My Bookshelf

I recently took time, and money, away from the investment in books themselves to construct a shelf for the things. Just the one, trailing the circumference of my oddly shaped room (few of the walls in Paris are straight) and I’m aware that it will no doubt soon be overrun. At the moment, however, it looks just swell. This may be because it took three days of measuring, jigsawing, remeasuring, rejigawing, drilling, hammering, hoping and €42 to make, and I feel cheek reddening pride everytime I look at it. I summoned the following order through a combination of intuition and logic, and in telling you this order I feel like I’m telling some dirty secret. Here goes: Bookend of empty notebooks / one bottle of Russel’s Reserve Rye Whiskey 6yr – Zizek – Lacan – books about the sea – books on wildlife – political works – Lit. Crit. – Philosophy in general – Deleuze – books on mathematics – books on chess – books I want to read or reread or may never read, arranged by author – various editions of Alice in Wonderland – good looking books – books on Yorkshire (the homeland) – Proust – half a bottle of Ardbeg as a Bookend.

–

Ps, I don’t have a blog, so I’m piggy backing onto this one for personal stuff.

The humility of dialogue; stirrings of the NightShift?

I attempt nothing grandiose with the blog, save to note that in recent weeks I’ve realised just how crucial humility is to the beginnings of dialogue. For some, this may be to state the obvious, but having spent some time with close friends (something that doesn’t occur often enough) I realised that only these people had the ability to make me critically engage (with) myself without immediately eliciting the defensive murmurings of my rampant ego.

So when I recently found myself rebutted for having offered unwanted advice to an acquaintance, it occured to me that humility is not only crucial to one’s ability to critically approach subjects of personal attachment, to accept and reflect upon criticism, but also crucial to the proffering of any initial thought. As HammamAldouri stated, why speak? Do we see reflected on our screens only attempts at self-affirmation? What can I offer this community, no longer (if ever) a community, to reopen the dialogue? Perhaps only the thought that dialogue is necessary, but alone a dialogue in which the buttresses of the ego are made less steady, both in the proffering of the initial gesture and in the gesture’s reception.

There is work to be done…

‘Florence, Italy’ by Ruth Orkin: Discuss

On the Narcissism of ‘The Night Shift’

[The original idea for this text was that it would consist of only a few short notes that illustrate the problematic of writing on the internet; the planned brevity has however remained only a plan.  The reality of writing this text has proved, on the contrary, a task that defies condensation.  I would then like to warn the reader in advance; the length of the text is significantly longer than the other posts on ‘The Night Shift’ – the word count comes to about 3,500.  I do hope that it does not make for tedious reading; even though I have tried to keep the text clear, there will crop up at times certain digressions which I hope the reader will simply indulge.  Also, I have been working on this text on-off since the launch of ‘The Night Shift’ but I feel that instead of continuously refining the text (which could go on forever!) it has become clear that it is about time to just post it, so apologies for the errata.]

On the Narcissism of ‘The Night Shift’

Not knowing what he sees, he adores the sight;

That false face fools and fuels his delight.

You simple boy, why strive in vain to catch

A fleeting image?  What you see is nowhere;

And what you love – but turn away – you lose!

You see a phantom of a mirrored shape;

Nothing itself; with you it came and stays;

With you it too will go, if you can go!

-       Ovid

I would like to discuss here Narcissism.  I would like to discuss more specifically the Narcissism of writing, that is, everything that is written here, under the title of ‘The Night Shift.’ I would like to set the text off by way of a general question: why do we desire to be seen, to appear?  Before this question is developed, let me provide a sort of cursory definition of the term Narcissism.  It has become common knowledge amongst academics that the term ‘Narcissism’ runs parallel to the works of Sigmund Freud (Oedipus would be another name that forms such an instant conjunction).  The very reference to Narcissism is to a certain extent a theoretical reference to Freud; perhaps we would do better to think rather of Narcissus.  This of course would suck us back into the academic realm we wish to maintain, momentarily, at least some distance from.  Seen as though ‘The Night Shift’ is not limited by the confines of academia, it seems very plausible to think Narcissism without recourse to Freud (of course I will not feign ignorance of his thoughts on the topic, however, I do not think the thoughts I sketch out here require any knowledge of his work; which, I might add, leaves me open to criticism of the severest kind!).

By Narcissism then, I mean very broadly a relation of one’s self to itself; an auto-relation.  This general definition is to be grasped on a preliminary reading the famous myth of ‘Narcissus and Echo’, to which we shall return (and from which the epigraph above is found). Narcissus’ fate is well known.  Narcissus is blessed by the gods with a divine beauty that, paradoxically, carries and casts his miserable fate and his organic future (in the shape of a little flower).  After refusing numerous advances of his enamoured country folk and the advances of supernatural beings (Echo the wood nymph), Narcissus catches a sight of himself in a pond and falls madly and dangerously in love, and yet, it is precisely this love that, for Narcissus, is unattainable.  Through his zealous excessive auto-relation Narcissus effectively commits suicide (by over-exhaustion).  It will be important to forge a distance from the negativity that the immediate interpretation of the myth points towards.  Indeed Narcissism is directed unhappily towards self-annihilation.  But through a re-interpretation of what the effects of self-annihilation could lead to, maybe we will come to an understanding of the myth that goes beyond positive or negative.  Let us turn back to our concern: why do we desire to be seen, to appear?

Perhaps, more than any other technological system, the Internet has radically globalized this desire for appearance.  It comes as no surprise that ‘The Night Shift’ then, takes the form of a website in which readers can enter at any time and choose to participate more actively (in the form of contributions) or more passively (by simply reading the texts provided – passivity is perhaps the incorrect word).  Let me state clearly here that I do not valorize the former over the latter; the question of the law that governs the distinction between active and passive would no doubt have to be raised (it would consist primarily in the analysis of conceptual apparatus’ that determine oppositional thinking and more importantly how the subordination of one term over another has come about).  This may turn up as a point of discussion another time.  Let us for the moment stay with the promise of a discussion on Narcissism.

