Reblog> Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Political economy via blogging… Yannis Varoufakis’ blog makes for an interesting read – extraordinary that a finance/treasury chief keeps a blog, and indeed has time to do so!

Here’s his powerful and succinct (and remarkably polite) six bullet points for voting ‘no’ in this weekend’s referendum in Greece:

Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Negotiations have stalled because Greece’s creditors (a) refused to reduce our un-payable public debt and (b) insisted that it should be repaid ‘parametrically’ by the weakest members of our society, their children and their grandchildren
The IMF, the United States’ government, many other governments around the globe, and most independent economists believe – along with us – that the debt must be restructured.
The Eurogroup had previously (November 2012) conceded that the debt ought to be restructured but is refusing to commit to a debt restructure
Since the announcement of the referendum, official Europe has sent signals that they are ready to discuss debt restructuring. These signals show that official Europe too would vote NO on its own ‘final’ offer.
Greece will stay in the euro. Deposits in Greece’s banks are safe. Creditors have chosen the strategy of blackmail based on bank closures. The current impasse is due to this choice by the creditors and not by the Greek government discontinuing the negotiations or any Greek thoughts of Grexit and devaluation. Greece’s place in the Eurozone and in the European Union is non-negotiable.
The future demands a proud Greece within the Eurozone and at the heart of Europe. This future demands that Greeks say a big NO on Sunday, that we stay in the Euro Area, and that, with the power vested upon us by that NO, we renegotiate Greece’s public debt as well as the distribution of burdens between the haves and the have nots.

Via: For Another Critique of the Pyramid, Nicholas Crane’s blog.

30 June, 2015

Amateur urbanism as political praxis, Andy Merrifield & Bernard Stiegler

Following a link posted by my colleague Clive Barnett I discovered the excellent collection of essays Andy Merrifield has collected in his website, which have all(?) been previously published elsewhere. I’ve been working through this treasure trove and was particularly struck by one of these essays.

Earlier in 2015, Merrifield published an ‘intervention’ on the Antipode website entitled “Future Shock“, in which he contemplates the absence of contemporary thinking of radical futures following a collapse of future thinking into a technocratic status quo.

Merrifield relates this to Edward Said’s 1993 BBC Reith Lectures on representations of the intellectual, and the amateur and the professional. Merrifield suggests:

[P]rofessionalism, said Said, can constitute a form of compliant behavior, of making yourself marketable and presentable to the powers that be. None of which denies the need for competence, for being conscientious about what you do, and for having the right skills to do it.

He argues that it is a form of professionalism that has facilitated a particular kind of ethos for corporate urban development, a development that

enables all sorts of ideas [to be] imposed on peoples’ lives from above, all kinds of paradigms that go from professional boardrooms to somebody’s drafty living room, if they’re lucky enough to have a living room.

He lays out an intellectual/ policy lineage from ‘authoritative’ urbanism to authoritarian ‘austerity’. Merrifield begins with Roger Starr, writer of Urban Choices: The City and Its Critics, who criticised the likes of Mumford, Jacobs and Gans as meddling amateurs, who became New York City’s Housing Commissioner and in 1976 masterminded a national program following directly from his earlier representations of urban reality: “Planned Shrinkage”.

Sketching forward to today, Merrifield asks us to consider the historical lineage between Planned Shrinkage and frenzied pursuit for “austerity.” he argues that Planned Shrinkage and austerity have two common characteristics.

First, is an overriding goal to rundown and/or plunder the public sector, to make “unproductive” public services productive for vested unproductive interests–you know, for financial parasites on the make. Second, both policies justify their programs though made up “evidence.” For austerity, just as for Planned Shrinkage, economists are the redoubtable voice of authority.

Thus, the amateur, counter-posed to the ‘professional’ is a political figure. Arguing, earlier in the intervention, through Said, Merrfield argues:

Professionalism means having an expertise to hide behind, an often narrow expertise, an esoteric language that sets you apart, that gains entry into a professional bodies, one strictly off-limits to rank amateurs. Amateurs, by contrast, aren’t moved by profit or pay; they usually care more about ideas and values not tied down to any profession; their vision is often more expansive, more eclectic, not hampered by the conservatism of narrow expertise, preoccupied with defending one’s intellectual turf. To be an amateur is to express the ancient French word: love of, a person who engages on an unpaid basis, a non-specialist, a layperson. Nothing pejorative intended. Amateurs sometimes care for ideas that question professional authority because they express concerns professions don’t consider, don’t see, don’t care about.

