Recording Surface

From David Graeber’s “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years“:

Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions — Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law — that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt. […] While the new age of virtual money [i.e., since 1971] has only just begun and the long term consequences are as yet entirely unclear, we can already say one or two things. The first is that a movement towards virtual money is not in itself, necessarily, an insidious effect of capitalism. In fact, it might well mean exactly the opposite. For much of human history, systems of virtual money were designed and regulated to ensure that nothing like capitalism could ever emerge to begin with.

If Graeber’s account of virtual, credit, deferring money forms — that is, money that is not bullion or backed by metal, which is important not because of the substance but because in previous ages it has been used to enforce the universality of wage labor — as a historic warding off of capitalism is correct, then there would seem to be two possibilities inherent in the current financial crisis: post-Bretton Woods capital has erred by its primary reliance on a money form and accompanying social bond — credit and debt, respectively — that are incompatible with it, and so a readjustment, a reversion, will be necessary; or capital’s overcoming of the current crisis will represent not simply surpassing a limit but also the crossing of a threshold — the integration of financialization into a new capitalist assemblage. The social-democratic calls for a new deal and the locating of debt as capitalism’s dirty little secret are, of course, reterritorializing demands banking on the former solution, a weird kind of desire to conserve an ontology that no longer exists. The latter, though, seems the more likely solution, one that will, as Melinda Cooper and Angela Mitropoulos note, be based on and pave the way for the “renewed deterritorialisation of capital flows on another scale and another basis.” If capital is able to overcome the first huge crisis in financialization, it will be, according to Graeber’s scheme, an epoch-making change. It will also, as both Cooper and Mitropoulos and Graeber agree, be achieved in blood: “there is no possibility of a peaceful exit” from the current crisis because of “the absolutely crucial role of violence in defining the very terms by which we imagine both ‘society’ and ‘markets’ - in fact, many of our most elementary ideas of freedom.”

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the constitution of the State, of the laws of social equilibrium, of the political and economic interrelations of citizens, can hold out no longer against the implacable criticism which is daily undermining them whenever occasion arises, — in drawing room as in cabaret, in the writings of philosophers as in daily conversation. Political, economic, and social institutions are crumbling; the social structure, having become uninhabitable, is hindering, even preventing the development of the seeds which are being propagated within its damaged walls and being brought forth around them.

The need for a new life becomes apparent.

The opening of Kropotkin’s “Spirit of Revolt,” prompted obviously by the events in Iran, but just as much by various occupations and other actions. There are at least two things that strike me as apposite about this paragraph. First, Kroptokin names “new ideas” as giving rise to revolt, not, as the usual Marxist formulation has it, “material conditions.” But Kropotkin’s “new ideas” aren’t simply idealism recast. Instead, they are formed by collaborations and conditions that are material but not limited to the economic: affective relations, social commerce, and diurnal cooperation. Contra current materialist theories, both mainstream and oppositional, as applied to Iran, in which the poor, working class, and rural belong to Ahmadienejad and the middle class and urban belong to Mousavi — in other words, where economic class and relative positions of poverty are said to determine one’s political allegiances — Kropotkin says that the “need for a new life” doesn’t ultimately depend on economic circumstances. Millions of Iranians from all classes protesting not just the fraud by the regime but its existence, like middle-class student occupiers in the U.K. and the U.S. insisting on their antagonism, are living Kropotkin’s precept.

The other thing to notice is that Kropotkin doesn’t mention anything about organization when describing the impetus to revolt. Again, in a time when many leftists insist on the necessity of organization and institution-building, Iranians and the occupiers are acting completely outside the bounds of preexisting structures and groupings. They are showing that organization can be formed in the process of action, that spontaneous reactions to events can create their own politics.

All of the above is, of course, too unsubtle, and probably too romantic. Economic conditions and organization are important. I want to say more about the events of the last few weeks and months — including some responses to Reid’s great but symptomatically problematic post at Planomenology — but it seems important to begin by stressing what these events have reminded us: politics doesn’t have to be coterminous with economics and its practice doesn’t have to rely on the demands of organization.

In what’s become a springtime ritual, the Austin Police Department last month shot and killed a black man in East Austin, this time an eighteen-year-old who was sleeping in his car at the time. Davey D and the D&HH Project have video, new stories, links, and more, emphasizing the response from the people living in the area where the shooting occurred, which could fairly be called a riot: eight wounded police officers, eight damaged police cars, and a handful of arrests.