Why does the advent of ‘The Night Shift’ ‘come as no surprise’?  It is precisely because the desire for appearance has, arguably, reached its nadir in the form of the Internet, which in turn harbors within it the very desire for globalization.  Doubtless, the word globalization here slips in very easily into the lexicon that accumulates on the pages of this website; that is, a lexicon that privileges a Marxist vocabulary.  Indeed, it is a word that has grown and developed out of certain Marxist trends.  However, we should not necessarily understand globalization in the immediate sense of the term.  Perhaps what is meant is rather the imaginary potentiality of an event that expands the length, width and depth of the globe.  As such, ‘The Night Shift’ would be an expression of globalization (both the great texts of the major monotheist religions and the Manifesto of the Communist Party would likewise be similar expressions).  If our text then operates around the general field of Narcissism and by now, the question of appearance, will and desire, we must ask the following: Whence the desire for globalization?  This is an ostensibly simple question.  To answer dogmatically (that is, simply), Capitalism, is to veer slightly off the mark.

It is incontestable that the activity and process of globalization can be examined within the frame of a critique of political economy, starting of course, with the critical analysis of the system of capitalism.  But does this standpoint gain enough critical distance, or, a fortiori, is it possible to gain critical distance when one is caught within the immanence of the system one is trying to displace?  Things are perhaps all too close to us, to human society; thus the generation of critical distance appears as an impossibility.  If critique is a matter of proper distance from the reflexive object of criticism itself (what is meant by distance here: physical or ethical?), then it is absolutely necessary to take some distance from the Marxist schema that dominates the pages on ‘The Night Shift.’  This of course is not a disavowal of its injunction and the imperative to think with Marx.  It is necessary however to examine and interrogate the prevalent theoretico-metaphysical presuppositions of Marx’s thought itself (for example, the Metaphysics of Labour, the Metaphysics of the world-view as presupposed in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach [A German ‘materialist’ philosopher writing between Hegel and Marx who had, momentarily a strong influence on the humanist dimension of Marx’s thought], which if the reader is not familiar with it goes as follows: “The philosophers have interpreted the world, only in various ways; the point is to change it”), that is, its ideologies (by ideology I understand simply as a metaphysics that does not understand itself as such).  Political economy offers only one way of approaching the figure of globalization.  Another way is to consider, historically, pre-capitalist societies in order to begin to locate something called, generally speaking, the will to globalization.

I hope that the reader will forgive the following abstract assumption and I apologize in advance but I would like to keep the economy of this text to that of generality for the moment.  The assumption is as follows: from the earliest formations of society, it has become clear that present within these social formations lies a certain will to globalize.  What is meant by this phrase?  The will to globalize is quite simply the collective drive and desire to dominate; a desire that is born out of the social antagonism of the event of the recognition of the very social itself.  In the most general schematic, the social is recognized as such when one self-consciousness is attained; that is, when a being thinks itself as such (a being).  This self-consciousness is only possible however through the passage and dependence of another self-consciousness (whose experience is reciprocated).  One cannot say ‘I’, cannot mutely point to oneself, one cannot even think ‘oneself’ without the constitutive presence of another.  Put very simply, no one is born independently; we all enter into family, which is, if anything, the most immediate articulation of the social (this immediacy however does not make the family a natural social structure or foundational it is simply the most familiar form of the social).  This interdependence then is itself the very expression of social antagonism.  However, what is presupposed here is the political figure of freedom.  There is only antagonism insofar as freedom is the goal of the struggle to be recognized as self-conscious.  This struggle for freedom is at times dangerous, often leading to death.  Death, that is, the cessation of the very relation between one and its other, is the absolute annihilation the social.  Thinking, technology, advancement, looks very small in light of the destruction of the solar system (one could even restrict this comment to the earth if one considers the global consumption of the earth’s natural resources, the systematic destruction of the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, etc.).  And yet, on occasion death is not feared.  History’s rhythms clearly illustrate that death is often the most valorized form of the affirmation of the social; this is a difficult paradox to come to terms with: the annihilation of the social is its living affirmation (I think it will be absolutely necessary to provide a systematic critique of the drinking habits of society, especially, the drinking habits of the economically advanced; but if the reader requires more historically ‘concrete’ examples, one need only look at the practice of human sacrifice of the Aztecs, the funerary rituals of the Ancient Egyptians and the practice of circumcision in Judaism and Islam).

This deathly (not dead but a living phenomenon veering towards death) affirmation of the social is of course analogous to the love Narcissus faced in the reflective occulus of his limpid tomb.  Like all tombs, the body is not only housed within its structures, but the body and the self are liquidated (Ovid’s genius [Ovid – 43BC-17AD – was a Roman Poet whose most famous work is perhaps Metamorphoses, from which the poem of ‘Narcissus and Echo’ derives] is intensified when we consider the locus and form Narcissus’ tomb takes).  Our tomb here is without question, cyberspace; a structure that, like the drowning waters of passion, liquidates space, time and, more importantly for the text here, subjectivities or how we come to understand the subject.  Let us ask again ask the primary question that mobilized this text: why do we desire to appear?  At the conjunction of the figure of Narcissus and the desire to appear, the problem is complicated.  If, like Narcissus, we do not ask why we desire to appear, we simply restlessly and anxiously believe in the reality of ourselves, we then desire, in a depth that Narcissus perhaps secretly intuited, our disappearance.  Disappearance, the culmination of the deathly desire for appearance, occurs when the waters are unrippled.  The still pond marks the absence of Narcissus and perhaps – and this time I stress the word perhaps, the accent placed on the rhetorical trope of speculation which remains more innocent than mere rhetoric – it is only through a certain absence of Narcissus that we can operate.  And yet, why do we desire to appear?  A fortiori why do we write on the virtual wall of ‘The Night Shift’, which surely accelerates a Narcissism of the most grotesque kind?  Perhaps the answer lies in the concept of desire.  Desire is something that we have been referring to a lot; but what is desire for it to produce a certain modality of appearance?

