tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24543651528065282362024-03-12T21:34:23.131-04:00notes for the coming communitydavid kishik on the interweb 2006-2011David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-11265131515595787162011-11-11T12:01:00.010-05:002012-08-11T00:19:37.820-04:00The Power of Life<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fcE2IlI7TBY/TspF1giUoAI/AAAAAAAAAWc/beD2Ugu8YoI/s1600/photo.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5677427065823207426" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fcE2IlI7TBY/TspF1giUoAI/AAAAAAAAAWc/beD2Ugu8YoI/s400/photo.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; height: 400px; width: 300px;" /></a><br />
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I have been using this strange medium for the past six years as a public notebook. Some of the sketches posted in this blog found their way into my new book, which, in this day and age, feels like an even stranger medium.<br />
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<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=KEkw4vwWAKIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+power+of+life&hl=en&ei=3Fi9TuHsBM6g8gPFvIWHBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6wEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Google Books</a><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Power-Life-Agamben-Coming-Politics/dp/0804772304/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1">Amazon</a><br />
<a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20514">Stanford UP</a><br />
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Also, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wittgensteins-Continuum-Studies-British-Philosophy/dp/1441171991/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_tab0_t_4">Wittgenstein's Form of Life</a></i> is now available in paperback.</div>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-6081562844281242762011-10-30T13:13:00.000-04:002015-11-15T09:06:40.269-05:00Mad MenI have a question for you:<br />
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What is the proportion between the time you spend, on the one hand, reading and thinking and writing in your field, and the time you spend, on the other hand, selling yourself by writing proposals and applications, shmoozing with colleagues and professors, and so forth? </div>
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And I have another question:</div>
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Did you know that the most cold-blooded corporations spend on advertisement anywhere between about %1 of their revenues (in the retail business) and about %7 (for companies selling packaged goods)? </div>
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This is just an educated guess, but I have a feeling that, on average, successful academics spend a much larger chunk of their intellectual resources on self-promotion than what good capitalists spend on marketing their wares.</div>
David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-54364809909430363762011-09-03T12:19:00.010-04:002011-09-03T14:19:13.368-04:00Mass Culture and Terrorist Culture<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kaxQwsZ5Akw/TmJT40KqiQI/AAAAAAAAAVo/WnmKR6QQf5E/s1600/ifgraf.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 316px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kaxQwsZ5Akw/TmJT40KqiQI/AAAAAAAAAVo/WnmKR6QQf5E/s400/ifgraf.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5648169118217177346" /></a>
<br />1. The great fear of the nineteenth century was that amorphous blob called “the masses.” The masses were irrational, unpredictable, ungovernable, and extremely violent. From the construction of the wide boulevards in Paris to the castle-like armories across New York, the people in charge went out of their way to combat the monster in the heart of the great metropolis.
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<br />2. For a twenty-first century reader of nineteenth century newspapers, the stories about the riots and the general paranoia they engendered feel very much like today’s discourse about terrorism. Though the looters are still alive and kicking, and the terrorists seem to be on the wane and on the run, there is certainly an overall shift in good society’s “greatest fear.”
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<br />3. What is the most effective way to gain control over the masses and avoid the dreadful riot? More police officers and CCTV? Better jobs and social benefits? The twentieth century actually found a much better method to put the masses on a leash: It invented something called “mass culture.” To paraphrase Clement Greenberg, we could say that mass culture pretends to demand of its consumers not only their money, but also the promise to never revolt.
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<br />4. If you can’t beat the masses, entertain the masses. If the masses can see their own image and likeness in films, music, television, etc., then their sense of oppression is all of a sudden, as if by magic, less justified. When life feels like a dead end, you can easily band with others who feel the same and take to the streets. Alternatively, you can press play on your iPod and listen to your favorite rapper telling you about his fabulous exploits. You feel that you have a voice, you feel empowered, the anger goes away, and you decide to stay in your room.