This has great resonance with a very similar understanding of the figure of the amateur, equally political, put forward by Bernard Stiegler. In the Ars Industrialis ‘vocabulary’, Stiegler argues that the amateur:

is the name given to one who loves works or who realizes him- or her- self in traversing such works. There are lovers of science and technology, just as one speaks of art lovers. The figure of the amateur extends the figure of taste, as suggested by the Enlightenment, as cognition of the sensible or mediation of the immediate, as the singularity of an educated sentiment. It accompanies, therefore, the question of the formation of a critical public (irreducible to the audience).

Thus, in counterpoising the amateur to the professional both Merrifield (via Said) and Stiegler (sort-of via Weber) argue that the role of amateurism is crucial to producing alternative ways of economic, political and social living.

Merrifield:

For the urban is itself a political object, a very special virtual political object; so is the “right to the city.” Urban rights are ones that need inventing, need inventing offensively; they aren’t established safeguards already there, ones you can invoke defensively…

Since we amateurs don’t have that means or money, we must start concrete and try to scale upwards and outwards, try to realize our abstract renderings, our utopian and futuristic yearnings.

Stiegler:

The figure of the amateur is the ideal type for the economy of contribution because the amateur is the one who builds him- or her- self a sustainable libidinal economy and does not expect industrial society to put it in place.

Both Merrifield and Stiegler offer laudable appeals to amateurism and the ground-up D.I.Y political action that, of course, also resonates with the forms of horizontalist political activism we are becoming used to seeing that operate both against austerity and towards alternative forms of urban life. Nevertheless, one might be left wondering, when reading both accounts, where the space is for collectivity? In both accounts the ‘virtual’ and the ‘transindividual’ are the conceptual footholds from which to forge such questions –it is in the immanent potential of the virtual that we, collectively, are produced and reciprocally produce the future and such a potential is performed within and through the various relations between our ‘selves’:

“The “I”, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a “we”, which is a collective individual: the “I” is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a plurality of “Is” acknowledge each other’s existence.”

[Stiegler, Desire & Knowledge]

This is an interesting (to me anyway!) parallel theorisation of the amateur and no doubt there are more… I think the close to Merrifield’s Antipode intervention is particularly effective:

Rights aren’t passive: they become your right by working through danger, by orchestrating effective political action. You make rights your right. Hence the reason why so many people misunderstand what’s meant by right to the city, where the future necessarily stalks the present; horizons open up for the virtual to be glimpsed, for rights to actualize themselves through politics. Virtual theory, as such, isn’t a theory that explains reality, nor even “corresponds” with reality; it’s more a theory that is correct because it enables politics to be correct. It nurtures the correct politics, a robust and possible Left politics: theory here opens up space for a radical politics that hitherto wasn’t there, that as yet has no space. It opens up the vastest and most thrilling futuristic space of all, the noblest of all cloud-cuckoo lands: the continent of hope.

30 June, 2015

Reblog > Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation

Mark Purcell points to an interesting CFP for a special issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

Originally posted on Path to the Possible:

Please find details of a CFP for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy which we hope is of interest and relevance to the group:––-

CFP: Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation

––-

The economic, political, social, cultural and environmental crises of our time continue to provoke and inspire a remarkable range of social movements into existence. These multiple forms of protest and activism express and embody a politics of hope – captured both in alternative narratives that envisage new post-crisis possibilities, and through the physicality of collective and popular resistance. In this context, the Special Issue of The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy is particularly intend on interrogating the socio-spatial forms of ‘organisation’ that underpin protest and activism. When taking a closer look at the organisational nature across these activist landscapes for example, it becomes apparent that resistance led through membership-based, co-ordinated hierarchical organisations (e.g. Trade Unions, NGOs) still retains an important visibility and influence in agitating for change. However, in addition perhaps, and in some meaningful waybeyond, these more traditional forms of organised resistance, there exists important diverse and spontaneous forms of everyday activism, one, perhaps, consistent with a more horizontal and anarchistic praxis of self-organisation.

