PROTECT THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY - WARWICK: OBJECTIVES

Reblogged from PROTECT THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY - WARWICK:

1. That the Vice-Chancellor of this university publicly affirms a commitment to the protection and promotion of the public university. We suggest he starts by affiliating himself with the Campaign for the Public University or Council for the Defence of British Universities.

2. That the Vice-Chancellor relinquishes his unjustifiable pay increase, with the funds to be channeled into widening access. We suggest that a bursary is established for students from the local community.

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I’ve published the first what I hope will be a regular series of Psycho-Climate Communiques, a kind of speculative non-fictional account of things happening out in the world. These, as well as much of writing I will do in the future, will be hosted over on synthetic zero. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Insurrectionary Times

A: I don’t think that we will be able to win a fight against financial capitalism by demonstrating in the street. Destroying banks isn’t useful if we are seeking emancipation from financial dictatorship. Financial power does not exist in the banks; it is embedded in software, in the techno-linguistic automatisms that govern daily life and the psychic automatisms of consumerism, competition and fear. Nevertheless we are in the midst of a process – a movement – that will deploy itself over the course of the next decade, maybe longer, and we have to start from where we are and what we know. What we have today is the memory of past forms that our movements have taken, including occupations, strikes and demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. All of these are part of the legacy of 20th century social movements. Recently, we have tried to resurrect some of these old forms of struggle – these old forms of expression – but this hasn’t worked particularly well. Established forms of peaceful demonstration have absolutely no possibility of changing the politics of financial capitalism. They don’t work when democracy is dead – and it is totally dead, the European experience is demonstrating that clearly. But on the other hand, violent riots or bank bombings are also useless because they don’t challenge the sites of real power. Real power is in the cybersphere, in the algorithms of financial control, in the quantitative analyses that undergird trading, and so on.

We continue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to imagine new forms that are capable of actually struggling against financial dictatorship. In my opinion, the first task – which we have begun to experience over the last year – is the reactivation of the social body that I have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough. We will also have to begin to learn to create new forms of autonomy from financial control and so on. For instance, in Italy we have been talking increasingly of “insolvency.” Of course, insolvency means the inability to pay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in monetary terms. There is also a symbolic debt that is always implied in power relationships. Imagination might mean the ability to create the possibility of insolvency – to create the right to be insolvent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semiotic and a symbolic level. We need to imagine forms of social relationships that escape monetary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks, new forms of currency, community currency and so on. Do you see what I am trying to say? The process of imagination begins with the reactivation of the social body but next this body has to create new levels of social interaction. Escaping financial dictatorship, in other words, means imagining new forms of social exchange. I don’t know what form emancipation will take in the coming years. I can only propose this little methodological starting point from what we already know.
- Franco Berardi, Here.

New content of any substance might be a while in coming to this blog. I am currently concentrating on an essay for the new group effort I’m involved with alongside Michael of ArchiveFire and dmf of ANTHEM fame. Watch this space.

Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon

Reblogged from Philosophy for change:

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This is the first instalment in a three-part series.

Part 2. I tweet, therefore I become
Part 3. The call of the crowd

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You start the day bleary-eyed and anxious. You stayed up late last night working on a post for your blog, gathering facts and memes from about the web and weaving them into an incisive whole. Has it produced a spike in the stats?

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Gone a bit quiet in here

This blog has been a bit quiet for a few weeks. That ought to change soon. I’ve been in a bit of a psychic torpor having been barely reading and not writing much at all (except nonsense on Twitter and Facebook). It’s probably just this lull in economic activity, which ought to be coming to an end itself pretty soon.

At any rate, I wanted to thank Levi Bryant of Larval Subject fame and infamy for the hat tip that sent swarms of beautiful and highly intelligent people to my temporarily arid patch with this post. It is always much obliged to have people think I’m anything more than an intellectual ant trying to swim in a giant pint of syrupy beer called Theory.

Normal functioning will resume shortly.

Reminds me of Steve Aylett’s ‘The Caterer’

Postpsychiatry: reaching beyond the technological paradigm in mental health

This World We Must Leave

Having finished Bifo’s The Uprising, I was reminded of a similarly pessimistic-optimistic communist theorist Jacques Camatte. In many ways Camatte foresaw the condition we are in today and laid out much of the exodus driven theory of the likes of Bifo, Tiqqun, Virno and so on. Camatte is an important and neglected figure in the history of Marxism, inappropriately stolen by the anarcho-primitivists, but, like the others in that list, would eventually formulate (and enact) a form of resistance that was really a retreat. I plan to write something on Camatte for this blog in the near future. This film takes its name from one of his books, “This world we must leave and other essays”.

Levi Bryant’s ‘Axioms for a dark ontology’

There is nothing to disagree with in Levi Bryant’s short nihilistic manifesto. In fact, all I can add is that Levi has summed up the nihilism that opens us up to the necessity of developing a post-nihilist praxis. This is the important work ahead. The post-nihilist impulse is born out of agreement and recognition with the points that Levi lists, but instead of considering them a form of darkness it considers them causes for celebration and for the movement out of constant mourning towards the joy of finiude. This world is all we have; but that is a super abundance more than we readily recognise. Read the mini-manifesto here.