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<br />5. European culture is still much more elitist than American culture, which is one way to explain why European cities are more vulnerable these days to riots than American cities. In the US everyone is equal...in front of their TV sets. Justice needs not be done, if it can only be seen as if it is done. Economically, kids in New York have as good a reason to smash a window as the kids in London. Culturally, they feel too good about themselves to even bother.
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<br />6. Mass culture, however, has been drugging the unstable masses to non-action long before hip hop. We have to keep things in perspective and realize that today’s anxiety from the rioting mob is a pale semblance of what it used to be a hundred years ago. Mass culture is such an effective mass tranquilizer that this (justified or unjustified) fear that people will suddenly unleash the animals inside of them is not unlike the zoogoers’ giddy fantasy that the tiger will escape from its cage.
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<br />7. If the comparison between the old fear of the masses and the new fear of terrorism is indeed viable, then the following thesis becomes very tempting: In precisely the same way that the best way to cope with “the masses” is to develop a powerful mass culture, then the best way to deal with terrorism is through what I would like to call “terrorist culture.” Terrorist culture will shape the culture of the twenty-first century exactly as mass culture shaped the culture of the previous century. Just as mass culture dispelled the fear of the masses, terrorist culture is quelling the terrorist boogeyman.
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<br />8. Banksy is the high priest of the burgeoning terrorist culture. Terrorist culture must (appear as if it) subvert(s) the cultural hegemony. Indeed, terrorist culture must (pretend to) undermine the insipid power of mass culture. While those in power have guns, the terrorists have homemade bombs. While the corporations inundate us with their fast food and stupid sitcoms, we can still make our own artisanal bread and shoot with our phones a quirky video and post it on YouTube. If only Harvard professors get to be critics for the New Yorker, we can write a blog.
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<br />9. Al-Qaeda is a DIY army. Voina is waging a cultural Jihad. If the capitals of mass culture are Manhattan and Hollywood, the capitals of terrorist culture are Brooklyn and San Francisco. If television was the prime tool to disseminate mass culture, smartphones are the best way to propagate terrorist culture. But if a revolution is “all over twitter” (rather than televised), does the statue of the sovereign make a sound as it tumbles (or tumblrs)?
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<br />10. Terrorist culture is no longer operating on the fringes of mass culture, the way Greenberg believed that the avant-garde must remain the obscure alternative to kitsch. Terrorist culture is becoming the dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. In the same way that Adorno used to lament the demise of high culture in face of the rise of mass culture, some smartass will soon tell us how glorious were the days when mass culture gave us a sense of unity and democracy, while today’s terrorist culture is only leading to fragmentation and exclusivity.
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<br />11. Nevertheless, terrorist culture, like mass culture, is only a reaction against a deep-seated anxiety. They are both just a continuation of a war (on the masses, on terror) by other means. From this perspective, both mass and terrorist culture are probably doomed to do more harm than good, because they end up sacrificing a genuine revolutionary force on the altar of its own representation. David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-39273123679004798132011-08-14T15:50:00.001-04:002011-08-14T17:41:10.341-04:00Academic LaborAn academic job is much more demanding than it seems. You need to do a lot of work to hide the fact that you don't really have anything significant to say. David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-79956652754068339352011-07-07T12:03:00.010-04:002011-07-30T16:32:10.076-04:00The Alienation of Theory<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V_oMZFRR6qw/ThXZgaNJbZI/AAAAAAAAAVg/GqyKnujdi58/s1600/Carpaccio_Augustine.