Questioning the relationship between activism with – and without – organisation throws up some interesting and important inter-disciplinary questions. At the most fundamental level it gives us cause to interrogate the very idea of activism: where does activism begin and end? Who gets to be an activist? Seeking to engage a more nuanced understanding of the differences between organized and unorganized forms of activism, provokes the question of how informal experiences of activism, encourage engagement with more organised forms of activism (and vice versa). Is the relationship between the two antagonistic, competitive or complementary to each other? How are organisational forms of activism dictated to by specific social and spatial temporalities, particularly at a time of crisis? Indeed in these (post)modern times is it meaningful to frame the organisation of activism within a binary relationship (either formal or informal)? Rather should we be encouraged to consider them on an organisational spectrum of difference (more formal, less formal and so on)? If desirable, how can a more informed complex understanding of the organisational natures of activism allow us to better recognise, value, strengthen and link up different types of patterns of activism and resistance?

To these ends we welcome papers of up to 8000 words addressing empirical or theoretical aspects focused on organisation of activism and protest, past and present, situated in any part of the world and at any scale.

Deadlines:

Please send 250-300 word abstracts directly to the Guest Editors, Richard White(richard.white@shu.ac.uk) and Tricia Wood (pwood@yorku.ca ) by 15 August 2015.

Full papers – between 5,000 to 8,000 words – must be submitted on-line to the IJSSP journal by 01 December 2015.

More information about The Journal for International Sociology and Social Policy can be found here: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=ijssp.

29 June, 201529 June, 2015

Translation > Greece at the Heart of Europe (An open letter signed by Balibar, Stiegler & others)

On Politis.fr (the weekly online political magazine) there is an open letter of support to ‘the Greek people’ (published this morning) signed by a long list of notable public/intellectual figures, including Etienne Balibar, Luc Boltanski, Michael Löwy, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others.

The content is not (really) surprising, and it broadly reiterates much of the criticism of an austerity that is seen as imposed ‘technocratically’ by an unelected (or at least – not clearly democratically accountable in a way that is meaningful to this form of action) ruling class in a socialisation of debt to the extreme detriment of those worst off in society, and apparently to the benefit of those who instigated the economic/financial crisis in the first place.

What is perhaps mildly surprising is where this has been ‘published’, not in Le Monde for example. I am not entirely sure what can be read into this… the website is seen as a more accessible/ international venue(?), the papers won’t publish such a letter(?) – it is interesting, in any case (and regardless of whether you agree or not), that such critique of austerity rarely finds its way into wider public debates (at least in the UK anyway, and perhaps not in France either).

I offer below a rough translation of the letter (it is fairly short). The footnotes were in the original, although I’ve linked to the English version of the second footnote.

Greece at the heart of Europe

PETITION: The Greek people have not problem with Europe, they and us have a problem with the “European” power which is destroying Europe!

We do not believe that it is the Greek people who are guilty of doubling their public debt in less than ten years [1]. Nor do we believe that they should pay such a debt, which has been artificially inflated with the sacking of their human rights and the wrecking of their democracy.

For years the national and supranational powers that control the European Union have inflicted austerity coupled with “structural reforms” upon the Greeks which is ruining their economy and sinking them into increasing misery.

Today, in a burst of lucidity and dignity the Greek people have given an electoral majority to the radical left, distanced from the corruption and compromises of yesterday, forming a government with a mandate to push back against the dictates of the “Troika” (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) and to enact a policy of breaking with such criminal austerity.

The objective of the European ruling classes is not to force the Greeks to repay a debt that everyone knows cannot be repaid, the only function of which is to drain public funds into the banks, but rather to force the government of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza into capitulation. They do this in order to continue to strangle the Greek people, condemning them to forever begging loans that become only ever more expensive, and to demonstrate in the eyes of all of Europe that it is impossible to tackle the banks, to contest the absolute power of the ruling classes, or to open out an alternative to austerity…

It is unacceptable that those who claim to speak “on behalf of Europe” contrive to breach their most basic commitments in order to break the government appointed by the Greek people. Going so far as to yesterday “ban” implementing even minimal humanitarian measures (housing allowance, food aid, restoration of electricity)! Today the ruling classes require the Greek government to worsen the decline in pensions, to below the poverty threshold, to increase VAT on necessities, and they confirm that they are willing to bankrupt the country and expel them from the Eurozone, and thus eventually the European Union, at the risk of provoking a crisis with unpredictable consequences.

We support the Greek people in their mobilisation and their determination to roll back this despotic and reactionary operation.

