Anyone who knows me understands that Quentin Meillassoux’s somewhat bizzaro rise to philosophical fame remains my singularly important academic interest. He captured our speculative hearts with After Finitude, and then dashed our collective hopes with the qualitatively insane excerpts from The Divine Inexistence… or so goes the dominant narrative. Anyway, his newest work, The Number and the Siren, has been recently translated and is available from Urbanomic, and it features a reading of French poet Stephane Mallarme’s Un Coup de Des (A Throw of the Dice…), and how the latter is basically a one-upping of Jesus and the entire Christian project. Wait, what? Here’s a snippet of Adam Kotsko’s ridiculously awesome review:
Yet in light of The Number and the Siren, I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that Meillassoux is embracing or appropriating Christianity. What he’s really trying to do is much bolder and, one might say, more insane: He wants to do Christianity one better. He wants to create something more powerful than Christianity, something that would radicalize Christianity’s wildest hopes — and that would deliver, insofar as it’s based on the radical contingency of the universe rather than on the illusion of a transcendent God.
Mike Konczal (aka the mighty Rortybomb) and Peter Frase (aka editor of Jacobin Mag), two of my absolute favorite bloggers on the internets, recently engaged in an iteration of Bloggingheads.tv’s Fireside Chats. The entire discussion is fantastic as expected, but of special note is the discussion of the future of work in a post-capitalist social formation, and the reference to Frase’s brilliant Anti-Star Trek post from awhile back. Do engage, dear readers.
Edit: If anyone knows how to embed this clip in wordpress, that’d be of some assistance.
The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect.
– Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
Umm, I hate to be that guy, but doesn’t Russell’s critique of Kant sound a little like, I don’t know, Speculation, and in the Hegelian sense no less? I know he’s coming from the vantage point of a defense of the correspondence theory of truth (the previous chapter of TPOP), but it’s interesting to see how the two historically opposed schools might find a common ground in the critique of correlationism.
I was watching one of my favorite shows yesterday, BBC’s Misfits, and a logical analogue with the debate surrounding SOPA and intellectual property rights came to mind. In the episode, one of the characters spontaneously acquires the ability to bring the dead to life, and immediately struggles with how to best apply his ability to his surroundings. Now, the episode in question decided against exploring this option in detail in favor of some good old-fashioned zombie mayhem (which is all well and good, mind you), but I wanted to tangentially delve into the question myself in relation to the idea of intellectual property rights and artificial scarcity.
You see, Curtis (and any society in general were it to discover this ability to raise the dead) would find itself in the inevitable dilemma of artificially creating scarcity. You can’t just raise all the dead people in the ground, or even unilaterally decided to never allow death to conquer another currently living human subject, because this would bring about a multiplicity of undesirable consequences: overpopulation, extreme rationing of food products, disease, famine, and a level of global suffering and poverty that would ironically have people clamoring for the release of death to make its prodigal return (apocalyptic dystopian novel, anyone?). This would be an ethico-political dilemma for which the categorical imperative has no answer. If you acquired this ability, would you immediately revive those to whom you feel deserve most the breath of life? Of course you would, and so would I. But can we universalize that into a maxim for all to follow? Of course not, for all the reasons listed above and many more besides.
This antinomy doesn’t destroy the foundations of ethical reasoning, nor does it necessarily lead us into the dungeons of a nihilistic anarcho-primitivism where all must be against all; rather, it simply tells us that this is an inherently political decision. Death is no longer a necessity, the power has been found to completely eradicate the scarcity of life, but unfortunately this is not a feasible option given exterior factors. What to do in this situation, in essence: how to artificially create scarcity, is a messy, complicated, thankless endeavor, but one that must still be made. And the key to understand is this: there is no natural right involved. Debate must be had, compromise must be made, and agreement must ensue, but in no way can anyone in the political process simply point to the natural right of a certain contingent outcome. That’s why we call this process political, because it must involve the grimy machinations of people coming to agreement.
This is where SOPA and intellectual property rights come into the equation. The MPAA and the RIAA and its cohorts are attempting to create artificial scarcity where it need not exist: we have the power to universally replicate anything in the digital medium in as many iterations as we please. Unfortunately, much like the above scenario, this is not an entirely desirable outcome. We want people to have some right over their creative work (I will leave aside for now the many spurious arguments used by IP advocates in this regard), so some kind of artificially instantiated scarcity is most definitely in the cards, but exactly how this is to be implemented is an unequivocally political issue.
