The Sociological Imagination

Wright Mills on the public / private split


Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

(C Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination, 1959)

Britain's Torture Policy

Further evidence as to why New Labour are unfit to be in office:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/16/pakistan-torture-mi5-agent-binyam

Politics as Bullfight

Politicians are like bogus toreadors, with all their banderillas and their lances, and the public in its entirety yelling and egging them on. But there isn't any bull any more. The bull is in the biotech labs, in the garages where they write software, in the production houses of imaginary futures, in Hollywood, in the MIT Media Lab in Boston.

(Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, in Settantasette, la rivoluzione che viene, eds Sergio Bianchi & Lanfranco Caminiti)

Politicians as Porn Stars

Agamben argues (Cf Il volto, in Mezzi senza fine) that politics is a process first of being put on public display and then, unlike animals, of taking control of that display: of separating the image from its object, of giving objects names. A process of (en)closure in which the Open is transformed 'into a world, which is to say into the battleground for a struggle which is political, which gives no quarter. And this struggle, whose objective is the Truth, is what we call History.'

But is this accurate? Aside from whether we differ from animals in this way, one must (of course) distinguish between two different sorts of situation.

On the one hand there are those in which apprehension itself is suspect, insufficient, in which there is a surplus which vests beyond either capture or control: a possessed without a possessor, neither something which is open nor yet some sort of Commons. In this sense History is just a frosting over of what was warm and freshly baked. The point about History being its potential for the future: ice can melt.

And on the other there is the missing surplus of advertising: the Exchange & Mart of the damned in which all one's yearnings for what might be or might have been in some longed for bulky package achieve a passing, spurious satisfaction through receipt of the package alone, of its contentless appearance, of its bits of cardboard, paper, sellotape and string. And this is deficit, the emptying out of History in the furtherance of a numb and endless present: bogus product, successive bogus rewards, the prancing ninnies of New Labour; politicians not as the citizenry acting as sovereign participants in some polity nor yet (in the representative model) both inspiring and being inspired by the citizenry but as narcissistic menials in some 'customer facing department' (offstage but grandly self important, as though speaking for grand ideals); the politician as porn star, writhing for the camera in the name of missing Love.

Just as advertising and pornography 'escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners' (from La comunità che viene) so the modern professional politician empties political institutions of their life force and makes of them hollow tombs.

Or to put that more concretely:

'To whom is [the porn star] indifferent? To her partner, certainly. But also to the spectators, who become aware (to their surprise) that the porn star, whilst knowing perfectly well that she is exposed to their gaze, is not complicit with them in the slightest. Her impassive features thus shatter any relationship between what is seen and what is expressed. She doesn't express a single thing any more but makes herself available to be viewed as a locus chaste of any expression, and purely as a means.' (from Profanazioni)

Power

Revolution isn't seizing power but seizing the power of life and over life. Seizing power isn't the culminating moment of the revolution but rather counter revolution in its purest form, in its triumph and its mockery.
(Pino Tripodi, in Gli autonomi vol I)

*

'Please don't seize power.'

(A/traverso, September 1977)

Miliband Exposed

David Miliband, the torturer's friend, continues to deploy the 'simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play', inherited from the almost equally squalid Jonathan Aitken.

Here is part of a letter from Miliband published on page 32 of today's Observer:

'Your leader ("Tell us the truth about torture, Mr Miliband", Comment, last week) suggested that I had "suppressed evidence" linking British officials to serious offences allegedly committed against Binyam Mohamed, and that my decision to seek public interest immunity against public disclosure of the documents might be from "fear of offending an ally".

'The truth is quite the reverse.'

And here is The Observer itself rebutting Mr Valiant-for-Truth on page two:

'The Foreign Office (FCO) solicited the letter from the US State Department that forced British judges to block the disclosure of CIA files documenting the torture of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, the Observer can reveal.

[...]

'A former senior State Department official said that it was the Foreign Office that initiated the "cover-up" by asking the State Department to send the letter so that it could be introduced into the court proceedings.

[...]

'The former senior State Department official said: "Far from being a threat, it was solicited [by the Foreign Office]." The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: 'Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.' If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court."

'The letter, sent by the State Department's top legal adviser John Bellinger to foreign secretary David Miliband's legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem, on 21 August last year, said: "We want to affirm in the clearest terms that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements."

In other words, once again Mr Miliband is correct. Rather than wishing to cover US backs, as The Observer shamefully alleged, it was the back of the UK government which he had intended to protect. Meanwhile he appears intent on applying the bad apples / Abu Ghraib defence to Britain's role in government sanctioned torture.

Good for him!

Conjunction versus Connectedness

At last year's Radical Philosophy Art & Immaterial Labour conference at Tate Britain Bifo spoke of a shift from conjunction, the world of the connotative where subjectivities interact, change one another unpredictably, become 'other', to the connectedness of machine like functionality, a denotative and objectifying world of unaltered and non altering singularities. In Infanzia e storia Agamben looks at the decline of experience as accumulation into time as mere succession.

These two observations are by no means unrelated. Read by their lights Lucarelli's Un giorno dopo l'altro becomes a sort of road novel about that connectedness, constructed out of the subjective experience of three quite separate individuals of the (objective) links between them, and about how time and distance now present themselves as repetition.

Alessandro is a youth who works for an ISP, where he monitors internet chat rooms. Time has stopped for him since his girlfriend went back to Denmark. So he has set Luigi Tenco's song Un giorno dopo l'altro, itself about repetition, to play as an infinite loop: 'Day after day / time disappears: / the streets are always the same, / the same houses. // Day after day / and everything as before; / step after step, / the same life.' He has a docile dog (called Dog) which others mistake for a pitbull. When he first encounters Vittorio (as he himself squats in an otherwise silent chat, surrounded by the empty noise of other rooms) it is simply as lines of text replying to earlier text from someone called 'the old guy'.

Vittorio is a contract killer. He is not a serial killer, though he constructs that image for himself: 'the pitbull'. This, however, is a sort of nickname or tag used with the aim, apparently, of returning (once it becomes appropriate) back to his former anonymity through a semiotic death: 'In order to kill himself the pitbull had first had to be in existence.' His real death is experienced, subjectively, paradoxically, as a semiotic death, a literal loss of signal, as descending into white noise, as 'fading into a hissing whiteness, like plunging into a sea of grass. He thought: it's ending. He thought: for real. He thought: here.' End of signal, end of journey, end of time.

Grazia is a police officer. She is one of a team keeping villains under surveillance. In the course of her work (and the novel) she is objectified at various points by the male gaze of Alessandro, of Vittorio and of her fellow officers. Initially she encounters Vittorio as an absence, a murderer of three people who has somehow managed to slip through the net of hidden microphones. So technology fails at this stage. But her method of tracking down her suspect is taken straight out of set theory ('Narrow down. Connect. Exclude and narrow down again.') just as Alessandro's initial and very indirect contact with the person behind the 'pitbull' nickname, mediated through his colleague Luisa, is by checking through IP numbers.

Throughout the novel runs a network of roadways traversed (subjectively) by Vittorio not really as the means towards some end but as the pattern of life itself: 'On the motorway life is movement. If you stop it's because you need help.' As well as two different binaries. Grazia's putative pregnancy, which could still be resolved by a test which Grazia never quite administers but instead reveals, more or less accidentally, first to Alessandro then to her fellow officers, as a sort of item of her trailing or extruded subjectivity. And the dilemma Alessandro faces: to get his girlfriend back or move on; ie What to do about time? Which he resolves (or fails to resolve) by flying to Copenhagen, winding back the tape, turning the clock back, foreshortening distance, right at the end of the book.