tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55094752024-03-13T11:01:41.018+00:00LENIN'S TOMBStill Not Dead.Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comBlogger4848125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-57501176102063845902017-08-26T13:28:00.000+01:002017-08-26T13:28:20.565+01:00On Fetish<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">
God creates Adam and immediately—sooner than we thought—He speaks to him. This first address, according to the midrash, is a seduction: </blockquote>
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<em>“And the Lord God took the human and placed him in the Garden of Eden” (Gen. 2: 15): </em></blockquote>
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<em>He took him with beautiful words and seduced him to enter the Garden. </em> </blockquote>
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It is seduction that is constitutive of the human entry into language. Moved, captivated by divine messages that escape his full understanding, Adam lives henceforth with these unconscious transmissions implanted within him. The first act of communication, then, brings the human being to a place beyond conscious choice. 10 The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche describes in similar terms the first relationship of child and parent. The mother unconsciously transmits to her child seductive messages, which intimate aspects of her life that he is incapable of grasping. The child receives the impact of the other in all her beauty; he is dazzled by a light beyond his comprehension. The alienness of the other is registered; its unassimilable, stimulating message is locked within. From now, the child will be haunted, decentered by his unconscious life. In Freud’s words, “The ego is not master in his own house.” </blockquote>
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-- Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, <em>The Murmuring Deep</em> </blockquote>
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<strong>I</strong>.</div>
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Language seduces us into an imaginary domain, an order of images. But it is an image – as with the Apple logo betokening forbidden knowledge – that precipitates our fall. Once we can see, we can look. And once we can look, we can labour.</div>
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The garden of virtual delights we call the internet, according to Jonathan Beller, is a factory, extended in space and time. Looking is labouring, and the value of whatever is looked at is just the fetishised form of all the glances, or lingering inspections, that the image draws. Capital posits looking as labouring, and turns looking time into socially-necessary-cybertime. It binds perception to production, orchestrating the extraction of sensuous labour</div>
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Capital sets about re-making the image in its own image. The rules of verisimilarity and legibility are modelled on the social structure, so that an image which does not in some way code the norms and protocols of that structure strikes one askance. The cultural pathways of race, sex, nationality and so on are converted into images which can captivate the look, and capture the labour of looking.</div>
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The image also excludes, as fetishes do. Rather as the gaze of the shoe fetishist is always drawn short of the point where the legs meet, the image is defined by its scotomisation of reality. As long as our attention is riveted to the circulation of images-as-commodities, it is not on the social realities sustaining the spectacle.</div>
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This estrangement of the visual order, this conversion of attention into alienated labour, is what Beller calls the ‘cinematic mode of production’. True to the paranoid, psychotic structure of the theory, he can do no other than offer us a cinematic image by way of explanation. We are in <em>The Matrix</em>, the life-energy we put into the world converted into energy to run the image-world, “imprisoned in a malevolent bathosphere, intuiting our situation only through glitches in the programme.”</div>
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<strong>II</strong>.</div>
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Was it a mistake to be seduced into the garden? And how far have we fallen?</div>
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Beller’s intense, provocative, stylishly seductive work is justly celebrated. And its eerie plausibility is not just a product of the fact that it conforms to capitalist verisimilarity. Participating in social media as a user -- or "produser" as they insufferably say -- might be creative and fulfilling in some ways. But it is also tiring, draining work. It is emotionally, mentally and physically taxing. To keep the circulation of images going – to feed the feed – we have to sacrifice hours of time that we might otherwise invest in anything else. </div>
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However, if looking is labouring, it is only in a metonymic sense. Beller – not capital – posits looking as labouring. But this only works because looking stands in for all the other activities that we do online which help generate profits for tech platform firms. Looking is a condition for labour, part of the labouring process; it is not the labour itself. <em>Netflix</em>doesn’t care if you watch, it cares how much you talk about its shows, to maximise its subscriber base. Advertisers ultimately only care for your longing looks to the extent that you demonstrate a propensity to buy. This is why the extraction, analysis, packaging and sale of data is becoming such a profitable industry.</div>
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If looking were literally labour – not in the ontological sense that everything we do is labour, but in the specific economic sense of it being a source of value – we would be faced with an almighty puzzle. Here, supposedly, is a new frontier in capitalist exploitation, the harnessing of perception to production. But when, one might ask, was perception not harnessed to production? When was labour not sensual? And if perception is itself a new form of value-production, how does one measure socially-necessary perception-time? How would one calibrate the instruments? And where, as Nick Srnicek asks, is the global capitalist boom as this new seam of value is mined? Where is the dynamic expansion of brand new means of optical production? </div>
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A Rembrandt, Beller says, only has the value it does as the fetishised expression of the looks it has drawn: “all that looking sticks to the canvas and increases its value”. What is the product of this labour of looking? How would one package and sell it? It is evidently not the painting itself, as that is a product of a previous labour-process. The implication here is that there is some intangible surplus-product which has invisibly stuck to the visual. How would one go about evaluating this claim? </div>
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If looking increased the value of a visual object, we would face an interesting paradox. In perhaps the majority of cases, accumulating more looks does not improve the market value – the realisable value – of a visual object. One need only think of the immense proliferation of visual items on the internet whose marketable value does not increase as a result of exposure (memes, for example). And so, just as a visual object is accumulating more and more value (as socially-necessary looking-time), it is becoming less and less possible for this value to be realised. This would be grounds for the economy of visuality to grind to a halt, not for it to become the basis of a new, spectacular mode of production.</div>
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But that implies dysfunction, and breakdown which, lip service aside, has no place in the “totalitarian social space” described in Beller’s thesis, where the language of capital has been introjected into the “sensorium”. </div>
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<strong>III</strong>.</div>
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In the Lacanian terms of which Beller avails himself, the subject wholly trapped in the order of images, is psychotic. </div>
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Lacking a symbolic structure to give structure to the imaginary world, the psychotic depends on a knot of delusion to hold it all together. Should it unravel, the subject would be exposed to a terrifying chaos of experience. And a delusion is not in the order of belief, about which one can entertain doubts: it is experienced as certainty, as an objective, intrusive reality. For that reason, psychotic delusion is often discernible not by its incoherence, but by its spurious and often elaborate coherence. </div>
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Yet in Beller’s bold attempt to re-work psychoanalysis in historical materialist terms, the unconscious itself is posited as a product of industrial capitalism and its order of visuality. The unconscious first appears through a gap, a place where the symbolic order breaks down, where speech slips, and in that gap – so Beller claims – around which all the signifiers float and circulate, is an image, the <em>objet petit a</em>, the object-cause of desire. It is, in fact, passing strange to have the object-cause defined as an <em>image</em> when what defines it is precisely that it eludes capture by both the symbolic and imaginary registers. </div>
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Nonetheless, the critical step here is to link Marxism and psychoanalysis through the fetish. The commodity-image, like all fetishes, acts as a screen which excludes: in this case, it is the totality of the social process which is screened out. Capital itself therefore acts as a screen in which the ‘socius’ is both processed and repressed, a tendency that is raised to a new level with the regime of visuality. A regime in which the technologies of optical production open up and fill our lines of sight with the fetishised, spectacular of social experience.</div>
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Fetishism, then, does all the heavy lifting in the 'cinematic mode of production', rescuing it from a structure of psychotic delusion. But this move depends on a common and questionable tendency in left cultural writing, wherein terms like ‘fetishism’ and ‘reification’ are extricated from the complex series of epistemological operations that they are embedded in, and generalised to their overall impoverishment. For example, with due care, the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism could be deployed in the critique of ideology, but to treat it as coextensive with fetishism in its political-economic sense strikes me as stretching both concepts beyond repair.</div>
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The grounds for their congruity is clear. In both cases, fetishism arises as a consequence of a form of <em>alienation</em>, which it covers up. In both cases, the fetish operates as a kind of imperialist, bringing all reality under its command, mobilising all investments around its own munification. If the sexual fetish is experienced as a kind of force-multiplier, promising more intense orgasms than could be achieved outside of its shadow, that is because of its tendency to monopolise all possible libido investments. If it represents a guarantee of satisfaction, the fetish is also a reduction of the repertoire, a narrowing of the field of attention. Likewise, the fetishised product of the capitalist labour process acquires a strange magic because it has come to embody the human labour-power expended in making it, while also scotomising the wider field of social relations.</div>
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These are, however, extremely sketchy correspondences. In the psychoanalytic sense, a fetish is constructed around a castration. In a classic case of fetishism, a man could only be aroused by a woman wearing rows of buttons. The signifier ‘button’ played an important, overdetermined role in this fetish, linked to many memories in which, for example, both his and his mother’s sex organs had been described as a button. His mother had essentially used him as a narcissistic prop, a little penis, until finally, and belatedly, a form of separation was achieved and he acquired his own subjective existence. But he continued to be plagued by the idea that his mother might not have a penis, might need him to be her penis, and thus might eat him, swallow his whole being like a whale (or like a malevolent bathosphere, as if Beller and the MRAs might converge on the idea that <em>The Matrix</em> is a ravenous, castrated mother). The fetish was a compromise solution which enabled him to disavow his mother’s castration, and his own.</div>
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An obvious question, then, is whether the ‘alienation’ achieved in the capitalist labour process can in any meaningful sense be described as a castration – even an imperfectly, partially-achieved one. It is a commonplace that in Marx’s terms, alienation refers to several discrete ideas. There is the alienation of one’s labouring capacities under the control of capital. There is the alienation of the products of labour, which one encounters as fetishised embodiments of labour power ‘on the market’. And there is, in the early Marx, the idea of an alienation from one’s ‘species-being’, one’s labouring essence. It is only in the latter sense, that one could speak of an alienation that produces a mourning for a fantasised ‘lost wholeness’, for which a fetish might cover and compensate. But in what sense would this produce an unconscious? Only in the sense, according to Beller, that the unconscious is a realm of production, and production is one with the repressed. The unconscious, then, is not a point of failure of capitalist subjectivisation, but a wholly integrated component of a totalitarian social space. Here we have a split subject working seamlessly and productively for capitalism. Beller disavows the Adornian conclusion that human interiority has been ‘liquidated’ and replaced by the culture industry, and in principle leaves space for ‘extra-economic creativity’ on the part of the masses – but this concession is in no way integrated into his theoretical apparatus. </div>
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And this raises the question of whether Beller is using fetishism qua concept, or, in an ideological sense, practicing fetishism. Whether, in fact, the higher level of articulation and abstraction that he attributes to capitalism under the reign of visuality is in fact a theoretical reification, and thus a fetishised production of his own paranoid style.</div>
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<strong>IV</strong>.</div>
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But if this <em>is</em> paranoia, then it is far from unique. Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ is, in the terms of its own theory and poetics, yet another magisterial account of the internet as a totalitarian space.</div>
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The central figure of Zuboff’s analysis is not the deterritorialised factory, but the corporation as a new sovereign – which she calls, without any explicit Lacanian reference, the Big Other. In this view, what big data firms like Google achieve is not the exploitation of a new and potentially limitless seam of value, but the redistribution of citizenship rights. They monopolise privacy, acting with state-like secrecy, while abrogating the privacy rights of their users. Through unilateral action, facts-on-the-ground, they extract a new commodity called data, with no necessity for a feedback loop with populations who aren’t even their real customers.</div>
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Zuboff’s case is that ‘surveillance capitalism’ is a distinctive ‘logic of accumulation’ following on from Fordism and financialisation. The ramifications of information technology can be so drastic because of what distinguishes it from ordinary machinery: it “reflects back on its activities and the system of activities to which it is related”, making a whole series of new objects visible for the first time. There has been “a comprehensive textualisation of the work environment”. “The world is reborn as data and electronic text is universal in scale and scope”. <br /><br />Whereas neoliberalism posited a market that was intrinsically ineffable and unknowable, every actor engaging on the basis of optimal stupidity and blindness as to the total, majestic logic of the market, now the market is known, and shaped, through data extraction. The more economic transactions are mediated by computing, the more flows of objects, goods, bodies and services can be tracked by sensors and chips, the more surveillance cameras and government and corporate records produce digital knowledge, and the more of every day experience is recorded and accumulated as data (cf Google Street View), the more markets can be pro-actively anticipated, produced and shaped. Reality itself is monopolised and commodified: becoming, in Polanyi’s terms, a fictitious commodity.</div>
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Online platforms thus structure their protocols in such a way as to engage in users in producing harvestable data: likes, searches, texts, photos, emails, mis-spelled words, clicks, all of which can be analysed, aggregated and sold. Data is extracted indiscriminately, without informed consent: an offer is made, a hook is dangled, addictions are solicited, but on the basis that the user is never told how the service is paid for. It is not a contract but a seduction. </div>
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The ever-spreading web of data collection enables firms not only to predict which customers will buy or invest based on the profiles constructed by Facebook or Google, but also to track which ones have bought, based on their clicks through to Amazon and other services. Firms can adjust, modify and change the contracts they offer in response to growing knowledge about customers. And of course, thanks to Snowden, we know a little of how big data relates to the security apparatuses of national states.</div>
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These processes, Zuboff argues, are not only objectionable because big data violates our privacy. These processes are reconfiguring power, producing “chilling effects of anticipatory conformity”, such that acquiescence is no longer extracted through threats of force or ideological compulsion, but “disappears into the mechanical order of things and bodies”. Authority is replaced by technique, and behaviourism becomes, not a social theory, but a potential social reality.</div>
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Like Beller, Zuboff tries to disavow the paranoid logic of the theory by declaring that there is a space for resistance, and that the major force conniving in securing consent for this new mode of sovereignty is ignorance. But, of course, ignorance can’t be regarded as innocent, any more than the ignorance which allows people to rely on tabloids for their information, or which allows people to entertain grotesquely racist beliefs. It is saturated with jouissance, a <em>will-not-to-know</em>.</div>
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And this raises the question of where the ‘user’ or ‘produser’ fits in. Somewhere between Zuboff’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ and Beller’s ‘deterritorialised factory’, there is a subject.</div>
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<strong>V</strong>.</div>
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The relationship between repulsion and attraction resembles that between the two edges of a Mobius strip. On the one side, there is a powerful repellent force which we call phobic; on the other, the intense libidinised attraction, which we call a fetish. As Fanon said of the racialized body, the same object, appearing in different guises and contexts, can be both phobic and fetishistic. The man with the buttons fetish had to see several of them in a row in order to be aroused; a single button was abhorrent to him. </div>
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In this sense, technophobia and technophilia are different arrangements of the same fetishistic orientation. Blaming the internet, and boosting the internet are both potentially in the position of ascribing to it characteristics which properly belong to human communities. It is clear enough that online media constitute new types of social relationship, characterised by the ‘weak ties’ – someone can ‘like’ you, or a photograph of you, or your current mood or situation, without it meaning much. And it’s equally clear that part of the ‘magic’ of new technologies, from tablets to Twitter, is to keep us talking about the phenomenal things they enable, without thinking too much about the constraints they impose. After all, ‘likes’ and ‘reacts’ are just an objectified, reduction-to-quantifiable-metrics of otherwise qualitatively complex interactions. And, as we know from Zuboff and Srnicek, the reason we are offered the possibility of interactions of this kind is so that they can be tracked, analysed, packaged and sold.</div>
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So, there is an assemblage of technologies, institutions and users, but these are all formatted by the logic of competitive accumulation. Nothing takes place on Facebook or Twitter or Google unless it can potentially give rise to a saleable commodity. Far from it being the case that merely looking is labour, we find that we have to engage in a set of measurable, recordable activities which are of use to advertisers.</div>
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But, the relationship between capital and its markets, and between platforms and their user populations, is a social relationship. And like all social relationships they’re subject to antagonism, dysfunction, and sometimes resistance. Where online corporations introduce new copyright-protecting devices, others find ways of routing around it. Where Apple tries to limit your choices, there will always be ‘jailbreak’ software and other work-arounds. Where corporations collect, hoard and monetise your data, to the extent that they can come to know you better than you know yourself, users increasingly use proxies, ad-blockers and anti-tracking software. Increasingly, political movements and parties are paying attention to these issues. The idealisation of our new economy overlords has broken down, and silicon oligarchs are coming under increasing scrutiny both as cash-hoarders and data-hoarders.</div>
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The efficacy of any moves to put democratic manners on post-democratic platform capitalists depends in part on how well they, and their opponents, each understand the way users relate to the technologies. We must assume that Facebook and Twitter, having accumulated so much data, understand their users well. They understand, not just what their users actually want from the service, but what they <em>think</em> they want. Their marketing strategies, as well as the way in which they format their platforms, tell us what they see. </div>
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Think about the way in which services like Periscope or Facebook Live let everyone know you’re watching, so that it is as though you are a participant in events. Think about the way Twitter has <a href="https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/757561453079474178" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">marketed</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/757561586030551040" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">itself</a>as a place to see “what’s happening”, where the world and all its drama and novelty will be fed to you in edible bites. Think about how Facebook advertises itself as the place where real social encounters happen, where remote or long lost loves can be virtually embraced across oceans. </div>
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The ideology of social media is that it’s like having a servant or a butler, thus democratising luxury. The ideology of social media is that it enhances and extends our agency by offering us a magical, cyborg-like expansion of our earthly powers. The ideology is that somehow it both does things for us, enabling us to live and act vicariously, and enables us to do more in the world, to be more places, to act at a greater distance and on a greater number of people. The ideology is that there is limitless plenty online, away from the tragic world of offline scarcity: just log-in, it’s abundant and it’s free. The ideology is that the technology and its protocols can achieve our goals for us.</div>
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This is the seduction, what leads us into the garden into the first place. It is fetishism. Is there any doubt that the platform firms have understood us well? In an hour online, you might sign up to a job-search site and upload your CV, in the hope that the technology will achieve your objectives for you, by finding you a job. You might share content made by other people on your wall, and let the Facebook technology accumulate a react-count while you do other things, thus sustaining a set of weak relationships on your behalf. You might sign an online petition or download an app that explains where to flashmob, in the belief that the internet would do your political organising for you. You might vicariously participate in major news events, or festivals or concerts.</div>
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We all know perfectly well that it doesn’t really work this way. The technology chiefly enables us to engage in a strictly defined, delimited and formalised set of interactions. If we want anything beyond that, we have to do it ourselves, knowing full well that it will become part of someone’s data empire. We know that social media ‘abundance’ is just another form of scarcity, that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing, and that our engagement with online ‘abundance’ will tend to lead us into paying for some goods and services that have been carefully marketed for us, anticipating and precipitating our desires. We know that the social ties we form online are weak, and that a like might be worth less than a handshake, or more than a smack in the mouth. We know this, but the technology enables us, invites us, to behave as if that wasn’t the case. As though the technology was a guarantor of our satisfaction, when we know it is no such thing.</div>
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Fetishists, though, always find what they’re looking for. If your thing is a pair of leather boots, say, then you’ll notice occurrences of them everywhere, and keep a mental catalogue thereof. Likewise, if a theorist’s kink is fetishism, chances are they’ll find plenty of it. As a rule, left-Lacanians do find it. And the problem here is that the theoretical optic of fetishism can act to perform the same disavowal as fetishism itself. The fetishist’s position is: ‘I know these leather boots aren’t magic, but I’ll get a kick out of pretending they are’. That’s a form of ambivalence in which the truth is both affirmed and denied in the name of enjoyment. Critically, however, the fetishist doesn’t acknowledge the ambivalence. And when theorists take the category of fetishism for granted, as a stable structure of meaning, they too are occluding the ambivalence embedded in it – and thus, the possible sources of change. </div>
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After all, we knew it was a seduction when we came into the garden. We knew there would be trouble, and there was. We were and are not completely ignorant, even if we have been ambushed by the knowledge of just how dark and brutal this place can be. Given this, if we have become part of this machinery and ceded parts of our reality to it, that is at least in part because the ideology, the seduction, plausibly operates on our valid desires. The ‘sell’ of the platforms could not have been based in a complete unreality. And it had to perform favourably, in at least some respects, with traditional media alternatives.</div>
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A fetish is a compromise solution. And when the compromise breaks down, and when we are confronted with its failure, with its diminishing returns, with the fact it no longer guarantees satisfaction and perhaps never did, compromise gives way to conflict. We are torn, necessarily. We could be enticed by an intervention seeking to get the fetish up and running again. A new Twitter policy to clamp down on bullies. A new voluntary charter for social media firms. A new anti-fake news initiative. Or we could be persuaded to give up the fetish, and try another way.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-49253633022478827712017-08-26T13:27:00.002+01:002017-08-26T13:27:16.571+01:00Identity, love and death<strong style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">I</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">. Identity, in the modern sense, is necrological. It is an obituary notice. It overwrites us, in lapidary fashion, with the deposit of history. Here lies the subject: sex, race, class, nation. A list of attributes.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Given this, it is striking how little effort we put into historicising identity. As Marie Moran points out, prior to the Cold War, the term 'identity' tended to be used very little. Where it was used, it was only in its narrow philosophical sense, of the 'sameness of an entity to itself'.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">From the first green shoots of identity-talk in the 1950s to the </span><a href="http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank"><ins>Combahee River Collective Statement</ins></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> in 1977, identity slowly became the dominant idiom for understanding the shared experience of oppression. It was projected backward into history, so that Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and W E B Du Bois became pioneers of identity politics.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Forty years later, amid an explosion of identity-talk permitted by the internet, it is still unclear what we are actually talking about when we're talking identity. It is difficult to even pose the question because we talk about identity as though it were self-evident; as if the self was evident, and evidence of itself.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Yet the polyglossic proliferation of individual, corporate, political and national identities, and identity crises -- the mere </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">idea</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> that a corporation could have an identity and an identity crisis -- is surely novel enough to demand explanation. Is 'identity' a new concept, or a new label for an old concept, or just a label without any real conceptual integrity?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><strong style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">II</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">. The growing cultural fetish of ancestry, emblematised in the BBC television series, 'Who Do You Think You Are?', is based on the premise that something in our identity eludes us, and is bigger than us. The claim is that we have been unknowingly identifying with the dead.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">The characteristic double-take of identity is that it is somehow both about singularity and belonging. Our identity is who we uniquely are, but it is also the weight of history. It is both difference and belonging.</span><br />
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To be too identified with the group would be experienced as oppressive. And yet, one of the worst forms of social punishment is banishment from the group, with its rehearsals in childhood: "go and stand in the corner, facing the wall."</div>
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Conformity is to be mocked, but so is pretension, and we are always doing both. Our communities, our mother-tongues, attract us and repel us. They give us our places from which to speak, our ways of being, with which we both identify and dis-identify.<br /><br />Sticking with the theme of childhood, isn't one of the earliest experiences of identification our finding out who we are and what we're like from our parents? They tell us what we need -- does baby need feeding? does baby need wiped? They mirror back to us what they perceive as our traits. Naturally, this reflects their own fantasies and fears. Later, when we're asked to describe ourselves, often we're describing these early descriptions.<br /><br />So if identification in one sense is an identification with history, the dead, in another sense it is an identification with the descriptions of ourselves offered by others. We call the latter a personality. And a personality is just a more-or-less convenient fantasy to enable us to survive and get along without tearing one another apart.<br /><br />It seems obvious that neither history nor the mirroring of others can fully capture who we are, for all that we might put every ounce of spare energy into fortifying our identities. We could never be fully self-identical. That is why, as Rimbaud put it, "I is another". Or, as per <em>Othello</em>, "I am not what I am".<br /><br />And why we can never be anything other than ambivalent about identities, which are always ambivalent about us: they chew us up but they spit us out as well.</div>
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<br /><strong>III</strong>. Ambiguity and complexity are not necessarily disadvantages. Not knowing what we're talking about is never a bad place to begin, as long as it enables us to de-familiarise 'identity'; to dis-identify with it.<br /><br />If 'identity' is a complex concept, it might well be what Moran, following Raymond Williams, calls a keyword.<br /><br />A key compresses lots of complex information, enabling us to quickly decode or unlock something. A keyword condenses complex and various meanings because it describes, informs and is part of equally complex social changes.<br /><br />From this point, the bewildering polysemy of identity is useful, because it gives us an enviable point of access to the way in which social practices and institutions covered by it have been evolving. And anyway, as Moran shows, the complexity can be pared down for analysis to three types of meaning: legal identity, personal identity, and social identity.<br /><br />The legal sense of 'identity' tells us something about the rise of political controls, policing techniques, borders, and so on. A legal person must be self-identical for the purposes of prosecution or deportation. The distribution of modern citizenship rights depends on identity in this sense, as the contemporary panics about 'identity theft' and 'identity fraud' demonstrate.<br /><br />The personal sense of identity brings with it something else, on top of self-sameness: the idea of identity as a substantive property and proprietorial substance. It is something we can own: 'my' identity, 'my' uniqueness, 'my' belonging. The qualities described as identity are assumed to be both in some sense 'deep', at one's 'core', and yet also fluid and constructed. Identity in this sense is also something that can be consumed; we can introject objects offered to us on the market, invest them with libido, and make of them a new side of our selves.<br /><br />The third, social sense of identity, would appear at first glance to be a purely external idea of identity: your identity is just how the world has classified you. And yet it also usually invokes a substantive property inherent in the group, something internal and common to all its members, which must in turn be registered publicly and politically.</div>