SOPA ignores the politics of it all, it ignores due process, it fortuitously ignores the fact that there is no natural right over intellectual property, but only a battle between content producers like the music business and Hollywood who want harsh intellectual property laws on the books, and the social network industry (Google, Facebook, etc.) which depends upon the slow death of digital scarcity. The thing to keep in mind is that neither of these sides fight for us. They are the two jock douchebags who are battling over the same girl at the bar. They’re only talking to you because you’re her best friend and have power over her decision making process (“Come on baby, think about the work-a-day laborers on all those film sets!”). We need to realize that this is an issue of political economy of the highest importance, and see to it that we never allow ourselves to become the secretly despised concubines of opposing streams of capital.
Quite a lot happened in 2011, but SSA is a culture blog, so I’ve prostrated myself before the gods of the blogosphere and fulfilled their wishes by deciding to do a list-post: the best of the past year in film, books, music, and a few other related phenomena. So, here we go!
Films
Drive: I loved this film in every way imaginable. It was like a beautifully constructed homage to a world that never was. Forget the performances and the tension and the slow-burn, this movie is all about a Los Angeles of Refn’s own making.
Moneyball: I love baseball, and I love statistics, and this movie married the phenomenon of sabermetrics with an old-school feel-good narrative with pure delight. It could’ve used a little more math, but still…
13 Assassins: The first half of this film is pure Kurosawa samurai-lore: gather up a bunch of misbegotten ex-warriors and take down a fascist pig. The latter half? Oh my god, just mayhem. You have to see it to believe it.
Attack the Block: The absolute polar opposite of Cowboys and Aliens, Attack the Block focuses on a group of London teenagers protecting their neighborhood from an alien invasion. The narrative presents itself in the form of the Exodus, and represents everything that I love about B-films.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Yeah, it’s a big budget flick, but the fact that I sat in a theater with a bunch of regular Joes rooting in unison for a Marxist uprising against humanity makes this movie awesome.
Books
After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: This anthology edited by Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, if there is any justice, will be considered the quilting point of future academic success for those interested in continental philosophy of religion. The aforementioned author’s editorial introduction is a fine work all on its own.
Debt: the First 5,000 Years: Graeber’s genealogy of debt is a really fascinating work. The overturning of the perceived origin of money in the thought of early capitalism is more important than can be stated. A truly seminal work.
Hegel and the Infinite: From the awesome Insurrections series, this anthology on contemporary Hegel studies features some duds, but the essays by Adrian Johnston and Bruno Bosteels are very illuminating.
The Kingdom and the Glory: I just got this for Christmas, so I haven’t finished it yet, but I think I’m finally coming around to Agamben. I can’t wait to relate the stuff on the economic/immanent divide to Barth.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: Okay, so this is cheating a little since this book came out 30-something years ago, but I read it for the first time this year and it has absolutely changed my view of consciousness studies. Jaynes theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind affects every layer of philosophy and psychology, and I hope to spend much of the next year figuring out exactly how this plays into my thinking.
Music
Tom Waits – Bad as Me: Another Tom Waits album, another killer set of tunes. Think early 90s Bone Machine-era Waits, but with a lot more guitar (and funky guitar, at that) upfront in the mix. Highlight: “Hell Broke Luce”
Mastodon – The Hunter: Not their best album, but they are the best metal band in the world, so they deserve a place. Seeing them live for the first time this year was a bewildering experience. Highlight: “Dry Bone Valley” (where drummer Brann Dailor takes the mic well)
Battles – Gloss Drop: The future, the shape of rock to come.
Wild Flag – Self-titled: I was a huge Sleater-Kinney fan, so the idea of this band had me excited. Luckily, they broke the curse of all-star groups and produced a really well-conceived album. Highlight: “Future Crimes”
Thurston Moore – Demolished Thoughts: Sonic Youth is my favorite band of all-time, so its natural that Moore’s solo work would appeal to me. His meandering atonalism is what made me want to play guitar in the first place, and his acoustic transition has only improved his songwriting. Highlight: “Blood Never Lies”
J Mascis – Several Shades of Why: My other favorite guitarist in the whole world also made a transition to the acoustic guitar, and while his blistering solos with Dinosaur Jr are what make my blood boil (seeing them live for the first time this year was the highlight of my year), his songwriting is an underrated part of his arsenal. Highlight: “Several Shades of Why”
(Note: I have yet to dig into the new-ish albums by The Roots, Bjork, or TV on the Radio, otherwise they may have made the list).