The struggle of the Greek people is that of all European democrats and progressives. If there is eventual defeat, all of Europe will pay the price. Should there be a victory, however limited, all of Europe will reap the reward.

This is why it is necessary that the movements which in France and in Europe hope for a renewal of democracy affirmatively respond to the calls of Syriza to construct a European solidarity around Greece and the Greek people. The prospect of a referendum increases the urgency of such solidarity [2].

We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Greek people, for their fight is ours.
PRIMARY SIGNATORIES

Antoine Artous, Etienne Balibar, Sophie Bessis, Jacques Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Gilles Bounoure, Marie-Pierre Bourcier, Claude Calame, Patrick Chamoiseau, Patrice Cohen Seat, Jean-Numa Ducange, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Michel Husson, Michael Löwy, Marie-José Malis, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit, Philippe Pignarre, Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Pierre Salama, Denis Sieffert, Patrick Silberstein, Francis Sitel, Bernard Stiegler, Hervé Télémaque, Jacques Testart, Eleni Varikas, Pierre Zarka…

Notes.
1. See: An Appeal for Support for Greek resistance and their Trust Commission on Public Debt: http://cadtm.org/Appel-pour-soutenir-la-Grece-qui

2. http://www.altersummit.eu/accueil/article/no-to-austerity-yes-to-democracy

ADDENDUM: Of course, having said that the argument contra austerity rarely appears in ‘mainstream’ media outlets there are some exceptions, not least economist Paul Krugman’s repeated denouncing of austerity through op-ed articles in left-leaning newspapers, such as in The Guardian (29/04/2015) and The New York Times (29/06/2015).

31 March, 201522 September, 2017

To Save the World… Preface by Bernard Stiegler for Michel Bauwens’ new book

Michel Bauwens, peer-to-peer activist and founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, has a new book out, in French, entitled Saving the World: Towards a post-capitialist society with peer-to-peer. In the book Michel, with his collaborator Jean Lievens, argues that a new distributed and de-centralised economic model is necessary to shake up the world and drive us towards a post-capitalist society. In a wide-ranging, impassioned and ambitious, perhaps idealistic, diagramming of a new mode of living and working Bauwens reaches for a different way of performing economics and the political.

The book has a preface by Bernard Stiegler that has been shared on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website and so I have translated it. I have offered this to the foundation and I would be pleased if it is of use to them or to anyone else. The copyright of the text remains under the license attributed to the original book.

Preface by Bernard Stiegler

To Bauwens, M. and Lievens, J. 2015. Sauver le monde. Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer, Editions Les Liens Qui Libèrent. [Saving the World: Towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer]

Over the course of the next twenty years, automation will instigate the decline of a society founded on salaried jobs: 49% of jobs will disappear in the United States, 43% in Great Britain, 50% in Belgium, 56% in Italy and Poland[1]. This huge transformation, resulting from the integration of digital automation, constitutes the horizon for the argument put forward here by Michel Bauwens. He has studied and promoted the new model of production made possible by digital technologies and founded in peer-to-peer relations, which thereby surpasses the proletarianisation that has hitherto been the basis for industrial capitalism – here, proletarianisation principally signifies the loss of knowledge.

Like Ars Industrialis and the Institute for Research and Innovation, the P2P Foundation sets out the principle that digital reticulation is no longer a model based on the functional opposition between production and consumption. Rather it is based on the constitution of communities of knowledge developed through relations between peers – that is to say, on the reconstitution of knowledge (of life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]) which have been systematically dismantled over the last 250 years. This discourse affirms the possibility of salvation: it attempts to save the world. Such claims will no doubt be scoffed at by sceptics of all persuasions – they are deniers, who, like climate sceptics, are still trying to ‘convince the Marquise that everything is fine’ [2]… against all available evidence.

The evidence is the profound collapse of social cohesion in every industrial society on Earth and the devastating effects on those societies on the margins of industrialisation. Nothing is being done in the short period of time we have available in the near-future to address these issues, and this damage will only cascade like an uncontrollable chain reaction. This situation arises through what we have called, since the beginning of the 21st Century, the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene constitutes an unsustainable acceleration of entropic becoming–to the extent to which it perturbs the meteorological, oceanographic, atmospheric, hydrological and demographic equilibriums while depleting fuel as well as social, psychic and physical or cultural energies–which threatens a world which it should, in fact, be saving.