Local politicians and media put on their sad, rational faces when talking about the killing and did their usual routine about waiting until all the facts are in and what a tragedy it is for the community. Their job was made a lot easier when it was revealed that the victim, Nathaniel Sanders Jr., had been arrested a couple of times before for various crimes, including a few days earlier for robbery, giving them a chance to rehearse pieties about kids gone wrong and wasted opportunities. The implication being that we can’t rush to judgment until the investigation is complete, but the facts are also irrelevant because the kid put himself in a bad position.

In other words, what I wrote two years ago applies to this police shooting as well, but what is perhaps more prominent this time is the city’s attempt to modulate the affective response to the shooting. As the Austin Chronicle put it:

The somber mood in the council room reverberated from the grimmer scene on Springdale Road. Afterward [Mayor] Wynn briefly discussed efforts in the making to reach out to Eastside residents for “dialogue” — “beginning with the churches” — and cited the reportedly restrained response of Nathaniel Sanders Sr. to the news of his son’s death. “The father of the young man showed remarkable restraint and patience,” Wynn said. “He sets a remarkable example for us all.”

But as the videos show, there was no “grimmer scene on Springdale Road” — the scene was marked by anger, indignation, and refusal. The Chronicle decidedly adopts the point of view of the police, who were indeed grim-faced, but mischaracterizes the neighborhood’s reaction to the shooting and agrees with the mayor that “restraint and patience” are the proper emotional registers. For the city, the spontaneous riot of the politizen has to be stifled and stilled, and this is best achieved by (attempted) regulation of the affective responses to the event. Appeals to calm, rationality, and patience are, in this instance, attempts to depoliticize political actions that exceed the city’s management abilities.

Eyal Weizman has an article on the how the IDF consulted military lawyers in its recent actions in Gaza, to both ensure that it acted within the constraints of international law and to expand those limits to Israel’s benefit. Or rather, it acted, as Weizman puts it, in the “zone of interpretation that exists between obvious violations and possible legality.” Among other things, such as moving toward a Benjamanian analysis of law-giving violence and warning of the dangers of using international law as a protest against war, Weizman shows how in international law, military action is becoming the de facto legislative force.

International humanitarian law is based upon treaty law and customary international law. The former is fundamentally indeterminate and subject to constant fights over interpretation. The latter means that military practice can continue to shape the law. As such the law is pragmatic, its borders are elastic enough to enable diverse interpretations and subsequent expansion. Far from being opposed to violence, the law can be settled through the application of state violence. Indeed, the legal tactics sanctioned by military lawyers in Israel’s attack on Gaza were located precisely in this zone of interpretation that exists between obvious violations and possible legality.

International law designates the limit of what international public opinion may consider as “tolerable”, but these limits too can be stretched by military practice. Practices applied long enough by different states, and supported by the necessary legal opinions, could eventually become law. Operating at the margin of the law is thus one of the most effective ways to expand it. According to this “postmodern” legal interpretation, violence legislates.

I’m more than halfway through Pynchon’s Against the Day, and so far, like most of his books, it is by turns enthralling, excruciating, beautiful, and boring. I’ll wait until I finish the book to talk about the story and thematic elements, but I just wanted to put in a quick note about something that I keep thinking about it as I read it. Probably because Against the Day was published around the same time as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, those books have always been linked in my mind. Unemployed Negativity wrote a fine post about how The Road “gesture[s] to the limits of our own imagination…. It is easy for us to imagine society collapsing [but] much more difficult to imagine the creation of a new world.” Rather than devising some Looking Backward-style envisioning of a new world, McCarthy’s book continually “draws the limits of our ability to imagine it,” a threshold it runs into but never passes through. Pynchon, in many ways, agrees with McCarthy about the insufficiency of our imagination: the characters in Against the Day are unable to conceive of another world and rarely reject or even question the lives laid out for them by fathers, employers, nations, and enemies, just as the world is unable to arrest its headlong rush into World War I. No one in the novel, so far, can envisage an existence that is formed by their actions; the world is always something that happens to them.