On the one hand, we could argue that desire is determined by nature, or rather, by a natural relation.  The human as merely conscious being is a rather weak entity in the ferocious world of nature.  Before he understands himself as ‘man’ or ‘being’, he (should we say ‘it’?) is subject to the harshest realities of the natural world: he must take cover from the capricious weather; he must satisfy his hunger and thirst; he must establish a dwelling in which to rest, etc.  The natural world as such is as of yet not the reflexive object for man, it is rather the subjectivity that subjugates man to a moment of mere objectivity.  The natural relation determining desire constitutes man’s immanent will to survive.  On the other hand however, this natural relation itself is overcome at the very point of desire, at the moment of its own appearance.  Desire is as such a productive agency that allows for the manipulation and configuration of the world itself.  It is what allows man to think; it is the primordially instigation of thought.  Nature and thought cannot be separated: desire is what forms the relation between them.  Between the two intertwining definitions, desire produces Narcissism.  More abstractly, desire is the Narcissistic production of the human and the world it inhabits.  Desire then begins to form a chain in which production, Narcissism, thought and Nature are links.

Maybe it is about time we considered Narcissism closer, taking as our point of departure here, the short cursory ‘definition’ provided at the very beginning of this text.  Writing is a practice of Narcissism.  All the more reason precisely because Narcissus (the mythical figure) could not write anything.  The water of the pond is impenetrable; it remembers nothing, it traces nothing, which, in a way, means that Narcissus has no memory of himself or his deranged love (this lack of memory is perhaps what infinitizes Narcissus’ love, in so far as it springs new each time the pond calms and the image that reflects back is sharpened).  Writing on the internet (websites, blogs, emails) is a very modern phenomenon.  Indeed, writing is a peculiar activity, but perhaps the human is not alienated from its technicality.  We understand writing as an extension of ourselves which has the power of recording the very relation of the self to itself.  This is the Narcissistic core of writing.  The Narcissism of the writer is intensified when within the time of a blink of the eye (how fast is information transmitted onto the internet now – the mere click of the button; this is not a cliché any more, it is quite simply the truth, the practice of writing on computers and working with the Internet) – that is, the time of Narcissus – the writings of the writer return to the writer himself in a moment of pure Narcissistic pleasure.  The writer in the restricted sense of the one who contributes to the webpage – as I do here – is a Narcissus of the most intense form.  In less than a second, a text that took hours, days, weeks, maybe even years to compose, is reflected straight back to the writer who in the same instance transforms, metamorphoses into a, or rather, the reader; the tightness of this circularity, of this economy of the exchange, is at times disquieting.  It strikes the writer, who is nothing but the reader, as worrying as when the voyager lost shouts into the empty valley to hear nothing but the echo of his/her appearance.  We notice here that Narcissism is not reducible to an image.

The experience of Narcissism does not just refer to an image or picture in the restricted sense of the word (which means that it can of course refer to images).  The Narcissism that interests us here takes the form of a modality of a return to something that is attributed to the self; in this instance, I am interested in the use of writing and the use of names.  The Narcissism of the writer as touched upon above is redoubled in the event of the signature of the name; that is, all our posts are named, either from the beginning or at the end.  From this we could ask: is it possible that all our endeavours on ‘The Night Shift’ are secretly (but not too much) driven by a longing to see ourselves return onto the (virtual) page?  Let us not think that this would be a reduction!  The work, thought, vignettes, notes and texts archived and collected on ‘The Night Shift’ is to a certain extent irreducible precisely because of the Narcissism involved; that is, my question (part provocation part sincere) only performs a reduction if we understand Narcissism in the reduced (often negative) sense of the term.  The task of Narcissism (would it even constitute a ‘task’) could no be re-appropriated methodologically.  What I mean is, Narcissism, or at least the Narcissism that we are trying to develop, or, more precisely, trying to witness, to take account of, could not be molded into a determining, technical ethos or procedure that could at once offer itself up to infinite repetition (the consequences of this would clearly lead to the different and distinct institutional forms and contexts of disciplinarity we face daily).  This leaves the necessity of mastery asunder: the force of Narcissism must be left un-mastered; or rather, the very force of Narcissism is un-masterable.              

How to un-master our relation with Narcissism?  Maybe we need more time.  Maybe the process of slowing down is required.  This tempo-dynamics does not immediately appear possible within the virtual reality of cyberspace.  Certainly, let us not disavow Narcissism.  Maybe it requires redeeming somehow.  The difficult question that arises here is that of the mode of presentation: is the website the best way of presenting the ideas that ‘motivate’ its injunction to be, that is, to appear somehow?  Or does it operate too immanently within the dangerous circularity of a Narcissism that desires only its annihilation?  Have we sufficiently interrogated this desire to appear?  Perhaps we should think to communicate otherwise, slower; this would derail the insistence of using the Internet all too destructively.  As a slight digression, I find it very interesting today that on a cultural level we think it inconceivable that one did not have access to the Internet; this appearance of inclusion is perhaps an illusion, an illusion that neutralizes the voice of another.  The Internet is maybe not the (technological) ground for our commonality; it is something that is maybe not shared.

Consequently, it is another modality of the will to globalize, which, appropriated a certain way, could form into the will to dominate which is a will that would always require the active subservience of its other.  One would have to provide a systematic critique of this mode of communication (does it even communicate if communication is the affirmation of commonality?).  Communism, in its historical forms (which was once fashionably referred to as ‘Soviet style communism’), has been superseded.  But, the trace of its injunction is clear and has been re-inscribed in the promise of democracy: to build a politics on a common foundation.  This is why, the specificity of our current historical conjunction is so volatile: perhaps the question of the environment, the consumption of the world, gives us a chance to re-think politics and the politics of commonality.  What else do we share absolutely other than the totality of the geo-physical world (even though we, as of yet, do not share it equally; nevertheless, the dominance of hegemonic political powers are established on the resources of the world and once it is emptied of its source, death is imminent)?

This, in a very peculiar way, always comes back to the deathly figure of Narcissus (sharing, commonality, start with division, antagonism).  That is, a return to the micro-politics of the relation of the self to itself, which, more than anything, is not a process of individuation, rather, it is the development of an ethics that tries to first describe how and why the self relates which could result in nothing but the affirmative de-individuation of the self or the proliferation of the self as many selves.