A real salvation implies a radical change in the organization of work, of social and economic relations, which take into account the changes already accomplished by digitisation beginning with the emergence of the World Wide Web and which goes beyond the state of affairs that these relations have installed, to understand the global domination of the increasingly sprawling reticular industries, stemming from the California model of Silicon Valley, so well described by Evgeny Morozov in “the rise of data and the death of politics” [3].

The present model of voluntary or involuntary contribution imposed by the data economy exploited by the “Big Four”, and by those prospering within their ecosystem, is not only unjust but also bankrupt and hyper-proletarianising: Far from deproletarianising individuals it remotely controls them, as they increasingly rely on mimetic technologies driven by an intensive calculation through algorithms, processing massive data sources in real-time, which form a new kind of “crowds”, in the sense that Freud discusses the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon [4].

This is possible because bottom-up networks capture value and hyper-standardise behaviour (they hyper-proleterianise in this sense) storing and monopolising them through top-down processing of data produced by the crowds, mobs and other reticulated masses sublimated by intensive computing. I believe, like Gert Lovinck, that in this respect the emergence of social networks in the first decade of the 21st century constitutes a dangerous turn as the dynamics of peer to peer submit to statistical models that perpetuate herding behaviour through user profiling and our many algorithmic doubles.

The transition to a true peer-to-peer economy, however, is, in time, inevitable for four reasons:

1. In the current system based upon wage labour, stemming from Fordism and regulated by the Keynsian belief in the redistribution of purchasing power through employment (despite neoliberalism first weakening the system by reducing wage redistribution and now through speculative devices) a massive process of automation will engender a systematic insolvency and lead to a collapse of consumer capitalism.

2. On top of the destructive effects of the macroeconomic system, the anthropocene will itself generate telluric toxic effects that may only be countered by the promotion and maintenance of new forms of negentropic potential.

3. Thales, “the first geometrician”, initiated the canon of rational thought (logos) in the peer to peer model, which Socrates furthered through dialogic practices, and as the principle of development for the Greek city, as a process of collective individuation based on the maximum expression of the possibilities of psychic individuation for every citizen – this installing knowledge and the culture of knoweldge at the heart of collective being, exactly the opposite of the decomposition of knowledge that is today pushing towards what some have called the functional stupidity [5] of cognitive capitalism.

4. Only knowledge has the capacity to produce new negentropic potential, and only social organisations based on systemic enhancement and culture made possible through reticular parity will enable a move beyond the anthropocene, to “save the world”, and enter into what would therefore be called the “neganthropocene”.

At Ars Industrialis and IRI, we think that this requires a new model for the redistribution of the extraordinary gains in production made possible by a full and widespread automation, which must be taken as a template for new ways of organising work amongst peers.

This is why we advocate a [citizens’] contributory income, granted to everyone, in order to cultivate their abilities (as suggested by Amartya Sen) and provided that they regularly use those abilities in contributory projects, themselves supported by mutual credit granted by contributory banks, and within the most diverse forms of socialisation: associations, public services and businesses. The modalities of realising such approaches should be experimented within the areas which will make the choice [of which economic system to pursue], in particular in order to maximally expose their younger generations to the consequences of automation, and the possibility of producing capacities to exceed it.

Automation, with the failure to appropriate free time in order to increase knowledge in all its forms (life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]), can only drive through a mortifying acceleration of entropy. By contrast, deproletarianisation is a reconstruction of knowledges, which are individual and collective capacities and which transform any time saved through negentropic possibilities.

This is why, for us, it seems essential to confirm and realise the opportunities created by Michel Bauwens through his extraordinary practical and theoretical knowledge of the dynamics of peer to peer, and respond to the “Web We Want” initiative [6] launched by Tim Berners-Lee in March 2014, by proposing a new model of architecture based on the valorisation of interpretable and incalculable singularities – calculation being the entropic reduction of the singular into the particular.

Notes.
1. These figures have been suggested by Jeremy Bowles (Bruegel Institute), as a part of a study conducted by the Oxford Martin School by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, and featured in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on 19th July 2014: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

2. I am fairly sure this refers to a comical jazz song, “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise“, recorded in 1936 by Ray Ventura’s band The Collegiate Five, in which the Marquise is told over the phone by various servants that everything is fine at home, excepts for a series of disasters. It has been suggested the song is a metaphor for France’s lack of concern for the approach of WWII –Trans.