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<br /><strong>IV</strong>. What is clear is that at least these last two senses of identity entail a form of essentialism; the substantial self-sameness of individuals and communities, howsoever conceived, being of the essence. But if identity is a reifying category, what is it that is being reified, and how?<br /><br />According to Moran, it is the 'social logic of capitalism' itself which, by governing the range of people's actions, incentives, expectations, motives and commitments, produces certain distinctly capitalist patterns of signification. Signification, as a means of semantic production, depends for its repertoires on the everyday, ordinary practices and behaviours that it arises in.<br /><br />Identity-talk, therefore, derives some of its common-sensical force from the surrounding framework of property rights, and possessive individualism: the idea that we are the proprietors of our own distinctive qualities. The ability to master and dispose of these qualities is the essence of capitalist freedom. The ability to acquire and trade off, to brand and re-brand, is at the core of practical citizenship.<br /><br />Likewise, in the post-war era, the emergence of consumption as a major social and cultural activity, as a leisure pursuit, and then as a social-comparative and competitive pursuit, lent itself to the idea that we could consume different selves -- because, in fact that is exactly what we began to do.</div>
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The emergence of modern forms of security and biopolitics, with rights and state access predicated on identity built over the edifices of older forms of racial sovereignty and patriarchy, would add another layer to the cultural force-field in which identity emerged as a keyword.</div>
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It would, of course, be at best negligent and at worst culpable to leave it at capitalist common sense. There are other senses, residual cultures, resistant formations, and they too shape the conflicted structure of identities.</div>
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<strong>V</strong>. This brings us back to ambivalence, a dynamic played out every day in our relationships with others.<br /><br />The romantic relationship merely has the potential to raise this omnipresent force to its most volatile pitch. The romantic relationship, with its swings between desire and repulsion. The separation anxiety and intrusion anxiety. The orgasmic melting of bodies and the post-nuptial separation and need to be alone, and conversely the blazing row followed by blissful make-up sex. The strange ecstasies of the hatefuck wherein identification and dis-identification are combined. We are always striving for, and not finding, the 'right distance' from the moving object of our identifications.<br /><br />Part of being in nature and yet unnatural is that we are social animals, yet also anti-social, yearning toward unity and separation. According to Paul Verhaeghe, this is nothing less than the pull of Eros and Thanatos. Which is to say that identity is both eroticised and necrotised. </div>
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Now that this is integrated within the infrastructure of platform capitalism, -- wherein identities are as fragile as the weak ties sustained online and yet essentialised and procured and cultivated like property -- don't we see this erotic and necrotic dialectic of identity played out everyday online? Isn't it the sadomasochistic script of our combined self-identifications and self-loathings, without any mediating ludic structure?<br /><br />The tempestuous rows within internet communities, the toxic pulsions of identification and dis-identification, the passionate solidarities and sudden rows when we find we're not really as alike as we thought. The libidinised investment in online 'celebrities' which turns suddenly and horrifically awry once our identifications disappoint us and we begin to berate and degrade them.<br /><br />Identity is, yes, necrological. It is also -- and co-constitutively -- passionately erotic.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-36718916418983952022017-08-26T13:26:00.003+01:002017-08-26T13:26:36.371+01:00Racism and child sexual abuse<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40879427" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">Operation Sanctuary</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> has uncovered, prosecuted and convicted members of another large child sex grooming ring, this time in Newcastle.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">As is always the case when the majority of the perpetrators are not white, this has provoked a 'debate' about race, that vacillates between the hand-wringing and the downright sinister. </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-40886658" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">Sarah Champion MP</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">has managed </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-40886658" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">both</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">, attacking the Tories from the right on race, and berating the "floppy left" for finding anything problematic in this. In particular, Champion avers that these offenders are "predominantly Pakistani" and castigates the government for not investigating this. Such debates are not provoked when the perpetrators are white, and this tells us something about the role of "race and culture" as talking points.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Now, contrary to what Champion claims, she is not breaking new ground here. Back in 2012 when a string of major child sex abuse stories, inculpating politicians, celebrities, senior police and others, exploded onto the national news, there was also a national panic about Muslim men as a result of child sex rings in the north. Keith Vaz MP </span><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9719000/9719588.stm" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">explained on BBC Radio</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> that one in five of the perpetrators of child sex grooming are British Asians. He was drawing on data from the </span><a href="http://ceop.police.uk/Publications/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">Child Exploitation and Online Protection</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> centre.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Even he wasn't breaking new ground, merely reiterating what Jack Straw MP had said years before. This is an old and dishonourable tactic by a certain kind of politician. In particular, it is Labour politicians who think that they have to demonstrate their un-PC credentials by pandering to racism.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">That this is in fact what Champion is doing, and knowingly, is disappointing given her record. She won her seat by defeating a toxic Ukip campaign orchestrated precisely on the axis of a panic about child abuse, implicating British Asians as a menace to white sexual innocence. Ukip claimed that Labour was more worried about political correctness and not being racist than in protecting white British kids.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Champion did not, at the time, concede ground to the racist fearmongering. She, as a professional with direct experience in dealing with child abuse, knows the literature and expertise well enough to refute race-baiting. And she increased Labour's majority. Now she is repeating the Ukip lines.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">There are a few things to clarify before a sensible discussion can even be had. First of all, "race and culture" should not be spoken in the same breath, as if they are the same type of thing. Cultures exist, but they are raggedy in outline, porous, and changeable. Their outlines are more like weather fronts than borders. Races don't exist, except as a political and ideological construct. The idea that any one specific culture could be imputed to British Asian men is incoherent.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Second, as an elementary point of logic, correlation is not causation. Commenting on the CEOP figures, an investigator </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/14/child-grooming-sexual-abuse-race" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">told The Guardian</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">that the higher representation of British Asian men in the data is likely to reflect not 'race' or 'culture' in these cases, but occupation. In other words, these grooming rings were made possible by a night-time economy populated by young girls moving between taxis and fast food outlets. Which, given a racial segregation of the labour force, meant that there was a unique opportunity for a small number of men, mostly British Asian in the case of Operation Sanctuary, to generate a grooming circuit, based on attention, flattery, parties, booze and drugs. Relatedly, where biases toward the over-representation of a particular minority group have been found among child sex abusers, typically it is because </span><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140909112603.htm" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">race is indexed to other factors that make children vulnerable</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">, such as class.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Third, proof of the stereotypical nature of this debate is Champion's claim that gang-related child sexual abuse is "predominantly Pakistani". This is often asserted, but there's no evidence for it, and the CEOP figures simply </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/14/child-grooming-sexual-abuse-race" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank">don't bear that out</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">. "Just 35 of the 415 Asians are recorded as having Pakistani heritage and thus highly likely to be Muslim, and only five are recorded as being from a Bangladeshi background. The heritage of 366 of the Asian group is not stated in those figures." As a result, the CEOP is quite explicit about its inability to draw any nationwide conclusions based on the fragmentary and partial nature of its data. It depends entirely on data deriving from cases reported to a police unit investigating these crimes.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Fourth, the construction of child abuse along racial or national lines depends entirely on how you focus your search. The majority of sex offenders in the UK, according to </span><a href="http://shura.shu.ac.uk/600/1/fulltext.pdf#page=4" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink; white-space: pre-line;" target="_blank"><ins>statistics</ins></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;"> collected by Sheffield Hallam University, are white. In the figures collected in 2007, 5.6 per cent of the sex offender population was 'South Asian' by origin, and 81.9% white. Taking into account the fact that this was the prison population, and that there are racial biases in the criminal justice system from arrest to prosecution, it would be surprising if these figures didn't exaggerate the representation of British Asians among the sex offenders population.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Fifth, one reason for the extraordinarily high rate of estimated non-disclosure is that the majority of sexual assaults are inflicted on children. And abuse selects for vulnerability. This means that there is, even in the best official data, a huge zone of blindness. But with the data we have, it is possible to say that the majority of child sex abuse is not like the grooming cases. It usually involves one-to-one assaults, in a residence, either first thing in the morning, during after-school hours, or at midnight. So, attempting to draw wider conclusions about the nature of child sexual abuse from the high profile grooming cases is at best a mistake.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">The problem with Sarah Champion's intervention is not that she wants to talk about culture. If we started to talk about the cultural biases and cognitive distortions that enable abusers, that would require a careful and nuanced discussion, which would take into account the specific ways in which different groups of offenders -- be they the abusers at Kincora Boys Home, the groomers of Rotherham and Newcastle, or the fathers who assault their children ongoingly -- are informed by their cultural self-understandings, their religion, their socioeconomic position, and so on. It would not try to simplify all this by forcing it through the morally charged and oppressive grid of race.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">To reinforce race as the appropriate framework for analysis and police action is to, as Sarah Champion admits, raise the pitch of nationwide Islamophobia. It is also to add one more giant weapon to the arsenals of silence. Children don't speak out for many reasons. In part because they fear they will not be believed, in part because they fear punishment or revenge. But one of the best known reasons is their fear of the process of accountability and prosecution itself. Their fear, in a word, that the process will run out of their control, that it will have consequences well beyond their intentions. If you turn child sex abuse into a national morality tale about race relations in 21st century Britain, you haven't made it easier for people to speak -- </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">especially children who are particularly vulnerable because of the way they are racialised</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Because contrary to Champion's claims, this sort of intervention is not about protecting children. Racism is not child protection.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><ins style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">Addendum</ins><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">: Since I wrote this, Sarah Champion has taken to the pages of <i>The Sun</i> to further incite racial hatred. The headline: "British Pakistanis ARE raping white girls ... and we must face up to it". Followed by the first sentence: "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls." </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">It is not trivial to point out that the majority of those arrested, prosecuted and convicted in this latest grooming circle in Newcastle are not Pakistani. To respond to this case by, as Champion has from the start, inciting against Pakistani men, is to conflate all the men with brown skin who were arrested, be they Iraqi, Bangladeshi, or Indian into a sort of racial amalgam, a Muslamic horde. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">It also goes without saying that Champion styles herself as someone very brave and original, as though what she is saying has not been said over and over again by opportunistic Labour MPs, Tories, Ukippers, Sun columnists, and so on. "There. I said it. Does that make me a racist?" She asks. Yes.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-74968952654632219952017-08-26T13:25:00.001+01:002017-08-26T13:25:45.999+01:00Dropping like bees<strong style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">I</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">. I'm in Iceland, watching bees feverishly court the foxgloves in the stinging cold. </span><br />
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They're working as though there weren't a billion tiny specks of rain drifting down on them like smoke. As though it really were summer.</div>
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And I am abruptly reminded of the need for this frantic labour. If the bees were to disappear as a species, humans will join them. Some say within four years. We will drop like bees, by the billions, famished.</div>
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We depend, albeit obliviously for most of our existence, on the bees for a huge amount of the food we eat. The mere work of pollination is worth billions -- of people, and pounds. It is worth tonnes and tonnes of exportable crops.</div>
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The sudden, sharp collapse of bee colonies across Europe and North America over the last century has been, gradually and reluctantly, correlated with capitalogenic climate change. A body of research tracking the relationship has begun to develop. Certain <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/14/pesticides-could-wipe-out-bumblebee-populations-study-shows" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">pesticides</a> may also accelerate the problem, beyond the point of repair.</div>
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The interesting thing about the phenomenon of colony collapse is that it resembles an abrupt and irreversible work stoppage. The workers bees simply quit, walk off the job, leaving enough food for the short-term survival of the queen and infants.</div>
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We all sort-of-knew of, but took for granted, the sexual and reproductive labour of pollination. Until the possibility of its sudden withdrawal brutally forced us to face up to an unacknowledged dependence. One species-death brings another in its wake.</div>
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<strong>II</strong>. Let's say it again: we sort-of-knew. And we sort-of-know about multitudes of other ecological dependencies, even if we proceed as though we didn't know. </div>
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The term for sort-of-knowing but ignoring is disavowal. In psychoanalytic terms, we disavow in order not to admit our castration, our dependence. And this particular disavowal is an operation of capitalist social relations. </div>
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It is not that it would be a good idea to re-enchant the earth, even were that possible. But disenchantment, as Adorno & Horkheimer have shown from one perspective, and Carolyn Merchant from another, was part of a gigantic civilizational rupture as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth century, bring new modes of oppression and exploitation with it.</div>
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The augmentation of the early modern state as it struggled to manage the emergent capitalist system. The acceleration of the Reformation into a continent-wide war that consumed eight million lives, produced a demographic crisis, and triggered the formation of a new states system. The enclosures and witch-hunts, the re-regimentation of gender on the basis of a division between public and private. The transformation of animisms, magical practices and alchemies of the Renaissance into the mechanistic, experimental sciences of the Enlightenment.<br /><br />The gains of this continental cataclysm, of course, need little elaboration here. We enjoy perpetually longer lives, expanding capacities, mobilities, and literacies, and perhaps even the possibility of human emancipation before human annihilation, because of the progressive part of that explosion. </div>
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But, bringing with it a new set of social relations, it also brought with it a new set of conceptual distinctions and dichotomies. Above all, the creation of 'Nature' as a distinct and subordinate realm of being, over which 'Man' enjoyed dominion. And if Francis Bacon liked to imagine 'Nature' as a woman, to be interrogated, chastened, and brought under control, the division of being envisioned here would see women, workers, and black and colonised subjects, placed firmly in the camp of 'Nature'. </div>
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If the disenchanted earth, atomistic and mechanistic, was finally regarded as being so available for domination, it was because it had been deprived of anything that could be regarded as agency. It was a raw material, potentially resistant, but otherwise strictly dependent and subordinate.</div>
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<strong>III</strong>. In this way, capitalism obscured its own conditions of possibility, even as the screen image of capital as a sleek, immaterial, weightless spirit is perpetually obscuring its vulgar agrarian origins, its basis in the exploitation of plant, animal and human labour.</div>
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The disavowal of what we sort-of-knew has consequences. If we cannot simply re-enchant the earth, we need to re-discover <em>at the level of theory</em> what has been blotted out of everyday perception.<br /><br />This starts with the acknowledgment that, as Jason Moore puts it, capitalism is a civilizational order that is "co-produced by humans and the rest of nature". It depends as much on the unpaid work and energies of forests, rivers, and wind, as on the unpaid work of women and slaves. Capitalism is a "multispecies affair". The bees work for capitalism.<br /><br />There is, as Moore suggests, not only the "socially necessary labour-time" of commodified labour, but also the "socially necessary unpaid work" of uncommodified labour, which "crosses the Cartesian boundary" between 'Human' and 'Nature'. </div>
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To make all this labour happen on terms commensurate with capitalist production, capitalists and states have to take hold of, observe, measure, classify and code all the various 'natures', human or not. They have to subject them to a capitalist grid of intelligibility, which is the grid of commodity production. All of these processes, wherein different forms of 'nature' are converted into preconditions for capital, Moore calls "<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264457281_The_Capitalocene_Part_II_Abstract_Social_Nature_and_the_Limits_to_Capital" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">abstract social nature</a>".</div>
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This, drawing directly on Donna Haraway's work, demystifying and dismantling the nature/culture opposition, assigns its findings a specific theoretical value within marxism. And in so doing, it gives the term "capitalocene" its proper conceptual basis (see Daniel Hartley's perspicacious but sympathetic critique <a href="http://salvage.zone/in-print/against-the-anthropocene/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">here</a>), without which it would simply be a sarcastic rejoinder.</div>
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But it brings us to this. Capitalism's "law of value" was always "a law of Cheap Nature". And yet, of course, cheap nature was always a fiction. "Abstract social nature" organises its exploitation so that its costs are externalised, driven outside the circuit of production: but they are still costs borne somewhere. And we are beginning to see where: they were piled up somewhere in the future, for generations unknown to encounter as their cataclysmic end.<br /><br />From various directions, the strains are showing, and revealing themselves to be potentially terminal. The possibilities of extinction multiply. In our thousands, in our millions.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-53952413868220649872017-07-20T20:03:00.000+01:002017-08-26T13:20:47.245+01:00Playing Dead<div style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;">
<span style="text-align: center;">“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me.” – Blaise Pascal, </span><em style="text-align: center;">Pensees</em><span style="text-align: center;">.</span></div>
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<strong>I</strong>.</div>
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In 2014, Jo Milne <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyDdVJ81Ixs" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">heard a human syllable for the first time</a>, and broke down into helpless sobs as though it were the first voice in the world. </div>
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The noise rang, she explained, with a very high pitch. The sound, rushed through her body. Sounds became irresistible, addictive. The light switch clicking on and off, the throng of water. Hearing was not simply a mental event, but a powerful somatic event. </div>
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It is always the same, when a nurse turns on the cochlear implant and the deaf begin to hear. There is a silent second of confusion and confirmation. Did I? Is it? A light switch clicks on. And then, water.</div>
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The first voice in the world, for those not born deaf, is that of the mother. We make a meal of her words. We must do so, as <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/122/37.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">Hopkins</a> implies, because we are hungry for them: “<em>Wild air, world-mothering air … My more than meat and drink,/My meal at every wink</em>.” We are hungry because we are missing something and are not at peace with the world.</div>
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The syllables which mothers begin to feed their children well before birth, might be just as overwhelming for the child to hear, and just as addictive, as they are to the congenitally deaf person hearing for the first time. Lacan called it <em>lalangue</em>: the sing-song, the music, of maternal babble.</div>
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The sing-song is a somatic event. The syllables, or letters, enter the body and mark it with enjoyment, just as Milne described. The psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire goes so far as to claim that, if you could accidentally sing these letters in a certain sequence and in a certain tone, you might plunge someone into rapture – since these letters are their unique formula for bliss.</div>
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Your relationship to speaking and silence, in other words, begins with your mother. And it begins before birth, before that first coming up for air, well before the words start to make sense.</div>
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<strong>II</strong>.</div>
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It can be both the best and worst thing in the world when the words stop. Silence creates a space in which fantasies roam free. You can hear yourself think, whether or not you like what you hear. Pascal was terrified of what he might hear given infinite space and time.</div>
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To experience an abrupt break in the flow of words, then, might be to experience time in a particular way. The usual images of time – a river, an arrow – won’t help us here.</div>
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Suppose instead that you are traversing a giant, sticky web, and with each step a new thread attaches itself to you.</div>
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More and more threads stick to different parts of you, and pull in different directions, until eventually you have to pause and try to sort it all out. </div>
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But the more you pull at this knot, or that snag, the more you get snarled and tangled up.</div>
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And you stop and think about your predicament.</div>
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And only then notice the silent observer in the corner of the web, still, implacable, waiting.</div>
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This is one way of thinking about the predicaments of life, and the temporal threads we are all caught up in, consciously or otherwise. We are all doing time, all working to various schedules, tangled up in the threads of expectation and commitment, some of which we know nothing of.</div>
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Silence in that sense can be a lag, a delay, a slackening in one of the threads. It takes a while to actually decide that someone is being silent, because silence is built in to the rhythms of conversation. Maybe less than a minute in face to face conversation, an hour or so on instant messenger, a day or so by email, depending on the context.</div>
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Once you’ve ascertained that there is, indeed, a silence, it snarls up all your other threads. What is going on? Is it passive-aggressive? Is there something wrong? If I nudge, will it be rude? Can I get on with other things? </div>
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And if the relationship matters to you, and if you can’t just snap the thread, you might begin, after a period of irritation, to feel a cold anxiety creep over you. You might worry that they have died, which is a way of wishing them dead. The anxiety might seem to be about the loose thread and to what it pertains, but it also contains an awareness of that impassive, patient gaze.</div>
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<strong>III</strong>.</div>
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The linguist Colette Granger tells the story of a five year old child, who did not speak any English. Having arrived in an English-speaking kindergarten, he was completely, disturbingly silent and non-responsive for five months. Until one day the class took a trip to the zoo, and passed by a display case containing a large, reticulated python. The child was suddenly animated, grabbed his teacher, pointed at the python and said: <em>I know this! I know this! This is my home, teacher, this is my home!</em></div>
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When you learn a new language, as you usually do when you’re an infant, the first thing you do is fall silent. You might occasionally utter learned syllables, holophrastically. But for a time, there is no creative speech.</div>
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Experts on language acquisition call it a ‘silent period’, but they call it that as though they think of it as empty, an absence. As though nothing interesting is happening until someone starts talking. As though everything stops when the child is put to bed and the lights turned off.</div>
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For Granger, silence is filled with meaning: a symptom, which has something in common with the eternal oath of silence we all ultimately undertake. In dreams, muteness is a common symbol of death. In death, we are all silent, and silence is a death of the self.</div>
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But what kind of symptom could it be? In psychoanalysis, a symptom is a way of speaking; it is the grammar through which a set of existential questions are addressed to the Other. <em>Am I female or male, subject or object, alive or dead</em>? Silence, keeping mum, mummification, can be a way of playing dead.</div>
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Something is lost when we begin speaking. The linguist Roman Jakobson remarked that in learning a language, “the child loses nearly all his ability to produce sounds”. The infinite variety of noises made by a babbling child is lost forever in a kind of phonic amnesia, and only some of them are learned again. </div>
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“Perhaps,” says the philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen, “the loss of a limitless phonetic arsenal is the price a child must pay for the papers that grand him citizenship in the community of a single tongue.” </div>
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But what is also lost is the unspoken existence which was hymned with this polyphony of babble. The unspoken being still bubbles over – one might say babbles – with inarticulate meaning, speaking in tongues, but is lost to conscious experience. In learning a language, we gain an identity, a place from which to speak – “a room of one’s own,” as Virginia Woolf had it. At the same time, we give up our previous accommodation, the unspoken self, the part of experience which words somehow don’t touch. </div>
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When words are fed to us we are expected to eat, and forget about whatever it is that can’t be said. And for a while, we have no room of our own. We are in a liminal space, where the old has been lost, but the new has not been assimilated. We clam up, because there is no place from which to speak, and we are angry and troubled, and don’t know why.</div>
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Something has been lost. We are at a loss.</div>
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<strong>IV</strong>.</div>
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In this sense, silence might not just be playing dead. It might betoken that something has actually died.</div>
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Self-formation, Melanie Klein thought, is a melancholic process; the self being produced out of the traces of objects that we have lost or been separated from. What we lose when we first gain language is, by definition, beyond articulation. It is an unrepresentable, unknowable object, and so it can’t be mourned.</div>
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Part of the mourning process involves bitter reproaches to the lost object which has let us down. But it is when we don’t know <em>what it is we have lost in the object</em> because our attachment to it was always narcissistic, that we direct the reproach at ourselves and experience a terrifying existential impoverishment. When, in addition to that, the lost object itself is beyond articulation, and so couldn’t even be represented as a loss, it remains unconscious. The trauma – and it is a trauma, insofar as it completely and irreversibly transforms your inner life – becomes a psychic landmine, awaiting activation.</div>
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Of course, the loss here is illusory. The pre-language ‘self’ is a retroactive fantasy, a product of what Freud called ‘<i>Nachtraglichkeit</i>’ (deferred action). Deferred action is itself just an everyday linguistic phenomenon. Lacan gives the example of a sentence; you don’t know the meaning of the first signifier until you’ve heard the last in the sequence. And if, at an unconscious level, the sentence is only finished ten years after it began, that is one of the ways in which a trauma can be belatedly activated. </div>
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In second-language acquisition, we lose a fantasy of linguistic omnipotence. Not only because for a time we inhabit a language that we can’t master, but also because we realise that our previous linguistic self wasn’t all that we thought it was. This brings into being, activates, a primordial loss of pre-linguistic omnipotence; of the mythical time when everything was seemingly provided, sufficient, without the mediation of words.</div>