Hammam Aldouri

Technological Determinism

In a series of discussions which have unfolded over the last few days in the comments section of Joe’s post on engineering a few big issues have emerged. What Joe did was to outline why he thinks engineers are the most important group of people in society and to point out that because the Left ignores their importance, multinational corporations have no problem in snatching engineers up for their own exploitative purposes. In the discussions that followed various other arguments were added to this, of which I’d like to respond to two, which are interrelated. The first is the role of technology in history. The second is what we understand by ‘society’ (which I’ll save for a future post).

Joe sees technology and technological innovation as the driving force of history. Initially I responded to this in vague and unhelpful ways. I had a gut instinct that something about this proposition was flawed, but couldn’t quite articulate what it was. I’ve since been thinking it through and it comes down to this: to state that technology is the driving force of history is to commit the error of what the Marxist tradition calls ‘technological determinism’. I’d come across this term in various places, instinctively learnt to be dubious of any manifestation of it, yet had never understood what it actually meant in the context of Marxist theory. So at this point, I went off to read a bit about it. This post gives an absolutely basic account of what Marxism has to say about technological determinism. It issues, not from profound knowledge of the tradition, but rather from a few cursory readings (of Marx, Lukács, Brewster and Harvey), so should by no means be treated as gospel.

For Marxism the driving force of history is the contradiction that occurs between what is termed the ‘productive forces’ and the ‘relations of production’. Many readers of Marx mistake ‘productive forces’ as meaning ‘technology’ – hence giving rise to claims that Marx himself was a technological determinist (Engels, as ever, is a different story) – but what it means at its most basic level is simply the power to transform and appropriate nature through human labour. This includes all the social, cultural and physical factors that go into the process of production. ‘Relations of production’ are the social organization and the social implications of the what, why, and how of production – the social relationships that arise between human beings as they combine and co-operate in the fundamental tasks of production. They include the relations determining the ownership and distribution of the product. When a contradiction occurs between the productive forces and the relations of production, either there is a social revolution, or the current mode of production is radically restructured so as to accommodate the contradiction.

Technology for Marx is the material form of the labour process through which the underlying forces and relations of production are expressed. In other words, technology is simply one ‘moment’ (aspect) of a given system of production, not that system’s determining factor. An important example of this comes during the long transition between medieval feudalism and modern capitalism. The fundamental point Marx makes is that the transition from (medieval) guild handwork to (capitalist) manufactures initially involved no change in technology. What changed at first was simply an increased number of workers simultaneously employed by one and the same capitalist. The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman was simply enlarged. At first, therefore, the difference was purely quantitative. The craftsmen continued to use exactly the same labour process as before, with exactly the same technology, but now they did it all in one place, employed by one capitalist.

Gradually, however, as the requirements of production began to exceed the levels of productivity, new methods had to be developed. The most important was what would become known as the capitalist ‘division of labour’: instead of one man making one product from start to finish, each man would now work on only one component of each product, repeating the same task as the others repeated theirs. (‘Division of labour’ within a workshop production process is, incidentally, different from the ‘social division of labour’, which is that between ‘agriculture’, ‘health’, ‘industry’, etc.). In other words, the capitalist division of labour and its inherent power relations preceded and made possible modern mechanized techniques of production, whereby each worker becomes a component in a ‘collective machine’ – a precursor to the mills and, much later, the conveyor belt. Of course, once those new technologies are introduced via very complex processes of experimentation, renovation, and so on, then they too become actors in the dialectically interrelated (roughly meaning ‘mutually constituting through time’) whole.

The point here is not to deny that engineering is currently very important, nor is it to suggest that we can do without it in a future society; it’s to argue that technology doesn’t determine history except through very complex dialectical relations to many other determining moments of a particular mode of production. It’s also to reaffirm the importance of historicizing the concepts we work with (‘engineering’, ‘technology’ etc.). Finally, it’s to stress that technological solutions to current world problems are only part of the answer, not least since any form of engineering as we now know it is – as Joe went out of his way to stress – so bound up with capitalist productive forces, capitalist relations of production and – to borrow a phrase from Harvey – capitalist ‘mental conceptions’. To move forward on this issue will require practical action in terms of providing a first point of call for engineers with radical sympathies, and a rethinking of the history of engineering and the various ideologies with which it is bound up.

Dan Hartley

“yes, but I like looking at girls” – (feminism, sex and porn)

We all know that we need some radical rethinking of the ‘woman issue’.  ‘Woman’ needs to be rearticulated in terms that do not implicitly submit the issue to ‘Man’ – this may require a radical restructuring of almost everything we know – language, social relations, you name it.  And I put the word ‘feminism’ in parentheses for a reason, because the  reality of how we view feminism is infact articulated much more clearly this way.  What do I mean?  Whilst one might publically agree with all tenets of feminism, the latent logic in most men (and these are socially determined to a huge extent) is the ‘yes, but…’  The ‘yes, but’ is evident in all aspects of social change from race to feminism.   To go into this a little, I wish to say that whilst one may say ‘yes, these socially accepted libralisms are true’ they so often function by then placing a ‘but’ afterwards, and it is this ‘but’ which reveals the true ideological position in play.  “I agree that a black president should be possible, but I don’t think we’re quite ready”;  “Yeah, we should stop buying things in huge mega stores, but nowhere else does jeans that fit me”; “I know women are totally equal in all socially relevant respects to men, but….”  What is more problematic, however, is when these ‘buts’ are not articulated publically and function rather as the underside of our internal thought processes…and I believe this is the position in which feminism finds itself.

An example of the painful truth:

A friend of mine and I have an in-joke that runs along the lines that the seduction of/intrigue in a woman is delivered/arrives before you even see her: in the sound of laughter or high-heels coming down the corridor, for instance.  They are the sounds of women to be seduced.  This is the horrible truth, and we all know it, and I’d say that women do too.

What to do?