3. Evgeny Morozov, “The rise of data and the death of politics”, The Observer, 20th July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation

4. This has been demonstrated by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy in “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” [Algorthimic governmentality and perspectives on emancipation: disparity as a condition of individuation by relation?] Reseaux v.31 n.177: pp. 163-196 (2013) [ http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/ ]. I am developing, myself, this analysis in The Automatic Society, to be published by Fayard.

5. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer “A stupidity-based theory of organizations”, Journal of Management Studies v.49 n.7: pp. 1194-1220 (2014) [ http://jourhavandesociolog.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/joms1072.pdf ].

6. For information on the Web We Want initiative see: https://webwewant.org/ –Trans.

8 January, 201511 January, 2015

Out now > Bernard Stiegler – States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century

Those of you vaguely interested in the work of Bernard Stiegler, and perhaps those of you who are not (yet!) will I hope take note of the publication of an important work by Stiegler: States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century [a translation by Daniel Ross of États de choc: betise et savoir dans XXIe siecle].

Here’s the blurb from the publisher Polity:

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

14 May, 2014

Reblog > “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” Interview with Gilles Deleuze

Really interesting from Critical-Theory.com

This interview, entitled “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter”, was published in 1967 in the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur on April 5. It was conducted by Guy Dumur. Posted to Reddit, the source of the translation is not cited. However, a translation of the same interview exists in “Desert Islands: and Other Texts, 1953–1974.”Deleuze discusses the release of Nietzsche’s collected works, and the problems analyzing Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Many of Nietzsche’s works were heavily altered posthumously by his sister to make them more appealing to the German Nazi Party.

“Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche put together an extremely harmful work that privileges many Nazi interpretations,” Deleuze notes. “She didn’t falsify the texts, but we know well enough that there are other ways to distort an author’s thinking, even if it is merely an arbitrary selection from among his papers.”

Before writing “Anti-Oedipus” with Felix Guattari, Deleuze wrote about the history of philosophy, including “Nietzsche and Philosophy.“ It was the second book he ever published.

Deleuze continues to speak on the relevance of Nietzsche in contemporary France. “The reaction against oppressive structures is no longer done, for him, in the name of a ‘self’ or an ‘I,’ Deleuze says. “On the contrary, it is as though the ‘self’ and the ‘I’ were accomplices of those structures.”

Read the interview below:

Dumur: How was the new edition of Nietzsche’s Complete Philosophical Works established?

Deleuze: The problem was to reclassify the posthumous notes–the Nachlass–in accordance with the dates Nietzsche had written them, and to place them after the works with which they were contemporaneous. Some of them had been used in an abusive way after Nietzsche’s death to compose The Will to Power. So it was essential to reestablish the exact chronology. This explains why the first volume, The Gay Science, is more than half composed of previously unpublished fragments dating from 1881-1882. Our conception of Nietzsche’s thought as well as his creative process may be profoundly altered as a result. The new edition will appear simultaneously in Italy, Germany, and France. But we owe the texts to the work of two Italians, Colli and Montinari.

Dumur: How do you explain that Italians rather than Germans did the job?

Deleuze: Maybe the Germans were not in a good position to do it. They already had numerous editions, which they were fond of, despite the arbitrary organization of the notes. Also, Nietzsche’s manuscripts were in Weimar, East Germany–where the Italians were better received than any West German could have hoped to be. Finally, the Germans were undoubtedly embarrassed at having accepted the edition of The Will to Power created by Nietzsche’s sister. Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche put together an extremely harmful work that privileges many Nazi interpretations. She didn’t falsify the texts, but we know well enough that there are other ways to distort an author’s thinking, even if it is merely an arbitrary selection from among his papers. Nietzschean concepts like those of “force” or “master” are complex enough to be betrayed by a selection such as hers.

Dumur: Will the translations be new?

Deleuze: Completely new. This is especially important for those writings toward the end (there have been some poor readings, for which Elizabeth Nietzsche and Peter Gast are responsible). The first two volumes to be published, The Gay Science and Human, All Too Human, have been translated by Pierre Klossowski and Robert Rovini. This doesn’t mean that the prior translations by Henri Albert, and by Genevieve Bianquis, were bad–not at all. But if they were determined to publish Nietzsche’s notes with his works, they had to begin from scratch and unify the terminology. On that note, interestingly enough, Nietzsche was first introduced in France not by the “right,” but by Charles Andler and Henri Albert, who represented a whole socialist tradition with anarchical colorings.

