Power and Opposition

The consecration of power must not carry greater weight for us than the halo of irreducible opposition.

(Cornelius Castoriadis)

Lenin on Social Constructivism, according to Dunayevskaya

‘Man's cognition not only reflects the objective world but creates it.’

(Lenin on Hegel’s Science of Logic, according to Raya Dunayevskaya, 1987)

Safe as the Bank of England

'The owners of capital will incite the working class to buy more and more costly goods, more houses and items of technology, pushing them to take out more and more lines of credit until the burden of debt becomes unsustainable. The outstanding debt will lead to the bankruptcy of the banks, which will then have to be nationalised, and the State will be forced to undertake a journey that will lead, eventually, to Communism.'

(Karl Marx, supposedly in 1867, though it's probably an urban myth, as quoted by Marco Niada, retiring correspondent of Sole 24 ore, at a farewell dinner held in his honour in the City, presided over by the Italian Ambassador to London and attended by a number of Italian bankers, 3 February 2009)

Secrets

David Miliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, is of course perfectly right. Friendship requires confidence, trust. Lots of cuddles and warmth. And little bits of torture here and there.

When we were at school together, I and another friend brought Carol Thatcher to see David Miliband. She had been a friend too until she'd offended him in some way. Anyway, we held her down whilst David stamped on her hands. Naturally we felt badly about this afterwards, although our consciences were clear since only David had done the stamping.

And so time passed, as it always does...

One year at the school reunion I said to him, 'David, don't you think you behaved rather badly, stamping on Carol's hands?'

'What do you mean?' he replied. 'I only held her down along with you. It was Hassan who stamped on her hands.' And, of course, he was right. I remembered that after he said it.

A short time later, we were all sitting together in the green room of a well known TV company when we overheard Carol Thatcher saying in her inimitably loud and rather vulgar way, 'You know three of them attacked me after school and took turns to stamp on my hands.' And, obviously, after a breach of trust like that, no friendship can survive. So we dropped her. And, in addition, we sued her for defamation.

Well eventually the case did get to Court where it was heard before Jonathan Ross LJ, a Law Lord of some note. In his rather testy summing up, Ross stated:

'I am unable to try this case. The plaintiffs have hidden the evidence. I find it intolerable that any Court should be put under this kind of pressure.'

Tonight David and I are going round to Ross's house. We are going to stamp on his hands.

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The Soviet agent and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, Anthony Blunt, famously defended himself with E M Forster's observation that it was better to betray one's country than to betray one's friends.

David Miliband has adapted this principle. It is, in his view, better first to go along with torture in secret and then to go against international law than to go against whichever friendly country carries out these acts.

Technology

'Technology is a way of so arranging the world that we do not have to experience it.' (Max Frisch)

'The lift is a machine for ignoring one's co-tenants. The car for ignoring people who go by tram. The telephone for not looking people in the face or going into their houses.' (Don Lorenzo Malini: Lettera ad una professoressa)

A Good Childhood

Having previously rescued children from the chimneys of industrial capitalism we have put them to work on the sofas of cognitive capitalism.

A Good Childhood is a so called ‘landmark report’ from the UK Children’s Society. According to a selective article in the Telegraph, it argues, inter alia, that television makes children mentally ill partly through advertisers' messages that 'you are what you own' and partly through that medium's practice of celebrity:

'Children today know in intimate detail the lives of celebrities who are richer than they will ever be, and mostly better-looking. This exposure inevitably raises aspirations and reduces self-esteem.'

The reference to 'aspirations' here is peculiar. For a start, aspiration is more usually seen as one of capitalist society's major drivers: you look across at the field belonging to that other chap, you see that it is greener, you apply some fertiliser to your own field and very soon everyone gains. It is this that underpins the hugely patronising (and often White) belief that inhabitants of US projects and slums are going to look up at Obama over the coming years and see not only a brave fulfilment of the dream of Dr King but also an inducement to themselves to give things one further heave.

And that, essentially, is its function in this view of how things work, an inducement to further effort, to fit in. But it's a position from which, even though Tim Gill, for example, notes that children need to be autonomous, self directing and so forth, the Report as a whole will probably not dissent, its own sort of aspiration, other than at the margin. Aspiration, in other words, doesn't seesaw with self esteem. Rather it works as social control in a way that desire, for instance, never can; which is what makes desire so subversive.

So here we have it: the dynamic model of capitalist aspiration. A carrot moves forward endlessly and therefore you do too, failing again and failing better, goaded onwards by a stick. Don't do drugs and/or go to prison. Join the Democrats instead.

In a more topological model, one reaches towards the object of aspiration which always lies on the boundary of the very system within which one starts aspiring in the first place. In L'Europa e l'Impero, for example, Toni Negri notes how the US 'empire' is the skin or outer surface of a container for which we provide the contents, within which we live. And this, no doubt, is why (in a British context) the same mindless New Labour clique has looked successively to the vibrancy, if that's the word, of WJ Clinton, GW Bush and now of BH Obama. Policy here is secondary if it's relevant at all, because the issue is one of marques.

Nor are things much different in some Christian contexts. Christ is the object of imitation, the source of 'living waters'. However, that imitation is always radically incomplete. Either one never reaches that boundary (becoming fully alive is therefore always postponed) or else imitation fails in some other way: '[they have] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water' (Jeremiah).