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V_oMZFRR6qw/ThXZgaNJbZI/AAAAAAAAAVg/GqyKnujdi58/s400/Carpaccio_Augustine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626642460282809746" /></a><br /><br />“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” --Wittgenstein <br /><br />Granted, there is not much money to be made doing theoretical work. Which makes it all the more difficult to explain why theory turned into something that looks more and more like a feverish commodity market. Like the latest electronic gadgets, today’s concepts and subjects quickly rise and fall as they enter and exit the discourse of speculative exchange in the marketplace of ideas. <br /><br />At the same time young financiers consult their Bloomberg machines in an attempt to decide whether they should invest their available capital in crude oil futures or sub-prime morgages, young philosophers attend scholarly conferences and read blog posts in an attempt to figure out what people talk about in today’s theoretical landscape, and where they should invest their available brain cells. Biopolitics? Animal philosophy? Speculative realism? Anarchism? Hauntology? <br /><br />This is certainly a fun little game. It makes us think that the world of theory is alive and kicking. Like fashion, it creates the exclusive feeling of the in-crowd, the exciting sense of hype, and the exaggerated belief that some understand something that others simply don’t get. <br /><br />The downside to all of this (the “collateral damage,” to use the right buzz word) is the alienation of theory. We talk about concepts the way a Wall Street analyst talks about stocks, or the way a Burger King employee flips burgers. Ideas have only exchange value for us, but no use value. Our philosophical labor feels more and more foreign to who we really are. The only thing we really care about is not the work that we do (the arguments we make, the books we write) but its surplus value (the invitation to present a paper, the prospect that others will cite it, and, ultimately, the tenure job). <br /><br />Philosophy used to function according to the formula C-M-C: you developed a new Concept, which led to the gathering of Minions, which helped you to develop other Concepts, and so on. But today’s philosophy functions according to the formula M-C-M: you gather around you Minions, with the help of which you can disseminate your Concepts, which leads to the attraction of new Minions, and so forth. <br /><br />It is rather strange to see how so many thinkers who love to talk about Marx (at least since he made his spectacular comeback in Derrida’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Specters</span>) fail to apply his most basic idea about the alienation of labor to their own lofty practice. While all around us people try to reintroduce un-alienated labor (the “artisanal” bakery that replaces the factory bread), in theoretical work any investigation that defies the cosmopolitan production of jet-set ideas is treated as a marker of low intellectual capacity. <br /><br />No one in particular is to be blamed for the alienation of theory. Neither Derrida, nor Zizek, nor Agamben, nor their minions, is more responsible than others for this predicament. We all carry this blame together. Once we realize this, we could begin to cure ourselves from the depressing effects of this alienation, no matter what faction or school we belong to. Then, perhaps, the notion of “lifework,” where one’s life and one’s work cannot be told apart from each other, will return to inform who we are and what we do.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-60301480404861703962011-06-03T20:08:00.002-04:002011-06-03T20:12:30.542-04:00The Finest Thing about New York City<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24492485?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />"The finest thing about New York City, I think, is that it is like one of those complicated Renaissance clocks where on one level an allegorical marionette pops out to mark the day of the week, on another a skeleton death bangs the quarter hour with his scythe, and on the third the Twelve Apostles do a cakewalk. The variety of the sideshows distracts one’s attention from the advance of the hour hand."<br /><br />-A. J. Liebling, "Apology for Breathing"David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-27510280729739127152011-04-26T12:53:00.030-04:002011-04-26T18:26:36.242-04:00Friend-Prisoner-Enemy<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fYYDgBgCuPk/Tbb40_lSbQI/AAAAAAAAAUU/IfT3TYbkoZM/s1600/friend-prisoner-enemy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 296px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fYYDgBgCuPk/Tbb40_lSbQI/AAAAAAAAAUU/IfT3TYbkoZM/s400/friend-prisoner-enemy.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599936775986507010" /></a><br />This diagram was prepared by Bruce Jessen, a psychologist whose work was instrumental in the design of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Program, used by the US Department of Defense and the CIA to torture their detainees.<br /><br />What interests me about this diagram is the way the prisoner at the center is treated as a zone of indetermination that can either undermine or substantiate Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. First, noticed that the American interrogator is labeled in the diagram as the enemy, while the terrorist group back at home is the friend (in the prisoner's mind, of course). The point is to transform the enemy into a friend and the friend into an enemy, that is, to make the prisoner collaborate with the enemy and resist his friend.