On the first axiom (Life is an accident and has no divine significance), I am convinced that this is still to be thought through. In order to think this we ought to return to Paul Virilio, this time not as dromologist but as the thinker of the accident. If life is an accident, indeed, if creation itself is an accident, then within all temporalities is the one temporality, the overarching cosmological rhythm of that accident working itself out: creation is catastrophe, the moment everything begins and ends are immanent, and so there is no need to mourn or weep. All we have is this world: a world that is in free play, that has absolutely no reason to be this way or that beyond the reason we give it. This is the emancipatory quality of nihilism that opens us up to euphoric visions.

A brief remark on a brief remark

‘No one has ever experienced metabolism, though everyone has experienced wakefulness and fatigue, and no one has ever felt their brain or the impact of omega-3 fatty acids on their body’, as Levi Bryant states in one of his most recent posts.

Couldn’t I also say that no one ever experienced vision, though everyone has experienced seeing and not seeing, that no one has ever felt a punch to the guts but that they have felt pain. This is just absolutising the separation of experience of the thing and the thing itself, as if it could ever be possible to experience the source of experience except as an experience. Sure, when I experience tiredness and wakefulness I don’t experience every single part of metabolism, but in order to experience metabolism it isn’t necessary that I experience all of it, only part of it. After all, I have been to Ypres in Belgium, so I experienced Belgium…but it would be ludicrous of me to claim that I experienced all of Belgium in all its possible modes of being experienced. But if I say “I have been to Belgium” or “I enjoyed visiting Belgium” I’m not really making a claim of that order of intensity.

To agree within a disagreement: it is entirely possible for people to experience other depths of the body, to enact a phenomenological embodiment that exceeds the everyday embodiment of most people. There is a wealth of research into the hyperreflexive and hyperautomated experiences of the body in people diagnosed with schizophrenia, experiences of organs in people with eating disorders and starvation syndrome. These people enact their own ‘alien phenomenologies’ that deviate from what gets- ludicrously- called neurotypicality and what we could call the normative body. In suggesting that people do not experience the real of their bodies at all, Levi is at risk of engaging in a kind of idealism, even in the name of materialism, that cancels any non-normal experience of the body out from consideration. Only the healthy body exists, and only this health experience of the body matters, while of course the experience of the body is not the body, is a translation of the body. Between the text and the translation the materiality is lost: what do I experience if not the materiality of my body?

There is almost a temptation to ask whether, given Levi’s understanding of phenomenology (which he seems to conflate with phenomenography) as ‘constitutively unable to think the real of the body’ that there is anything that can think the real of the body. After all, any science that we might develop, any materialist naturalism, is a materialist naturalism that at the very least has to be understood by, be intelligible to, a human consciousness. Doesn’t all scientific experimentation and truth have to appear to a consciousness. They may well be true even without that consciousness, but truth and being registered as true in the organised form of knowledge called science are not identical. For instance while the theory of evolution may also have been a truth, its appearance to a living consciousness made a difference to the nature of that truth in relation to those for whom it was disclosed as a truth. If there is no way to experience the body at all then aren’t we back in Cartesian territory?

To suggest that one doesn’t experience ones own body is to think in terms of the disembodied society that we are living in; the society that can’t take up sensibility, that takes the body to be a fleshless becoming-immateriality that can only know itself as carnal in violence and disease. To suggest that there is no experience of the body but only its effects is also to separate what a body is from what a body is capable of and to set up some eternal body behind the body in interaction and interoaction. Pain, no longer to be considered an experience of the body but an experience of its effects, is rendered as a stereo-reality; carnal on the one hand, ghostly on the other. There is a risk that this is insulting to people who suffer from their bodies, people who are always aware of parts of their body that happily recede for others. It is also to suggest that pain and pleasure are matters not of the body but of effects of the body and so of certain inscriptions of the body onto consciousness and so we remain within a kind of textualism.

Finally, at the pragmatic level, if I am working with someone who is suffering from pain what tools am I offered by the thought that pain is merely an “effect”; I knew that already, it is an effect of the body on itself. Being able to phrase this from within a machine-oriented ontology gives me nothing new to offer the patient in pain, save to assure them all they are experiencing is an effect of the body, not the body itself. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, continues to be a source of pragmatic value for medicine and nursing. This pragmatic concern links with the earlier question of whether this is a new Cartesianism. After all, to say that the body does not appear to consciousness is to set up a separation between these two terms so that the body can be conceived of as material, while consciousness is something that is not material. This is to shy away from the findings of the embodied cognition wing of cognitive science.

These are brief questions, my immediate response to Levi’s post. I’d go on but its a little too hard to be a very serious theory blogger while listening to a five year old shouting at 101 Dalmatians.

MASS LOOTING IN PARIS AS THE SUBURBS COME SHOPPING - WITHOUT MONEY

Reblogged from Ian Bone:

Cops guarding posh shops from rioting looters.

Paris Saint German supporters ran riot on the Champs last night as they used the victory celebration to loot posh shops and restaurants. Beneath the paving stones....a rolex.