On Socialist Science

Seneye yaz yapmak istediğimiz çalıştayın öğeleri hepsi bu konuşmada toplanmış. Meğer aradığımız adam buymuş.

Mekinciyle o kadar konuştuktan sonra: "what Lysenko represents for Western Science is what Stalin represents in Politics" dakika 40'ta (marxism karalamalarına karşı)

Birincisi, Deleuze-Althusser ilişkisini düşünürken her zaman soru olarak kalan "buradan bir return to Engels çıkacak" hissi, bu konuşmada maddeleşti.

İkincisi, Zizek'in sondaki sorusunun "is there a materialist reading of quantum physics" sorusunun cevabını yazın biraz tartışmıştık: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Sanki sorudan biraz sonra "we have to meet halfway" diyen Johnston da Barad'ı hatırladı o anda.

Bu konuşmanın yanı sıra:

1) Protevi'nin West-Eberhard yazıları (bu ve şu)
2) Malabou, The New Wounded (plus maybe this)
3) Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

hadi bakalım.

Invisible Thread

Love re-presents I to itself broken.

"Self" defines the element in which "me" and "you", and "we" and "they", can take place. It is "in-itself" prior to any "ego", prior to any presentable "property".

structure of the with is the structure of the there.

"with" is the closeness, the brushing up against or the coming across, the almost-there of distanced proximity. When we tryo to evaluate this closeness (as if in a marketplace or railway station, or in a studyhall, or in a cemetery, we were to ask what are the meanings and values of these hundreds of people, of their restlesness and passivity), it comes out as frantic or distraught. But the meaning of the "with" itself, or the "with" of meaning, can be evaluated only in and by the "with" itself, an experience from which nothing can be taken away."

world is nothing else than the togetherness of all things; of all things touching the other.

touching is not a separate sense; it belongs to every sense.

Jean Luc Nancy "On Communism" July 3rd 2010, Birkbeck

Thanks to backdoorbroadcasting, we are able to listen to Jean Luc Nancy give his talk "On Communism", the same one he was supposed to give in Birkbeck last year if not for his bronchitis.

Nancy starts his talk by emphasizing the charge that the word communism has and states that the historical or real process of communism cannot shadow the philosophical-metaphysical-spiritual charge of the world communism. He refers to Heidegger's Dasein as "the new title for Man", which is always "mit Dasein" or being-with.

"Com" of the common finds its English equivalent in "with". With belongs to the existence, Nancy quotes Heidegger, (paragraph 25 of Being and Time) it is not categorical but existentiel. What is emphasized is an existential understanding of the "with", which is crucial for Nancy's defense of the word communism. According to Nancy, this proposition to take "with" as existential is the first step for a non-Humanist analysis, taking man as always being-with, being-there, opening a place in the world. Although Heidegger says that "with" belongs with existence, according to Nancy, he stops before the "How" question.

What Heiddeger does in paragraph 70, Nancy says, is to introduce people-community (Volksgemainschaft) as a sort of content of this being-with, where Dasein becomes able to have a history, or enters historical destiny. What Nancy points to is that the emphasis on the existential belonging of "with" dissapears in Heidegger's discussion of the Volksgemainschaft, where community finds its ontos in the people. Whereas according to Nancy, in the first part Heidegger dealt with the question of writing on "with" as such.

Then Nancy goes on to discuss the word common. (gemain in German) He points to the double meaning of the word as togetherness and also vulgar or profane. This divorce between two "common"s Nancy reminds the audience, is not Heidegger's invention but exists throughout the all heritage of Western thought. The question according to Nancy is; "How to be together with vulgarity?" or "Can we be together without being jeopardized of being vulgar?"

Nancy talks about two French phrases which he translates as "sir everybody" and "man on the street", which are figures presupposed as being always the bearer of ideology, of being vulgar and common sense, therefore low. The real experiences of communism in the last two centuries according to Nancy created a sort of suspicion, where communism was understood as vulgarity and low, with all the package of totalitarianism etc. This creates an understanding where "common does not belong to the high" but to the vulgar and low.

From hereon, Nancy briefly refers to Hegel, to point to a tradition of thought which understand the social bond as an exteriority of the relationships between individuals, where the individual always comes first. The word society appears exactly for this reason opposed to community. The sublimation of the state as high, is possible when the starting point is the individual which comes before. Even in Heidegger, Nancy says, "with" comes later, as being-with.

Nancy's question is to think a way which can present the "with", or common belonging without being political authority or without religious authority. He proposes the totem as the name of that way. The place of the totem is empty and this emptiness is the essential condition of democracy. (Nancy refers to Claude Lefort) This empty place appeared in the first part of Heidegger's Being and Time, where he dealt with the question of "with as such".

