Deleuze and Proletariat: path to Ranciere

" ... it is as though each affirmation referred to its negative, or has 'sense' only by virtue of its negation, while at the same time a generalised negation takes the place of the problem. Thus begins the long history of the distortion of the dialectic, which culminates in Hegel and consists in substituting the labour of the negative for the play of difference and the differential. ... Furthermore, if the truth be told, none of this would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositions and practical implications of such a distortion. We have seen all that this valorisation of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby, and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task, that of determining problems and realising in them our power of creation and decision. This is why conflicts, oppositions and contradictions seemed to us to be surface effects and conscious epiphenomena, while the unconscious lived on problems and differences. History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed; they repel shadows into the shadows and deny only as the consequence of a primary positivity and affirmation. For them, as Nietzche says, affirmation is primary; it affirms difference, while the negative is only a consequence or a reflection in which affirmation is doubled. That is why real revolutions have the atmosphere of fetes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are."

Difference and Repetition, p.267-8

Ranciere, in the Misadventures of Critical Thought makes a very similar point with regard to 19th century elites and their use of critical thought. The premise of critical theory to reveal what's hidden beneath mystifications is what Ranciere criticizes there. He argues that this pattern of thought which acts like an authority, revealing the reality of problems was acquired by the elites for social engineering, leading to the assimilation of labour movements into social democratic regimes. On top of that the quote above would reject any interpretaion of Deleuze as "a non-political philosopher before he met Guattari".

Tesmeralsekdiz, Jacques Ranciere, İnsan Hakları'nın öznesi kimdir?

"İnsan hakları, sahip oldukları haklara sahip olmayıp sahip olmadıkları haklara sahip olan kişilerin haklarıdır."

"Hakların öznesi, bu hakların iki farklı varoluş biçimi arasında köprü vazifesi gören bir özne, ya da, daha doğrusu, bir özneleşme sürecidir"

"Öncelikle bu haklar yazılı haklardır. Bu haklar toplumun özgür ve eşit olduğunun yazıya dökülmesidir."

Ranciere...

"Equality has to be practiced before being dreamed", J. Ranciere

19.yy işçi hareketlerinin esas olarak şimdide bir kopuş olarak yaşandığını, 'sensous' olanın dağıtımını reddederek hareket ettiğini söylüyor Ranciere. Yeni hissiyatlar, zaman-mekan dağılımlarını zorluyor.

Lukacs'ı okurken de bütün o Hegelci sistemin ardında, sürekli o isyan halinin hissiyatından bahseden cümlelerle boğuşuyordum. Belki de Marxist geleneğin satır aralarında yaşanmış ve birikmiştir bu estetik devrimin tohumları.

"For these workers, emancipation meant breaking the partition of the sensous that determined the day as the time workers work, and night as the time they rest. The beginning of emancipation was the decision to make something more of their night: to write, read, think and discuss instead of sleeping."

Bu bağlamda düşününce Türkiye'de solun geçmişiyle farklı bir barış kurulabilir. İlla söylemsel-teorik anlamda bir devamlılık gerektirmeyen bir barış olacaktır bu. Radikal anlamda 'dissensual' yaşamlar ve yeni bir estetik yaratmadığını söyleyemeyiz sol hareketlerin.

Hepimiz Ermeniyiz

"What I call positive subjectification is this process of disidentification. What is important is the disidentifying moment that shifts from identity or an entity as a worker, as a woman, as a black, to a space of subjectification of the uncounted that is open to anyone. This means making the same words mean different things, so that it can refer to closed groups or to open subjects. This open process of disidentification is also a process of universalization. Take the declaration 'We are all German Jews' in Paris, May '68, or the present 'We are all children of immigrants' slogan in France. These names of subjects don't designate groups, they disrupt the system of designations that frame the community in terms of definite standarts of inclusion. A 'movement' invents this operation in specific names, provisory names bound up with specific situation."

from; Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle: An Exchange with Ranciere

Oliver Ressler

http://www.ressler.at/category/projects/

http://www.ressler.at/alternative_economics/

Yukarıdaki "Alternative Economies" enstallasyonu 2005'te Garanti Sanat'ta "An Ideal Society Creates Itself" adlı sergide yer almış. Altta J.Ranciere'den yaptığım alıntıda da aynı işten bahsediliyor.

"..The project presents alternative social and economic models such as “Inclusive Democracy” from Takis Fotopoulos (GB/GR), “Participatory Economy” from Michael Albert (U.S.A.) and “Anarchist Consensual Democracy” from Ralf Burnicki (D). Chaia Heller (U.S.A.) presents “Libertarian Municipalism”, Paul Cockshott (GB) “Towards a New Socialism”, Heinz Dieterich (MX) “The Socialism of the 21st Century”, Marge Piercy (U.S.A.) the feminist-anarchist utopias of her social fantasies, and the underground author p.m. (CH), the ideas of his concept “bolo’bolo.”

Oliver Ressler (b. 1970 in Knittelfeld in Austria) lives and works in Vienna. He produces theme-specific exhibitions, projects in the public space and videos on issues such as global capitalism, forms of resistance, social alternatives, racism and global warming. His work constantly tries to blur boundaries between art and activism.

from Jacques Ranciere, Misadventures of Universality,
taken from the report, 2.Moscow Bienialle, 2007.

"...The struggle against the “society of the spectacle” and the practice of “détournement” are still put on many artistic and curatorial agendas and they are still supposed to be implemented in standard forms such as : parodies of promotional films, reprocessed disco sounds, media stars modelled in wax figures, Disney animals turned to polymorphous perverts, montages of “vernacular” photographs showing us standardized petty-bourgeois living-rooms, or overloaded supermarket trolleys , huge installations of pipes and machines representing the bowels of the social machine, swallowing everything and turning everything into shit. Those dispositifs keep occupying many of our galleries and museums, with a rhetoric assuming that they make us discover the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power. But, as it will be hard to find anybody who would still ignore them, the mechanism ends up spinning around itself and playing on the very undecidability of its effect.
At the beginning of my talk I referred to Kozui Enwezor’s project for the biennale in Seville. The project of giving art an integral and no more peripheral role in the task of unmasking the machineries of the global world. It comes as no surprise that this enlightened project was dedicated to the production of ‘phantom scenes’. Unmasking the ghosts has turned to be an affair of ghosts. The ghost is a figure of the equivalence between the functioning of the machinery and the functioning of the unmasking the machinery. It has the power of “unmasking” turned to impotence, become itself a ghost, the voice of the ventriloquist.
This is probably why at the end of the space of the exhibition of the Biennale in Seville, there was an installation of a very different kind. In two rooms, the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler had set up a lot of monitors. On those monitors, there was no ghost. Nor collage. There were real persons, standing in front of us, speaking to us. One of them spoke about the Paris Commune, another about feminist perspectives, another one about zapatist movement, other one about alternative economy, alternative forms of production, exchange and life. So, it transpired as though the politics involved in the production of the “phantom scenes”, the politics of “unmasking” had to be supplemented by a politics of real scenes, where real people spoke about the state of the world, the sense of their struggle and the way to envision a new world - a supplement of “central” politics which precisely was “peripheral” in the space of exhibition."