A) a question of repression – I can feel my ears perk up when I hear these things, but I don’t look.  I repress the desire.  Many claim that this would be a negative realisation of the problem, of the sexism, and that I am only confirming the problem in repressing it.  True, but is it not a start?

B) how do we go beyond this?  A few questions now guys and gals (gals and guys):

• Is the current way we look at sex capitalist (many would argue that it surely is, like everything else)?

There are many more questions to be asked, for instance:

• what role do the socially accepted forms of the ‘sex industry’ (porn, strip clubs etc) play in the horrible underbelly of sexual relations (prostitution, pimping, human trafficking)?
• furthermore, what role do socially accepted forms of the ‘sex industry’ play in daily life – the way we view each other on a day-to-day basis.  John Berger asked these questions in relation to advertising with his book Ways of Seeing – analysing not only how men view women, but how women view themselves.
• how do we go about moving into the future with this?

Theoretically, we can ask:

• is sexuality an issue of inherent repression (i.e., do humans need to have the dialectical relationship bewteen public decency and private fetish)?
• If it is, then do we have to accept ‘sex’ as a trade in moving into the future?
• Can this be internalised (legal brothels)?

Even here, the question has moved away from ‘women’ per se to one of specifically sexual relations…and let’s not reduce everything to sex but instead try to move beyond it….

***

Anyway, there you are – I thought ‘The Night Shift’ needed to get started on this.  It is complicated and so I shall start with an admission:

I like looking at girls – and I have no idea what to do about it.

David Harvey on Radical Social Change

After the discussions that have been taking place on the issues of the importance of engineering for any future society, I can’t think of a better video than this, nor an apter moment for us all to watch it. The first 17 minutes are David Harvey – the world’s leading Marxist geographer – outlining a Marxist template of radical social transformation. I think it’s exactly a way of thinking which might be able to unite everyone here at The Night Shift, so please dedicate the 17 minutes to it! (The rest of the video is his responding to the audience’s questions).

Basically, Harvey says that there are seven moments which have to co-evolve in any major transition from one social order to another. But: They have to change in dialectical relation to each other: no one of them is determinate. What I find so liberating about it is this: a new social movement can begin at any one of these seven moments…so long as you then move across all of the other six. Here are the seven moments (but watch the video for the details):

1. Relation to nature
2. Technology
3. Social relations (Joe, he literally makes exactly the same point you made about the necessity of hierarchy for things such as power stations).
4. Organisation of production
5. Mental conceptions of the world
6. Daily life
7. Institutional and administrative arrangements

I’ll follow this up soon with a couple of posts on the role of technology in history, as seen from a Marxist perspective. Need to read about it first…

Women: We Need You!

This blog is currently way too dominated by a small handful of men, so much of what we’re doing and saying is very limited in scope. We need the participation of women to really make this a viable project. The atmosphere of the comments sections thus far hasn’t really made people feel welcome, so we’re changing that. Come on in and read, think, share and act!

Dying to One’s Neighbour

Last year I read a book by Rowan Williams on the Desert Fathers, who were the precursors to the monastic movement in Christianity.

I was reminded of the book after reading the entries written by some of the contributors. There was an honesty in their explanations of what brought them to the site that I thought inspired a reciprocity from others. Also there were discussions occurring where sympathy with others was overtaken with what stuck me as something of an egotistical drive to “win” the discussion.

In the book, Williams recalls an idea that was at work in the daily lives of the Desert Fathers: of dying to your neighbour. What I took as the overarching concern of this principle was to try to help people to live with greater love and compassion for their fellow neighbours; to trouble firstly over one’s own failings before falling upon the perceived failings of others, thereby becoming more sympathetic with the position of others. Part of the praxis of the principle seems to have been to open oneself up honestly to one’s neighbour, in the hope that it would inspire a reciprocation that would bring the two closer together. To live in an awareness of the frailty of human life (and identity) was important to the notion, and that in light of this, one should try to sympathise with their neighbour before finding themselves passing judgement.

While one of the aims appears to have been to encourage a more honest examination of oneself, (trying to keep an honest account of one’s own failings), it also seemed to offer the community an opportunity to overcome those façades that are constructed around the self, and to counter those unhelpful impulses that the ego can seemingly oblige a person to take.

It is a principle that seems to want to draw out the potential in vulnerability. That if someone is willing to offer me an honest examination of their worries,or fears, or failings, then there is also an opportunity for me to open up and likewise offer an account of myself. If taken from an individualistic perspective, it may appear to weaken and endanger the two people concerned, but if the perspective is one of trying to conceive of a potential community, it may be argued that it strengthens them, moving towards more egalitarian relations rather than potentially dominative ones. Arguably then, concern for the position of the neighbour is something that has an emancipatory opportunity for both parties.

Decent Trade, Fair Trade and Trade (A History of Buying Coffee)

This blog comprises two things.  First, a hunt for fairtrade and something better that I found.   Second, theory behind this and questions to be posed.

I recently undertook a mission to find the fairtrade cafés of Paris – not an easy quest.  Paris, and most of France I would assume, is dominated by Café Richard and a host of coffeemakers/baristas (although this is being generous with terminology) that seem to find the question of fairtrade either totally pointless or hilarious.  I found a café in the 18th, the Louvre and somewhere near me in the 17th.  Unfortunately, two of these places gave me terrible coffee.  Oh, also, I forgot to mention that our friendly Starbucks has fairtrade coffee too.  Not a great choice, especially when the Louvre is about to welcome its first McDonalds.  I was laughed at until the point of despair, and began drinking standard coffee from wherever I could get it (the jilted lover turns to the streets)…but then I found a place called cafeotheque.  Now, I can’t claim that a shop is my saving grace, or that it is utterly unique, but it isn’t bad in anycase.  Despite having about 20 coffees from around the world, roasting each bean themselves in the shop and doing everything properly (ie, making you an amazing drink), they work directly with each coffee planter.  Perhaps a short catch-up on the recent history of coffee can illustrate why this is important (beyond the fair-trade issue):

HISTORY LESSON:

I’m going to try quote from memory here, and everything I know comes from ‘Black Gold’ (see image below, ISBN: 978-1841156569)