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A self is a fantasy, an image of ‘what I am really like’ by which we represent ourselves to the world. Selves are more-or-less skilful diplomats; they’re what we have to stop us from ripping each other to pieces. This is why Winnicott described the ego as a ‘false self’; but he also argued that it allowed for a ‘third’, transitional space to be created between ego and unconscious which could be the locus of creative freedom.</div>
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And what happens when you have to learn a new language, according to Granger, is that a self dies, a fantasy of mastery and competence, for a while the locus of creativity is lost, and so for all practical purposes you fall silent. You pull the coffin lid shut.</div>
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<strong>V</strong>.</div>
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What would it mean to be addicted to words? </div>
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Addiction is, in its own way, a kind of silence. Not a diction, but – as the addiction specialist Rik Loose puts it – an a-diction. Why bother speaking when you can bypass all that and get a direct line to enjoyment by mouth, nose or vein? </div>
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Perhaps this is one reason why addictions are on the rise, in an era of atomisation. Toxicomania, the administration of so-called toxic substances, is but one variant of the tendency. The addiction to the noise of social media is a dependence on another kind of toxicity.</div>
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It is well known by now, though addiction therapists seem to have no idea what to do with the information, that the same quantity of drugs have widely varying effects depending on who they’re administered to. </div>
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This suggests that the toxicity resides, not in the substance itself, but in the subject. The happy pills have no more magic than magic beans; they have a blunt somatic force but there has to be something else, a set of psychodynamics, to act on. It might be a form of unacknowledged depression, or anxiety. It might be that what the drug does is suppress a conflict, or disarm repression, freeing up a lot of psychic energy that can be experienced as euphoria. But whatever it is, the effect of the drug is meaningful, in that it has some relationship to subjective truth.</div>
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What does this have to do with sound and syllables? Let’s go back to those lines from Hopkins for a moment. The poem compares the air to the Virgin Mary. It is an act of erotically-charged idealisation. It hymns life, breath, maternity: the iambic trimeter is deliberately speedy and emphatic, the variation of couplets and triplets in the irregular stanzas conveying almost an improvised feel, as though he was singing this in prayer. But what are the unconscious conditions for this idealisation? </div>
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If the Holy Mother, the idealised mother, is “<em>My more than meat and drink/My meal at every wink</em>”, this betokens an aggressive, cannibalistic impulse that is belied in the ecstatic poetics. The Holy Mother is already dead, of course, like all ideal mothers. “<em>Not flesh but spirit now</em>.” But that’s another sense in which idealisation is a convenient cover story: a refusal and transformation of the drives. To devour the mother’s words is to devour a bit of her. To make a meal of “world-mothering air” is to make a meal of the sanctified mother, and thus of the very conditions for life, including one’s own. </div>
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The death-drive lurks here. </div>
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<strong>VI</strong>. </div>
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Silence can be a form of playing dead. And as we know from the stillness of crocodiles in the wild, just before the jaws abruptly open and snap shut, playing dead allows one to eat the other. So, playing dead, we can wait for the other to speak: and then, if they venture too incautiously, snap the jaws shut with merciless force. </div>
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However, there are many ways of wishing someone dead. And, from another point of view, cannibalism is a form of passionate identification. Or to put it another way, identification begins with eating. When orally evaluating objects as infants, we are deciding which we’d like to ingest, and which we’d like to spit out. We are deciding what objects in the external world should become part of us, or not. To eat someone’s words is to identify with them; indeed, to love them, to accept them as a master. Much as to eat the eucharist, and swallow the word of Christ, is to identify with a dead son.</div>
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What we are speaking of here, being played out in Hopkins’s poem, is a form of conflict – a contra-diction – known as ambivalence. It is, thanks to his diaries, no secret that Hopkins bitterly resented his violent father and, though more at ease with her, at least partly despised his mother for supporting the patriarch. In an unpublished rhyme, he had a character named Mrs Hopley refer to her children bidding their father goodnight: “<em>Bid your Papa goodnight. Sweet exhibition!/They kiss the rod with filial submission</em>.” </div>
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It is also fair to say that Hopkins struggled with his drives, and desires – his ‘evil thoughts’ about animals, his ‘temptations’ regarding young men, his masturbatory ‘sins’, his refusal even to eat a peach out of aversion to its juicy sweetness. It was as though he felt there was a toxicity in him.</div>
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The addict’s solution to this contra-diction is a-diction. It is to stop swallowing the word and start swallowing booze or pills instead. This is an oral short-cut, a bite through the knot of drive, desire and repression. But a short-cut to what? The junkie literature gives us the answer: death.</div>
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But this is not death as a scientific fact; it is death as psychic meaning, death-in-life. In the literature, poems and art made by men influenced by addiction, death is figured as a woman. </div>
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Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written under the influence of opium, contains these lines: “<em>Is that a DEATH? And are there two?/Is DEATH that woman’s mate? … The Night-Mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,/Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”</em> This is the repressed truth of Hopkins’s lines on the Holy Mother: “<em>Laying, like air’s fine flood,/The deathdance in his blood … Men here may draw like breath/More Christ and baffle death</em>…”. It is the Mother who is no longer alive, he fantasises, who can give life.</div>
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But to figure death as a woman is to turn death into a choice: an erotic object-choice. Properly speaking, this is a <em>denial</em> of death in the carnal sense, which is not a choice. It reflects the fact that, unconsciously, we don’t believe in the possibility of our own mortality. And yet it flirts with death, seeks a kind of fusion with it, just as the Catholic Hopkins saw in the Eucharist the possibility of a fusion with the dead mother. </div>
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And it achieves a death. Entering into a relationship with a drug, one drops out of the web of history – one’s own past and future, and that of the world – and inhabits a liminal zone beyond time. This is what is meant, or one of the things that is meant, by a death-drive. After all, what gives you your stable, intransitive existence as a subject other than your relationship to others (the Other)? A relationship that is necessarily mediated by words? If a-diction is a way of bypassing conversation, getting a direct line to enjoyment, it is also where the subject goes to die.</div>
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<strong>VII</strong>. </div>
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Bibliomania (a-diction to books), of which lexicomania (a-diction to diction-aries) is a special type, is a way of being hooked on words. Historically, the idea was linked to problems of pedagogical control: children who read too much were apt to get out of line, their thinking becoming undisciplined. It was Coleridge who complained of “the mischief of unconnected and promiscuous reading”, a phrase that is doubly telling.</div>
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It is as though reading had, by the early modern period, become a way of having one’s cake an eating it. A spurious, ‘unconnected’, long-range intimacy was made possible by the printing press. The pace, volume and nature of reading is dependent in the first instance upon an economy of production. And the rise of the printed novel enabled a glut of solitary pleasures, routing around the Other.</div>
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The way in which technologies become part of the fabric of everyday life means that over time their effects become naturalised, such that they are no longer seen as being problematic. Indeed, the idea that you might separate yourself from the habits of everyday life and read a book in tranquil solitude doesn’t seem especially pathological. I am not suggesting that a certain relationship to reading <em>can’t</em> be problematic; but certainly a great deal of the initial reaction was moral panic.</div>
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The jolting break with print culture, has brought with it an entirely new mode of “unconnected and promiscuous reading” (and a new moral panic). The idea that reading leads to flightiness of thought, excessive lightness of foot, appears much less appropriate to a linear mode of reading such as the printed book, than to the associative, hyperlinked mode of reading found on the internet. A mode reading that is strangely both connected – which depends on connection, cannot do without the Other – and unconnected.</div>
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Almost all possible addictions have been subject at some point to the displacements and exaggerations typical of moral panic, and social media addiction is no different. But moral panic takes addiction as a given, known quantity, when of course it isn’t. What I want to suggest is that addiction to words in this sense might be similar to gambling addiction.</div>
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Compulsive gamblers play with a set of signifiers – the dots on a die, the suit on a card, the symbols on a slot machine – which in themselves are utterly meaningless. They ask of these signifiers a question – “what am I? what is my destiny?” – and they stake their being on the answer that those signifiers give. And when the answer is not what they wanted, they ante up; and when it is what they wanted, they ante up again, because this struggle is timeless, eternal. They get a strange pleasure from betting everything, tied to a terrible guilt over the debts they accumulate. Of course, in the long run the house always wins: and that is the answer given to the compulsive gambler. You are a loser, and your destiny is to die.</div>
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This is just a speculation on my part – a gamble or roll of the dice – but I want to suggest that if you were to conduct an analysis of tweets, quite a lot of their contents would include signifiers that are strictly meaningless (and not just phatic terms like ‘tbh’ and ‘fwiw’). In a sense, for social media addicts, tweets are combinatories of signifiers that are rolled on to the platform like dice, as a speculative test of luck. As a way of posing the existential question. </div>
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Yes, the signifiers are not totally arbitrary, but nor are the choices that one makes in gambling (higher or lower, red or black, hit or sit, etc). No matter how random one tries to make them, they will always be determined by the laws of the unconscious. And of course, just like in gambling, in the long run the house always wins. The answer in the long run is always the same; and the addict always antes up. And having anted up yet again, against all advice and all evidence, the addict always offers the same rationalisation for doing so – one day I’ll have a big win and then I can quit. The unconscious fantasy behind such rationalisations is that they can master death.</div>
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This brings us back to another function of playing dead. It doesn’t just allow you to eat the other; it allows you to escape being eaten. Of course it is extravagantly paradoxical to describe a noisy activity like social media engagement a form of ‘silence’, a form of ‘playing dead’. To be absolutely clear, for many people it isn’t. But one way of posing the question of social media a-diction is to ask what this highly distracted kind of engagement, this unconnected connectedness, allows one to avoid saying? </div>
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The mordant irony of the compulsive gambler’s unconscious fantasy of defeating death, is that the daily conflicts, debt and guilt they build up can become so horrifying to live with that they actually kill themselves. The spread of social media suicides allows us to think that something similar could be going on there.</div>
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Playing dead, ultimately, has something in common with the eternal oath of silence we all undertake.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-39561008619056802692017-07-14T23:30:00.002+01:002017-07-14T23:30:32.088+01:00The parliamentary state of mind<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">
And we are here as on a darkling plain </blockquote>
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Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, </blockquote>
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Where ignorant armies clash by night. -- Matthew Arnold, <em>Dover Beach</em></blockquote>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Dzw-9WJ81OU/WWlF7WCy9MI/AAAAAAAAQQM/SCTME51-b687LqVoFe3bdeO_h4kCiLjWACLcBGAs/s1600/v_for_vendetta_parliament_explosion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="243" data-original-width="425" height="182" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Dzw-9WJ81OU/WWlF7WCy9MI/AAAAAAAAQQM/SCTME51-b687LqVoFe3bdeO_h4kCiLjWACLcBGAs/s320/v_for_vendetta_parliament_explosion.jpg" width="320" /></a>There is a claim in Christopher Bollas’s essay on ‘The Fascist State of Mind’, that the<em>Communist Manifesto</em>, dixit Leo Kuper, enacts a “thoroughgoing dehumanisation of the bourgeoisie”. This dehumanisation purportedly occurs in the lines on the bourgeoisie's tendency to drown everything in the icy water of egoistic calculation. </div>
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Neither author bothers to evaluate the truth value of the claim, and nor of course do they interest themselves in whether there has ever been an acceptable, consensual interpretation of marxism which says that the bourgeoisie should be physically exterminated. Rather, the dehumanisation is (presumably) alleged to be there in the unconscious of the text.</div>
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Such a reading has to be symptomatic, however, eliding as it does lengthy passages of exaltation, lionisation and heroisation. The ironic structure of the text, the literary and political dialectic, depends upon the disappointment of real possibilities created only by the existence of capitalism and of the capitalist class. </div>
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Kuper (and thus Bollas) fail as literary critics, political critics and psychoanalysts when they ignore the fundamental <em>ambivalence</em> of the Manifesto's attitude to the capitalist class. The passage from which the offending lines are extracted contains the following:</div>
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“The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. … The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. … The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. … The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate … The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. … The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. … The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”</blockquote>
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One can scarcely reconcile this with a <em>thoroughgoing dehumanisation</em>. I won't add more on the question of the text's ambivalence, since I have an essay covering this subject coming out soon.</div>
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To give the criticism its due, the lionisation makes the ensuing condemnation all the more compelling and forceful. And the creative and generative capacities of the bourgeoisie are framed within a context in which as a class it is held to be pitiless, calculating, without the ordinary human compassion. </div>
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Yet this is not an analysis of human beings, but of class formation, and of the systemic imperatives of its reproduction. Class properties are <em>relational</em> properties; they are what you do, how you reproduce yourself, and only then, on account of that, what you are. To treat this as an act of theoretical dehumanisation is extraordinarily summary, gliding over the kinds of complexities which psychoanalysis generally finds it helpful to explore.</div>
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At any rate, framing Marxism in this way leads back to Bollas’s argument that the mind is “rather like a parliamentary order with instincts, memories, needs, anxieties, and object responses finding representatives in the psyche for mental processing” — and order of checks and balances, a “democratic order”. The metaphor is strained here, because the balancing of various interests is not the same thing as a democratic order.</div>
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Fascism, Bollas argues, involves at a psychic level a “killing off” of parts of the self, in favour of destructive narcissism. But this, again, is treated as an outgrowth of revolutionary ideology. Bakunin’s call for “tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, and even honour” to “be stifled in the revolutionary by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause” is the cited as first example of this tendency. The argument might be slightly more interesting if it started off with destructive altruism.</div>
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The idea of an order of checks and balances is, of course, not so much liberal as conservative. It implies that we already know how the different ‘interests’ should be represented and balanced. It implies we know in advance that certain ‘interests’ have an intrinsic right to exist. It is an oddly <em>a priori</em> way to defend a parliamentary system of mental representation. It implies a kind of omniscience about what a good mental politics must consist of.</div>
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We might ask what sort of psychoanalysis it is that seeks the prototype for a healthy mind in an idealised healthy politics? What sort of psychoanalysis suppresses not only the ambivalence of its subject, but its own? What sort of psychoanalysis necessitates the suppression of class and history? There is a tendency in all psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips suggests, to become "a sophisticated form of adaptation," and that is a tendency that goes with omniscience.</div>
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There is no reason to assume that minds, whatever else they may be, are supposed to be 'balanced', or even democratic. What should a mind forged in oedipal capitalism look like, other than a struggle half in darkness, a knife-fight between shadows, a battlezone in which it is never clear what the stake is, other than the living body?</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-3796445273216858762017-07-11T19:37:00.001+01:002017-07-11T19:37:51.853+01:00On the Twelfth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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They usually began at around 11.30pm on 11th July, with crowds of people gathering round a large stack of pallets, tires, old furniture, mattresses, and anything else that would burn. All of it drenched in petrol. At the stroke of midnight, someone would approach the pile, throw on some lit matches, and with a "yooo" from the crowd the giant stack would be rapidly engulfed in flames.</div>
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The children at these events would have enthusiastically participated in the recruitment of materials for, and building of the bonfire, raiding local factory yards and anywhere else with wood and tires. And seeing their efforts go up in smoke, they stood and gazed at the bonny blaze, or scampered around daring each other to jump over mini-bonfires dotted around the main event, or tried to steal stray cans of lager. Or, holophrastically blurted out slogans like, "fuck the Pope" (pron. "fawck the Poop"). Or, in a sing-song voice, "fuck the Pope and the IRA, doo da, doo da". Or tried to remember some lyrics from 'The Sash'.</div>
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There was always an ugly contingent of pissed Loyalist spides hanging around with the local UVF family who organised the blaze. And they were the organisers, or friends of the organisers. They were the ones who knew what they were there for, what the bonfire was all about, what 'R.E.M. 1690' meant, why "No King Barry Rule", and why it was necessary to "kill all taigs". Some of them might even have a certain, mythical, sense of history. They played dreary, murderous anti-Catholic songs, celebrations of the 'Volunteers' and of their proud history going back to William of Orange, while sinking can after can from stacks of 24 packs, followed by bottles of whisky and vodka. They worked themselves up for a night of petty terror. This might involve bricking the windows of some Catholic residents, for example. There was a family next door to us, whom we were good friends with, who never came out for bonfire night. Sometimes, I think, they made sure they were away for bonfire night. </div>
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There was also the Parades next day to think about. Some of these young men were band members, after all. I remember one year, members of the Murray Memorial Flute Band found a Catholic bus-driver, and stabbed him repeatedly and left him lying on the roadside. An elderly woman tried to save the man: she just kept wrapping him in towels, ten or a dozen of them, whatever she had in her house. Of course, he bled to death in her arms before the ambulance got there. These people, our bonfire companions, were the scum of the estates: the psychos, the bullies, the bigots, the refuse. They terrified everyone, some more than others. They ignored us as we played, huddled in groups; we occasionally looked with fear and fascination at them.<br /><br />It's hard to be sentimental about the working class when you've seen this side of it. Perhaps you can call to mind those ghoulish images of Southern lynchings, where there are white children, white parents, local notables, sheriffs, men and women, gathered around the hanging body of a black man, smiling for the camera. They have the atmosphere of some sort of macabre festival of supremacy, celebrating the confirmation of white dominance, the plenitude of white being, by means of a human sacrifice. On bonfire night, people were burned in effigy -- the IRA man, the Pope, the fenian, the fenian's fleg -- while the actual terror was carried out somewhere off-stage, out of the bright glare of the consuming fire. But no doubt it served a similar affirming purpose, only it's the British crown that is affirmed.</div>
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This culture, long-term, is on its way out. Younger people in Northern Ireland are increasingly anxious to get out of the cultural, political and economic sump. The exodus of people from the six counties every year tells its own story. Local councils, anxious to attract multinational investment, are increasingly embarrassed by the outward signs of Loyalism. Some of them spend a lot of time trying to erase its hallmarks -- the red-white-and-blue kerbstones, the bunting, occasionally the murals. It is not that they have stopped being sectarian, but there's a desire for respectability, and one really wants to go back to the war.</div>
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But there are quite a lot of desolate urban backwaters in Northern Ireland. Places which never had much to begin with, and have been losing hand-over-fist for decades. Places which, insofar as they had any life, were supported by a local factory that has long since gone out of business, or by small businesses which have given up in the face of out-of-town malls (shappin centres), or by army barracks or giant police stations which have been closed. <br /><br />Now these are not even necessarily the poorest parts of the six counties. The proddy-gerrymandered eastern half has always been the more affluent half. It's where the infrastructure is built, where factories are built, where employment is concentrated. But there's less of what little there was to go around. There are a lot of dead town centres. And there are a lot of people who want 'their country' back. They want Britain to mean what they once thought it meant. They want to be British. They're beginning to think they lost the war. In a way, they're right, of course: but they lost to the extent that their side won. They lost because they're stuck in a polity which they fought to preserve, but which has no <em>raison d'etre</em> other than to be at war.<br /><br />What would you do with this cultural rubble, this debris? Maybe you would expect me to advocate a salvaging operation. To go looking for tiny slivers of salvation right there in the DUP's fiefdoms. Maybe, because I'm like this, you would expect a bit of ecstatic nature writing, carolling the coast road, pine forests, volcanic causeway, Norman-era castles, county-sized lough, braids, six mile waters, round towers, irregular, poky hamlets and villages, viciously wind-whipped countryside, mountainscapes lined with ancient walls where you're apt to suddenly find yourself surrounded by rushing heavenly clouds. Why not, indeed, go up to the mountaintop?<br /><br />But I have a better idea. What I suggest we do is this. We take the flegs. The guns. The balaclavas. The murals. The Britishness. The sombre, violent Orange pubs. The wee hard man prototype. The provincial evangelism. The bowler hats and sashes. The small town politics of respectability. The concern for "traditional mawrridge". The twenty-four packs. The smug, 'our wee country' attitude. The platitudinous veneration of community, and the lamentation of their 'division'. The pompous UTV newscasters. The under-serviced, jobless sink estates with their faded red-white-and-blue.</div>
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And we get it all together. In a neat, conical pile. And, at the stroke of midnight, as 11th turns to 12th, we burn it, with holy fire.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-36491088047180876992017-07-11T11:53:00.000+01:002017-07-11T11:53:02.328+01:00Kafka's Castle<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-family: America, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;">
"That truly Kafkaesque Castle, the modern state." -- Nicos Poulantzas.</blockquote>
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<strong>I</strong>. In ‘<a href="https://libcom.org/files/Franz%20Kafka-The%20Castle%20(Oxford%20World's%20Classics)%20(2009).pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">The Castle</a>’, it is never entirely clear what is happening. </div>
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There are officials who appear to govern. No one knows what they do, exactly. The only thing that gives them any sort of definition, any sort of concreteness, is the snow-bound castle at the centre of the village, from which they govern.</div>
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This is the outward face of the bureaucracy. In the story, it appears at first as a void. This blank, silent screen encourages the inhabitants to project their own fantasies onto authority, so that they all entertain elaborate, inconsistent theories about what authority is actually doing.</div>
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The main fantasy is one of omnipotence. Their paperwork, the authorities claim, is perfect, without flaws. In reality, as with any bureaucracy, it is riddled with dysfunctions, which are dealt with through expedients such as, for example, burning papers. </div>
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The guarantor of the centralised unity of the Castle, its seamless perfection, is its worshipped ruler, the Count. But, as Kafka’s notes show, and those ruled by the Castle are unaware, the Count is dead. It is the supposed — hypothesised — omnipotence of the Castle which ensures that it continues to be obeyed. But it is also that same supposition which ensures that rules of authority make no sense, and impose impossible demands, since they can never be challenged.</div>
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If the Castle weren’t a physical object, we would have to ask what it is. And since, in the story, it stands metonymically for the authority, which isn’t a physical object, we’re still none-the-wiser. The authority, it seems clear enough, is a state. But what is a state? A state is something of a mystery.</div>
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<strong>II</strong>. Neither the policeman nor the truncheon, neither a subject nor an object, the state refuses to resolve into clear boundaries.</div>
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Thinking it through, what are the experiences we have of the state? Job centres, traffic wardens, council offices and hospitals. Schools, soldiers and army barracks. Police and police stations. Birth and death certificates. Road sweepers, rubbish bins and tax collectors. Border patrol and building inspectors. Laboratories, land surveyors and labyrinths. Speeds signs and spending targets. Parks, palaces and parliaments. </div>
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Banks and corporations are entities provided for, legalised, by the state. Work is conducted and remunerated within a framework provided by the state. Sex is had, or not had, under the law of the state. Ingestion and egestion are functions regulated by the state. The scope of state activity is <em>vast</em>, ranging from end to end of the territory, from the sewers to the seas and skies.</div>
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What single logic, what single necessity, what single function or structure, holds all of this together? We can think of the Castle in this context as part of the theatrics of the state, much as the changing of the guard, or a presidential speech to a joint session of congress, or an inquiry or inquisition, are theatrics. They produce an image of the state which appears to justify the use of the definite article.</div>
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If we didn’t have these theatrics, we wouldn’t know what the state was.</div>
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<strong>III</strong>. As the plight of Kafka’s villagers makes obvious, knowing what the state is, isn’t much help. This knowledge is a fantasy. If we start by not knowing what the state is, we will get a little bit further.</div>
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Peter Bratsis, drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, argues that “the state idea” is a bit like pre-scientific ideas of fire. A flame appears to be some sort of object or essence, and it has “palpable confirmations” — light and heat — that appear to support this idea. This gives rise to substantialist or animistic ideas about fire, wherein it is believed to be some sort of spirit or essence. Once the idea is established, it shapes how we register the palpable experience of fire, such that it is very difficult to let go of the idea.</div>
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The way out of this impasse was to analyse flame, not as a thing in itself, nor as a spirit, but as an outcome of certain physical processes. Only the analysis of these processes can tell you what fire is. Likewise, if we want to understand what a state is, we have to start with the processes.</div>
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This is, obviously, an argument for Nicos Poulantzas’s approach, in <em>State, Power, Socialism</em>, which describes the state as only the effect, the outcome, of those immense, complex processes of social production, reproduction, and contestation, which are summed up in the marxist phrase, “class struggle”. The state, in this sense, is a particular “material condensation of the balance of class forces”.</div>
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The thought is similar to Foucault’s contention, in <em>The Birth of Biopolitics</em>, that “the state does not have an essence”. Far from being “an autonomous source of power” in itself, it is:</div>
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“nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centres, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities.”</blockquote>
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Mark that: the state “has no interior”. The Castle has no heart, dark or enlightened.</div>
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<strong>IV</strong>. To leave it here would be to imply that the “state idea” is just an illusion and nothing more. But even in the Castle, that isn’t true. The idea has real effects in the organisation of power, and is made real in a sense through its effects.</div>
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In a recent <a href="https://www.academia.edu/555444/Everyday_Life_and_the_State" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">book</a>, Bratsis warns against the temptation to “take it literally.” Although he doesn’t say so, this could imply that the “state idea” is a kind of metaphor. As Raymond Williams tells us in <em>Keywords</em>, the modern term ‘state’ has origins in the conception of rank linked to political sovereignty: the dignity and status of the king. It came, through the seventeenth century, to be distinguished from another term, society, which represented an alternative order of being. The state came to signify the apparatus of political power, and society the association of free individuals. </div>
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To this we could add reference to the peculiar etymology of the term “body politic” which in the medieval period was the second body of the monarch next to the frail physical body. For much of the time, this was treated literally, in law, in that the body politic was considered a real manifestation of the king’s corporeality. In the modern sense, the body politic simply refers to the realm, the domain of rule and governance.</div>