Nonetheless — and perhaps at the peril of lapsing into idealism — I think there should be a distinction drawn between imagining and creating, a distinction that Pynchon keeps alive and that McCarthy emphatically closes. McCarthy’s assemblage is one in which the characters and the book constantly affirm the poverty of imagination and the complete inability to create a difference in the world, which are captured not just by the characters’ monotonous, reactive existence but also by the book’s austere prose and blank naturalism. Similarly, Pynchon presents characters and history that can’t imagine their lives differently, but he does so within a book that prizes and continually enacts invention and creation. In this context, Pynchon’s moments of what sometimes get called the fantastical decidedly contrast with the arc of the characters and the story (which, for him, is so far pretty linear): not just the Pynchonian moments of narrative departure — the airship that navigates under the earth’s surface, or the bilocated characters, to name a couple — but the intricate, at times grasping sentences and the wide range of affective modulation strain against the barriers obeyed by the characters and suggest that things can be other than they are. While McCarthy’s book is syncretic, in that both its content and expression are resigned to collapse, Pynchon’s, with its proliferation of inventions, even failed ones, affirms contingency and, thus, the possibility of other creations.

Another difference between The Road and Against the Day, though one closely related to the above, is their notion of events. The Road takes place after an apocalypse, and this event absolutely defines the horizon of the book’s action. McCarthy’s event is, to put it in a different language, Badiouan. For Badiou, events are rare occurrences that define epochs and whose corresponding subjectivity is charged with naming and being loyal to that event. Badiouan events are noisy: Paul’s intervention in Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, 1968. In The Road, the characters live the void created by the noisiest event, the apocalypse, and the book’s refusal to consider or invent other events suggests not only the limits of imagination but the impossibility of creation. Against the Day, on the other hand, is filled with events engendered by Pynchon’s refusal to collapse the distinction between content and expression. That gap ensures both that the book’s elements are constantly in mutual presupposition and that no hierarchies can be developed between them. More importantly, the proliferation of events keeps open the potential for the creation of new virtualities and possibilities–in other words, new worlds.

Below is among my favorite of the many insightful, and beautiful, communiques to come out of the actions in Greece over the past month. Obviously the first paragraph resonates with the events there, but also at this very moment with the annihilation of Gaza, an assertion of authority and opportunity that is already being countered with assertions of authority and opportunity. It also may mark, I think, what Dionysus Stoned sees as a changed political idiom, one relatively unconcerned both with creating Leninoid new realities — in the form of unhostile nontakeovers of the state like universal citizenship and a guaranteed wage — and with the anti-imperialism focus that emerged after September 11. It’s probably no accident that this idiom was first so noticeably articulated at the fringes of Europe.

We won’t forget the night of December 6th that easily. Not because the assassination of Alexis was incomprehensible. State violence, as much as it might try to construct itself into more productive formations of sovereignty, will endlessly return to dear and archetypal forms of violence. It will always retain within its structure a state disobeying the modernist command for discipline, surveillance and control of the body - opting, rather, for the extermination of the disobedient body and chosing to pay the political cost coming with this decision.

How did this revolt become possible? What right of the insurgents was vindicated, at what moment, for what murdered body? How was this symbol socialised? Alexis was “our Alexis”, he was no “other”, no foreigner, no migrant. High school students could identify with him; mothers feared losing their own child; establishment voices would turn him into a national hero. The body of the 15-year old mattered, his life was worth living, its ending was an assault against the public sphere - and for this reason mourning Alex was possible and nearly necessary. This sphere turned against a community us who revolted don’t identify with, exactly like Alexis did not identify. This is a community, regardless, in which many of us many have the priviledge to belong since the others recognise us as their own. The story of Alexis will be writen from its end. He was a good kid, they said. The revolt, which we would have been unable to predict, became possible through the cracks of authority itself: an authority deciding what bodies matter in the social network of relations of power. The revolt, this hymn to social non-regularity, is a product of regularity… It is the revolt for “our own” body that was exterminated, for our own social body. The bullet was shot against the society as a whole. It was a wound on every bourgeiois democr

For anyone interested, I have finally finished this thing. If you want a copy, leave a comment or send me an email [ersatzdog at gmail.com] and I’ll send it along. Maybe now I will start posting here with more regularity. Maybe. (more…)

And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by “deleometers.”

I watched only four speeches at the Republican convention — Thompson’s, Giuliani’s, Palin’s, and McCain’s — and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just witnessed a well-lit, hood-free Klan rally. (more…)

The lesson from the Palin affair seems to be that if you are white, Christian, and have smalltown values, an unmarried pregnant minor in the family is a private matter. But if you are black or brown and “urban,” an unmarried pregnant minor in the family is symptomatic of a social epidemic, a scourge afflicting the body politic. (more…)

A slab of draft words from the thing I’m working on. Comments welcome/encouraged. This needs to be cut, as it’s too long, is supposed to be only a transitional section, and is kinda boring. But the last is Harvey’s fault, not mine. Heh. (more…)