Comments on: Epochal

by: Nate

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:16:00 +0100

hi Eric,

I started a comment but it got so long I felt it was rude to leave it here and instead put it up as a blog post. Hope you’re well.

take care,
Nate

by: Ryan/Aless

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:29:27 +0100

If by using simplicity and reductionism we get to discount the idea of systemic change, then: Down with the Revolution. It won’t succeed.

This may be the implicit suggestion in arguments like Graeber. It’s different from the apologist in that it doesn’t need to weigh the good and bad about the system. It simply relies on an argument of practicability: It can’t be done, so don’t bother.

I doubt, however, if arguments like this come out consciously, as though planned. When one is inside the system that encourages precisely this kind of thinking (simplicity, reductionism, partial knowledge but systematic ignorance), then it is all too easy to deploy such critiques, esp. if one identifies with what s/he is defending. Why don’t we use a Marxist term to undermine Graeber’s argument here: Fetishism. Or a Foucaultian one: Power/Knowledge.

by: Eric

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:22:29 +0100

Maybe a distinction to be made here — and maybe this is too easy and not even very helpful — is this: reading for creation and reading for correction. Or maybe that’s too oppositional. But I like Kyle’s point, or at least part of what I take him to be getting at, about infidelity. Using Foucault, or whoever, as a springboard but modifying them as needed, a reading for creation.

Of course, my post in general is probably a corrective reading. Correcting the correction, I guess. But what I had hoped to get at a bit was the effect of the original correction, which in this case I think is a conservatizing one: insisting on capital’s continuity, not arguing against, e.g., Lazzarato’s concepts so much as pointing out error and emphasizing their personal messianism, etc.

by: DG

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:29:06 +0100

Ah, so then you think that Lazzarato is in fact “correcting” Foucault when he interprets him in the way Graeber says that Lazzarato is interpreting him (ie, as talking about a series of stages marked by fundamental breaks in just the way your Foucault cite says not to)? But you are also saying he’s “correcting” him incorrectly? But this makes Graeber wrong, but not Lazzarato?

I see. It all makes sense now.
DG

by: Kyle

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:54:40 +0100

DG: Why assume Negri, Lazzarato, etc. are pretending to be Foucault? Taking up a problem does not necessarily entail taking up a conceptual matrix. Negri, for instance, differs from Foucault in many important ways - so many that I feel shocked that that needs to be pointed out. Why reduce one to the other? You’ll only come out with a distorted vision of both and wind up in confusion about what, e.g., “security” (or any other theme held in common) is and does for each, in each project or program. “Properly reading Foucault” means criticizing Foucault and correcting him, and only sometimes confirming him (usually in the realm of the “big picture”). The important readers of Foucault do exactly this, engaging him on the level of his problems, the problems he created or developed - and putting them into variation by relating them to different phenomena and problems inexistent in Foucault’s own time. Negri is clearly one of these important readers, precisely because he does the opposite of what you suggest.

Apologies for any caustic tone - but people studying Foucault et al ought to be suspicious of themselves when they begin thinking along the lines of “properly” “reading.” Nothing has been more thoroughly brought into question than these notions and their cousins.

by: DG

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:36:57 +0100

yes but the problem is for any quote you can find where Foucault says one thing I can find three more where he says exactly the opposite. Foucault kept changing his positions or even epistemic assumptions all the time and he also was never so stupid as claim there are no continuities whatever (though in Les Mots et Les Choses he often comes awfully close), so he’d throw in an acknowledgment here and there and then go on to argue whatever he wanted to argue anyway. Actually Foucault was the master of the technique of saying, say, “this is not an idealist argument but…” and then making what seems in every other way an idealist argument.

At least he was subtle about it. Those who take up his ideas are usually much cruder. Because if Foucault says “there is not the disciplinary age, then the age of security…” (etc) people like Negri and Lazzarato say _exactly_ that, and frequently. Maybe rather than rag on Graeber for calling them on this you should be asking why they seem incapable of properly reading Foucault.
DG