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So, the “state idea” contains embedded within itself the idea of rank and hierarchy, the idea of sovereign power separate from society, the idea of a body consubstantial with that of the king, and the idea of a realm. And all of these ideas have played an important role in the history of state formation, the elaboration of jurisprudence, the allocation of rights, the organisation of territory, and so on.</div>
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<strong>V</strong>. In The Castle, ‘all’ that is happening is a series of bureaucratic processes which organise political power. </div>
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The Count doesn’t really rule: he is dead, his body is decomposing. That things go on as they were suggests that the Count was only necessary as a signifier, as a social location that people could believe in — or that they could at least believe others believed in.</div>
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Nonetheless, there is centralisation, there is hierarchy, there are chains of command and flows of information. As fissiparous and dysfunctional as the processes of the Castle are, the idea that the Count rules and that the system works perfectly, organises the processes of government.</div>
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But if the Count is dead, on whose behalf do the officials rule? Not ‘the people,’ surely? They are kept ignorant and excluded from power. Not themselves? They could do a lot better with their rule than organising this absurdist paper-chase. They, ultimately, are subject to the same ludicrous law as everyone else, even if they occupy a special rank.</div>
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The state is always a state under law. And law is <em>what</em>, exactly? It is, you could say, the dominant ideology in any society, exhaustively distilled into a series of axioms determining how things shall be done, and not done, articulated with the means of violence. The law is where the consent-coercion dichotomy breaks down, since the refusal to consent is met with physical force.</div>
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Being ideology, there is nothing intrinsically rational about legal axioms or the more-or-less predictable chains of juridical reasoning unfolding from them. Nor is there anything universally true about them. However, law selects the ontological and epistemological premises of the social order under law, and encodes them in the legal form which rationalises and universalises them.</div>
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Of course, the field of law isn’t univocal. It is always contested, and there is always room for the balance of legal forces to alter, to be pushed in a more liberal or fascist direction, but always in a form determined by the way in which the ruling class dominates in it.</div>
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And this is the final point. It is the law which says there is such a thing as ‘the state’. It is the law which appears to give it clear boundaries, a clear definition, in the separation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres (which maps onto the state-society dichotomy). It is the law which orchestrates the public-private dichotomy and which regulates the legitimate range of actions within each sphere.</div>
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But of course, the law is just the state speaking in its dominant register. The public-private dichotomy is a division internal to the state. It is the state giving itself the appearance of concreteness, of definite boundaries, of an interior. It is the state giving itself a body and a heart, the latter shrouded in darkness.</div>
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So, in this sense, whatever other functions and characteristics we might wish to allocate to the state, there is this one which is consistent. From beginning to end, from cradle to grave, from coast to coast, <em>the state is process whose purpose is to make us believe in the state</em>.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-56694922970811082452017-06-29T13:30:00.002+01:002017-06-29T13:30:41.767+01:00Labour and immigration<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">I</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #052d49; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-line;">. Labour's policy on immigration is as yet unclear. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Corbyn has said that, though Labour is not 'wedded' to 'free movement', he refuses to set reducing immigration as a goal, or set any targets. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Labour manifesto committed Labour to a "fair" system of managing immigration, without it being clear what that meant. There were some inclusive, humane signals such as a promise to review Britain's diabolical asylum system, and end income thresholds for residency. But what does 'fairness' look like when it comes to migrant labour? Is it even possible?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A Labour policy paper leaked during the general election indicated that the party would favour adapting the current five-tiered visa system, "including the currently unused tier applicable to those seeking low-skilled, unskilled or seasonal work".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This would imply that, rather than using the Schengenian 'free movement' system, Labour would operate a US-style 'green card' system. In such a system, those migrating at the bottom tier might have a shorter visa stay than those higher up. This might potentially change the composition of labour migration -- indeed, Nigel Farage might get exactly what he claimed to want, with more migrants coming from other parts of the world like India. But it need not necessarily reduce the total number of migrants, since Labour has made it clear that reducing net totals is not a priority. What it <em>would</em> do, unarguably, is significantly expand border controls. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>II</strong>. Schengenian 'free movement' is a liberal institution that is also racist in principle. Free movement, so far as it goes, is desirable, and something is lost by ending even this limited form. The answer to Schengen racism is not Little Britain racism. However, it is analytical dereliction not to grapple with what 'free movement' actually means.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Schengen Agreement is one of the laws of the European Union, originally developed in 1985. Incorporated into the EU legal structure with the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, this law allows for the free movement of people within the Union. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is one of the famous "four freedoms" in the Union, the others being freedoms for capital. Free movement of people was a logical extension of the plans to create a single market: in effect, to treat the members of the Union as parts of one interlocked capitalist economy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But freedom within meant raising walls and razor-wire to the outside. Coterminously, therefore, there was a tightening of border controls around Europe, and new systems such as FRONTEX were created to help prevent what it called, and continues to call, <em>illegal migration</em>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The majority of 'illegal' migrants arrive with passport and visa by plane, and work in the jobs they were hired to work in. But that is not what the labelling was getting at. If states, is it were, 'state', one of the ways they do so is by creating social classifications and giving them normative and juridical force. Any naming in this sense is performative. To call a particular group of immigrants illegal if you are a state is, in a way, to make them so. Certainly, insofar as the states of the European Union preemptively deemed the vast majority of asylum seekers to be 'illegal', it treated them as such, and developed expanding systems of surveillance and monitoring to arrange speedy deporttations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Dublin Agreement, struck in 2004, stated that refugees had to place their asylum claim in the first country they arrived at. In practice, since refugees travel overland or by sea, often the first country they arrive at will be Greece or Italy, so that countries of north-western Europe like Germany aren’t bothered. Their fingerprints are taken where they land, and fed into a database so that they can be tracked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Since 2009, the unelected executive of the EU, the European Commission, has been developing new protocols under the rubric of the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum, tightening up frontier controls and mandating deportation of all ‘illegals’ in all member states. These changes were informed by the increasingly securitarian and Islamophobic drift of many member states, especially France which then held the EU presidency, in the aftermath of the ‘war on terror’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And, of course, the system is currently supported not only by FRONTEX raids on refugee boats, resulting in a spike in mediterranean drownings, but also by the biggest of all illegal pushbacks, consecrated in the deal between Merkel and Erdogan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">If you take the approach of Domenico Losurdo, there is nothing particularly paradoxical in a fundamentally liberal institution, free movement, having this fundamentally racist obverse. Liberalism has always been distinguished by its logic of exclusions; there is always someone for whom the universal doesn't apply.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>III</strong>. There has, since the 1990s, been a <a href="http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">significant increase in labour migration in the United Kingdom</a>, the great majority of it coming from within the European Union. The percentage of foreign-born workers in the UK increased from 3 million (7.2% of the total labour force) in 1993 to 7 million (16.7%) in 2015.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">About a third of these live and work in London, on the pattern of 'global cities'. The low-paid among them, the majority, have become a racialised 'reserve army of labour' in the classic marxian pattern. This has been accompanied, not by the thinning out of the middle expected by 'global cities' literature, but by professionalisation of occupations in the London labour market, with a growing number of managers and professionals. Nonetheless, there was some occupational polarisation with an absolute increase in top jobs, and a complementary absolute increase in the number of low-wage jobs at the bottom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Why has this happened? There is a marxist political economy, rooted in the study of migrant economies in apartheid South Africa, which can explain some of it. In particular, the costs of reproducing migrant labour in a 'free movement' zone are much lower than the costs of reproducing domestic labour. The price of labour is suppressed by a number of factors, including the fact that for short-term migrants, the inputs are determined in part by prices in Warsaw or Bucharest -- so, if you have a family to send money back to, a little extra money made in London counts for a lot more back home. There are also the collective conditions of housing and transport for many workers, which reduces costs even more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But, of course, 'the economy' is never free-standing, never exists apart from its political and legal constitution. The impact of welfare policies, labour market laws, and 'managed migration' collectively help constitute hierarchies in work. Successive British governments since the Thatcher-era have made a competitive advantage out of low wage labour, relying on supply-side improvements to reduce the 'natural' level of unemployment. They have rolled back state protections and wage bargaining, imposed competition in local services, and relied on markets to discipline the bottom end of the labour market and impose flexibility. Changes to the welfare system, hailed as 'workfare', have been designed to promote this flexibility and low-wage culture. This means that where labour markets are tight, and shortages need to be filled, it is less likely that they will be filled by raising wages: that is not what is meant by 'making work pay'. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is within this broadly neoliberal growth formula that it makes sense for employers to turn to low-wage, insecure migrant labour. <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/index.cfm?action=media.download&uuid=29A42101-C61F-A70C-765477392235EB6A" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank"><ins>The Work Foundation</ins></a>, a think-tank initially set up under Will Hutton's leadership, elucidates some of the assumptions behind this. In short, it argues that given the government's macroeconomic commitments, the choice was between turning to migrant labour, or using high interest rates to deflate wage pressures arising from tighter labour markets at the bottom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In other words, this racialised form of labour market segregation is not just a product of economic processes, but is a result of a whole orientation of statecraft -- what David Harvey somewhere called a "spatio-temporal fix" for capitalist dysfunction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><strong>IV</strong>. Does this mean, then, that UK-born workers are in some sense being undercut by migrant workers? Not so fast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">First of all, remember that many of the new low-wage jobs which have been created simply couldn't be filled by workers born and permanently residing in the UK, given the costs of reproducing their labour. The jobs market is not, in that sense, a zero-sum game. Migration allowed for a significant expansion in total employment, some of which otherwise would not have happened.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Second, insofar as there is increased competition in the labour market, there is very little evidence for any <em>generalised</em> wage-depressant effect. <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/immigration" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">Research</a> suggests that there is no net negative impact from migration on wages. Many studies, for example by the centre-left IPPR think-tank, suggest <a href="http://www.newunionism.net/library/internationalism/IPPR%20-%20Economic%20Impacts%20of%20Migration%20on%20the%20UK%20Labour%20Market%20-%202009.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">a moderate net increase in wages,</a> as does a <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/Cpapers/CDP_03_08.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">similar study</a> by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CRAM) at UCL. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Third, there is, however, plenty of evidence that migrant labour itself is exploited by this system, and that insofar as there are wage-depressant effects at the bottom, migrant workers are the ones to suffer. This is indicated by <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19797/1/The_Impact_of_Immigration_on_the_Structure_of_Male_Wages_Theory_and_Evidence_from_Britain.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank"><ins>LSE research</ins></a>, which finds that "the only sizeable effect of increased immigration is on the wages of those immigrants who are already here."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The CRAM analysis suggests that in fact the moderate overall growth of wages is concentrated at the top of the wage structure, and that one possible explanation for this is that as migrant workers are being paid less than the market value of their labour in the UK, there is an additional surplus that is redistributed up the chain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On top of this, some of the redistribution is worked out through the social wage. The <a href="http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-in-the-uk/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #f96854; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none; text-decoration-skip: ink;" target="_blank">net fiscal impact</a> of immigration was estimated by the Migration Observatory at Oxford to be small but positive. And the OBR estimates that higher rates of migration, by increasing the working age population relative to the dependent population, reduces the pressure on government borrowing. This doesn't mean migration in certain areas didn't increase the load on local services; it just means that there was no reason why the government couldn't have more than covered any additional outlay necessary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the <em>last analysis</em>, in marxist terms, all state expenditures are a deduction from profits. Even if they're funded by consumption taxes, that merely tends to push up the price of labour. Of course, things in the real world are never as pure as in the last analysis, since raising consumption taxes can be one moment in a wider process of ruling class struggle intended to <em>cut</em> working-class consumption overall. That is, after all, what austerity is all about. And it is quite possible that concretely, in the actual rhythm of political struggle, an increase in revenues to the Treasury would have helped offset the pressure to cut expenditures. But, from the point of view of this last analysis, we would have to say that the net contribution of migrant labour to British coffers is a net saving to profits.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">However, <em>all</em> of these effects are minor relative to the total labour market and to total state expenditures. What I am describing is a situation in which a combination of 'workfare', 'flexibility', privatisation, competition, 'free movement' in some areas, and 'managed migration' in others, increased <em>the rate of exploitation of migrant workers</em> to the benefit of the capitalist class. But it is also a truism that labour market segregation harms the bargaining power of those supposedly in the 'privileged' position in it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>V</strong>. All of these claims and measurements are, of course, relative to a set of prevailing macroeconomic assumptions. If you make a different set of assumptions about how economies work, then different conclusions are entailed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What I mean is this. The debate about migrant labour is structured around the red herring of whether 'free movement' undercuts UK-born workers in terms of employment and wages. Even if there were significant evidence of it doing so, it would be a red herring, since the grammar of the question is wrong. There is no abstract 'free movement', only the freedom of movement within a given economic and policy context. You can have free movement on a neoliberal and racist-exclusionary basis -- which, indeed, is part of a system which does disadvantage UK-born workers as well as migrant workers -- or you can have free movement on a socialist, or at least social-democratic, basis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For example, suppose a Labour government were to reverse decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. Suppose that, in place of counter-inflation it privileged full employment and high wages as its main economic policy priority. Suppose its goal was to create competitive advantages through state investment, rather than eke out competitive advantages from low-wage labour. Suppose it rolled back anti-union legislation, so that the long decline of union representation was reversed. Suppose it reorganised the welfare state, abolishing workfare and sanctions and all the forms of coercion designed to make people more available for low-wage work. Suppose it rolled back privatisation and competition measures, and introduced collective bargaining where possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Setting aside the difficulties in actually achieving this against entrenched opposition from the business class, such an approach would have to imply an attack on labour market segregation. If anyone is tempted to say this means ending free movement, let me say they've missed the point entirely. Creating new legal restrictions on migrant labour simply increases its precarity and vulnerability. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By expanding the remit of the border men, and intensifying surveillance, one wouldn't even necessarily reduce the total amount of migration -- and Labour has said this isn't a priority -- but it would help drive migrant workers further into the shadows where they are more susceptible to violence and hyper-exploitation. They would end up with less pay, with more immiserated existence, living in even worse death-trap accommodation. It would create more "illegal" migrants, and thus more misery. That doesn't suppress wage-competition. It might give it a new, more segregated structure, with a sharpened, racialised set of advantages and disadvantages -- but that would in aggregate intensify labour market competition and strengthen the bargaining position of employers, particularly the cut-throat poverty employers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Rather, for a leftist growth model to work, one would need to give up completely on the idea of squeezing a competitive advantage out of a bargain basement economy. One would need, if anything, a far more egalitarian labour market policy. One would need to proactively <em>suppress</em> labour market segregation on all axes. One would need various measures to ban exploitation along gender and racial axes. One would need all workers, regardless of origin, to have equal pay for the same work, equal access to the state, equal protection under law, equal access to housing and welfare, equal access to union representation, and so on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Breaking with neoliberalism means breaking, not with free movement as a goal and principle, but with a racially segregated labour system. This isn't uncomplicated. Suppressing competition through state intervention reduces the 'pull' factors for migrants. From a certain point of view, it reduces their opportunities. But it does so, precisely by levelling up, by attacking labour market segregation as a principle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>VI</strong>. It would be completely unrealistic to expect Labour to embrace an open borders policy. The balance of forces in Labour, let alone the wider country, simply wouldn't let that happen. I'm not even sure who would be able to organise around such a demand, or what the political effects of doing so would be. "Momentum for Open Borders"? I can't see it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">However, that doesn't mean progress cannot be made, and reaction resisted. To an extent, it already has been. In the New Labour era, we had what proved to be a toxic combination; a 'free movement' system organised along segregated patterns supported by labour market and workfare policy; and a set of political triangulations in which every other week a minister would expound on the need to control immigration and enforce integration, especially of those troublesome Muslims. Taken alongside the breakdown of large, unionised workforces as Labour allowed manufacturing to go bust, and the concomitant growth of racial segregation among UK-born workers in the labour market, this contributed to gains made by the far right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The last general election abruptly changed the dynamic. Labour didn't win, but it surged to a degree without precedent post-1945. And it did so, despite (or because of) the fact that Corbyn was widely depicted as someone who wanted an immigration free-for-all. Despite (or because of) the fact that he was attacked day in and day out as an alibi of foreign terrorists. Despite (or because of) the fact that he systematically repudiated the very right-wing arguments on immigration to which all previous Labour leaderships have grovellingly deferred. Despite (or because of) the fact that he refused to set a target for reducing immigration levels. <br /><br />Yes, Labour's official position was ambiguous, and yes that may have softened the attitude of some of the 'red' Ukippers, and defused some of the attacks. But in retrospect, and in future, I don't think it can be taken for granted that a broadly pro-immigrant stance is an electoral liability. I think, with the electorate changing, it is possible over the medium term to a) win the argument for maintaining such free movement as we currently have, b) win the argument for de-stigmatising refugees, abolishing the detention centres and ending the appalling conditions in Calais; and c) addressing the decades-long, systematic, racist exclusions aimed at citizens of what used to be called the 'New Commonwealth'.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At the very least, the election showed that provided it has a radical agenda that excites its supporters, Labour doesn't have to be scared of the Crosby smear-and-dog-whistle machine, of tabloid poison, or even of Ukip. The Left can be confident, rather than cowed, in its arguments. It doesn't have to accept either a defensive posture of uncritically crawling to the EU and its version of free movement, or an even more defensive posture of demanding an end to free movement. </span></div>
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<i>Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/labour-and-12120891">Patreon</a>. If you liked the article, please consider pledging.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-14188928019975510812017-06-25T22:40:00.003+01:002017-06-25T22:40:33.588+01:00You are living in a death cult.<b>I</b>. Why was there only five days between the Grenfell blaze, killing dozens of working class and racially oppressed people, and the Finsbury Park mosque attack? And what connects the two?<br />
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Why should it be that after years since 2005, in which there were few successful attacks, the Woolwich killing being the most significant, there were five outrages in sequence over the last year beginning with the killing of Jo Cox MP? Why should the "lone wolf," the entrepreneurial form of fascist and jihadist killing, be the main form this has taken?<br />
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Why, in the aftermath of a terrifying disaster, should there be earnest discussions about whether the "illegal" migrants who survived ought to be given amnesty? As if the alternative, deportation, is remotely acceptable? Why would some of the residents of Kensington Row prefer a kind of socio-ethnic cleansing, with residents bussed to the north or lined up for deportation, to the most minimal gesture toward justice?<br />
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Why did Ken Clarke say in parliament yesterday, in defending the EU's 'free movement' principle, that the "real problem" was "illegal immigrants" from outside the Schengen zone -- as, he said, was illustrated by the Grenfell disaster?<br />
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Why was a major issue of contention in the general election the question of whether Jeremy Corbyn would "push the button"? What practical problem could possibly be solved by a willingness to obliterate entire populations? To what question is nuclear genocide an answer? To what questions are the murders perpetrated by both agonists and antagonists of 'Britain', short-cut answers?<br />
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What is happening in Britain today? What has erupted? What has been boiling away like lava under the surface these last years, until now?<br />
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<b>II</b>. Borders fail. They must.<br />
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Borders are not perimeters, outlines, but grids of sorting and sifting, filters which govern the whole population. The border is everywhere, increasingly integral to the governance of race. Ever larger numbers of people in various institutions, from universities to hospitals, are being unofficially converted into border officials. Border men suddenly appear -- rather like The Breach in China Miéville's novel, The City and The City -- in the streets, or kicking down your door, and withdraw from sight just as quickly.<br />
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The border is a race-making apparatus in the guise of race-suppression. The language of legality, and integration, is supposed to guarantee that all citizens are treated equally. It is supposed to guarantee, in other words, that race -- a violent hierarchy -- will not exist. And by keeping out the displaced of imperialist wars, the refugees of the 'war on terror', it is supposed to externalise the violence of a global racial order.<br />
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But what it does, precisely through its orchestrations of varying shades of legality, is produce race. What it does, through its criminalisation and brutalisation of refugees and migrants, those penned in and tear-gassed in Calais, those confined in detention centres, those separated from their families and deported, is bring the violence of empire closer to home.<br />
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The border is a race-maker.<br />
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But borders must fail insofar as, while producing race, they also attempt to manage, suppress and externalise it. Race will not be mapped onto place, and it will not stay in its place. There are always the displaced. There are always the depaysements of empire, always the ghosts of everyday racial capitalism.<br />
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The harder you try to filter out the Other qua Otherness, the stronger is its recurrence. The harsher the repression, the more stunning its return; like an ambush, or something worse. Even without the racial Other physically represented, its ghosts would still appear in dreams, fantasies and jokes, and still haunt relations between 'whites'.<br />
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This may partly help to explain why it is not in the societies, cities, towns or regions with the highest degree of migration that are most palpably menaced by migration.<br />
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<b>III</b>. Race is a metaphor in the guise of a literalism.<br />
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It constitutes the racialised subject through the displacement and condensation of the (usually undesirable) features, characteristics, desires, and behaviours of those perpetrating the racialisation.<br />
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The racial Other metaphorises the antagonisms and dysfunctions and undesirable desires of a society. It is they who, variously, carry the can for sexism, crime, rape, child abuse, fanaticism, violence, nihilism, exploitation, robbery and even, by what could be called a kind of 'white magic', for racism.<br />
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But the fundamentalism of race necessitates a belief in its literal existence, somatic or cultural. The pseudo-scientific, ahistorical basis for this belief is neither here nor there. The true believer makes an investment in it, puts his or her being on the line for it, confident that its truth will be revealed. The bad faith believer either pretends to have no investment in it, no desire other than a technical problem-solving one; or even to have no personal belief in race whatever. Still, they put up their stake.<br />
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But since it is a metaphor, it is worth thinking about how the border is orchestrating a metaphorical response to a range of problems. Problems, certainly, of labour-supply and labour-process, of education and training, of scarcity in public services, of policing, and so on. But, also, in the context of a crisis of the Union, problems of hegemony.<br />
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Hegemony is achieved when the ruling class doesn't simply dominate, but leads. It presents the society with an historic mission, a purpose to which the nation (barring an excluded and repressed remainder) can attach itself. The hegemonic project of the neoliberal era had reached, as certain posters vividly suggested through their own racial metaphors, "Breaking Point".<br />
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For the Right, Brexit was to be the organising principle of revival, giving Britain -- a Union forged for colonialism -- a new purpose. By "taking back control" of the borders, the people-nation would also have taken back control of the polity, and embarked on a thrilling new mission of global expansion. Our former colonial friends, the Commonwealth, surely grateful to hear from us once more, and perhaps keen to repay old debts, would be anxious to be our trading partners -- once we'd deported every single one of their errant citizens back to them.<br />
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Unmoored, unbound to a decaying Euro-bureaucracy, Britain would embark like the ship on the frontispiece of Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna, to see a world made new again. New World, New Britain.<br />
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<b>IV</b>. The fantastical element of this hard-right hegemonic project was inescapable, and given away precisely by its small-time, miserly defensiveness about immigration.<br />
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For all the colonial nostalgia, for all that there is an unprocessed clutter of colonial nonsense sedimented into national unconscious, throwing up ghosts, repetitions and deferred actions, even the most bullish of 'global traders' must have a sense of playing for time.<br />
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The language of "border controls" simply did not have the resonance during the colonial era that it does now. Insofar as borders mattered, it was chiefly because of Europe's internal Others, Jewish refugees from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Such was the rationale, supplied in abundance by the gutter press -- a press now, happily, dying in the gutter -- for the Aliens Act of 1905.<br />
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But until 1962, there remained a considerable degree of freedom of movement for people within the British Commonwealth both to and from the colonies. Subjects of the Commonwealth were considered subjects of the British monarch and in legislation passed in 1948 confirmed as citizens of the “UK and Colonies”.<br />
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Not that British governments, including the post-war Labour government, regarded their presence as unproblematic. In remedying labour shortfalls, they preferred people of "good stock," white labourers from Ireland or Poland whom they had more confidence could merge into the general population. Nonetheless, migration from the New Commonwealth was an integral part of post-war social democracy: no migrants, no NHS, no national reconstruction, no postwar boom.<br />