This empty place is the foundation for togetherness. Yet Nancy brings in Rousseau and his discussion of civil religion. He emphasizes two things. One is that the empty place as the foundation allows us to start with the contract rather than Man or Individual. (This is similar to E.Balibar when he says Man or Human is always mediated by citizenship as a third term)

Two is that the empty place has to be felt, it presents a possibility of feeling. The civil religion means that the contract and the empty place of the totem has to be sensible to the heart of the citizen, the contract has to be felt. There has to be something beyond law which makes the contract be felt. What is at stake in vulgarity (as gemain-common)is a feeling Nancy says, in that "we don't like vulgarity". Nancy relates this to Kant's "unsocial sociability" and an oscilliation between attraction and repulsion. (He probably refers to the psychoanalytical tradition). If am not mistaken, Nancy is talking about the impossibility of an equilibrium of forces where the force of feeling finds its ground. In contrast to money as general equivalence (capitalism) and/or individual as equivalence (liberalism-Human Rights), Nancy says that feeling is rooted in difference of value. "Power to" comes from the realm of feeling in a sort of impulse. Whereas in "liberal society", difference of value is reduced to the private sphere and its link with the common is not established.

Spectral Histories

"A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility."

Jacques Derrida, quoted in Zhivka Valiavicharska, Socialist Modes of Governance and the "Withering Away of the State", Theory&Event Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010

The article is another one of a series of attempts to re-Present the Left-wing past as a political possibility of today. A close reading of State&Revolution is all the more interesting given that we attempted a similar reading this smester with Ozselcuk.

Valiavicharska does not use psychoanalysis, but her point is similar to that of Yahya-Ozselcuk's discussion of the forms of the commune, especially when Valiavicharska refers to retrospective studies on Soviet experience and the practice of property law. The close reading of State and Revolution gives us a sense of Lenin flirting with what Madra&Ozselcuk call feminine jouissance following Lacan, countering arguments on the domination of beuracratic specialists as the anthropological truth of Soviet experience in all its aspects.

The article is an attempt to re-Present Soviet past and rescue the "pure memory" of communism from its representational chains.

Previously on Heroes

"He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

Jodi Dean on Zizek.


carnivalesque, Heroes and communism!

from Lenin

"The narrow horizon of the bourgeious law which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else..."

State and Revolution, Lenin

CAN

Can was an experimental rock band formed in West Germany in 1968. One of the first "krautrock" groups, they rejected American influences and incorporated strong minimalist and world music elements into their often psychedelic music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)

In Julian Cope's book, Krautrock, he mentions that the word "can" has several meanings in a variety of languages: the Turkish word "can" pronounced "chan", means life or soul; the Japanese word "kan" means feeling or emotion; and the Japanese word "chan' means love when used in salutation. Keyboard player Irmin Schmidt defined "can' as an acronym for Communist, Anarchism, Nihilism.

from the Tarnac 9

http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/interview-with-julien-coupat/

Interview with Julien Coupat...

The way she makes the link between political action and philosophy is encouraging.

"

Q. You come from a very well-to-do background, which oriented you in another direction. . .

A. “There are plebes in all classes.” (Hegel).

Q. Why Tarnac?

A. Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you, I fear.

Q. Do you define yourself as an intellectual? A philosopher?

A. Philosophy was born like chatty grief from original wisdom. Plato already heard the words of Heraclitus as if they had escaped from a bygone world. In the era of diffused intellectuality, one can’t see what “the intellectual” might make specific, unless it is the expanse of the gap that separates the faculty of thinking from the aptitude for living. Intellectual and philosopher are, in truth, sad titles. But for whom exactly is it necessary to define oneself?

Q. Are you the author of The Coming Insurrection?

A. This is the most formidable aspect of these proceedings: a book integrally versed in the case histories of instructional manuals, in the interrogations in which one tries to make you say that you live just as described in The Coming Insurrection; that you protest[5] as The Coming Insurrection advocates; and that you sabotaged train lines to commemorate the Bolshevik coup d’Etat of October 1917. Because this idea is mentioned in The Coming Insurrection, its publisher was questioned by the anti-terrorist services.

In French memory, one hasn’t seen power become fearful of a book for a very long time. Instead, one had the custom of believing that as long as leftists were preoccupied with writing, at least they weren’t making revolution. Assuredly, times change. Serious history returns.

What founds the accusation of terrorism where we are concerned are suspicions about the coincidence of thought and life; what founds the accusation concerning the association of evil-doers is the suspicion that this coincidence couldn’t have been the result of individual heroism, but communal attention. Negatively, this means that one does not suspect any of those who sign their names to so many fierce critiques of the system of putting the least of their firm resolutions into practice; the insult is strong enough. Unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and this whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially repressive [policiere] character of the author’s function.

On the other hand, I am a reader. Re-reading it, just last week, I better understood the hysterical bad temper that, from high up, motivates the State to hound its presumed authors. The scandal of the book is that all that figures in it is rigorously, catastrophically true and it does not cease to prove itself true, little by little, each day. Because what proves itself, under the outward appearance of this “economic crisis,” this “collapse of confidence,” and this “massive rejection of the ruling classes,” is indeed the end of a civilization, the implosion of a paradigm, namely, that of the government, which rules everything in the West — the relations of beings to themselves no less than to the political order, religion or the organization of business. At all levels of the present, there is a gigantic loss of mastery that no word-games [maraboutage] by the police will be able to remedy.