<br /><br />To achieve this goal, torture is actually presented as counterproductive. Punishment from the enemy (the interrogator), coupled with the potential reward from the friend (predicated on the prisoner's unwillingness to collaborate), leads to colossal failure (this is the left side of the diagram). Success lies on the right: rewarding the prisoner (thus making him feel that the interrogating enemy is actually a friend), while instilling the notion that collaboration will lead to punishment from the friend back at home (thus transforming the friend into the new enemy of the prisoner).<br /><br />Of course, turning the friend-enemy distinction on its head is only an illusion. The interrogator will never be the prisoner's friend, and the prisoner knows it. This is why the interrogator always remains an enemy in the diagram, even when collaboration is achieved (the same is true about the friend).<br /><br />But what is most intriguing about this diagram is that the prisoner is labeled in it neither as a friend nor as an enemy. Instead, the prisoner creates a zone of indistinction between the two categories. Put differently, the prisoner is the sovereign who decides on who is a friend and who is an enemy.<br /><br />It is therefore not a coincidence that the prisoner is depicted in the diagram as if crucified. What Christ does to the Jew/Gentile distinction the prisoner does to the friend/enemy distinction. This becomes clear when one considers Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” where the image of Christ and that of the prisoner merge into one. In the parable, Christ returns to Spain in the sixteenth century, performs a few miracles, and is adored by the people as the true Messiah. But before long the cynical Inquisition, which perceives Jesus as a threat to the status quo, decides to sentence him to death. Christ does not utter a word throughout the parable, so the bulk of the text is dominated by the long speech of the Grand Inquisitor during his nocturnal visit to the cell where the Resurrected awaits his execution. But Christ does reply to this speech, though not with words. When the old inquisitor concludes his denunciation, at the very end of the parable, Christ gently kisses the old man on his “bloodless” lips.<br /><br />Schmitt, who was a devout Roman Catholic, could be easily compared to the Grand Inquisitor. I wonder what would be his reaction if, at the end of one of his lectures in which he discussed his friend/enemy distinction, one of the audience members (preferably a Jew) were to approach him behind the lectern and kiss the eloquent jurist on his bloodless lips.<br /><br />And who knows, maybe in one of the interrogation cells in Guatanamo Bay a prisoner is leaning over right now and kissing his American interrogator. I would love to see this scene at the end of a Hollywoodian psychological thriller about a CIA agent and an al-Qaeda operative. Maybe the film should be titled, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-62597107857838321332011-03-30T17:32:00.003-04:002011-03-30T17:43:38.561-04:00In the Commandment was the WordAudio of Giorgio Agamben's lecture, "What is a Commandment?" London, 28 March 2011. <br /><br /><a href="http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/audio/2011_03_28/2011_03_28_GiorgioAgamben_WhatIsACommandment_talk.mp3">Follow this link (or right click to download linked MP3 file)</a>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-48585969941716137352011-03-21T19:29:00.011-04:002011-04-09T13:12:21.341-04:00The Inoperative Police“...inoperativity is not inert; on the contrary, it allows the very potentiality that has manifested itself in the act to appear. It is not potentiality that is deactivated in inoperativity but only the aims and modalities into which its exercise had been inscribed and separated... We are not dealing here with a simple and insipid absence of a purpose, which often leads to a confusion in both ethics and aesthetics. Rather, at stake here is the rendering inoperative of any activity directed toward an end, in order to then dispose it toward a new use, one that does not abolish the old use but persists in it and exhibits it...” (Giorgio Agamben, "The Glorious Body," in <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804769508/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0804769494&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=15503BEK8NY46HPFYT49">Nudities</a></span>)<br /><br />Follow the link below to a pretty neat example of inoperativity: a live feed of the New York Police Department radio layered over random ambient tracks. Listen to it as you read a book, cook dinner, or fold your laundry. <br /><br /><a href="http://youarelistening.to/newyork">http://youarelistening.to/newyork</a>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-10631232798152012022011-03-14T20:52:00.008-04:002011-03-15T14:11:51.868-04:00Situationist, the iPhone App...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--Cza5c1q8_A/TX64VuZ12JI/AAAAAAAAAUM/u8adqcUuCys/s1600/situationist.