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Those migrants would have faced racism in the Britain of that day, whatever happened to the colonies, but it is fair to say that the fact of Britain's loss of colonial elan, the fact of India achieving independence, of bloody counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Kenya failing, altered the dynamic somewhat.<br />
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Britain imposed its first restrictions with the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, six years before it withdrew from east-of-Suez imperial commitments and left management of those 'Free World' sectors to the Americans. These restrictions, compounded in a 1965 White Paper and then in subsequent acts in 1968 and 1971, did not at first seek to reduce the number of migrants, since quotas could be adjusted to fit the needs of employers, but to reduce their status and rights.<br />
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But the early death-pangs of the post-war compromise, the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods system, the slump in manufacturing profitability, and the decay of social-democracy, that expedited the ascendance of a populist-racist New Right, pioneered by the vanishing mediator Enoch Powell and carried on by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. And with the National Front on the rise too, the whole political spectrum was yanked sharply to the right on the axis of immigration. Labour MPs, like Bob Mellish, could be just as racist as their Tory opposites on the issue. By the time of Thatcher's British Nationality Act of 1981, which decisively ended any right to citizenship on the part of New Commonwealth subjects, primary immigration was virtually at a stand-still.<br />
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This shift tracked a transition from a global, aggressive white-supremacism to a defensive white-nationalism. The phases of anti-immigrant reaction since then can be seen as desperate attempts to preserve what is left of imperial whiteness, like a dusty, cob-webbed shrine to a long lost lover. Unsurprisingly, it comes with a fondness for bunting and military regalia, with 'Rule Brittania' anthems, and a fascination with the armed forces as the embodiments of British heroism and power.<br />
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But there is no going back; there is only either the freeze-frame of a fantasy, with its frozen-in-time unreality, or letting go.<br />
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<b>V</b>. It is in this sense that the politics of "border controls" is a fantasy politics. Fantasy covers up a lack, something lost or missing.<br />
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It is not, of course, that borders are unreal. Any more than the state is unreal. But they are not physical objects and they are not persons. From one point of view, a state is the political organisation of a set of social relationships. From another point of view, a state is a cultural formation.<br />
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What states do, in this sense, is produce a normal order, a moral order. They produce, incentivise and police set of social classifications which, in the words of Corrigan and Sayer, render "natural, taken for granted, in a word 'obvious', what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order".<br />
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It is "obvious," in the sense of being "taken for granted," that immigrants are a problem to be solved, and illegal immigrants the most pressing problem. And, of course, this logic extends backward temporally and generationally. If "they" are a problem now, then those migrants who arrived earlier, and their children, and children's children, start to become a problem as well. Their 'integration' becomes a question, even though it is precisely their integration that is not really desired.<br />
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The logic is never fully spelled out or, if it is, is disavowed as "going too far". But the logic of the border, the way it sifts through loyal and disloyal, real and bogus, good character and bad character, necessarily produces this fantasy of finally expelling the undesirable non-white elements.<br />
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Herein lies the necessary authoritarianism of "taking back control" -- or, indeed, "building that wall". Obsessed as it is with racial separation as a kind of social hygiene, its biggest fear is the racial mishmash, the undifferentiated pulpy mass in which the principle of whiteness is lost. In a previous essay, I wrote of the overlap between David Starkey, Geoffrey Cronje, and Thomas Mair around this fantasy.<br />
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In a way, however, the danger is that they will be forced to reckon with the extent to which it has already been lost. In the colonial unconscious, Britain still reigns over a quarter of the world, the Union flag still commands terror, and working class men from Glasgow, Liverpool and London are still pushing around their racial 'inferiors'. The anger of the colonised is still 'native fanaticism,' their demands for dignity and equality still 'ingratitude'.<br />
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The existence of Britain's multicultures, is a permanent reminder that imperial whiteness is dead: and thus, that whiteness as such has no certain future.<br />
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<b>VI</b>. "Nihilistic death-cult? You’re living in it." -- <i>Salvage</i>, November 2015.<br />
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Colonial ideology has always maintained that the Empire brought law, language and liberty, and trained its subjects in habits of work, and how to sublimate their pleasures in exchange for civilisation.<br />
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The colonial archives, on the other hand, are filled with genocidal fantasies and acts, massive rapacity and theft: a lawless jouissance. French colonial travelers were fascinated and repulsed by what they thought of as the 'cannibal' qualities of the natives, but distinctly untroubled by the Malagasy genocide.<br />
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In the same way, 'war on terror' ideology has always held that 'our' wars are responsible, proportionate, unavoidable, law-bound and geared toward democratic outcomes, while 'their' violence is limitless, shameless and nihilistic.<br />
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And in the same way, the archives of the 'war on terror' are filled with soldiers raping teenagers, shooting families at checkpoint, torturing and sexually assaulting prisoners, gunning down civilian gatherings from a great height, bombing hospitals and schools, destroying mosques, all while officials run around with suitcases filled with cash, building sectarian-mercenary armies, skimming off profits, building extravagant and luxurious 'Green Zone' compounds.<br />
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And we are used to, in some quarters, fascination with the death-dealing jouissance of terrorists, and comparable indifference to the slaughters perpetrated under the Union flag.<br />
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It is quite normal for pundits to be paid for the opinion that 'they,' whomever they may be, love death as much as we love life. Life is cheap to them.<br />
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With varying degrees of racism, this is said of Daesh, or of terrorists, or of Muslims, or of Palestinians. The border, in that sense, is presented as a kind of life-preserving machine, identifying death and keeping it out of the social body.<br />
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This is classic colonial projection. Even where, as in the case of Daesh, there is an element of truth in the claim, it is projection. If, per Fanon, the image of the Other is an imago onto which can be projected the death-drives of Europe, that continues to be true even if Daesh, like Satanism and Hitler-worship, offers a perfect screen for the projection.<br />
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The fact that the Daily Mail is so luridly fascinated with the diabolical jouissance of torturers and murderers, beheaders and enslavers, that it treats their daily exploits with the loving textured detail of the reports in its "sidebar of shame," and with the same giddy editorial voice, is a testament to cross-cultural communication: the Mail has recognised in Daesh something of itself.<br />
<br />
But this is also another reason why borders fail: the death is always within us. Think of the many examples where young men have been hassled by border men, cops and immigration officials, because someone saw them with a Quran or a rucksack on the train. Think of the people bundled off airplanes because other passengers thought they 'looked like terrorists'.<br />
<br />
Think of the process involved. You see something, a racial cue, something that summons terror. You start sweating and hyperventilating, imagining, fantasising, running through the possible ecstatic ends to which you could come, in your mind. Any minute now, the cry, the explosion. The racist horror story unfolding and replaying itself over and over within a few seconds. And you call on the border to crush the danger. Well, of course, that only disposes of its immediate external target of your projections; the danger is still unknown, still within, still setting off alarms.<br />
<br />
Think of nihilists, think of death-cults, and you should at least be able to think of the shark-eyed yuppies and speculators for whom only the accumulation of money and property is worth the burden of existence.<br />
<br />
Or those who, presented with the desolated, raging, wronged survivors of Grenfell, see only a threat to property markets.<br />
<br />
Or the climate-deniers who, whether they acknowledge it or not, are sacrificing futures not even dreamed of yet, generations not yet conceived, for the sake of a satisfactory rate of return on capital.<br />
<br />
Or those for whom the savage ecstasy of nuclear annihilation has to be in every potential statesman's purview, and the cynics who egg them on.<br />
<br />
The thousands upon thousands of people turned back by land and harassed at sea by Frontex operations called (with jaw-dropping cynicism) 'search and rescue' missions, until their drenched, drowned bodies turn up on Mediterranean shores, for nothing more noble than a trading bloc.<br />
<br />
And the thousands trapped in Calais, tear-gassed, harassed, isolated, deprived of aid, for no better principle than that of protecting a fantasy of whiteness.<br />
<br />
You're living in a nihilistic death-cult; and the impossible promises of the border are its mantra and manifesto.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/you-are-living-11946900">Patreon</a>. If you liked this essay, please consider supporting my writing by making a pledge.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-70941637381288831482017-06-23T17:05:00.002+01:002017-06-23T17:05:23.692+01:00O, Jeremy CorbynA brief round up of my writings about the general election outcome -- the result of which, as bantering-left social media knows, is that Jeremy Corbyn is actually, really, the Prime Minister.<br />
<br />
My first reaction piece was for <a href="http://novaramedia.com/2017/06/09/a-different-country/">Novara</a>, in which I pronounced with a certain awe that we now live "in a different country -- one which we didn't know existed". In a <a href="http://novaramedia.com/2017/06/11/where-we-go-from-here/">longer react piece</a>, I reflected in more detail on the changes and on the limitations facing the Left even as it has taken a giant leap forward.<br />
<br />
For <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/corbyn-election-labour/">TLS</a>, I wrote about how Corbyn had, as some wag put it, smashed the Overton window, totally changing our sense of the possibilities. Such that, frankly, we're looking at the chance of a big popular sweep, a left-wing Labour government elected on the back of broad radicalisation, 1945-style.<br />
<br />
For <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/corbyns-activists-must-keep-campaigning-even-if-theres-a-labour-government">Prospect</a>, I wrote of the challenges that would face a Labour government without an organised and critical activist movement behind it.<br />
<br />
There were also a couple of things on my Patreon. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/can-you-hear-11695628">Here</a>, I look with stunned delight at the meme wherein young people at clubs, discos and sporting events are chanting, "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" to the tune of 'Seven Nation Army' by The White Stripes. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/brexit-that-bark-11756708">Here</a>, I revisit my previous view that the national question would be decisive in reshaping the electoral terrain, something on which I was decisively (gladly) wrong.<br />
<br />
And, of course, I contributed to the <a href="http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/absolute-on-the-british-general-election/">Salvage editorial</a> qualifying our hard-won pessimism for the first time, courtesy of the Absolute Boy.<br />
<br />
I have to say that over the last year, my guesses have been confounded more often than they have been confirmed. I expected the Front national to come close to winning in France; Le Pen got far too big a vote, but lower than polls expected. I did not expect Brexit to win, and when it won, I expected it to play a big role in any general election, which it simply didn't. At first, I expected Corbyn's Labour to push only slightly above Miliband's polling, at best; at my most optimistic, I privately allowed the possibility of a win, but would only chance a guess at 36-7% with a loss of seats in public. That necessarily calls for a re-evaluation of some of my assumptions.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-73653749485477303682017-06-23T16:50:00.002+01:002017-06-23T16:50:27.525+01:00Notes on the EU and privatisationThere is a default assumption on the centre-left that the EU is, if not an outright progressive institution, not fundamentally problematic either.<br />
<br />
Obviously, I think this is wrong. Given the reactionary nature of the Brexit campaign, and the ensuing fall-out, it was hardly the most pressing error. Nor was the enthusiasm of 'Lexiters' any better grounded. In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, the Left's position was mostly a defensive one, of trying to limit the damage and prevent it from sinking the first ever left-wing leadership of the Labour Party.<br />
<br />
Clearly, we're no longer on a purely defensive footing. There is a lot that can go wrong, and Britain feels like it's on a knife-edge, but for the moment the Left has the advantage. There is now a chance to fight more aggressively for a left-wing interpretation of Brexit, rather than just limiting the damage of a reactionary Brexit. The difficulty is, what would that mean?<br />
<br />
Corbyn has indicated that he means to fight for "tariff-free access" to the single market. Does this mean membership? Or does it mean, almost tariff-free access, as near as can be arranged with a bit of give-and-take? And how likely is the EU negotiating team to offer anything like this?<br />
<br />
Given that approximately half of UK trade is with the EU, solving this problem is not only important in itself, but also vital to Corbyn's ability to collect enough taxes to pay for his manifesto commitments. Yet at the same time, the single market represents another type of problem for some of his manifesto commitments.<br />
<br />
I hope it's not too controversial to agree with Nick Clegg on one thing. The single market is a Thatcherite achievement. That's right: as the old, forgotten campaign slogan goes, "I Agree With Nick". The terrible reality of the Brexit campaign is that it attacked the only really attractive aspect of this institution, which is the free movement of people.<br />
<br />
But, just as the EU is more concerned with the organisation of investors' rights than 'trade' narrowly speaking, the "four freedoms" institutionalised by the single market are chiefly concerned with property rights, not human rights.<br />
<br />
What I want to do is spell out the possible implications of single market membership for Corbyn's manifesto, focusing on his commitments to nationalisation of mail, rail, energy and water.<br />
<br />
The trend in EU law is to liberalise across economic sectors, and to harmonise whatever provisions facilitate that. The core EU institution, stipulated by Article 26 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), is the single market. The single market entails the free movement of goods, capital and services, which are investors rights, further strengthened by the EU’s Services Directive in 2006.<br />
<br />
What does that mean in practice? As in all jurisprudence, there is sufficient indeterminacy in the law to potentially allow a variety of outcomes. For example, Article 345 of TFEU states that nothing in the law shall prejudice the right of member states to manage their own system of property ownership.<br />
<br />
This could be taken to mean that member states have a right to nationalise or privatise whatever they want. But that can only be determined by seeing how the European Court of Justice, which applies the law, has determined its scope in specific cases. Most recently, the Essent case has been an important test case, although one with an ambiguous result.<br />
<br />
The Essent case involved energy companies taking the Dutch government to court over laws absolutely prohibiting energy privatisation. The Dutch supreme court referred the case to the ECJ. The government's position was that it shouldn't be a matter for the ECJ, because of Article 345. The ECJ agreed to the extent that, indeed, the government had a right to manage its own system of property ownership. But it said that this right was not unrestricted, and that therefore it did fall under the Court's scope.<br />
<br />
In particular, the ECJ insisted, the fundamental provision in the TFEU of free movement of capital had to be taken into account. Restricting the rights of private investors to acquire shares in an undertaking was an abridgement of free movement. This could be tolerated only in a narrow range of exceptional situations. Specifically, the member state in question would have to demonstrate that there was an overriding reason of public interest, and that it must accord with the proportionality principle.<br />
<br />
The ECJ, having laid out this reasoning, referred the case back to the Dutch supreme court. So what constitutes "proportionality"? In what circumstances is it permissible for a member state to abridge the free movement of capital? That has to be inferred from other rulings.<br />
<br />
For example, take the Société nationale Elf-Aquitaine, the French oil company. The French government used a ‘golden share' in the privatised company to ensure that the state had decisive influence. The minister for economy had to approve the acquisition of shares and voting rights by any individual above a certain threshold. The European Commission objected that these regulations were anti-competitive, and the ECJ agreed.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, in the case of the Belgian Société de distribution du gaz SA, the government invoked a principle of public security as a justification for holding a strategic stake in the energy industry. The principle in question involved the state's ability to maintain a continuity of energy supply in the case of attack.<br />
<br />
The ECJ has cleaved to a restrictive definition of proportionality, permitting exceptions where a concern is implicated in the exercise of authority. In the French case, it was deemed that no satisfactory principle had been offered to justify curtailing free movement of capital and goods, and that state intervention was in excess of what would be required to secure energy in the case of emergency.<br />
<br />
The decisions of the ECJ, which have primacy over the national law of member states, have generally supported the preferences of the European Commission and the extension of liberalisation -- meaning, market competition and privatisation -- in a range of domains, from energy to telecommunications.<br />
<br />
In the run up to the Brexit campaign, a lot of 'Lexit' polemic focused on desiderata such as the renationalisation of the railways. Kate Hoey probably doesn't count as a Lexiter, because she's not particularly left-wing, but her argument was typical in claiming that EU membership made renationalisation impossible. That overstatement ruined a perfectly good argument.<br />
<br />
The "fourth railway package" seeks to extend the logic of the internal market to rail. As per Article 345, it does not specify a public or private property regime. It would be quite compatible with either a Railtrack or a Network Rail running the rail network. It does not specify that specific service providers must be private operators.<br />
<br />
It does specify markets and competition. It does mandate separating infrastructure and service operators. It does mandate the opening up of domestic public rail contracts to competition by 2019.<br />
<br />
In principle, the government could take all the existing rail networks into public ownership as their contracts expire. A publicly owned firm, separate from Network Rail, could take over all the service operators. However, should the government try to prevent a private investor from acquiring shares in a service operator, or should it prevent private investors for bidding for the franchise, that would fall under ECJ remit. The Commission could make a complaint, and it probably would, and the government would then have to answer to the "proportionality principle" which, as we have seen, is applied quite narrowly. It would be unable to maintain a state monopoly.<br />
<br />
Being a member of the single market would entail accepting the "four freedoms" and the jurisdiction of the ECJ. Now, what if the ECJ ruled against a Corbyn government? What if it instructed Corbyn to immediately open up publicly owned carriage provision to competition from private providers, say to Virgin or Southern Rail? Could Corbyn simply refuse to comply? If he was prepared to accept steep fines for every day of non-compliance, yes. If he was prepared to be at the epicentre of a barrage of condemnation and vilification, yes. On the other hand, could he just forget about renationalising these goods, in the interests of trying to keep the economy growing? If he was prepared to take a major defeat on a major plank of his platform, at the risk of demoralising his supporters and strengthening the reactionary Right, yes. If he was prepared to forget about any left-wing challenge to the established growth formula, yes.<br />
<br />
There is, of course, no guarantee that the Commission or a private provider would take Corbyn to court, or that the ECJ would find against him. In part, it depends on the political climate. And it may not be necessary to be negotiate full membership of the single market in order to get its benefits (although frankly, economic logic aside, I don't know why the EU negotiators would concede that). This is just an example of something that applies more generally, in terms of the relationship between an elected left-wing government, and powerful, non-democratic institutions.<br />
<br />
The last time there was a Labour government, it was immediately and enthusiastically working with the grain of global, post-democratic institutions, from the EU to the emerging World Trade Organisation. It produced reports describing its progress with privatisation, private finance initiatives, and public-private partnerships. It recapitulated orthodox 'free market' arguments for proceeding in this direction, above all the efficiency of competition and private provision. That 'efficiency' was pure ideology, but it was an ideology congruent with the smooth circulation of power. Labour at that time could stride the world stage as a major player in the construction of a liberal world system, while also putting the iron fist of war behind the velvet glove of trade.<br />
<br />
A Corbyn government would immediately have to wrestle with these institutions, and they include the EU with whom they would have to negotiate. Corbyn is quite rational in stating "full, tariff-free access" to the single market as a basis for negotiating. But whatever he can get from Guy Verhofstadt and colleagues won't come cheap.<br />
<br />
<i>Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/notes-on-eu-and-11833771">Patreon</a>. If you like this post, please consider pledging a small monthly sum to support my writing</i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-80797804102594028482017-06-08T21:47:00.000+01:002017-06-08T21:47:17.983+01:00Bring on the floodA freshet is a river flood, brought on by the melting of snow. We need a freshet in this election, brought on by a great political thawing, a sort of glasnost of neoliberalism. We need, in short, those frozen over blocs of non-voters, those who have been disempowered and excluded, those who haven't been represented, those who just gave up voting -- most of whom would have been Labour voters if it in any way represented them -- to be fired up and put into motion.<br />
<br />
In this election, it is not surprising that there has been a huge controversy about turnout. Jeremy Corbyn's leadership pitch was, from the start, that he would bring back lost voters, people who have given up and felt alienated from the system. He said, from the start, that Labour needed to win over people who had stopped voting. Part of the surge in Labour's support during this campaign has been driven by groups of voters who ordinarily don't vote, or who haven't voted before. That, to an extent, reflects success on Corbyn's part. But it is one thing for people to be politically won over by Corbyn; it is another thing for them to be persuaded they must vote.<br />
<br />
There is always the risk that the bubbles of political life, encouraged by social media -- what they call the "pluralization of life-worlds" -- has created a false sense among some of us of just how widespread and how deep the excitement is. That risk is tempered by the very obvious successes of Labour's campaign, by the tremendous reception Corbyn gets in diverse settings, by his surprisingly strong media performances, and by the sheer calamity that is the Tory campaign. Nonetheless, I think we all -- all of us who will campaign for Labour tomorrow -- worry that we're missing some hidden structural resources of conservatism, or confusing wish-fulfilment for analysis. Even when we try to check our biases, passionate longing has a way of making one dream.<br />
<br />
And we are dreaming, and not just that Labour will do well. Let's be honest, we want there to be a Spring surprise, a shock Labour win, a rupture, something that radically confounds received wisdom. We want the entire set of assumptions by which neoliberalism rules, above all the internalised defeat that goes under the mantra 'There Is No Alternative' to be irradiated. We want the cultural predicates, by which everything should have a market price, and by which refugees and those on benefits are sadistically punished, while banks and large corporations endlessly get away with it, to be overturned. We want, on Friday morning, to wake up to a different country.<br />
<br />
That, though we all know the odds against it, though we all know how much power is mobilised to stop precisely this from happening, exerts a gravitational pull on all our analysis. And we have to be endlessly careful not to give in to it.<br />
<br />
In this election, because of the unusual degree of volatility and uncertainty, polls have been wildly divergent in their assumptions. Some polling companies have consistently predicted a Labour share of the vote around 33-35%. Those would include ICM, Opinium, ComRes, Panelbase and (until tonight) TNS. YouGov (until tonight), Survation and ORB have shown much higher Labour shares, in the region of 38-40%. The ironic role reversal tonight was that it was TNS which put Labour up 5 points to 38%, and YouGov which, with some methodological adjustments, brought Labour down three points to 35%.<br />
<br />
Choosing between these is impossible, and reflects a mix of desire and gut instinct. One of the problems with polling, one of the reasons why it can get things wrong, and why weighting is such an issue, is that its method of inquiry starts from the assumption -- which then has to be corrected, post-hoc -- that political action is based on individualised units of opinion, in which every opinion is of equal weight and competency. In fact, ideologies are usually formed in collective, group contexts, based on shared experiences: your class, your race, your gender, your locality, your religion, your nationality, your street, your occupation, and so on.<br />
<br />
Posing the question in an individualised way sidesteps the collective way in which people form ideas and make decisions. And it has the effect of forcing people to rely on impressions gained from recent media campaigns. That renders polls particularly susceptible to media-driven buzz. Recall that before the 2015 problems which produced such reflection from pollsters, there was also the 2010 "Cleggasm". I don't remember too much panic about that, but polling companies seriously overstated the Liberal vote (with the effect of uncharacteristically understating the Labour vote) in that election year.<br />
<br />
This is, of course, not to dismiss polling. It is a highly technically advanced way of gaining a snapshot of ideological forces in motion -- raw material which politicians and public relations professionals are able to work with, and work on very effectively. It is often wrong, but not usually that wrong. And with the huge differences among polling organisations, they all have a degree of rationality in their predictions, informed by past practice as well as (frankly) a degree of unconscious ideology manifesting as 'gut instinct'. They have a huge amount of future business riding on their predictions, so they have every interest in getting it right. YouGov probably has a mixture of professional concerns in adjusting its estimate and business concerns -- the costs of underestimating Labour are a lot lower than those of overestimating labour.<br />
<br />
But it is to say that there is nothing authoritative about polling. It is always just raw material to act on. We read the polls looking for points of weakness in our opponents, moments of opportunity, areas where intervention can make a difference, ambiguities and ambivalences in what appears to be a consensus.<br />
<br />
And as we approach polling day, we read them with only one answer. Let's get as many people out to vote as possible. Let's make all the pollsters wrong. Let's confound their expectations. And even if we can't, even if what we're doing now is building a basis for the future, even if we know that we were never going to turn Britain into a left-wing country within just two years, or just one election campaign, in the wake of Brexit and after years of reaction... Still, let's bring on the flood.<br />
<br />
<br />
Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/bring-on-flood-11616529">Patreon</a>. If you like the post, please consider making a 'pledge'.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-54993731945575620762017-06-04T21:01:00.004+01:002017-06-05T21:17:42.777+01:00Let's drop the big one<i>"The individual would misconceive the nuclear peril if he tried to understand it primarily in terms of personal danger, or even in terms of danger to the people immediately known to him, for the nuclear peril threatens life, above all, not at the level of individuals, who already live under the sway of death, but at the level of everything that individuals hold in common. Death cuts off life; extinction cuts off birth . . . the meaning of extinction is therefore to be sought first not in what each person’s own life means to him but in what the world and the people in it mean to him." </i><br />
—Jonathan Schell<br />
<br />
<i>"We died with the dying: </i><br />
<i>See, they depart and we go with them. </i><br />
<i>We are born with the dead; </i><br />
<i>See, they return and bring us with them." </i><br />
— T S Eliot<br />
<br />
<br />
During the Korean War, when troops from the People's Republic of China entered North Korea to repel the US invasion, General MacArthur conducted a quick strategic re-thinking. Let's invade China, he said. Let's drop the big one. "Oriental psychology," he insisted, was such that it would only "respect and follow aggressive, resolute and dynamic leadership".<br />
<br />
During the Vietnam War, the US government looked into the use of nuclear weapons to decisively finish off a determined, disciplined revolutionary nationalist movement that was actually in the course of decimating the US army.<br />
<br />
During the Second Cold War, US weapons policy was informed by the most alarmist neoconservative prognoses about red danger, triggering a nuclear arms race. The United States president was a man who interpreted biblical prophesy to mean that the United States was destined for nuclear confrontation with the Communist antichrist. His Secretary of State wanted to bomb Cuba and "turn that island into a fucking parking lot". His Pentagon repeatedly war-gamed a nuclear war with the USSR, and readied the US military for a "protracted" nuclear war in which the US must prevail. It took a mass anti-nuclear movement to put a dampener on the nuclear arms race.<br />
<br />
You can see these little moments, alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis, as a series of near-misses for the species. Millions of lives, perhaps all of human life, depended on those misses. After all, this is what definitional about what these extinction-level events, be it ecological collapse or nuclear war. It isn't just about ending a lot of lives in an unjust and tragic way. It is about ending the possibility of life. The one tiny spot in this vast, mostly lifeless universe -- as far as we know or have any right to guess -- where life has emerged. And we have come uncomfortably close, several times, to extinguishing it.<br />
<br />
A lot hangs on that 'we'. Because after all, most of 'we' had little to do with it. These were decisions made by bureaucrats and military personnel acting within certain lines of strategic and jurisprudential logic. That logic is, as we can plainly see from the MacArthur case, not so much exempt from ideology as a concentrated form of ideology. We could even describe it as, since it impelled its bearers toward the brink of megadeath, a kind of fanaticism.<br />
<br />
'We' are the hostages, the human shields, of a thermonuclear protection racket. There is no purpose to a nuclear weapon other than to annihilate major population centres. The weapons are pointed at us, by the rulers of the states in which we live. And they tell us that the gun pointed at our heads is for our protection, when it is the administration of death, of extinction.<br />
<br />
And yet 'we', or some of us, a minority perhaps, are also eminently available for this transaction. Enthusiastic, sadomasochistic participants. The thermonuclear state probably doesn't have a huge popular constituency. But <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/pick-bigger-11358591">the other side of politics</a>, usually working for the side of reaction, has nothing to do with the usual norms of enlightened self-interest, nothing to do with "rational choice".
