to bring electronic soniculture and carnivale into the light and name it as such in the 1990s.

Afrofuturism is a network from Jamaican dub to British ska-punk, New York hip-hop to disco, Chicago house to Detroit techno, dancehall to Dogon and Ngome ritual. And, of course — jazz and rock n’ roll, Chubby Checker and Little Richard, the blues and Dixieland. That said, it traces its historical appearance far beyond its  postslave / postcolonial cultures and the advent of recording technologies that echoed and intensified its force (in a manner which needs further explanation, technology is essential to Afrofuturism). Ron Eglash’s research into African fractals suggests that there is more Africa in the computer than Brian Eno thinks. Afrofuturism is the cultural evolution of black secret technology that underlies algorithms of computing technology. It arises at the same time as the invention of the computer as an exit from what Heidegger identified as technology’s apparent containment of being within en-framing. If the computer is the machinic materialization of African fractal thought, then Afrofuturism is the cultural anticipation of its machinic overcoding. Think on this. This is an entirely other and radical justification of sampling, remixing, open use, piracy, sharing networks, and otherwise collective exappropriation of technology. And not only a justification before the Law, but a rethinking of its basis.

Exodus, then, is vast, trans-epochal, interstellar. In its lineages it sustains both apathy and energy. Reconnecting or hooking-up apathetic exodus to its energizing variant – without burning out, as rave culture did – is a question of sustained and urgent consideration.

Beside itself: alterglobalization as alternative power

The parallel polis —

does not compete for power. Its aim is not to replace the power of another kind, but rather under this power – or beside it – to create a structure that represents other laws and in which the voice of the ruling power is heard only as an insignificant echo from a world that is organised in an entirely different way. (Václav Benda, quoted in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 180).

The alternative power grows within existing structures; like a weed it cracks the cement walls and foundations. But what has come of the strategy? Is it at all a possibility in the 21C, and what is its efficacity?

Perhaps, again, the question and its problem should be reversed. Not only is the parallelism of alterglobalization possible, it operates as the basis of existing distributions of power today. That there is no unification to power, no centralization of its control (and thus no conspiracy of the few over the many) is the secret hiding in plain sight — the purloined letter of alterglobalization. Alternative globalizations exist as the means by which attempts at militarized and economic centralization take place. In this sense, the strategy of the parallel polis has been well incorporated within military strategy; but this also only acknowledges that the terrain of its passage remains open.

./..