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584103271359174802" style="width: 400px; height: 201px;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--Cza5c1q8_A/TX64VuZ12JI/AAAAAAAAAUM/u8adqcUuCys/s400/situationist.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div><div>How about this situation: grab my iphone and run away with it.<br /></div>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-47723366371246047822011-03-05T18:29:00.024-05:002011-06-13T12:56:16.186-04:00Kids' Revolution<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HjYo279hFDE/TXLH98ahPHI/AAAAAAAAAUE/j11P1ycZN7I/s1600/madagascar.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 256px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HjYo279hFDE/TXLH98ahPHI/AAAAAAAAAUE/j11P1ycZN7I/s400/madagascar.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580742755268770930" /></a><br />For Naomi<br /><br />Today, perhaps more than ever, parents are plagued by the anxiety that they do not give their children what it takes to get “ahead in life.” After the recent uprisings around the globe, some radically-inclined mothers and fathers might ask themselves another fundamental question: What can I do to make my kids grow up to become good revolutionaries? When the time comes, will they be among those in the street, or will they stay at home and miss the historical moment?<br /><br />The solution to this pressing problem is simpler than you think. All that the parent needs is a copy of the most revolutionary movie in recent memory. I am referring, of course, to the animated feature, <i>Madagascar</i>. The film begins in the Central Park Zoo, where the caged animals are treated like celebrities, adored by the visitors and pampered by their caretakers. Relinquishing this cozy arrangement, the zebra leads the lion, giraffe and their cohorts to escape from the zoo and experience life in the wild for the first time.<br /><br />To understand the deep revolutionary spirit of <i>Madagascar</i>, we need to go back for a second to Aristotle. Humans, he points out the obvious, are animals. But they are a special type of animal that possesses <i>the additional capacity for political life</i>. Every animal has a given form of life that it shares with its species. A fish lives its life in one way and a donkey lives its life in another way. But a fish cannot decide one morning to live like a donkey or vice versa. Humans, on the other hand, don’t have to follow such a narrow form of life. They can live in many different ways, speak in many languages, have different occupations, and so on. And how do humans come to change, develop, and share those diverse forms of life? Aristotle’s answer is twofold: first, they need to realize that the aim in life is not just to live, but to have a <i>good</i> life. Second, they need to <i>speak and act with one another</i> in order to pursue this good life together. If both conditions are met, man transforms from just another animal to a <i>political animal </i>(or,<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "> in Greek, </span></i></span>politikon zoon<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">).</span></i><br /><br />In a regular zoo, the captive animals have no way out. They are doomed to live the life prescribed to them by their biological necessity and by the zookeeper. In the animated zoo presented in <i>Madagascar</i>, however, the animals transform into <i>political animals</i>, since they act and speak with one another, and since they come to ask themselves whether a different life, perhaps a better life, awaits on the other side of the wall. As a result, they can <i>revolt</i>. A similar point is made in another popular animated film, where the question is radicalized even further. Toys are just things. They have no life whatsoever. Kids can do to them whatever they want: play with them, toss them around, stuff them in a box, etc. A pet still maintains a certain level of volition (the puppy can bite the kid), but a toy is absolutely powerless. In <i>Toy Story</i>, however, the toys mount their revenge. Again, by acting and speaking with one another, by transforming into political animals (or political objects?) they are no longer merely impotent playthings. The story of those toys is therefore a revolutionary story, with the child in the role of the great dictator.<br /><br />The moral is very simple. Human beings, those animals with the additional possibility of living a political life, have a choice. They can just hold on to life itself, which, Aristotle admits, is pretty sweet as such. Like the other animals, they don’t need to question the way they live. They can simply accept it as a given. They don’t need to seek the good life beyond the confines of their already prescribed lifestyle. The other option, which is the more difficult one, arises from a dissatisfaction with the life we live, with a sense that the good life is elsewhere, and that, by speaking and acting with other humans who find themselves in the same condition, we can change this form of life. We can revolutionize or resist or revolt against <i>every</i> aspect of our life, and not only the way we are being governed. When we do so, we become political animals. When we don’t, we are essentially just animals, or maybe even only inanimate objects. In fact, we can barely even be a “we.”