That other side works according to the logic of the unconscious.<br />
<br />
A friend reminded me earlier of the Spanish fascist slogan, 'Viva La Muerte'. Which, translated, means 'Long Live Death'. Think about the logic of that slogan. It is completely contradictory, containing no sense of logic or sequence or temporality. It is a slogan that comes from a place outside of reality, defying the laws of physics: hence its peculiar poetic resonance. It wants life in death; death in life. Unconscious death-wishes often work that way.<br />
<br />
And this is the world into which we are inducted when we hear from fellow citizens for whom, happiness is a gun pointed at your head. Citizens for whom, it is the job of a political leader to hold that gun there and be willing to pull the trigger. It is a world where death and supremacy rules. Where people don't mind dying in a nuclear blaze as long a migrant doesn't get to claim benefits.<br />
<br />
This isn't a world half way around the planet. It isn't even a world half way down the block. It is the world we live in, dying.<br />
<br />
<br />
Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/lets-drop-big-11542150">Patreon</a> -- if you liked this post, consider supporting my writing by making a pledge.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-6224966783490845182017-05-27T10:40:00.000+01:002017-05-27T10:43:26.996+01:00Troops on the streets, crazy in the news sheets.<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />One death-drive turns another. One journalist calls for the "internment of thousands". Another calls for a "final solution".</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />When the Westminster attacker, Khalid Masood, struck, there was the usual authoritarian frenzy, such as calls for the end of instant messaging privacy, and The Sun demanding armed cops on every street corner -- a lurid Petainist fantasy. But there was also a sub-current of exciting, macho rhetoric. </div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />Andrew Neil, in a speech he was allowed to deliver to camera by the BBC, derided this "poundland terrorist". Do you, he wondered, have any idea who you're dealing with? We are the British. We conquered half the planet. We have committed untold acts of violence. You are nothing next to us. Bring it on. Send your best, send your worst. Come ahead, square go. This phallic bombast was so thrilling that Tommy Robinson, sharing the speech, said it gave him goosebumps. A visceral reminder that all rhetoric is erotica.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />The stirring evocation of armour-plated British omnipotence was, however, only as persuasive as the attack was unsuccessful. Masood's methods were crude and chaotic. His headlong death-lunge at the nominal centre of British power was always doomed to fail. The indications are that he had converted to Islam to get out of a violent life -- he dreamed of blood, as he put it. But he was seemingly never a doctrinaire jihadi. </div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />Salman Abedi, the 22 year old suicide attacker in Manchester, was a different type of attacker. This we know just from what he did. He used an explosive device, not knives. He picked a soft target, and a large target. Some 21,000 people, not protected by armed police, or even a baggage check, were potentially within the radius of his explosion. And maybe there was also an element of religious sadism, in targeting young people who had been having a good time. It seems obvious what he sought to provoke; exactly the kind of reaction that similar attacks have provoked in France, in the hope that an increasingly embattled minority of young Muslim men will flock to the theocratic far right. They want British politicians, spies and cops to become the recruiting sergeants for Daesh, and also collaterally the recruiting sergeants for Europe's next wave of fascism. Another turn in a depressingly familiar death-spiral.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />And so, the Prime Minister gave a speech. The reclusive, gaffe-prone, gurn-smirking Theresa May, finally found her mark. It was, by all accounts, stateswomanlike, dignified, resolute, capturing the mood of the nation -- which is to say, it was exactly the same as any speech any Prime Minister would have given at such a moment. It said nothing, but said it with conviction. The point of such speeches is that, in their authoritative disbursement of information that was already available, in their solemn declarations of the obvious, in their insistence on certain adjectives which do the heavy lifting of explanation -- cowardice, evil, and so on -- they seem to make a superficial sense. Such attacks do not make sense. They are where sense breaks down. But the obligatory Prime Ministerial speech insists on making sense. In saying that we are strong, they were weak; we are brave, they are cowards; we will win, they will lose, it re-asserts a whole order of sense-making that has come into question.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />What was far more important, registering the actual tenor of her policy response, was what came after. Theresa May is an ally of hardliners in the state, particularly in MI5. It was a former spook whom she recruited to draft her snoopers' charter some years ago. Her repertoire of responses to terror all fall on the side of intensified authoritarianism. Last time, she used the occasion to once more browbeat messaging services like Whatsapp -- on the preciously thin grounds that Masood may have sent a vital message linked to his attack before dying -- into abolishing user privacy. </div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />This time, in the middle of an election, she has raised the "threat level" to "critical" and sent armed forces out into the streets. Without attempting to second-guess government claims that there is another terror attack imminent, or inquire into the integrity of those "threat levels" (if it hasn't dropped below "severe" in such a long time, perhaps the war isn't working), this is obviously not going to stop an attack.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />It is, like airport security, a superstitious ritual. The point of this sort of terrorist tactic is that it is flexible, unpredictable, designed to upset calculations, and work around obstacles. As long as Daesh and like organisations have the ability to recruit, to summon loyalty, there will always be soft targets. Why? Because the idea of an ironclad, completely securitised nation, with no vulnerabilities, is a sinister totalitarian fantasy. Even if it were possible, it would depend on a repression ten times more ferocious than that which it was called down to stop.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />So this is posturing, which happens to serve the interests of Theresa May and of police hardliners who want to show off a bit of British muscle and steel. And the more barbaric and violent the discourse becomes, the more it can be canalised into this statist machismo. The more-or-less civilised, collectivist, solidaristic reaction of Mancunians, the blood donations and free taxi rides, the homeless man rushing in to help the victims, the refusal to 'be divided', the chasing away of EDL provocateurs, is a cultural counterweight to that dangerous and ineffectual strutting. </div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />But at some point, we need that multicultural conviviality to be conjoined with something which is presently absent, and that is a serious and critical reappraisal of every assumption of every 'counterterrorist' policy that has produced this terrifying impasse. That would mean the Prevent strategy, the various foreign policy interventions, the alliance with Saudi Arabia, everything. It would all have to be on the table, without intimidation. Because that intimidation is coming. The Birmingham MP, Khalid Mahmood, is already using the attack to demand that people stop criticising the hugely discriminatory and counterproductive Prevent strategy. Bear in mind that even such figures as Liam Byrne and Syeeda Warsi have criticised Prevent for the chilling effect it has on Muslim communities and on the enjoyment of civil liberties. The vitriol against Corbyn for his supposed Provo sympathies is part of this offensive, <em>pour encourager les autres</em>. </div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />Nonetheless, the discussion has to happen. Because the cost of not having these conversations will probably be measured in a body count.</div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br /><br /></div><br /><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; color: #232d32; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; white-space: pre-line;"><br />(Cross-posted from my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/richardseymourwtf">Patreon</a> account. If you like it, please consider sending me a couple of quid.)</div><br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div><br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-30303659022385390822017-05-25T12:13:00.002+01:002017-05-25T12:13:17.154+01:00WritingI have launched a new project, using <a href="https://www.patreon.com/richardseymourwtf">Patreon</a>, wherein I'll be writing daily and 'patrons' (anyone who pledges any monthly sum to my account) will have immediate access to that writing. There are already three articles up there, dealing with <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/unpopular-11308853">Labour, the elections</a>, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/prime-ministers-11319737">Manchester</a>, <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/11358591">terror, and the death-drive</a>. This is an attempt to incentivise people to pay for writing, and to give me a reason to write every day. The pitch is as follows:<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />What do you do when you write? You give yourself a second body. And when you read, you breathe "air from another life and time and place".<br />Extended explanation, said the poet Marianne Moore, tends to spoil the lion's leap. I will be brief. You cannot pay for good writing. You can't incentivise someone to lift your day, or to send you out into the streets in a fury. And you can't subscribe to a life-changing experience. All you can do is pay for writing to happen, and see what comes.<br />If, somehow, you don't know me, I am the author of several books, most recently 'Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics' (Verso, 2016). And I am a founding editor of Salvage magazine. I mostly write marxist political commentary -- a practiced purveyor of undead ideas. And sometimes I take strange, nocturnal detours.<br />If you support my writing, you will see daily political commentary (a diary or blog), regular political articles (roughly once a week), and occasional long-form essays before they appear anywhere else.<br />You will suffer shattering mood-swings, expand your vocabulary, acquire a certain aristocratic disposition, and fall in love twice as often as before. You will be on better terms with cats, and dogs will stop growling at you. The world will end more reluctantly and gracefully, and only after you've had dessert. Everything will be fine; no, it won't.<br />Please help.</blockquote>
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If you 'subscribe' to this blog through PayPal, you are invited to switch, so that you get automated access to daily writing. I'll be continuing to write here, of course, especially the irregular longer form essays. But you can get more for your money by switching.</div>
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Also, the javascript service I was using has gone defunct, meaning this blog currently has a rather plain look. This is temporary. Normal service will be resumed. </div>
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If you haven't ever supported my writing financially, do consider dropping a couple of quid my way. It doesn't have to be a lot, provided there are enough supporters.</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-20849537578709213952017-05-19T10:27:00.001+01:002017-05-19T10:27:54.410+01:00Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless CentreMy <a href=http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/eternal-sunshine-of-a-spotless-centre/>latest long form piece for Salvage</a> is about Corbyn and the snap election:<br /><br />"Nothing is forever, except absence. And if the bromides of the British pundit class seem timeless, that is because the political centre registers as an absence.<br /><br />"Credibility, they’re saying. What Corbyn needs now, and sorely lacks, is credibility. How does one get credibility? A sharp swerve to the centre. The capitals of the European centre are collapsing around their ears, from London to Madrid to Athens to Amsterdam. Only Paris has averted the complete collapse of the centre through, as Perry Anderson put, a yuppie simulacrum of populist breakthrough. And even there, it followed the implosion of the Socialist Party and survived only because its major opponent was fascism. Yet nothing can shake a belief that has never even been thought about as such. The answer – cleave centre – is given with the same confidence that spiritual adepts once prescribed trepanning for the sick. Corbyn needs centrist credibility, in other words, like he needs a hole in the head.<br /><br /><br />"That Corbyn lacks credibility is the implied or explicit premise of almost every report, every editorial, every interview question in this election. When Corbyn supporters are sought out for a grilling on national television, the question is usually put with a degree of polite amusement: ‘do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe Jeremy Corbyn is a potential Prime Minister?’ The interviewee then has to choose between appearing to be unreasonable, in view of the polls, or offering a half-hearted, mealy-mouthed defence which amounts to the patronising idea, indulged by even his bitter enemies, that he is ‘a thoroughly decent person’.<br /><br />II.<br /><br />"Let us cut through the bad faith and bullshit. The answer to the question is ‘no’: by their standards, Corbyn has absolutely no credibility, and is not a potential Prime Minister. However, while this should be given its full weight as a material factor, we should also recognise that the British political and media establishment is akin to Standard & Poor’s in their disbursement of ‘credibility’ ratings. This establishment has spent years giving triple A scores to what turned out to be toxic political stock, while regularly using its ratings and public statements to organise the processes it claims to be reporting on. And these last few years have seen a credibility crunch of gigantic proportions.<br /><br />"This is not to double down on the unworldly claims of some of the Corbynite Left’s social media prize-fighters, who routinely claim that he is about to school Theresa May. As an expression of a devoutly held wish, an animating desire, this is laudable; as anything else, it is ineffectual bombast. The Conservatives may fall short of the 20 per cent leads they began to score after announcing a snap election. Labour’s polling, having been depressed to around 25 per cent post-Brexit and amid the ‘chicken coup’ and its reverberations, seems to have returned to around 30 per cent, which is where it has been in practice since 2010. But the local election results were poor, with the Conservatives gaining seats in the hundreds while Labour shed seats in the greater hundreds. Credibility may be a hugely depleted currency, but it is still a material force in this election. The punditocracy still has its power, and so therefore does its received wisdom. The centrist political establishment is on the back foot, but fighting back with ruthless determination and resourcefulness. The same countersubversive zeal with which May announced the snap election, pledging to crush the saboteurs, expunge division from politics and forge a unified national will, also animates the centre’s war on Corbynism..."<br /><br /><a href=http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/eternal-sunshine-of-a-spotless-centre/>Read on</a>.<br /><br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-61857525486699557582017-05-19T10:16:00.001+01:002017-05-19T10:16:56.593+01:00Is Fascism on the Rise?<i>I was asked to post this brief talk I recently gave to a Stop Trump meeting in South London.</i><br /><br />It was the Martinican poet and anticolonial fighter, Aime Cesaire, who tried to point out to Europeans that what they called Nazism, they had been practicing with a free conscience in the colonial world for decades. And that this relationship was not incidental.<br /><br />In fact, the conscience of the European was never free. Octave Mannoni, the French psychoanalyst who famously psychoanalysed the colonial situation, once suggested that there was a surprising pervasiveness of the colonised, in the dreams of Europeans who had never left the continent and never seen such a person. Today, one wonders if provincial, sedentary English men and women dream of the Muslim.<br /><br />If they do, these hauntings allow them to dissociate: that is, to project all their destructive impulses (the death-drive) onto someone else. It also allows them to dream that, since there is this other figure who isn’t fully human, they are guaranteed full humanity, a plenitude of being, by their whiteness. A certain cosmic prestige. Remember D H Lawrence in his ecstatic passions about nature — the dandelion is a nonpareil, foolish, foolish, foolish, to compare it to anything else. This was also a racist metaphysics of a great chain of being, in which he judged life more vivid in him than in his Mexican driver.<br /><br />A lethal anxiety can be provoked when the principle of race seems to collapse. Because then you might have to take back your projections. What’s more, you have to confront the emptiness of your identification with whiteness. You may remember the racist tram passenger, Emma West, emotively excoriating black passengers and saying, “my Britain is fuck all now!”<br /><br />In the summer of 2011, David Starkey complained that the whites have become black. This was his explanation for multiracial, anti-police riots that flared across English cities. Well, five years later, Thomas Mair gave that anxiety the force of arms. In the middle of a Brexit campaign which dramatically represented the country as being at a “Breaking Point”, where that break was clearly linked to race, Mair sought out a 'traitor' to whiteness — just as Breivik did — for murder.<br /><br />The Breiviks and Mairs, lone wolves of 21st century fascism, are also canaries in the coal mine. They don’t tell us that fascism has arrived, but they do show us what it means.<br /><br />The question, “Is Fascism On the Rise?,” could too easily provoke us to offer glib answers. Trump isn’t a fascist, Farage isn’t a fascist, so we might think we can set the whole question of fascism aside. But we can only do that if we treat fascism as a scholastic typological question, rather than an historical one.<br /><br />History is a process, and we need to understand the processes through which fascism arises. There is a traditional schema according to which economic crisis equals polarisation equals extremism. Things are more complicated. There’s a particular sequence which we should pay attention to.<br /><br />Yes, economic crisis is important, but it has to be metabolised by the state somehow. A crisis of capitalism, has to be a crisis of its political institutions and of its ideological claims. That crisis must manifest itself in a deadlock of political leadership of the ruling class. If, typically, one of its sectors leads (say, the City of London) and imposes its imperatives as being for the good of all, that leadership will come into question. <br /><br />There will be a crisis of representation, as the link between parties and their traditional social base breaks down. As governments flounder, the state apparatuses will achieve a higher degree of autonomy and salience. There will be profound and pervasive distrust of the existing ideologies and the media outlets which purvey them. <br /><br />The Left will be weak, and retreating. The labour movement will be weak, employers on the offensive. That offensive will have severe consequences not just for workers but also for the lower ends of the middle class, who suddenly risk being plunged down into the ranks of the poorest — or worse, being made equal to the racialised outsider. The whites will become black.<br /><br />And then, internationally, the state will be either in some state of relative ‘backwardness’ (as was the case for imperial late-comers Italy and Germany) or in some state of relative competitive decline. A decline which metaphorises the decline of all the downwardly mobile social strata in the nation.<br /><br />In that context, of comprehensive crisis and left weakness, a fascist organisation can take power.<br /><br />The traditional way of doing this would be to exploit democratic politics while building paramilitary strength; to forge networks of elite support and covert state alliances while posing as anti-establishment.<br /><br />But in most cases, no mature fascist organisation exists. The closest we have come to seeing that in recent years was the Golden Dawn years in Greece, where they assembled mass support and rival centres of legitimate violence on the streets, alongside links to state allies — but the confrontation with bourgeois state power came too soon. They were crushed, for now.<br /><br />But the fascism of the future doesn’t have to be traditional. Nor does it have to respect the sequences observed in the interwar years, or reanimate old cultures. It could even adopt a patina of edgy cool, as with the alt-right: we should never underestimate the erotic glamour of fascism and its appeal to the death-drive. <br /><br />Nor does it have to always be on the brink of a putsch. Let us not forget the strategy of the Front national, to win mainstream credibility by demonstrating the ability to govern within liberal constraints. The attempt by Bannon and Miller to force a rupture in the American state was premature and voluntaristic. A more competent germinal fascism would take its time, patiently exploiting the fascist potential within the liberal state, to incubate and nurture the fascist monster of the future.<br /><br />We face a parlous situation. The instability of capitalist democracies will produce both exhilarating breakthroughs and morbid symptoms. Recent polls across Europe showed that surprisingly huge numbers of young people would be up for a revolt against their government. This can be a radical groundswell, but let us not underestimate the space or pure negativity, the possibility for an identification with pure destruction. Polls around the time of Charlie Hebdo showed a surprisingly large reservoir of sympathy for Daesh among young French people — not just Muslims, as was inaccurately reported. How can the Left harness the best and head off the worst — if not to channel it through pointless social media blood-lettings? We know how the Right will respond; by racialising it, and by calling down the force of an authoritarian response ten times more lethal than what it is supposed to repress.<br /><br />We on the Left are having a good campaign about class and economic issues right now, but to an extent we seem to want to have anti-fascist conversations without seriously addressing the centrality of race, nation, war and the colonial legacy. The national question, which in Britain is always a racial question, has become more and not less central. We would not be facing a Tory electoral behemoth now, had Brexit not completely transformed the terrain. Too much of the Left, including some of the Corbynite Left, would rather not have that conversation for reasons of electoral expediency. It would simply cost too much to have that conversation in the short run. What they don’t realise is what it will cost them in the long run not to have that conversation. <br /><br />I return to Cesaire, talking about that troubled conscience of Europeans:<br /><br /><blockquote>“it is Nazism, yes, but before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; they have cultivated that Nazism, they are responsible for it, and before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.”</blockquote><br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-60999908017087621592017-05-09T18:23:00.003+01:002017-05-09T18:23:35.402+01:00One must not move too quickly to sense-making.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-30hMQselFzQ/WRH681kxAjI/AAAAAAAAQLU/ii73zGHBzJoMb2MroZXWmSn3BRcs-fk2ACK4B/s1600/C_ZqDchXgAENjP4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-30hMQselFzQ/WRH681kxAjI/AAAAAAAAQLU/ii73zGHBzJoMb2MroZXWmSn3BRcs-fk2ACK4B/s320/C_ZqDchXgAENjP4.jpg" width="320" /></a>My <a href="http://revueperiode.net/lhegemonie-de-la-race-de-gramsci-a-lacan-entretien-avec-richard-seymour/">interview with Période</a> about my academic work and writing has been republished, in English, <a href="http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/richard-seymour-making-non-sense">over at Historical Materialism</a>:<br />
<br />
"There is a rationalising tendency in all theory, Marxism included: a drive to ‘make sense’ of things. One of the virtues of psychoanalysis at its best is that it is comfortable making do with nonsense for a while — it doesn’t move too quickly to sense-making. And when you have people beating up Mexicans, or Poles, or behaving politically in ways that seem profoundly injurious even to themselves, there is a temptation to try to rationalise and move quickly to solutions. To say, “ah, they’re doing this because of economic insecurity” or “they’re doing this because the media have misinformed them about the real causes of their situation”. It might be worth spending time with the nonsense before moving to problem-solving."<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-84464899462502250782017-05-08T23:38:00.000+01:002017-05-08T23:38:05.414+01:00The Night Season<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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“I sleep, but my heart waketh,” begins a verse in the Song
of Songs, “it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh”. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The songs of depression and loss begin as songs of obsession
and yearning. If, as Andrew Solomon claims, depression is the flaw in love, it
is in part because violence is the repressed truth of romance: it is always a
St Valentine’s Day massacre. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The knocking of a woman’s heart becomes the knocking of the
door, and the knocking of the bed. It is a dream, and the dream is a wish-fulfilment.