It is not by skewering us with prison terms, microscopic surveillance, judicial supervision and prohibitions upon communication because we might be the authors of these lucid findings that one will make what has been found disappear. The characteristic of truth is that it escapes, barely enunciated, from those who formulate it. Governments: it doesn’t accomplish anything if you send us to jail; quite the contrary.

Q. You’ve read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Does this analysis still seem pertinent to you

A. The prison is indeed the dirty little secret of French society, the key to and not the margins of the most respectable social relations. What is concentrated in the prison is not a pile of wild barbarians, as it pleases some people to think, but in fact the ensemble of the disciplines that weave together so-called “normal” existence outside. Supervisors, the canteen, soccer games in the courtyard, one’s use of time, divisions, camaraderie, fights and ugly architecture: one has to have been in prison to take the full measure of the carceral in the school, the “innocent” schools of the Republic.

Envisioned from this impregnable angle, prison isn’t a pit [repaire] for society’s failures; instead, current society is a failed prison. The same organization of separations, the same administration of misery through shit,[6] TV, sports and porno reigns everywhere else, but much less methodically than in prison. To conclude: these high walls only hide from view this truth of explosive banality: there are lives and souls, entirely equal, who drag themselves along on both sides of the barbed wire, and because of it.

If one avidly tracks down the testimonies “from the inside” that finally expose the secrets that the prison conceals, it is done to better to hide the secret that the prison is: the secret of your servitude, you who are reputedly free, while its menace weighs invisibly on each of your gestures.

All of the virtuous indignation that surrounds the black hole [la noirceur] of French prisons and their suicide rates; all the crude counter-propaganda of the penal administrators who bring on camera the disciplinarians [des matons] devoted to the well-being of the detainees and the metal-plated directors who are concerned with the “meaning of the penalty”; in sum, all of the debate on the horror of incarceration and the necessity of humanizing detention is as old as the prison system itself. It is part of its efficacy, which permits the State to combine the terror that the prison must inspire with the hypocritical legal status of “civilized” punishment. The little system of prison-based spying, humiliation and violence [de ravage] that the French State uses more fanatically than any other State in Europe isn’t even scandalous. The State pays for it a hundred times over in the banlieus, and this, from all the evidence, is only a beginning: vengeance is the hygiene of the plebes. "

Badiou on BBC

Fark Yaralari'nda Badiou'nun BBC'de katıldığı programın video linki var.

http://farkyaralari.blogspot.com/2009/04/badiou-on-bbc.html

BBC sunucusu o kadar sinir bozucu sorular soruyor ki, Badiou ve zorlayıcı ingilizcesi bu sorulara cevap veremeyecek kadar uzakta sanki o soruların dünyasından.

Sunucu "Kendiniz komunizmin bir başarısızlık olduğunu söylüyorsunuz ve hala komünistim diyorsunuz" diye bastırıyor. Badiou ise bir fikir/kavram olarak komünizm ve 20.yy daki tecrübeleri ayırmalıyız diyor. Ancak programın gerisinde sunucu bunu anlamadığından ya da anlamak işine gelmediğinden sürekli aynı noktaya dönüyor. Anglo-sakson medyasından korkunç bir komünizm fobisisi örneği. Badiou'nun lafını ikide bir sert bir şekilde kesen ve bilmiş tavırlarıyla beni deliye döndüren bir sunucu... Mösyö Badiou ise bu saçmalık karşısında aksak ingilizcesi ve ilginç öksürükleriyle birşeyler söylemeye çalışıyor.

Marx'ın metinlerine tekrar dönmeliyiz önerisini 19.yüzyıl romantikliği olarak algılayan (bununla birlikte birkaç saçma yanlış anlama sonucunda) sunucu karşısında Badiou çareyi 'ben filozofum ve perspektifim felsefidir' demekte buluyor. Bu sonuç sunucunun agresif, "bak şimdi nasıl köşeye sıkıştırcam" tavrından doğuyor bence. Sonrasında ise yüzsüzce diyor ki "sizin felsefi laflarınızı millet yutmuyor".

Artur Rimbaud, 1871 Paris'ten 2008 Atina'ya

http://voidmanufacturing.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/images-from-greece-along-with-arthur-rimbauds-poem-the-parisian-orgy/

from, The Parisian Orgy or Paris Repopulated, Arthur Rimbaud. (şairin Paris Komününe katıldığı tahmin ediliyor. Zaten şiirde bunu anlamak mümkün. Son dörtlükten ve tarihten de anlaşılacağı gibi Mayıs 1871'de 'düzenin' tekrar yerine oturması ve Komünün sona ermesi üzerine yazılmış.)

"...

Open your nostrils to these superb nauseas!
Steep the tendons of your necks in strong poisons!
Laying his crossed hands on the napes of your childish necks
The Poet says to you: “O cowards! be mad!

...

The Poet will take the sobs of the Infamous,
The hate of the Galley slaves, the clamour of the Damned;
And the beams of his love will scourge Womankind.
His verses will leap out: There’s for you! There! Villains!

- Society, and everything, is restored: - the orgies
Are weeping with dry sobs in the old brothels:
And on the reddened walls, the gaslights in frenzy,
Flare balefully upwards to the wan blue skies!

May 1871."