<br /><br />A final clarification. One might assume that living in captivity is an unnatural way for an animal to exist. Trying to escape from the zoo and live in the wild, so it seems, is an attempt to fulfill the animal’s natural destiny, its true essence. But of course, when the animals in Madagascar that were used to the amenities of life in New York find themselves in the middle of the jungle, they realize, like the Woody Allen character, that this is not exactly for them. To paraphrase one of Allen’s zingers, “Have you read the book <i>Jews and Nature</i>? It is very very short!” We may lose the joke if we swap “Jews” for “humans,” but we gain in this way a basic philosophical insight that runs from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Agamben in contemporary Italy. The “good life” that humans try to achieve as political animals is <i>never defined </i>in a particular way. The good revolutionary cause, as basic as it might seem (freedom, democracy, equality, etc.), is not a natural goal that all humans must necessarily achieve. Sometimes the good life does not even lie in our ability to change the world (as in Marx's credo). Sometimes it is enough to simply try, like philosophers do, to interpret it.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-54057394245915573972011-02-14T11:38:00.003-05:002011-02-14T21:07:31.544-05:00Foucault’s Utopian Body<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gv1tHt_HrXw/TVla6aFqQvI/AAAAAAAAAT8/tG28njx-NxY/s1600/michel%2Bfoucault.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 393px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gv1tHt_HrXw/TVla6aFqQvI/AAAAAAAAAT8/tG28njx-NxY/s400/michel%2Bfoucault.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573585973329674994" /></a><br />[Excerpts from the translation by Lucia Allais of a radio lecture Foucault delivered in 1966. Published in <i>Sensorium</i>, MIT Press, 2006, 229-34.]<br /><br />…<br /><br />My body: it is the place without recourse to which I am condemned. And actually I think that it is against this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being. The prestige of utopia--to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected--always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body.<br /><br />…<br /><br />No, really, there is no need for magic, for enchantment. There’s no need for a soul, nor a death, for me to be both transparent and opaque, visible and invisible, life and thing. For me to be a utopia, it is enough that I be a body. All those utopias by which I evaded my body--well they had, quite simply, their model and their first application, they had their place of origin, in my body itself, I really was wrong, before, to say that utopias are turned against the body and destined to erase it. They were born from the body itself, and perhaps afterwards they turned against it.<br /><br />…<br /><br />My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is <i>elsewhere</i> than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to <i>it</i>--and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign--that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate.<br /><br />…<br /><br />Maybe it should also be said that to make love is to feel one’s body close in on oneself. It is finally to exist outside of any utopia, with all of one’s density, between the hands of the other. Under the other’s fingers running over you, all the invisible parts of your body begin to exist. Against the lips of the other, yours become sensitive. In front of his half-closed eyes, your face acquires a certitude. There is a gaze, finally, to see your closed eyelids. Love also, like the mirror and like death--it appeases the utopia of your body, it hushes it, it calms it, it encloses it as if in a box, it shuts and seals it. This is why love is so closely related to the illusion of the mirror and the menace of death. And if, despite these two perilous figures that surround it, we love so much to make love, it is because, in love, the body is <i>here</i>.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-67568009763225382892011-02-05T21:16:00.002-05:002011-02-05T21:17:52.032-05:00Limit to your Love<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/15624524" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>by James Blake</p>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-71201485209723682762011-01-14T18:39:00.002-05:002011-01-14T18:46:27.857-05:00No Ideas but in Things<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TTDe5pw7bVI/AAAAAAAAATw/xzbaJXFXVEg/s1600/benjamin.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TTDe5pw7bVI/AAAAAAAAATw/xzbaJXFXVEg/s400/benjamin.