Later, the woman goes out walking, after midnight, searching the streets for
her lover.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a strange interlude in the early biblical texts, one
which was included amid controversy, because it has no express spiritual
content. It is an erotic poem, laden with superlative idealisation. The
language points to qualities that exceed description. “His legs are as pillars
of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon,
excellent as the cedars”. “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair
as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” “I am a
wall, and my breasts like towers … Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a
roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The lovers in the Song of Songs find one another, a success
story. They are not just idealised, but ideally matched, mirroring one another's desire: “brother” and “sister”
in the curious language of the Old Testament. But if, as Michael Eigen wrote
somewhere, “desire and idealisation are sisters,” the violence of idealisation
appears in its language. She is “terrible as an army with banners,” he sings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Love is strong as death,” she sings,
“jealousy is cruel as the grave”. We have to imagine that, as with all ideal
lovers, they would be an absolutely awful couple.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">II.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Idealisation is a success story, simmering with violence
which lurks, like piranha, just below the reflective shimmer. One might say, it
is the success story of heteronormative patriarchy. Like perfectionism, it is
gendered – we all do it, but women lose most from it. It comes from a need to
control the unpredictable, to disavow the open and indeterminate. Idealisation
is a defence against the future. A woman is terrifying, Jacqueline Rose says
somewhere, because you never know what she is going to come up with.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Another side of this story, one of its many failures, might
be found in Patsy Cline’s country and western song, ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’. A
story told by a woman seemingly deserted by her lover, who goes out walking in
the desperate hope that he will somehow materialise along the road, searching
for her all along. As if her walking and wanting, tracing what town planners
call the “desire lines” made by human footfall, will, like a magical ritual,
summon the object of desire into being. The song is a dream, and the dream is a
wish-fulfilment. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
If, for Matthew Beaumont, night-walking is a tacit challenge
to the political and social regime – think ‘Reclaim The Night’ or 'Nuit debout' – it can also be
a very individualised rebellion, like depression. The term “night season,”
which evokes a state of worldly abjection, is used often in religious language:
frequently in connection with the Song of Songs, where it in fact does not
appear. It occurs only once in the King James Bible, in Psalm 22. It is the
season of abandonment:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“My God, my God, why has thou
forsaken me? why are thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my
roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night
season, and am not silent.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The psalm is a song of being forsaken. The feeling of being
forsaken, an “immense and aching solitude” as William Styron put it, even amid
crowds, even among friends, even when no real-world abandonment has taken
place, is common in depression. (Styron began to experience melancholic depression late in life, after developing an intolerance of alcohol. But his description, in <i>The Confessions of Nat Turner</i>, of the hero's feeling of abandonment by his God in the aftermath of his failed uprising, suggests that he might have known this all along.) But if the song is also a dream, we might ask
what sort of wish-fulfilment that could be. What sort of satisfaction there is
to be had, or avoided, in abandonment. And whether idealisation can also be a
defence against consummation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">III.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The theological term for night-walking, is mysticism. Theologians
who speak of the “night season” invoke a state, not only of abandonment, of
being far from God, but of total subjective destitution. The removal of all
worldly comfort and support. It is a state of being plunged into darkness. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Darkness is one of the first metaphors in Genesis, for matter
without form, a world without language or purpose. Lord Byron’s meditation on
apocalyptic darkness evokes an eternity without meaning:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“The bright sun was extinguish'd,
and the stars<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Did wander darkling in the eternal
space,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy
earth<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Swung blind and blackening in the
moonless air.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is as though the sun bleeds to death in the heavens, and
you wander darkling, blind, pathless, traversing frozen, lifeless tundra in
every direction, which you must navigate in consummate darkness. At least the
deep freeze is a kind of anaesthetic. We are used to depression as a refusal.
This is depression as a kind of exile. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And it is, some believers will have you believe, a necessary
pilgrimage. An experience without which faith is never realised, and which ultimately
leads, if pursued, not to abandonment but to the more perfectly apprehended
presence of God. As if to say, a self-cure for depression might be to relate to
it differently, to think of it as the beginning of a voyage to ecstasy. What
could this be like? “The end of a world,” says Michel de Certeau. A
consummation devoutly to be wished for.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">IV.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mysticism is as old as religion, but it emerged as a
substantive concept in the seventeenth century. The early modern mystics were
depressives. The economic depression of their social strata, the political
depression of their age of religious wars and oncoming modernity, left them
feeling abandoned by God. The texts of seventeenth-century mystics use the term
“night” to refer both to their dire global situation and to a way of moving in
it: night-walking.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The disciplines of mysticism were ambulatory, not doctrinal.
They engaged the breathing body: whatever they prescribed was intended to help
the spiritual traveller walk in the dark. But to walk where? Away from the
self, toward the north pole of the psyche. It is an imaginary, septentrional
journey that ends in being taken by force – rapture.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Night-walking in this sense is not something one undertakes
lightly. To give up worldly things and embark on a journey whose end-point is a
kind of spiritual kidnapping, must be full of peril. And indeed, the religious
historian Karen Armstrong describes the terror, guilt and tearful anxiety of
mystics on their journey. Perhaps the most famous Biblical encounter with God
is that of Ezekiel, who has to be forced into miserable exile before he can encounter
the terrifying Almighty. And this is to say nothing of the death-like catalepsy
that follows the lucid phase of the trance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Those who made the trek expecting to find anything like a
personal God to relate to would have been terribly disappointed – if not
devastated – by what they found. The ecstatic subject, as Amy Hollywood writes,
is she who “stands outside herself, encountering and communicating with another”.
But it is not even clear that communication is what happens. This other is
radically other. Other with a capital ‘O’, from another dimension of existence,
defying human categories of comprehension.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To succeed as a mystic is to be abducted by an alien. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">V.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mystics, attempting to communicate with an other, must
assume the right to use language other-wise: a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">modus liquendi</i>, Certeau wrote, valued more for what it does than
what it says. In modernity, mystery is something to be resolved. Language is
put at the service of elucidation. In mystic speech, language is its effects,
and mystery is not to be resolved but experienced. Language must, at any rate,
fail if its purpose is to signify that which by definition exceeds
signification.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This partly explains the curious status of that erotic,
aspiritual poem, the Song of Songs. For early night-walkers like Rabbi Akiva
and Gregory of Nyssa, it was the very epitome of transcendence precisely
through its delight in worldly things, its breathless ecstasies which push
beyond the limits of language to try to grasp the thing-in-itself. This isn’t
as paradoxical as it seems. Mysticism is defined by the value it places on
knowing through experience; mystical texts, Certeau writes, display a passion
for what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>. Think of that other
ecstatic poet, Hopkins, who glorifies God:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
For dappled things –<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
For skies of couple-colour as a
brinded cow;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
For rose-moles all in stipple upon
trout that swim;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls;
finches’ wings…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This giddy blast of parataxes, descriptors, comparators and
intensifiers, climaxes with one last foot, one last spondee: “Praise him.” As
if to give up, and concede that all of these magnificent descriptions simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fail</i>: only awestruck praise is possible.
Something like this is true of the Song of Songs, in its superlative excesses.
Early mystical texts treat the Bride’s descriptions of her Lover in this poem
as an attempt to describe God – or rather, as an attempt to gesture at the failure
of description.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The eroticism of mysticism, then, is predicated on a
yearning for something that is beyond speech. Armstrong remarks that the
reports of early Jewish mystics, as detailed as they are, “describe anything <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">but</i> God”. They provide details of the
robe, the chariot, the palace, the stitched lettering reading ‘YHWH’, the gold,
the fire, but these are all framing devices. The mystics knew perfectly well that
this was just a stock of received religious imagery that they possessed and
manipulated to get to the ecstatic place. But it frames, it circles around, a
zone of – nothing. Or something so radically, absolutely Other that it
manifests as a void. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here, God resembles nothing like the personal being that
appears in everyday theology and crude antitheism alike – the idea of God as
some sort of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chap</i>, as Terry Eagleton
scoffs. Whatever it is, it defies human categories. The psychoanalyst Darian
Leader sees a similar pattern in modern art, wherein the negative space framed
by image and text evokes nothing but the Lacanian Real – that part of
experience which tortures and electrifies us but which cannot be represented.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The terrible joy and pathos of mystic speech is that it
strains for something impossible. It tries to say it all, but what it wants to
say most is unspeakable.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">VI.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The tension in any pathos could be said to be like that of
the string on a musical instrument. To make its music, it must be wound up
tightly, at two ends, suspended over a carefully framed void. In this case, the
two ends correspond to that which the mystic desperately wants to put into
words, and that which can be put into words.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mystics experience two kinds of ecstasy, corresponding to
these points. The first is the rapturous sense of wholeness and plenitude, a
return to Oneness through proximity to a being that stands for, says,
absolutely everything. The second is linked to that religious experience of ‘standing
near the cross’. Beholding, as it were, the battered, broken, bleeding body of
Christ, and partaking of the fellowship of his suffering. This is an encounter,
not with wholeness, but with something that is split wide open. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The human body is not always mutilated, but it is always
lacking something. It is, in the psychoanalytic idiom, ‘castrated’. According
to the religious philosopher Amy Hollywood, this movement between wholeness and
fracture is typical of ecstatic experience. In his later years, Lacan began to give psychoanalytic attention to mystical experience, and the relationship of ecstasy to speech. For Lacan, the tortured doubling of mystic speech corresponds to the
sexed doubling of language itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The two ecstasies, or jouissances, experienced by mystics
were considered ‘phallic’ or ‘feminine’ depending on their relationship to
castration. Phallic jouissance is that which is concerned with planetary
fullness and plenitude, having and saying it all. Feminine jouissance, is the
ecstasy made possible by not having and not saying it all. After all, a world
in which there is always more to be said, is necessarily more open and
undecided – and perhaps the more overwhelming, the more rapturous for it – than
one which has been entirely spoken for. Phallic jouissance totalises; feminine
jouissance seeps in through the split.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In language, there is a movement between the two positions.
On the one end, there is always an attempt to stabilise language by positing a
transcendental signifier (which could stand in for ‘God’). This signifier is
supposed to cement the relationship between signifiers and meaning, which
Saussure demonstrated was otherwise contingent on traditions of use. But, on
the other end, there is the recognition that the transcendental signifier,
which supposedly guarantees the presence of meaning, is itself empty. God, as
we have seen, is a void. The music of language therefore depends on a movement,
or play, along a string suspended between presence and absence. Between having
and not having. Between saying it all, and not saying it all. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You could say that the yearning of mystical experience is
toward that phallic jouissance, but the void cannot be full. Language never
says everything, and there is always heterogeneity. All one can do is accede to
that feminine jouissance of not saying it all. All one can do is put some of
the Real into words.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">VII.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And this is what happens to Ezekiel when he confronts God.
He experiences, first, a raging inferno and howl, overwhelming to human senses,
which resolves only briefly into a few opaque images and words. A chariot. A
hand stretched out. A scroll filled with lamentations and wailings. A divine
voice, which commands him to eat the scroll. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
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“When he forced it down,” Armstrong writes, “accepting the
pain and misery of his exile, Ezekiel found that ‘it tasted sweet as honey’.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-7249387165748504252017-05-03T23:26:00.000+01:002017-05-03T23:45:02.831+01:00Awkward<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S_aFK-7I3eo/WQpPciagSpI/AAAAAAAAQKo/qrsYYJ03YDMSugA15hEt5mYjU3jpwPEGACK4B/s1600/Graun%2Bon%2Bcolonial%2BFrance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="29" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S_aFK-7I3eo/WQpPciagSpI/AAAAAAAAQKo/qrsYYJ03YDMSugA15hEt5mYjU3jpwPEGACK4B/s200/Graun%2Bon%2Bcolonial%2BFrance.jpg" width="200" /></a>Sometimes a passing remark tells you everything you need to know about a particular person, or a particular way of looking at things. This is <i>The Guardian</i>'s European affairs editor Jon Henley, reporting on the debate between Macron and Le Pen: "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/may/03/emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-final-french-presidential-election-2017-debate-live-coverage">Le Pen brings up Macron's clumsy remark about France having committed crimes against humanity in Algeria</a>."<br />
<br />
This was not a "clumsy remark". It was one of the few entirely, uncontroversially accurate things that Macron has said in his whole campaign. Not only is it deadly accurate, it is also vital to understanding today's France. You cannot understand the France that allows police to rape a teenager with a baton, then declare it "accidental", without understanding the France that, for example, tortured and murdered captives in Algeria. What is more, you cannot understand fascism, or the campaign of Marine Le Pen, without understanding this context.<br />
<br />
Macron doesn't know this, of course. Why would he? But Jean-Marie Le Pen was a Lieutenant in the French paratroopers who helped suppress the Algerian independence struggle. And in the course of that task, he was directly involved in the torture and extrajudicial execution of prisoners. This included electrocution, battering with truncheons, and being force-fed soapy liquid before having a towel stuffed in one's mouth while soldiers jumped up and down on one's stomach. This was a crucial part of the subjectifying experience that galvanised the fanatical nationalist and racist Le Pen, sparking his dreams of fascist revolution, and that provided a base for a fascist movement discredited by the Second World War. Much as the National Front and then BNP emerged from beleaguered and embattled empire loyalists, so today's Front national is a legacy of the French empire.<br />
<br />
What is more, the rise of fascism in the first instance could hardly be explained without reference to the colonial experience and its huge, often hidden, crimes, and the racist dreams driving them: Italy in Libya, Germany in south-west Africa, France in north Africa and Indochina, Spain in the Rif, and so on. One could hardly talk fascism without talking about the history of bombing, the history of gassing, the pioneering of efficient methods of genocide, all in the colonies. One could hardly talk about Nazi Germany's campaign for Lebensraum without addressing its ideological inspiration in the British Empire. One could hardly talk of the vicious doctrine of Aryanism, without talking about the British colonial philologists and others who invented it as part of the subjugation of south Asia.<br />
<br />
"Clumsy" is an interesting English locution, a way of saying that one doesn't talk about such things. It is also euphemistic, because what is being warded off with such polite coughing and hand-waving is the ghost at the feast -- the mutilated body of the slain who kills the buzz. What is "clumsy," from any other perspective, is being unable to talk about this history. What is awkward is the extent of circumlocution necessary to have a discussion of fascism that omits colonial history entirely.<br />
<br />
Above all, clumsy is any attempt to discuss presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, without mention of the palpable, bragged-of atrocities of her father, and their role in the formation of her own politics.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-77393670968902439372017-04-23T02:16:00.001+01:002017-04-23T02:18:16.518+01:00After the Catastrophe: resistance and the post-truth era<br /><i>Abstract</i>.<br />Mourning is movement; melancholia is stasis.<br /><br />We live, supposedly, in an age of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth politics’. This is a misunderstanding. ‘Pre-post-truth politics’ includes the era of the ‘war on terror’ and its deceptions, and the orthodoxies and falsehoods which led to the elite debacle of the credit crunch. It is technique, not truth, which has been found wanting. That is, the idea of a ‘fact’ as an objective measurement of reality, is losing ground in the post-credit crunch era.<br /><br />‘Post-truth politics’ is what, until now, we have been living under: technocracy, in a word. The “monstrous worship of facts”, as Wilde called it, is nothing other than an avoidance of the question of truth. The category of ‘fake news’ describes a fusion of infotainment, propaganda, public relations and churnalism which has been long in the making, now accelerated by online advertising revenues. The moral panic which blames ‘fake news’ for the rise of fascism and right-wing populism misses the point that these degraded ecologies of information have triumphed in the vacuum of political possibilities produced by the post-Cold War consensus.<br /><br />What the moral panic also obscures, by displacing it, is the fact that ‘fake news’ is just one symptom of the breakdown of the near ideological monopoly previously enjoyed by large commercial and state media outlets. The fragmentation of content, the rise of ‘narrowcasting’ on social media, the proliferation of producers — more people are published authors now than ever before, rewarded in ‘likes’ rather than cash payment — produces as many opportunities as pathologies. New types of information and new ways of sharing it, new literacies, new modes of writing, are becoming possible.<br /><br />The problem is that we grope toward these opportunities in the shadow of catastrophe. The fall of the USSR didn’t signal the defeat of socialism so much as confirm it, at just the point at which it is clear that the persistence of capitalism means possible species death. Parties, publications, union membership, ideological affiliations, confidence and self-organisation dwindled and fragmented into the scale of atoms. And politics without the possibility of a liberated future, curdles and turns reactionary. New forms of antisystemic politics are emerging to take advantage of new forms of social media, but they can’t by themselves replace what has been lost. Without acknowledging what we have lost, we cannot creatively adapt to what we have left. We need, as Douglas Crimp wrote, “Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><i>Talk</i>.<br />- [ ] In the beginning was the lie. Freud points out that it is a condition of our autonomy that we can successfully lie: once we know mum and dad can’t read our minds, we can think freely and rather subversively. Milan Kundera argues that the injunction not to lie is one that can never be made to an equal, because we have no right to demand answers from equals. Adorno argued that, “the injunction to practice intellectual honesty usually amounts to a sabotage of thought.”<br /><br />- [ ] And if I’m top-loading this talk with quotes and intellectual armoury, it is because I’m aware of how merely common-sensical is, what Wilde called “the monstrous worship of facts” — exactly what we have been living under. A politics exclusively consisting of facts is a tyranny of technique and an avoidance of truth. The relationship of lies to truth turns out to be rather more interesting than we would assume.<br /><br />- [ ] So when we talk of “post-truth politics”, with the implication that we have just departed from an era of unalloyed truth-telling, from Iraq to the credit crunch, we might be making a huge category error. In truth, it is not truth, but facts, which have been found wanting; facts, as somehow purely objective measurements of social realities which, because intrinsically relational, can never be purely objective. Expertise, as Michael Gove reminds us, has made us sick; its seeming commonsensical neutrality exposed as merely the prestige of the ruling ideology. Sir Humphrey Appleby can sound like a technocrat only for as long as the ends to which techniques are crafted are taken for granted.<br /><br />- [ ] Those blaming the internet for this state of affairs run up against the difficulty that the internet doesn’t exist. It is by now a cultural commonplace that the Internet, as Internet jargon has it, it isn’t “a thing”: jokes about the internet in South Park and The IT Crowd make light of the tendency to reify the internet by representing it as a single broadband router. And we get the joke, because we know that what we call the internet is a series of processes and relations mediated by its technological bases and protocols. But we forget it, too, if we succumb to either cyber-idealism or cyber-cynicism, by reinforcing too strict a demarcation between the online and the offline.<br /><br />- [ ] I think it would be useful, therefore, to start with the kind of activity that is involved in the internet, and particularly in social media: that is writing.<br /><br />- [ ] We are all authors. Interrogate that we: the differential access to the internet is obviously raced, and classed, and in an interesting way, gendered -- it isn't just about affordability and bandwidth, it is about how much work you have to do. A consequence of the internet is that, we all write, and we are all published. Because of email, social media, and instant messaging services, we now spend more of our lives writing than we ever have. We are acquiring new literacies at a ferocious rate. We have yet to grasp the full significance of this vast expansion of literacy, this democratisation (and further commodification) of writing. One thing we do now is that we are all becoming amateur hermeneuticists, scanning quickly through acres of text, learning to discern, quick sharp, how to discern trolling and ‘fake news’, paid advertisements, charlatanry, and scams. We’re also learning the whereabouts of all kinds of invisible and rapidly shifting cultural thresholds; things that can and cannot be said and in what way.<br /><br />- [ ] We are all, putting it slightly differently, artists of the self. When you write, you invent yourself, give yourself a specific embodiment. By putting some part of your being into the form of words, you're giving it a corporeal shape that it would not otherwise had. You are not just 'expressing' something that was already there, but creating something new. And you're doing this every day, all the time. The format in which you can do so matters. Rather than keeping diaries, many of us now metabolise our lives online, for a public. Our pets, our dating mishaps, our family lives, our jobs, our accidents, the quiddity of experience is inscribed in a public realm in the heavily stylised format of tweets and posts, with current moods, filters, hashtags, emojis, stickers and the rest affording us a convenient short-hand to make ourselves conformable to our peers.<br /><br />- [ ] Of course, there is another form of writing that is achieving a degree of autonomy from human creators, and that is computer programming and script. It is completely non-phonetic writing which reminds us that writing began with the knot or quipu, read through touch, and it does as much to give us embodiment as what we may write in our phonetic alphabets.<br /><br />- [ ] Social media is not new -- non-commercial leftwing popular newspapers in the past operated as a kind of social media -- but capitalist social media arguably is. The social media formats in which most of us do most of our writing is so structured as to make petty entrepreneurs out of us. Our writing becomes a form of corporate personality, a sales pitch seeking to attract eyeball attention and 'followers'. This both a democratic opening, and a property-based closure; both an unprecedented opportunity, and an acceleration of the ‘culture of narcissism’ that Christopher Lasch worried about. It supports to an extent Manuel Castells’ argument about ‘creative autonomy’, since it breaks the ideological monopoly of the broadcasters and print media; but it also supports the argument of Philip Mirowski and to some extent Evgeny Morozov that in its networked individualism (or entrepreneurialism), it is a playground for neoliberalism.<br /><br />- [ ] Technologies are not socially and politically neutral. If nuclear power tends to support hierarchical, secretive structures, social media tends to support the opposite: a panopticon effect. Individually, this has both opportunities and costs.<br /><br />- [ ] The internet is a rigged lottery. If our capitalist social media accounts are indeed set up like enterprises competing for eyeball attention, then going viral or 'trending' is like winning the lottery. And in principle, anyone can win. The potential audience for your writing literally is the entire internet. In practice, of course, the lottery is mostly won by well-placed media corporations and public relations firms dominating the terrain.