Television
Breaking Bad: This season of BB was amazing. From beginning to end, the ultimate tragedy of Walt’s downfall was obvious, but watching it happen, piece by piece, along with arguably the greatest villain in television history in Gus, was an absolute treat. This might be the most chilling scene I’ve ever seen:
Misfits: The British show about ASBO superheroes deals with the dynamics of adolescence in a way that no other show can. See the episode where Curtis becomes a woman to see what I mean. Also, it’s hilarious.
Sons of Anarchy: the first half of the fourth season seemed a bit directionless, moving from biker-gang-spat to unexplained-internal-racial-tension without apparent motive, but the latter half got back to the Shakespearean familial dynamics and biblical violence that it does best.
Game of Thrones: It took me about six episodes to figure out each character’s name and place in the story, but once I did everything started rolling. Plus, the cliffhanger included dragons: ’nuff said.
Nietzsche, from the section The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols:
The “inner world” is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be completely absent. The so-called motives: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them. And as for the ego … that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!
I was struck upon rereading Twilight of the Idols as to the prescience of Nietzsche’s remarks on consciousness. It has always been said that, in addition to his cultural-critical acumen, Nietzsche was a psychologist ahead of his time, pointing out the pernicious activity of the submerged unconscious lurking beneath the surface of the ego, but I can’t help but think that Nietzsche’s attack on the notions of ego, will, and spirit in this section partially anticipates another theoretical movement: namely, the deflationary consciousness of late 20th century theorists like Julian Jaynes.
the framework for Jaynes’ theory of Bicameralism is obviously lacking in Nietzsche, but this doesn’t necessitate opposition. The first several chapters of Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness don’t even deal with Bicameral theory, but with methodically dismantling our common-sense notions of how consciousness works. Learning, memory, thinking: these are all things that we immediately associate with conscious activity, but Jaynes does a fantastic job of showing how all of these things, and more besides, function just fine, and sometimes more efficiently, without consciousness. Nietzsche’s point about consciousness being an “accompanying event” or a “surface phenomenon” works in this same direction.
Since he’s as fond of formal introductions as GOP presidential candidates are of monogamy (topical humor!), I’m going to go ahead and introduce Sub Specie Aeterni’s newest blog-recruit: Austin Guffy, a.k.a. Gus. He studied Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, and is currently in the hunt for a doctoral studies program for next fall. Gus is going to fill the cultural studies void here at SSA by spewing knowledge about film, music, art, and if we’re lucky, a few politically charged rants from time to time (if you know him, then you know how much of a treat this can be). I am confident that you, the reader, will be enlightened.
His inaugural post on Kurosawa’s Rashomon is here.
Over the weekend there was a bit of a debate in the lefty-politico blogosphere concerning whether or not CEOs and other lavishly payed individuals can be accurately labeled as “workers” without obscuring something about their connection to capital. Matt Yglesias started it by arguing that according to the classical Marxist conception, CEOs are technically wage slaves, and Doug Henwood and Peter Frase countered it respectively. It was Frase’s post, however, that I found most interesting since he dealt with some of the underlying issues of political economy that Yglesias’s post neglected. In short, it’s not so much that the means of production have been taken away from the fat-cats and given to shareholders in a sort of compromise with the worker’s movements of the 20th century, but that the binary relationship between capital and labor remains unchanged even while the exploitative relationship between bourgeois and proletarian remains.
It is possible, at least in principle, to have a society that is just as capitalist as ours, but where everyone is really a “worker” in a meaningful sense… the opposition between capital and labor is not the same as the opposition between capitalists and workers, and you can’t always cleanly align the two relations on top of each other.
The point is that the capital/labor split is the fundamental one – it is the transcendental set of categories. The back and forth negotiations between actually-existing capitalists and workers doesn’t have to perfectly co-align with the form in which capital affects labor, or the fact that people are still forced to sell their labor-power for sustenance. The only difference between the Marxist conception and our current setting is found in the relationships among the actors of capital, and not in the capital/labor network itself.
What’s most interesting about this is in how the changes in the bourgeois/proletarian relations can be seen to shed light on the possibilities of change in the transcendental category of capital/labor. Marx once remarked how the fact that the capitalists might be willing to sell stock in their company to outside interests proved once and for all that ownership of the means of production by the hands-on entrepreneurial capitalist was not a fundamental truth of modernity: if this is possible, then why not allow the workers, who are just as incentivized to grow their business and profit as much as stockholders but also happen to be hands-on and knowledgeable about the industry in which they work, to in a sense “hold the stock”? It’s the best of both worlds: the knowledge and aptitude of the entrepreneur with the incentive of the stockholder, just without the bourgeoisie.