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5562190621847547218" /></a><br />Here’s a fun little game. First, find a Marxist, which is not that difficult these days. Then, engage the Marxist in a conversation about anything whatsoever. The aim of the game is to defer as much as possible the moment when the Marxist says something like, “Look, you must take into consideration the difference between the structure and the superstructure.” To those who don’t know (or are afraid to ask) what the Marxist means, the following should suffice: poetry and art, philosophy and politics, culture and ideas, laws and institutions, do not exist on their own. They are, rather, only the effects of material conditions that, as a whole, are their causes. Economy determines our lofty human endeavors. The overall <span style="font-style:italic;">structure</span> of these relations and forces of capitalist production is the ultimate foundation of the <span style="font-style:italic;">superstructure</span> of our intellectual achievements.<br /><br />When Walter Benjamin sent in 1938 the first text that was meant to become a part of his never-finished <i>Arcades Project</i> to the Institute of Social Research in New York, it didn’t take long for its director, Theodor Adorno, to jump the structure/superstructure gun. Benjamin’s project, which was supposed to produce a kind of a philosophy book dedicated to Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is really an assemblage of a variety of themes: ancient streets and new boulevards, shady catacombs and shiny department stores, iron and glass constructions, prostitutes and collectors, to name just a few. In Adorno’s eyes, these could all be considered as integral parts of the material <i>structure</i> of Paris. The problem, however, is that Benjamin resists the subsumption of these elements within a single coherent system, and instead treats them as independent fragments or “monads,” as he liked to call them. As a result, any inference from this disjointed basic structure to the higher superstructure is highly suspicious, and so it must be dismissed as a case of “vulgar materialism”--a standard Marxist anathema.<br /><br />Benjamin did not manage to make Adorno see the value of his “micrological” way of thinking, which resists any integration into a totality. Even in <i>Prisms</i>, published 15 years after Benjamin’s death, Adorno continues to reprimand him on precisely this ground. One must wait another 22 years before Giorgio Agamben mounted his defense of Benjamin’s method against its greatest critic. The distinction between structure and superstructure, Agamben claims, cannot be based on a simplistic <i>causal</i> relationship. The need to figure out the entire material structure before one can go up to the immaterial superstructure is a false need. If anything, Benjamin shows that there is a <i>direct correspondence</i> between the two, which abolishes the metaphysical or dialectical distinction between animality and rationality, nature and culture, matter and form, economy and politics, reality and poetry. By making immediate or unmediated connections between elements of the structure and the superstructure, Benjamin does not practice vulgar materialism, but a courageous one. “The fear of vulgarity,” Agamben therefore snaps, “betrays the vulgarity of fear."<br /><br />The question remains, however, how can structure and superstructure correspond to each other so perfectly? The answer is that, for Benjamin, these two realms are both manifestations of one and the same thing, or attributes of one and the same substance, which I would like to call <i>infrastructure</i>. What both Adorno and Agamben seem to miss is that, as much as Benjamin was interested in the material structure and the immaterial superstructure of Paris, these two realms only play in his thought second fiddle to a third layer, even deeper than the first two, which is the true subject of his <i>Arcades Project</i>. This is what I call the city’s infrastructure. Infrastructure can encompass everything that we normally mean by this term (train stations, the sewage system, sidewalks, street signs, gas lamps, et cetera), but not only. In Benjamin, infrastructure could stand for anything that is understood in and of itself, that is, before it finds its expression within the fields of structure or superstructure (for example, as an economic or political entity). Before Benjamin even considers the use and exchange values of a thing, or its aura, or its philosophical and poetic sense, his true aim is to never lose sight of the <i>thing itself</i>. Early on in his life, he even tried to make the argument that things possess their own language, by which they communicate themselves to man. By looking at the infrastructure of the city, he was able to finally reveal things in the purity of their singularity, as such, thus.