As to the message that 'you are what you own' here are the children of Don Lorenzo Milani's school in 1960s Barbiana (from Lettera ad una professoressa):

'The poor create different tongues and then they struggle to renew them for ever. The rich crystallise these so that they can keep down those who do not speak as they do.'

Now what these children were complaining of was this: firstly that they were excluded from or dispossessed by others of a language which was theirs and secondly that a false and 'crystallised' form of that language (and this is similar to the commodification of 'dead labour') was then turned back on them prescriptively and proscriptively as a source for their (new) identity.

And this is actually quite serious. On the one hand there is an asymptotic relationship pre-existing between two aspects of language, a sort of ecology of the potential, which must not be destroyed:

'The true culture, that which no one has so far possessed, is made up of two things: belonging to the group and possessing the power of individual speech.' (Lettera...)

And on the other hand there is the sort of observation about that destruction which is made by Roland Barthes:

'To rob a man of his language in the very name of language; this is the first step in all legal murders.' (Mythologies)

But of course children living today are by no means dumber (or less dumb) than were their counterparts in Barbiana. Certainly they are experiencing a similar negative loop whereby they too become forced consumers of their own production, now fed back at them in crude and distorted ways: for example as reflections of their desire to be like their peers or like their older siblings, or as their desire to create new friendships, now reflected back as the bogus friendship of celebrity. And, almost certainly, like the children of Barbiana, they know this at some level. Yet they are hardly unique in this. Rather they are victims of the process common in cognitive capitalism and which applies both to children and to adults whereby (as Alquati and others have noted: tourism is an example) production and consumption coalesce:

'They have sold us one by one. They have sold our poor lives and our history to make a history combined with others, a fake history, that doesn't even have a happy ending, one that finishes in indifference for everything and for everyone.' (Stefano Benni: Saltatempo).

Active Passivity I

'How does one actively do the passivity thing?' asks the narrator of Tiziano Scarpa's Kamikaze d'Occidente. One attempt might be that of the fireman of Guccini's locomotive. You set up the situation; the technology does the rest: 'Remind your soul to listen and obey ... you will face decisive situations ... be patient ... things get easier without your intervention ... ' (Mohammed Atta, document written just before 11 September 2001; 'things get easier...' comes from another translation)

Or to turn that around entirely, 'Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.' The emptying out of the self; the 'imaginary institutions' of whatever greater (but absent) entity instantiated, made carniferous through not entirely elective prosopopœia. These walls may not have ears, but they certainly do have tongues.

Or as Hegel said (or at least Engels summarising Hegel, later quoted by Plekhanov), 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity.' And Necessity, the Law, is dark or occluded only insofar as it is insufficiently understood, the container that's to be breached, the potential for destruction, from within. This is subjectivity conceived in Avicenna's terms, as ontological Russian dolls. Not the ground beneath one's feet (elephants all the way down) but successive ceilings, the impositions stemming from others' objectification, against which subjectivity has to push. Until some terminus ad quem is eventually reached, be it God, Historical Necessity, the biggest dead whale in Lombardy (Cf Aldo Nove). Or whatever. And Pie in the Sky When We Die.

Joe Hill offers 'pie in the sky when we die', whence the phrase. But right now we have to 'work and pray [and] live on hay', which is a nicely acerbic sneer at the tension running through so many parts of Christianity (as a religion of achievement) between the modally present, optative and aspectual ('God be with you') and the temporal, deontic and modally future ('Heaven shall await you': God postponed).

Guccini's God is Dead draws a somewhat similar contrast, this time between a world in which:

'on the kerbsides God is dead
in the cars picked up on instalments God is dead
in the myths of summer God is dead'
and 'a new world' which is in the making, precisely because:

'in terms of what we believe in God has risen
in terms of what we wish for God has risen
in the world we wish for
God has risen'

but also in which the Resurrection precedes, as it were, the Revolution rather as velleity precedes conation before the arm can be raised. Or in this case the whole of the body from the not yet emptied tomb.

And there may be still other ways into this notion of active passivity, always presuming it exists, one of which might be to think not about inaction versus action but instead about how presence relates to pretence, of presence without pretence, and about absence. From outside each ontological boundary (ie looking in) content is an image, a representation: its reality is subordinate, diminished. Whereas 'there could be another way, of making of it only presence, only absence.' (This is Antonio Moresco.) So 'to hell with representation! This is the time for presence. Fewer metaphors, fewer mediations. Meaning things directly. Making literal sense.' (Tiziano Scarpa)

And if meaning now becomes key, is meaning itself then simply a series of jugs or boxes in which to capture the world? This is ontological containment, meaning conceived of as though it were mastery over the world. Or is it a set of tails which one haplessly attempts to pin upon the donkey flux of sensation, which is what the world, as we experience it, comprises? This is nominalism, whose two ontological realms, somewhat estranged, comprise Reality on the one hand and the Naming of Reality on the other, rather as essentialism (which treats of what is true and thus unchanging against a flux of names) and nominalism (not quite vice versa, but nearly) are themselves estranged. Or is it rather a suit of clothes with which to cover up the nakedness of being? Maybe. Because Nature abhors undressed emperors above all things and therefore so should we? Or because Tinkerbell exists precisely through our belief?

But I don't, in saying that, wish to make fun of what is simulation semantics at a personal level, social constructivism at the interpersonal. The creation of meaning, the production of some sort of glow of value, maybe if only a glimmer even, is a much more important and complex thing than its pricing through re-production, through the quotidian exchanges of all our busy social lives.