Recording Surface

As usual, George Caffentzis requires very little time to come up with an insightful analysis. This time it’s about the springtime protests against the anti-immigrant legislation still wending its way through the U.S. Congress and the emergence of a working-class immigrant movement. (more…)

Bitch Lab is hosting the 17th Carnival of Feminists. Exhaustive (and a bit exhausting), eclectic, and well worth a look.

The new of issue of The Commoner is out, and what I’ve read so far is excellent. Cheers to Nate and Stevphen for putting together a provocative, feminist-directed number. I’ve gotten through only the four articles written by women, and though the Precarias a la Deriva and Sylvia Federeci contributions are quite good, I really dig (and am still chewing on) the articles by Angela and Ida Dominijanni, both of whom read through/against Tronti in their discussions of, respectively, migration and feminism. The last part of Dominijanni’s piece concerns her investigations into democracy, which have an affinity with Angela’s (and Brett Neilson’s) essay on democracy in Culture Machine. This is a fruitful area of research, methinks, but one that’s all but ignored by the left, most of which, in a testament to its Hegelian legacy, sees democracy as the ideal, the end. In other words, they are predisposed to ignore Dominijanni’s aphorism: “[T]here is no break between the model and the thing, between the idea and the historical experiment. Democracy is real (or actually existing) democracy. It is not something other than the historical realization of the idea.” (more…)

Philip K.:

I know only one thing about my novels. In them again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength. Perhaps [my critics] are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them: there is nothing vaster.

and

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society, the thing would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities…. [Because] we can tell and tell [minor people] what to do, but when the time comes for him to perform, all the subliminal instruction, all the ideological briefing, all the tranquilizing drugs, all the psychotherapy are a waste. He just plain will not jump when the whip is cracked.

From here.

Is it possible that the boilerplate sentence in author acknowledgements about all mistakes being the fault of the author is less a humble acceptance of responsibility than a muscular assertion that the work is truly the property of the author? Don’t these sentences usually follow the ones where the author lists all the people who helped (usually modified by “immeasurably”) him/her write the book? Specifically, don’t male authors effuse about their partners’ patience/research/brainstorming, and then go on to assert, without explicitly asserting, their authorship?

The Long Sunday symposium on Carl Schmitt is well under way. Several thought-provoking posts so far, including one by Anthony Paul Johnson on thought and politics as they relate to Schmitt and Deleuze and Guattari, which I need to read and chew over again. I especially like this bit from Nate’s post:

In all three [i.e., Schmitt, Marx, and the operaisti] there is a certain depoliticalization operating. A prior given unity is posited - the people, the class in itself, the technical and political composition of the class - which undergoes a fiery baptism such that it becomes capable of acting together. This prior unity, the precondition for the political entity, is placed outside the bounds of the political, such that it can not be decided upon, in an operation that at the same time serves to produce unity as the goal, again in a way that can not be decided upon or contested. That is to say, politics is circumscribed within the state and nation, or a sphere which is state-like/nation-like.

[…]

Schmitt’s primary fear is the practice and what he sees as the trend of the “shattering of social structures.” It is this political component, more than the technical challenge of policing partisan war and its possibilities, that makes the partisan such a troubling figure. “Commonality exists as res publica, a public sphere, and it is called into question when a non-public space forms within it, one that actively disavows this publicness.” (51.) The partisan indicates a political potential not appropriated or exhausted by the state, one which works toward the dissolution of the monopoly which constitutes Schmitt’s political entity as such. The partisan is evidence of a power to act and produce in common, to produce social relations which are not of the people but rather introduce a disunity that challenges the workings of the people as an entity. This is what Schmitt is most opposed to and fearful of, to such a degree that his work can barely recognize it: the existence of a power to dissolve the res publica and sovereignty. (Schmitt comes close in his polemic against Scelle’s methodological individualism in the paper translated as War/Nonwar.) It also should be noted that this power is what makes the partisan an important figure, not the reverse.

If you’re the type that’s easily bored and want to do some pro bono work for the state, Texas governor Rick Perry has created a recreational activity for you:

Gov. Rick Perry vowed Thursday to counter rising border violence, drug activity and illegal migrant crossings by placing a “virtual” wall of Web cameras on ranch land in South Texas.

Armed with a night-vision capacity, hundreds of cameras will feed images to a state Web site on a 24-hour basis, allowing anyone to watch for illegal activity. […]

Perry said citizens could file reports via a toll-free number, with law enforcement officers ready to respond. He said the cameras, paid for with money from his office, would be used on farms and ranchland “directly on the border” but not in neighborhoods and urban areas.

In related news, the nominally private-sector militia the Minutemen, who like Perry are sick of the federal government’s dithering, have begun building a wall in the desert:

Meanwhile, a group of US civilian volunteers that has been patrolling the Mexican border began last week building a fence along a section of the frontier.

The Minutemen group started erecting the fence on privately-owned land in Arizona on Saturday, saying it is “doing the job the federal government will not do”.

The Minutemen are allowed to report illegal crossings to border police but have no right to arrest suspects.