Dumur: Do you think a “return to Nietzsche” is taking place in France today? And if so, why is it?

Deleuze: It’s difficult to say. Maybe there has been a change, or maybe the change is taking place now, with respect to the modes of thought which have been so familiar to us since the Liberation. We were used to thinking dialectically, historically. Today it seems the tide has turned from dialectical thinking toward structuralism, for example, as well as other systems of thought.

Foucault insists on the importance of the techniques of interpretation. It’s possible that in the actual idea of interpretation is something which goes beyond the dialectical opposition between “knowing” and “transforming” the world. Freud is the great interpreter, so is Nietzsche, but in a different way. Nietzsche’s idea is that things and actions are already interpretations. So to interpret is to interpret interpretations, and thus to change things, “to change life.” What is clear for Nietzsche is that society cannot be an ultimate authority. The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority. From the very beginning of his work, Nietzsche posits that there exist ends “just a little higher” than those of the State, than those of society. He inserts his entire corpus in a dimension which is neither historical, even understood dialectically, nor eternal. What he calls this new dimension which operates both in time and against time is the untimely. It is in this that life as interpretation finds its source. Maybe the reason for the “return to Nietzsche” is a rediscovery of the untimely, that dimension which is distinct both from classical philosophy in its “timeless” enterprise and from dialectical philosophy in its understanding of history: a singular element of upheaval.

Dumur: Could we then say this is a return to individualism?

Deleuze: Yes, but a bizarre individualism, in which modern consciousness undoubtedly recognizes itself to some degree. Because in Nietzsche, this individualism is accompanied by a lively critique of the notions of “self” and “I.” For Nietzsche there is a kind of dissolution of the self. The reaction against oppressive structures is no longer done, for him, in the name of a “self” or an “I.” On the contrary, it is as though the “self” and the “I” were accomplices of those structures.

Must we say that the return to Nietzsche implies a kind of aestheticism, a renunciation of politics, an “individualism” as depersonalized as it is depoliticized? Maybe not. Politics, too, is in the business of interpretation. The untimely, which we just discussed, is never reducible to the political-historical element. But it happens from time to time that, at certain great moments, they coincide. When people die of hunger in India, such a disaster is political-historical. But when the people struggle for their liberation, there is always a coincidence of poetic acts and historical events or political actions, the glorious incarnation of something sublime or untimely. Such great coincidences are Nasser’s burst of laughter when he nationalized Suez, or Castro’s gestures, and that other burst of laughter, Giap’s television interview. Here we have something that reminds us of Rimbaud’s or Nietzsche’s imperatives and which puts one over on Marx–an artistic joy that comes to coincide with historical struggle. There are creators in politics, and creative movements, that are poised for a moment in history. Hitler, on the contrary, lacked to a singular degree any Nietzschean element. Hitler is not Zarathoustra. Nor is Trujillo. They represented what Nietzsche calls “the monkey of Zarathoustra.” As Nietzsche said, if one wants to be “a master,” it is not enough to come to power. More often than not it is the “slaves” who come to power, and who keep it, and who remain slaves while they keep it.

The masters according to Nietzsche are the untimely, those who create, who destroy in order to create, not to preserve. Nietzsche says that under the huge earth-shattering events are tiny silent events, which he likens to the creation of new worlds: there once again you see the presence of the poetic under the historical. In France, for instance, there are no earth-shattering events right now. They are far away, and horrible, in Vietnam. But we still have tiny imperceptible events, which maybe announce an exodus from today’s desert. Maybe the return to Nietzsche is one of those “tiny events” and already a reinterpretation of the world.