Basically, there are two dominant strains of coffee (arabica and robusta).  The first is now the most visible in the coffee world (www.coffeeresearch.org mentions that robusta takes about 20% of the current market), and this is as a sort of backlash against robusta.  There are some valid and some invalid reasons for this.  Basically, robusta is more robust (duh) – it can grow in more demanding climates and travels better than arabica.  Furthermore, it’s got significantly more caffeine and significantly less taste.  During a boom period (ie, before 2000) almost every vending maching used robusta and a lot of coffee houses (including Lavazza is seems – though apparently they now deny it) blended in robusta to their coffee to help it last longer.  Fine.  Except there’s a twist – because during its hayday, robusta was planted mainly in Brasil and Vietnam and the land used was owned by large corporations.  The Vietnam based companies were using land stripped bare by the Americans  – Agent Orange makes for cheap coffee, it seems.  With this, the large companies basically swallowed up all the coffee syndicates that used to exist.  Previously, a small coffee producer could know that their produce would be sold to a local syndicate (at a decent price) and then sold on from there, but the syndicates began to be out bidded by the large, robusta weilding companies and the farmers were being left to fend for themselves.  This is horribly simplified, but sort of gives you the picture of how capitalism led the way for fairtrade coffee.  The round up being that fairtrade coffee is evidently a bandaid on this initial wound caused by outbidding.  Furthermore, the revival of all arabica blends could be attributed mainly to the companies sensing the market place.  (What appears on the surface to be) green is in.

And so back to my hunt for fairtrade and the problems this led too, for whilst I know that fairtrade is merely a ‘band-aid’, I still feel that positive action for producers is positive action for producers.

So when I found the cafeotheque I realised that this sort of one-to-one trading by-passes the fairtrade issue and that the moral and economic lingo of fairtrade is replaced by a hands on investment in a producer.  I am interested in what everyone things here (and I need some coffee myself as I’m running out of steam).  Is this an actual alternative?  Issues with fairtrade, one-to-one trade?

Furthermore, it leads me to another issue (and an independant blog is needed but let’s kick things off).  The issue is that of the tradesman – an economic mode that this article seems to be pointing to (I accept this).  This is a difficult issue, becuase I feel with traders, with specialists, a certain nostalgia and warmth – yes, I recognise that this group of people have dedicated their lives to perfecting a trade and this is valuable.  I don’t mind paying more (including for my coffee) but, and I was chatting with Dan about this the other day, isn’t this a mode of trade inherent to the bourgeois?  Aren’t tradesmen simply extensions of a bourgoeis system?  Is there something to be salvaged here without being caught in a spiral of nostalgia (that is to say without thinking that new socialism must return to old forms of production)?

Anyway, food and coffee call me…

***

Engineers of Socialism

The modern view of engineers...

What does it mean to be an engineer today? Engineers without a shadow of a doubt, are the single most important group of people in society today. Without legions of engineers quietly working away behind the scenes, you would have literally none of the things you can see right now. That glass of water? Engineers are managing the water supply that brought it to you, built the taps that you poured it out of and the glass you caught it in. That book? Engineers provided the paper it was printed onto, the printing press it was produced with and the shelf it’s now stored on. The development of a society is better measured, rather than by any cultural measure, by the level of technological advancement it has achieved. Without good engineering, great thinkers throughout history would not have had the time they needed to sit down and ponder those great ideas if they still had to hunt and forage for their food. It was the advancement of technology that for the first time in evolutionary history, gave a species time that did not need to be spent merely surviving , but could be used to develop other areas of the human mind.

You could therefore be forgiven for thinking that engineers are some of the most respected figures of modern society… Sadly you would be mistaken. The modern engineer is too often seen as a figure of fun to the rest of the world – mocked for being obsessed with the minute details of seemingly trivial items. This says a lot about the ‘civilised’ world where the most productive and hardworking are mocked and trivial celebrities are obsessed over.

The only groups to really see the value of engineers are those, who through no coincidence are the most powerful entities in the capitalist system. Graduate engineers are targeted and fought over by multinational corporations and investment banks. While those who profess to seek social change turn the other way. For an illustrative example, take a few minutes to look for engineering jobs offered by charities and non-profit organisations and compare to the numbers available for policy managers, advocacy officers and engagement campaigners. It is almost impossible to remain an engineer and a committed advocate of the left, which only goes to further entrench capital.

For the other radical left wing engineers out there: you are therfore required to carve out your own area. Undervalued and ignored by the majority of the left, and constantly courted by big business, there are no easy solutions for you. Start your own projects, develop your own ideas and stay in touch with those precious few engineers out there who feel the same way.

Manufacturing Depression

This is a good concrete example of how the system can be said to structure even what feels like the most personal experiences and traumas. Here’s the link to the video:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/1/gary_greenberg_manufacturing_depression_the_secret

Commonwealth: 1.2 Productive Bodies

Young Marx

This is a very difficult chapter, so you’ll have to bear with me. The first section charts the transition that occurred in twentieth century radical thought from the Marxist critique of private property to the ‘phenomenology of bodies’. The young Marx focused on the relation between capital and law. Legal systems, he stated, are abstract representations of social reality, whilst capitalist property relations provide the concrete reality. In other words, the law says we’re all equal, but pop down to your local factory and you’ll see we’re not. Thinkers like Louis Althusser, an important French Marxist, and Theodor Adorno, a leading member of the Frankfurt School (a group of Marxist theorists), then extended this analysis beyond the law to demonstrate that the whole of social life has been ‘subsumed’, or saturated, by capital. Because of this shift away from an outlook which perceives only certain areas of social life as being ‘contaminated’ by capital to an outlook which claims that our entire lives are produced by capital, the type of societal analyses became less ‘transcendent’ and exterior, and more ‘immanent’, or interior. The body now becomes important.