<br /><br />- [ ] Even if we do win, it can be the worst thing that happens. While most of us dream of going viral with that one insightful tweet or post, few of us are equipped to maximise any opportunities that arise from positive publicity, or to cope with the costs of negative publicity — which might include shaming or trolling campaigns, themselves a devolved form of tabloid expose and bottom-feeding culture. We may be treated as if we're small enterprises, but since we are not corporations with public relations budgets, we are vastly under-resourced to handle the attention we may potentially receive.<br /><br />- [ ] Far from simply challenging the ideological power of the old media, moreover, at critical moments it arguably amplifies and exacerbates it. The rise of narrowcasting and the proliferation of content producers helps to disperse the concentrated spectacle of broadcast news into the diffuse spectacle of Twitter and Facebook. This can even be more effective in securing consent, as Guy De Bord pointed out, because it works through seduction and commodity competition, rather than simple top-down violence. This is to stipulate a different form of presence of violence within the organisation of consent, rather than a withdrawal of violence.<br /><br />- [ ] This is in part because capitalist social media isn’t an organised opposition or alternative to the mainstream but a formal extension of it looped into new economies of attention. If one thinks of the England riots and the role of social media in allowing certain points of view to be ‘spontaneously’ organised — pro-police and counter-subversive attitudes and campaigns — one can also call to mind those attitudes which were more effectively identified and punished, by looking at the case Azhar Ahmed, the #twitterjoketrial or any number of instances wherein social media users have been prosecuted under public order legislation.<br /><br />- [ ] Whence then the fear of post-truth politics? And the moral panic about ‘fake news’? The category of ‘fake news’ starts to collapse from the inside when you examine it up close. The Washington Post, in its war against Russian-inspired fake news stories, has repeatedly published untruthful claims about Russian subversion in the US. It would be stretching credulity to say that Post’s falsehoods are less fake because well-intended: as if the newspaper of the DC establishment doesn’t have its own propaganda goals, or its own record of disseminating intelligence falsehoods. In truth, what we call ‘fake news’ is often either infotainment, PR, rumour, celebrity gossip, military or state propaganda, churnalism, or a combination of all of these — tendencies that were already well underway in the old media. So in what sense are we ‘post-truth’?<br /><br />- [ ] We could start with the lies we tell, and the truths they inadvertently tell. Why should it be that the shift in political imaginaries means that people are more likely to be taken in by the idea that Mexican immigrants are rapists, than by fuzzy satellite imagery of weapons laboratories? Both of these lies displace colonial desire in different ways, but the shift almost repeats the shift from global white-supremacy to defensive white nationalism: each different ways of preserving racial distinction organised around the signifier of whiteness, as a signifier of limitless being, omnipotence and plenitude.<br /><br />- [ ] And we could go back to Freud here: because lying on the couch, one can’t help but tell the truth one way or another. Indeed, it is when the patient stops reeling off the banal facts, whatever status they may have, and starts to lie, that the truth of her desire begins to emerge. The lies we are prepared to speak, and believe, says a lot about our desires, often thwarted and displaced: and that is why correcting a lie, fact-checking and all the rest of it, is often useless by itself. Though necessary, it does nothing to get to the other place, the place of desire, which is the place of political truth. That is how a well-informed but politically inept Nick Clegg could be so comprehensively defeated by a facile liar attuned to the dreamwork of politics named Nigel Farage.<br /><br />- [ ] This place of desire is the nocturnal side of reason, on the side of what Adorno referred to as “pleasure and paradise”. But if desire is excluded from politics, if it becomes simply a matter of management of the status quo, and of assembling coalitions to prevent major changes, then desires which might project into the future, curdle and turn nostalgically reactionary.<br /><br />- [ ] That is the real relationship of post-truth politics to the new far right. Post-truth politics is the triumph of managerial politics, of a politics in which after 1989 the long-standing defeat of communism was finally registered, with an immediate drastic contraction of the horizon of possibility. As Enzo Traverso put it, “an entire representation of the twentieth-century”, in which the disasters of the age were also the ground for revolutionary hopes, fell apart.<br /><br />- [ ] One reason why social media couldn’t ever the Shangri-la of a new radically horizontalist activism predicated on a democracy of writing, is because of what it does to our writing. Twitter, for example, aims to mimic in some ways the patterns of speech, especially with its multimodal, digressive tendencies -- ironically, it is the non-phonetic aspects of writing that come to aid here, above all the emoticon. But of course, it also reduces speech to its tiniest molecules, 140 characters, and generates such a rapid turnover of content that it produces a tremendous pressure to fire off concise, immediate tweets and replies. And since the only incentive to participate in a conversation like that is because of the likes and retweets, attention and approval, this tends to mean that to an extent, people are only paying attention to what you are saying insofar as it gives them something to say, for the likes. This results on an insidious barbarisation of discourse, fractured, ungenerous, unrigorous, grandstanding, bullying, trolling, performances of whiteness, masculinity, repetitions of trauma -- if we are artists of the self, think what selves, personal and collective, this kind of writing permits us to fashion. We somehow have to be both in and against (capitalist) social media, somehow swimming against its currents, it's timelines, its temporalities and tendencies.<br /><br />- [ ] But even if its protocols and structures had anything horizontal about them, even if they didn't favour marketing and accumulation, it emerged in the shadow of catastrophe. The eclipse of socialism was confirmed, at just the point at which it is clear that the persistence of capitalism means possible species death. Parties, publications, union membership, ideological affiliations, confidence and self-organisation dwindled and fragmented into the scale of atoms. And politics without the possibility of a liberated future, turns reactionary. New forms of antisystemic politics are emerging to take advantage of new forms of social media, but they can’t by themselves replace what has been lost. Without acknowledging what we have lost, we cannot creatively adapt to what we have left. We need, as Douglas Crimp wrote, “Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-90515340548002049842017-04-15T00:02:00.003+01:002017-04-15T08:36:38.760+01:00Letting go<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNi27UopiOk/WPFU4r3bmtI/AAAAAAAAP2E/z86DynmseCEbwVbEQXzV8B2fqjRrv-vlwCLcB/s1600/IMG_5275.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WNi27UopiOk/WPFU4r3bmtI/AAAAAAAAP2E/z86DynmseCEbwVbEQXzV8B2fqjRrv-vlwCLcB/s400/IMG_5275.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
“Why add more words? To whisper for that which has been lost. Not out of nostalgia, but because it is on the site of loss that hopes are born.”<br />
— John Berger, <i>and our faces, my heart, brief as photos</i>, p 55<br />
<br />
“This is the Hour of Lead –<br />
Remembered, if outlived,<br />
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –<br />
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –”<br />
— Emily Dickinson, <i>After a great pain, a formal feeling comes</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Robert MacFarlane’s <i>Landmarks</i> is a “counter-desecration phrasebook”: a vocabulary for valuing what we have just as we are about to lose it, just as we are losing it, just as we have already lost it.<br />
<br />
It is as if the living world, of shivelight and suthering tides, of desire lines and whale’s ways, of glaise and drindle, sumping sea-lochs and high headlands, could be saved through re-description. As if it wasn’t already too late.<br />
<br />
The last fourteen months have, one after another, broken global temperature records. Floods and droughts begin to assume Biblical proportions. Thousands of species disappear, forever, each year. Even on the mildest prognostications, they will disappear faster and faster.<br />
<br />
With a 1.5 degree temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, 20-30 per cent of species risk extinction. With a 3.5 degree increase, the range is 40-70 per cent. We are already at 1.3 degrees, and 4 degrees is the current projected temperature by 2050, even if the Paris Agreement survives.<br />
<br />
As the rate of acceleration increases, so does the probability of chaos. Scientists use the metaphor of ‘uncharted territory’ to describe this, since all we know for sure is what we are losing. What will never, ever be seen again.<br />
<br />
Walking, in this way, becomes an urgent voyage, a pilgrimage, a visit to a dying patient. A stolen glimpse of what might have been won, had the earth ever been a common treasury.<br />
<br />
But as Christopher Bollas points out, what we find in the environment is our own unconscious life — not in its narrative, nor in its scenery, but in keywords, objects. The more abstract, nonsensical and formless the terrain, the more we can project into it, and the more evocative it seems. Nothing is more evocative than what theologians, following Psalm 22, call ‘the night season’.<br />
<br />
What you find in the burnt edge of a cool morning, the summer shimmer of riparian wetlands, clouds the size of cities soaking in a blue pool, or even in the literary outdoors, the cold mountains of Han-Shan, the freezing Yukon of Call of the Wild — is unconscious meaning.<br />
<br />
Worlds of independence, adventure, possibility, decivilization, worlds teeming with potential, closer to birth than death. Oceanic immersion, the feeling of being held, protection. Phobias and anxieties. Screen memories. These private meanings always open out into public meaning. What Renee Lertzman calls “environmental melancholia” begins with lost worlds. Melancholia is a kind of freeze. Mourning is movement, and if you can’t mourn, you gather frost.<br />
<br />
One of the biggest obstacles to mourning is that we can’t face our ambivalence: the extent to which we hated the lost object of our love. The ambivalence is complicated. On the one hand, it seems, no matter how much they meant to us, we’re always in some part of us glad to be shot of them. On the other hand, we also hate them for no longer being there. And there are the unconscionable pleasures and benefits that accrue from their absence.<br />
<br />
We can hardly help being ambivalent about what we call ‘nature’ and its nemesis, fossil capital. The former means desperate, hard, labouring lives and early deaths. The latter, to the extent that it is coextensive with industrialisation, means comfort, central heating, celerity.<br />
<br />
So what is the greenhouse defrosting of arctic sea ice, the bleached death of a coral reef, and the disappearance of thousands of species every year compared to air travel, moon voyages, genetic science laboratories, and the internet. What is the silence of the remote croft, or the murmur of the forest, compared to rising life expectations and falling infant mortality?<br />
<br />
The other side of this ambivalence, the nocturnal side, is the knowledge — because this is no mystery, and anyone who wants to know already knows — that we are preparing a mass wake for the human species. It is a planned obsolescence. There are some hubristic billionaires who, by investing in survivalist Xanadus, fancy they will survive the collapse of the food chain and the destruction of habitable territory. Few have the luxury of that conviction. So, put another way, the questions above become: what is species death compared to another fifty years of life for capitalism?<br />
<br />
It is useless to berate the insufficiently woke. We are all sleep-walking, and all half-dreaming, even if we dream of being awake. We are all hastening toward the last syllable of recorded time. And the point of melancholic subjectivity is that we are already berating ourselves. Our experience of powerlessness in the face of loss, and isolation before gigantic, tectonic forces, has already become our mantra of self-hate. Adding reproach in the name of the future would only accentuate our resentment of future generations, and our desire to punish them.<br />
<br />
But if mourning is movement, it is also work. The work of mourning is not the same thing as the sharp, icicle stab of grief one might feel, while walking, when you suddenly realise that some day and soon, nothing that looks like this world will exist. It is the painful, laborious task of revisiting each memory, each thought, each impression, of what has been lost and, like Poe’s raven, meeting it with the judgement, “nevermore”. Mourning is not an uplifting process. It is a kind of despair, because it means giving up. First chill. Then stupor. Then the letting go.<br />
<br />
Only when we can separate the object that has been lost, from what has been lost in it, do we recover. In other words, we give up without giving up. We fully and relentlessly recognise the loss, but we hold onto the qualities we saw in the lost object, because we think we can find a way to revive them in a new passion, a new attachment. We despair, but we do not submit.<br />
<br />
“Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat,” Berger called it, speaking of the Palestinians and their Nakba. “Undefeated despair.”<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-1888677819362785262017-04-13T20:46:00.000+01:002017-04-13T20:46:49.916+01:00Against natureWe are being <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/human-nature-socialism-capitalism-greed-morality-needs/">asked to believe</a>. That is the first thing to take note of. We are exhorted to put aside doubt in the existence of human nature, and believe. The very fact that the argument is put in these terms is surely no accident. If 'human nature' were a self-evident reality that we could all agree on, there would be no need to believe. I don't "believe" in water, or air, or the colour blue; I can only believe in things that I can't know. Belief, in a sense, belongs to the register of certainty, but not knowledge.<br />
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Now the article goes on to claim that 'human nature' is something that we can know, but the conception that it offers is comparable to that other chestnut of contemporary discourse, 'British values'. Humans need to eat. Well, what's so special about that? Lots of animals need to eat. Humans need warmth. So do cockroaches. Humans are vulnerable to disease and organic decay. So is vegetation. Humans need to drink. So does Nigel Farage. That isn't 'human nature', that's just 'nature'.<br />
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The argument only really becomes interesting, and germane to the human, when it claims the existence of a human need, rooted in nature, for 'dignity' and 'autonomy'. But these are surely not needs in the sense that food and air are needs. They are the names for preferences, or desires, which are proper to linguistic creatures.<br />
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But once we are talking about language and desire, we are no longer strictly speaking talking about nature, because language and desire are historically and socially produced. Language marks the point at which the human animal makes a half-leap from nature to culture. In other words, as soon as you get to the characteristic that makes us properly human -- the fact that we are linguistic creatures -- you're already no longer in the domain of nature (indeed, you were never really in it).<br />
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And it is just as well to recognise this, because otherwise the argument becomes terribly tricky for socialists. Since the terms 'autonomy' and 'dignity' are glittering generalities which everyone is supposed to believe in (if only for themselves), having no intrinsic, uncontested, unhistorical, natural, given content, you have to engage in some logical gymnastics.<br />
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You can try to give these terms some content, at which point you risk bumping into all manner of phenomena which contradict them. For example, you might find that some people (maybe some Trump voters) will give up what you have defined as 'autonomy', in order to deprive others of it. Having done that, you can then try to question-beggingly define all apparently unavailing phenomena as a thwarted, deflected attempt at achieving these ends. It becomes even more complicated if you do try to relate the more unsavoury aspects of human behaviour to 'human nature'.<br />
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Suppose we abandon the distinction between need and desire, and concede that we do indeed have a need for 'autonomy' and 'dignity', howsoever defined, because of 'human nature'. Shouldn't we also make space for such needs as aggression, violence, domination, sadism, and omnipotence? On what ground do we insist that these are not needs while autonomy and dignity are? Eventually, if we were to proceed like this, we could end up with a concept of 'human nature' that covered every possible type of desire by redescribing it as a 'need', and every possibly type of action by redescribing it as an attempt to realise a 'need'. But then it would just be tautologous rather than informative. We would 'believe' in human nature, but to no avail.<br />
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A lot of the persuasive power of these types of argument derive from the idea that to doubt the existence of 'human nature' is to subscribe to a "blank slate" thesis. This is an idea shared by Steven Pinker and the author of this piece. Of course, even a "blank slate" is never really blank. It must have certain active qualities which enable/constrain inscription. But the real problem with a "blank slate" thesis, is that a slate is fairly limited in what it can be. It is there to be written on, or not.<br />
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As the biologist Steve Rose puts it, humans are 'radically indeterminate'. In part, this is because it is in the 'nature' of living systems to be like that, but language opens up a new kind of indeterminacy. To say that we are radically indeterminate does not entail that we have no organic constitution, but that this does not determine whether we are 'good' or 'bad', kind or selfish, nurturing or violent, sexist or egalitarian, or whether we prefer protection to autonomy, or domination to dignity, and so on. These things, the desires and behaviours which are characteristically human, are the contested product of history.<br />
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This brings us back to the major problem with speaking about 'human nature', which is that humans are distinctly <i>unnatural</i> creatures. Indeed, the very separation of nature and culture becomes problematic once humans enter the frame (meaning, it has always been problematic, since this conceptual cleavage is a human invention). As soon as human beings learned to make fire, they became co-constituted by technology (the body being nourished and reproduced by digesting cooked food). There is not a single human organic capacity that is not intricated with technology, culture and political power. Haraway's term "natureculture" is a more apt way to describe the material realities of human bodies and their relevance to politics.<br />
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'Human nature' is a contradiction in terms.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509475.post-80837609117412448622017-04-10T13:07:00.002+01:002017-04-10T13:07:20.247+01:00The multilateral bombing of SyriaDonald Trump, the New York Times tells us, has a heart.<br />
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The terrifying story of Assad's chemical attack on Syrian civilians, wrenched his soul. That, the paper says, is why he sent aloft a few dozen Tomahawk missiles, and bombed a half-deserted Syrian airfield. Love Trumps Hate, after all.<br />
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The collapse of the alt-centre media into adulation of a president who has waged merciless war on them, is stunning to behold. But at least now, the demented conspiracy theories and anti-Russian nationalism, can cease. Keith Olbermann can stop bellowing about Russian scum. Whatever else Trump is, he is not Putin's pet.<br />
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So what is he?<br />
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When it comes to foreign policy, he talked like a Bannonite. America First, bash China, smash Islam. Now, he is sounding a bit more like his Vice President, Mike Pence. There is even talk from his UN representative Nikki Haley, though quickly rebutted by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, of prioritising the overthrow of Assad. That is unlikely to bear fruit, at least in the short term, because what is happening for now is not about Trump's heart, or convictions.<br />
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The bombing in Syria is not a significant departure from existing policy. That is because Trump's policy is the one left by the Obama administration. When he came to office, bragging that he had a great plan to destroy ISIS, what he meant was that he would tax the generals with producing one, and would support it. The plan they gave him, within his 30 day deadline, was one devised by the previous administration, and included a number of lines of escalation and expansion within the terms of the existing strategy.<br />
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That strategy, with regard to Daesh, can be summarised as: medium footprint, with aerial bombardment supporting local auxiliary forces. In relation to Syria, the Obama policy was what the 'Realists' of the Pentagon would call offshore balancing. In this context, it means supporting the weaker side just enough to prevent it from collapsing, thus allowing both sides to bleed one another to death. It also means, of course, tolerating Russian support for the regime, which may be the only thing keeping it alive. And in the context of the rise of Daesh as a parasitic factor on the military stalemate, it means a de facto military alliance with Russia, a multilateral bombing campaign targeting Daesh (and also Jaish al-Nusra). Thus, the Syrian revolution has been drowned in blood and reduced to brutal struggle for survival led by reactionaries, but Assad's army has also been decimated, and is almost entirely dependent on outside forces. Trump hasn't broken with either, thus far.<br />
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The only major difference is that Trump has relaxed the fairly exacting political oversight exercised by the Obama administration on the military's actions. He has loosened constraints on targeting, which were already abysmal, with the recent major bloodshed in Al-Yakla, Mosul and Raqqa being notable byproducts. He has expanded the war along lines indicated by his predecessor, in Somalia and Yemen, and has changed the rules of engagement so that parts of these countries are deemed 'war zones' which can be targeted under the laws of war.<br />
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The major significance of bombing the airfield is that, by punishing Assad, it is a slap in the face to Russia -- although a very gentle one, it seems, since Russia was carefully warned beforehand. There is a risk that the neo-Cold War hawks will start setting the tone and, in the context of Syria, prepare the ground for a dangerous and potentially disastrous inter-imperialist confrontation. Naturally, this would be less of a surprise if so many people hadn't inhaled the laughing gas about Trump being Putin's puppet. In fact, whatever connections he has to Russian capitalism (on this, see <a href="http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/thirteen-reflections-of-golden-don-in-the-hall-of-mirror/">Jordy Cummings in <i>Salvage</i></a>) his amateurish pre-inauguration diplomacy with Russia seems to have been an ineffectual attempt to get Putin to relax support for Iran and Syria, and enlist him into a confrontation with North Korea. Indeed, though it is not widely reported, it is North Korea that has been the subject of Trump's rhetorical escalation in recent months. There is a reason why <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/syria-strike-designed-to-intimidate-north-korea-chinese-state-newspaper-says">the Chinese government regards the Syria strike as a form of sabre-rattling against North Korea</a>, and Rex Tillerson has been explicit about the connection.<br />
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The shift in register and rhetoric, however, is also linked to the resistance to Trump coming from within the state, 'deep' or otherwise. First, they engineered the ousting of General Michael Flynn, who was responsible for the organisation of the National Security Council which included Bannon as a permanent member and demoted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence. Briefing and leaking against Flynn ultimately ensured his resignation, even though the charges seem relatively trivial. The old military and intelligence leadership regained their dominance. This decisive change also led to Steve Bannon's departure from the National Security Council, and the tempering of some of Trump's rhetoric -- his acceptance of the Iran deal for example.<br />
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Many mandarin liberal pundits talked, in the early days, about a possible military coup against Trump. Such a move would have reflected sheer panic, indicating a complete breakdown of the embedded knowledge, cohesion and technological sophistication of the old state elites. Now, the foreign policy commentariat speaks of Trump 'learning' -- and that is the correct term. The pedagogy has been crude in some ways: a ferociously alarmist media campaign fed by intelligence leaks and more or less open dissent in the apparatuses of state. But it has still showed far more patience and guile than a simple coup, and there is probably more afoot. So, what has been achieved on the empire front is not the recomposition of forces at the top that Bannon et al were aiming for, but a consolidation of the Pentagon's priorities.<br />
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The empowerment of the military elite is, in itself, dangerous enough -- particularly if it is linked to the creation of new far right networks within the state. Add to it the fact that this is the Trump administration. This is not business as usual, and it won't be until it is effectively a lame duck administration. The military establishment has succeeded in reining Trump in for now, but Bannon is still his chief advisor, and his team is still dominated by lunatics of various stripes. Such an administration, I suggest, is almost definitionally a war administration.<br />
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The obvious thing to do, as their agenda falls apart on a number of fronts, and domestic support collapses, would be to organise a major war. That would consolidate the chief executive's authority. It would give an organising impetus to the administration, cohering the apparatuses of the state and, if done well, summoning a degree of popular support. It would license a major augmentation of repressive capacities, and justify renewed aggression against the media: 21st century fascism finds the diffuse spectacle superior to the concentrated spectacle. And, of course, it would filter new loads of racist ideology into civil society. Syria may not be the front in which they choose to embark on that war, given the range of state and other agencies already embroiled in that situation, and the huge potential for calamity.<br /><br />So what is Trump, if not a Russian puppet? He is a pure, concentrated expression of the culture of US imperialism.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href=http://leninology.blogspot.com>Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb</a></div>Richard Seymourhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03382239516001223229noreply@blogger.com