13 May, 2014

Nancy – ‘the political and/or politics’

Daniel Ross pointed, on twitter, to the text of a presentation by Jean-Luc Nancy in 2012 addressing the theme of ‘the political and/or politics’ – which ends with an interesting distinction or divergence between two versions of ‘co-‘ living: a co-mmunal and a co-llective ‘with’ (in the sense of ‘being-with’):

If, today the economic, judicial, religious and cultural spheres – and with these spheres the semantics of their names –, all together or each in its turn, are racing out of control in a way that is inflationary and even exorbitant and ruinous, it is because “politics” or “the political” harbors a discrepancy or an internal distortion between two values which are henceforth foreign to each other – let us say, an existential value and a social value or, in other terms, a value in accordance with the community and another in accordance with collectivity . To be clear , the tw o values are related and interdependent. Yet that difference of the values of the same co- – of that same “with”, which is the with of being, even more than a “being- with” – and thus that self-differentiation of the co- is precisely that which prevents it from coagulating into a mass and a destiny.

Worth a read, available here: Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities [PDF].

6 May, 2014

Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

I will be participating in the joint OU/RHUL workshop, which is the 6th annual Doreen Massey event, concerning how we can continue to think about how we bring together issues of culture and politics through the engagement between geography and social theory. Should be a stimulating day!

Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

Friday, 6 June 2014, 10:00 – 17:00 The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

The Geography Departments of the Open University and Royal Holloway, University of London are delighted to announce that the 6th Doreen Massey Annual Event will take place on Friday 6 June 2014 at the Open University in Milton Keynes. This year’s theme is the role of cultural geography in the contemporary moment.

In his book Maps of Meaning (1989) Peter Jackson set out an agenda for the ‘new cultural geography’ that was firmly committed to bringing together issues of culture and politics through an engagement between geography and cultural theory. In the 25 years since its publication cultural geography has, arguably, come to dominate human geography. Theorisations of production of culture as production of space have formed the basis for addressing a variety of ‘issues’ including race, gender, nation, nature and culture.

Today those provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking have been significantly reframed. Issues such as the environment, mobility, globalisation, liberalisation, security, sexuality and cultural intolerance have become more prominent political issues while other concerns have faded away. Cultural geography has also transformed, as too have the media and modalities of politics and political debate. How do we understand culture within this context and what is the role of cultural geography in the politics of the present? How will geography as a discipline be shaped by cultural geography? This event brings together some of the key thinkers in cultural geography in order to address these questions. As Peter Jackson said back in 1989:

If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … , ‘it cannot be by the defensive reiteration of well tried and by now well worn formulae. It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’(Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).

Programme:

10.00 – 10.30:	Coffee and registration
10.30 – 11.30:	Panel presentations (Societies/Economies/Cultures)
11.30 – 11.45:	Coffee
11.45 – 12.45:	Panel presentations (Histories/Technologies/Environments)
12.45 – 13.45:	Lunch
13.45 – 15.00:	Small group discussions
15.00 – 15.30:	Tea
15.30 – 17.00:	Plenary
17:00 – 18:00:	Wine reception

This is an opportunity for students to meet and exchange with key figures in cultural geography today.

Confirmed panellists include: Peter Adey, Phil Crang, Anindita Datta (via webcast), Mona Domosh (via webcast), Claire Dwyer, Isla Forsyth, Peter Jackson, Sam Kinsley, Pat Noxolo, George Revill, Gillian Rose, Anna Secor (via webcast), Divya Tolia-Kelly.

Parts of this event will be streamed live (the morning panel sessions and the afternoon plenary) and accessible through the Open University’s Webcast page. Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to join the live streaming and have an opportunity to submit questions that may be selected for discussion.

Registration:
Registration is free, but we ask that everyone confirms their place by filling in their details on this registration form.

9 April, 2014

Fred Turner talks about his “Democratic Surround”

Fred Turner (STS Assoc. Prof. at Stanford), author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has written another book examining the development of theories of what Turner calls ‘the democratic personality’ by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others into an alternative form of propaganda to encourage opposition to fascism, described as the Democractic Surround, which serves as the title of the book. Turner describes some of the important themes of the book in conversation with Howard Rheingold (who is, incidentally, one of the people that appears in From Counterculture to Cyberculture). Charting movements between American anthropology (through Mead et al.), European avant grade arts (the Bauhaus refugees) and their subsequent absorption into the American cultural milieu in the form of the Black Mountain College (and so John Cage), Turner skilfully weaves an interesting narrative.

For those interested, there is a review essay by Fred Turner of Peter Mandler’s Return From the Natives, on Public Books, which examines the influence of Boas’ ‘school’ of anthropology on war-time (WWII) propaganda.

You can also see Stanford’s form of ‘propaganda’ in the shape of the promotional video they created for Turner’s book…