Two-handed Conversations

Communication is asymptotic.


On the one hand:

The subject begins the analysis by talking about himself without talking to you or talking to you without talking about himself. When he can talk to you about himself the analysis is over.
(Lacan: Introduction to Jean Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's Verneinung. Cf Écrits, 1966, p373)

And on the other:

We have to be patient with each other, and rejoice whenever we manage (both us and other people) to move forward. We can't just stay where we are.
(Károly Kerényi, letter to Furio Jesi, 5 October 1964, as quoted by Wu Ming I)

Clara Petacci

On the death of Clara Petacci.


Like Mussolini, Clara 'Claretta' Petacci was shot in 1945 and her body hung upside down at a petrol station at piazzale Loretta in Milan. But with this difference: that her skirt was tied around her knees. To prevent her knickers showing, according to Giuseppe Genna in Grande madre rossa. Because she had taken them off, according to some reports. Because she had been violated, according to Giorgio Pisanò.

After the Mass Society

C Wright Mills and post autonomism


In The Mass Society (from The Power Elite, 1956) C Wright Mills looks at 'public opinion' as the mythic seat of democratic power. This is what New Labour's Gordon Brown deceitfully invokes whenever he bleats about 'the British people', whose needs he always knows. Essentially it is 'an 18th Century idea' which 'parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy': a world of freely competing actors where price (not value) is formed by 'anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals' and opinion arises out of 'little circles of people talking with one another'. So that autonomy is assumed in both cases and autonomy of discussion in particular is important for the idea of how it legitimates, of how 'no one group monopolises the discussion or by itself determines the conditions that prevail.' So that 'the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted.'

According to the reusable metaphor which Wright Mills then goes on to create out of the birth of British industrialisation, the opinionated public thus conceived 'is the loom of classic 18th Century democracy' in which 'discussion is at once [both] the threads and the shuttle', tying things together as it were.

And yet, then as well as now, this description is implausible: merely 'a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximation of how [...] power works [...] The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal' which 'is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.'

Writing out of his own particular time and place, Wright Mills develops out of what he finds a notion of a 'society of masses' in a way that parallels the identification of the 'mass worker' by Italian operaisti. In the latter, not wholly brave new world of post miracular Italy the opinion-forming Estates had either broken down or become irremediably repressive, rather as the unions and the trade and craft distinctions had either come to break down or had become oppressive in the Republic founded on Work:

'Boss, you haven't fooled us
with your creations, with the unions
your plans have gone up in smoke,
it's us you're up against.

And the qualifications, the trade distinctions,
we want them all abolished.
The divisions are at an end.'

(Alfredo Bandelli: La ballata della FIAT)

Or as an Autonomist slogan put it not long after dear, democratic Doctor Kissinger's splendid 11 September coup against Allende: 'In Chile they've got the tanks, but we've got the unions.'

And so, speculating now, out of this particular time and place, long after we got what we asked for, which wasn't at all what we wanted (who was it, by the way, who described Berlusconi, friend of Tony Blair and client of David Mills / Mr Tessa Jowell, as the bastard child of Radio Alice?), we can recycle. Indeed Wright Mills' metaphorical observations seem to need updating only slightly. In the era of cognitive capitalism, of immaterial labour, of precarity, the loom has been dismantled, or possibly repossessed. Instead there are simply small transmitter/receivers bobbing on the surface of the boundless ocean, linked only by the thread of their capacity endlessly, repetitively, to transmit and to receive. This is Negri's multitude, but before it achieves self consciousness as a social subject. The movement of the ocean is titanic. Events go on 'elsewhere'. Until the crash. But until then, in the thin and airless little world of the post Fordist polity as a viable public space, presence is everything, so that whilst these devices may disperse and recombine, whilst they float upon it they do not partake of the ocean in any active way, so that the overall effect is (at best) one of empty, mutual advertisement, of our affectless reincarnation as mindless, self documenting emoticons. Cf, for example, the examples of the bishop who would put confirmations on Twitter, as though the act of being formally received into the Church were a sort of spiritual happy slapping, or of Gordon Brown, looking and behaving like a gloomily aspirant Celtic Tony Hancock, over on You Tube. But there are plenty of non Establishment examples of the same sort of thing.

And meanwhile actual or social disappearance, not now the effect either of a real historical iceberg or of a metaphorical one but just a process of slow or rapid withdrawal, of absence, is merely radio silence, over and out, of death amidst white noise.

And we are, most of us, for the most part, still living out that death.

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)