There were two reasons for this shift. One was the militant activism that spread like wildfire across France, Italy and Germany in the 60s and 70s, thereby immersing analyses in the direct experience of militants. The other was a change in the object itself. Material production – making things in factories – gave way to immaterial production: labour was no longer simply physical, but also cognitive and intellectual. (In Britain we might say that this corresponds to the demise of primary industries like mining, ship-building, steel works etc. and the rise of service sector office jobs). When immaterial labour becomes predominant, so Hardt and Negri argue, the entire capitalist process has to be understood differently. Moreover, the scope of Marxist theory now expands. It is no longer acceptable simply to talk of class: feminist, antiracist and anticolonial struggles exploded and forced the Left to think the commodification of labouring bodies through the prisms of gender and race.

Ironically, this move from ‘transcendent’ critique of private property to ‘immanent’ experience had already been prefigured in various conservative philosophies in the early twentieth century. Vitalism and phenomenology, both of which attempt to cast off abstraction to root themselves in concrete life, offered to refuel the values of a system rendered hollow. If we imagine most philosophy up to this point as an overhead, panoramic shot, then the gaze now descends like a thunderbolt into the very bodies that just a moment ago looked like the tiniest of ants. As it does so, the view from inside the body looking out means that the individual to whom that body belongs can longer be seen; the move from the transcendent to the immanent coincides with openness to the other, to that which an individual is not: to the common. (Here, one might cite Husserl or Merleau-Ponty).

Foucault

And here we arrive at Foucault and the concept of ‘biopolitics’. Negri and Hardt very briefly outline three axioms of Foucault’s research:

1. Bodies are the constitutive components of the biopolitical fabric of being.
2. On the biopolitical terrain, where powers are continually made and unmade, bodies resist.
3. Corporeal resistance produces subjectivity, not in an isolated or independent way but in the complex dynamic with the resistance of other bodies.

What can this possibly mean?! Well, being itself – the totality of that which is – is conceived as constituted by a series of bodies (our bodies), like a great patchwork quilt – but a quilt which we produce through our labour (we build the buildings, we make the laws, we educate the children, we write the books, we invent the aeroplanes…). It is ‘biopolitical’ because it consists of our live, biological bodies, but also of a whole network of material and immaterial political forces: law, education, language, labour, capital, etc. All of these are intertwined to form a continuous whole; if one part alters, its repercussions ripple through everything else. But it must not be imagined that the political forces completely dominate our minds and bodies; on the contrary, history is precisely the antagonism of our bodies resisting these attempts to discipline us. Indeed, in the process of resisting we constitute our very ‘subjectivity’ – i.e. what we mean when we say ‘I’, our selves. The ‘I’ is an interplay of a whole mind-boggling range of encounters, of ‘yeses’ and ‘nos’ to power, of being with others, of dominating and being dominated. These are very difficult ideas, but they should become much clearer throughout the rest of the book!

Hardt and Negri end the chapter with a section arguing that fundamentalisms (religious, nationalist, racist, and – oddly – economist) all have a double relation to the body: on the one hand they are obsessed by it – the Islamic fundamentalist enforces the veil to hide the flesh, the racist transfixes the being of another in his very skin etc. On the other hand, however, they make bodies vanish: it is not, at bottom, the bodies about which fundamentalists care, but rather the transcendent values or essences of which the body is a sign, as if it were ‘an x ray to grasp the soul’. Biopolitics, as a form of resistance, refuses to acknowledge this transcendental realm by insisting on the immanent, material dimension, on the very power of bodies themselves.

Dan Hartley

Commonwealth: 1.1 Republic of Property

Haitian Revolution

The first half of the book will focus on ‘the republic, modernity, and capital as three frameworks that obstruct and corrupt the development of the common’. There is a structural analogy here to the seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus which aims to investigate the limits of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy as political forms. (Spinoza died before writing the crucial section on democracy. It should be noted that his philosophy has been hugely influential for Negri). Hardt and Negri want to carry out an investigation which interrogates the very conditions of possibility of social life today. Capitalism is not an overt sovereign ruling over us; rather, it is invisible and functions as an impersonal form of domination, saturating our entire social field of vision – right down to our most personal experiences – without our even being aware of it.

But the first political form in which capitalism as we now know it really took root was republicanism. This is a form of government, instituted by the great bourgeois revolutions, based on the rule of property and the inviolability of the rights of private property, which excludes or subordinates those without property. In the French and American revolutionary Constitutions the position of property was sacred. And this continues right through to the constitutions of the present day. The only exception was the Haitian revolution: by freeing slaves it freed property, and hence was denied entry into the canon of republicanism.

In the final section of the chapter, the authors locate a split in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. On the one hand, there is the ‘major Kant’, the thinker who provides the theoretical foundations for a burgeoning capitalist class. On the other hand, there is the ‘minor Kant’ who not only dares to know, but knows how to dare: this is the Kant whose critical reason turns against itself and threatens to explode at any second the very philosophical foundations of the republic of property which he had just laid down. The major Kant continues today in social democratic traditions across Europe (Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck), but the minor Kant is we, the multitude: overthrowers of the republic, brothers and sisters of the Haitian emancipators, builders of the common.

Dan Hartley

Theology Blog

Here at The Night Shift our focus is predominantly political, but I think it’s important to stay in touch with what’s happening in other areas of thought. One of the most dynamic fields in which the ‘Big Questions’ are still being asked is theology, and Ben Myers’s site, Faith and Theology, is one of my favourite blogs around. It’s a great mixture of philosophical insight, open discussion and plain old good fun. Check it out!

Dan Hartley

Participatory Economics

If any of you are familiar with the idea of Participatory Economics (Parecon) I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on it.

If you’re not familiar with it, it is a socio-economic model devised by Michael Albert that has guiding values of solidarity, diversity, equity and self-management.  Equity in particular is an interesting value that describes an economy where renumeration is based solely on effort and not output.

Anyway if you’ve got a spare 10 minutes (and the inclination), have a read of this article by Michael Albert, in which he explains the theory in a very interesting and eloquent way.

John

P.S. the book recommendations were mine as well

Book Recommendations:

I’d like to recommend a couple of books that are very easy and enjoyable reads, and should also be made compulsory because they are excellent and really eye-opening.

1. The Undercover Economist

This book is kinda like Freakonomics but in my opinion a bit better.  You might not agree with everything that Tim Harford says, but he is brilliant at illustrating the power of economics and how it can be used to solve global problems.   Some of his case studies include the distribution of HIV/Aids drugs, and the environment – so very relevant.

2. Bad Science

Bad Science is great at highlighting the distinctions between ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ science.  Topics include homeopathy, the MMR vaccine,  nutrition, and cosmetics.  There is a very funny chapter about Gillian McKeith, and a really interesting chapter about the presentation of science in the media.  If you only read one of these two books (although you should definitely read both)  then read this one.

Commonwealth – Preface: The Becoming-Prince of the Multitude

Don’t be put off by the title of the preface…

Hardt and Negri begin by making an important observation: globalization has resulted in the creation of a common world, one which has no ‘outside’. Another way of saying ‘no outside’ is ‘immanent’, the opposite of ‘transcendent’. We must abandon all dreams of political purity and transcendent values and accept that this is the world in which we find ourselves, and so this is the world in which we – immanently – have to act.

They then provide a definition of their most important concept: the common.

‘By the common we mean, first of all, the common wealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty – which in classic European texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. We consider the common also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.’

There are two important things to notice here. Firstly, the common is both material and immaterial – language and knowledge are just as much things to be shared as physical goods and land. Secondly, the common in some sense already exists; it’s just that we’re so blinded by ideologies of private property that we fail to perceive it.

Hardt and Negri go on to stress that capital is now so extensive that it ‘creates, invests, and exploits social life in its entirety, ordering life according to the hierarchies of economic value.’ But if this is our world, if this is entirely immanent, how can we resist? Well, paradoxically, capital – despite its continuing drive to privatize resources and wealth – actually makes possible and even requires expansions of the common: information, codes, knowledge, images, affects, communication networks, internet technologies. We don’t need to dream up utopian, ‘outside’ ideas of how society might be organised: capitalism is providing us with the infrastructure for a social and economic order grounded in the common.

They end the preface by introducing two more concepts: poverty and love. The normal meanings are obvious, but what is the spin they put on them? Firstly, they choose to talk of poverty because it avoids falling into old-school presuppostions about class and class composition, forcing us to take into account how class has changed now that so many productive activities remain outside wage relations. Secondly, their definition of ‘poor’ is not one of lack but of possibility. ‘Our challenge will be to find ways to translate the productivity and possibility of the poor into power.’ As for ‘love’, theirs is a political love. It is beyond individualism without being sucked back into the private life of the couple or the family: it is centred on the production of the common. Both poverty and love are animated by force: intellectual force, physical force and political force. ‘Love needs force to conquer the ruling powers and dismantle their corrupt institutions before it can create a new world of common wealth.’

One last key word: the multitude. This is a hugely complex term with a political and philosophical history reaching back to Machiavelli, and which I cannot hope to explain, because I don’t yet understand it myself. On one level, it suggests something like ‘proletariat’, in the sense that it poses a revolutionary threat to the capitalist social order. But on another level, and following the philosopher Spinoza, it seems to implicate all of us: just as the common does and does not already exist, so the multitude is already in some sense here: we – the human population of the world – are the multitude, a set of singularities with the creative potential to found the common. If that sounds confusing, it’s because I’m confused.

Dan Hartley

Commonwealth – Hardt and Negri

Over the next few weeks, I shall be reading a book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt called Commonwealth. If you don’t know who they are, I suggest you Wiki them and watch ‘A Revolt that Never Ends’, an entertaining documentary on Negri which can be found on Google Videos. The book has attracted many favourable reviews from the Left, ranging from Naomi Klein through to Fredric Jameson (a Marxist cultural theorist), so it seemed like a nice intersection between ‘activist’ politics and ‘theoretical’ politics.

After each section or chapter, I shall post a summary on The Night Shift. These summaries are designed so that no prior knowledge of theory or philosophy will be necessary to understand them; where philosophical terminology is used I shall do my best to explain it. That said, I chose this book for a reason. After Julia’s post on ‘The importance of being earnest’, I realised that I didn’t want to seem like a know-it-all. And about Negri and Hardt I know nothing at all. Nor do I know anything of the traditions from which their thinking and politics proceeds. In one sense, then, this will be the blind leading the blind – and you can choose to ignore these posts because of that. On the other hand, you could look at it positively: in ‘reading’ Commonwealth together, we’ll have to create a common of our own to understand it. The book itself is meant to lead to radical political action via theory; in the process, our theorising will have to generate a practice of sharing, patience, and discussion.

Dan

PS – A message from Paul Aitken, a friend of The Night Shift:

‘As you go through this Dan and others, please feel free to check out summaries posted by myself and my friend Alex Means. The complete set is located at http://criticalstew.org, while our individual contributions are located at http://jajuna.com and http://paulaitken.com.’

These are the guys you should go to for the real McCoy philosophical interpretations!

Some thoughts on sports

As I sit here on my sofa, trying to concentrate on writing whilst simultaneously watching Sweden defeat Britain in Men’s Curling (oddly, commentated on by Paula Radcliffe), I find myself wondering why the hell I care so much. I could hardly be described as a fan of my country – given the chance I would prefer to be a citizen of literally any other European country – but I find myself unable to watch England or Britain competing in a sporting event without screaming at the TV for whoever-it-is to run faster/kick it harder/hit the other guy harder (I was exaggerating about the screaming – I’m far too middle class).

Today at work, I wasted my entire day on a very passionate argument via email with a good friend of mine (Swiss), over which of our countries could really be described as the better sporting nation. It ended with us agreeing to a year long bet, with each of us being paid by the other when our country performs better in a sports event. As an anti-capitalist who is all for the abolition of tha nation state, this did not strike me as odd at the time.

To me, sport has replaced warfare as the weapon of choice in asserting one nation’s aggression towards and dominance over another. However, it seems to be something that was entirely of our own making rather than something that was forced on us… How did that happen? Stand in the wrong part of town on derby day and you’ll likely find yourself removed by the police for your own safety. The tribalism of sport is yet another thing that divides us, another obstacle to any truly unifying movement.