<br /><br />The paradigmatic example of an infrastructure is the arcades themselves, those covered passageways that were very popular in nineteenth century Paris (though they also quickly went out of fashion, like today’s shopping malls). An arcade is not an expression of ideas, whether they are economic or political, material or formal. Those ideas are <i>expressed in</i> this thing that we call an arcade. Whatever may be the structure or the superstructure of the arcades (are they public or private? Are they some kind of an indoor <i>agora</i>? How do they transform a commodity when it enters their space? And how do they transform the man who strolls through them?), it must come to manifest itself <i>through</i> the infrastructure, and not vice versa. The infrastructure thus becomes the secret key that unlocks the mysteries of the city. Those who try today to undermine the overwhelming power of the metropolis know very well that, while an attack aimed at the structure or superstructure is utterly hopeless, slightly tipping over the infrastructure can bring the city to its knees. <br /><br />It may be helpful to think about this issue in the simplest Freudian terms. Analyzing what is conscious and what is unconscious in Paris of the nineteenth century, <i>à la</i> Freud’s early “topographical” model of the psychic apparatus, may surely be of value. This, of course, is what it means to look for the city’s structure and superstructure. Yet Freud’s more advanced “structural” model--the id, ego, and superego--becomes an exceedingly more useful tool in Benjamin’s hands, as he dissect the Parisian urban apparatus. Infrastructure is the city’s id, the origin of both ego and superego, underneath both structure and superstructure. But what is this id, according to Freud, other than <i>das</i> <i>Es</i>, literally, “the It.” To come to terms with the city as an It or the It of the city (as in “It is glorious,” “It is expensive,” “It is hectic”), to manage to think not about <i>what</i> the city is, but <i>that</i> it is, is, after all, a work reserved for ontology, or first philosophy, which is what the <i>Arcades Project</i>, in its quintessence, was meant to be.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-69273514778080049862011-01-04T15:16:00.001-05:002011-01-04T15:19:09.332-05:00Gaza's Youth Manifesto for Chnage"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113803372021733&id=118914244840679">Continue reading</a>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-85154922050365369482010-11-10T10:48:00.004-05:002010-11-10T10:53:03.832-05:00If this is a Person<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TNq_aKsI77I/AAAAAAAAASk/Fbz1N08zslk/s1600/the_social_network_jesse_eisenberg_image_02.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 269px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TNq_aKsI77I/AAAAAAAAASk/Fbz1N08zslk/s400/the_social_network_jesse_eisenberg_image_02.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537949148072439730" /></a><br />"At the moment when individuals are nailed down to a purely biological and asocial identity, they are also promised the ability to assume all the masks and all the second and third lives possible on the Internet, none of which can ever really belong to them. To this one can add the fleeting and almost insolent pleasure of being recognized by a machine, without the burden of the emotional implications that are inseparable from recognition by another human being. The more the citizens of the metropolis have lost intimacy with one another, the more they have become incapable of looking each other in the eye, the more consoling the virtual intimacy with the apparatus becomes (an apparatus that has learned in turn to look so deeply into their retinas). The more they have lost all identity and all real belonging, the more gratifying it has become for them to be recognized by the Great Machine in its infinite and minute variants: from the turnstile of a subway entrance to an ATM machine, from the video camera that benevolently observes them while they enter the bank or walk down the street to the apparatus that opens the garage door for them, all the way to the future obligatory identity card that will recognize them in any time and any place for what they inexorably are. I am here if the Machine recognizes me or, at least, sees me; I am alive if the Machine, which knows neither sleep nor wakefulness, but is eternally alert, guarantees that I am alive; I am not forgotten if the Great Memory has recorded my numerical or digital data.<br /><br />That this pleasure and these certainties are artificial and illusory is evident, and the first ones to recognize this are precisely those who experience them on a daily basis." <br /><br />From "Identity without the Person," in Giorgio Agamben's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nudities-Meridian-Aesthetics-Giorgio-Agamben/dp/0804769508/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?tag=533633855-20">Nudities</a>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-38197268325266994292010-10-12T16:47:00.004-04:002010-10-12T19:04:30.342-04:00Immaterial Labor?Banksy takes The Simpsons<br /><object width="400" height="300"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DX1iplQQJTo?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DX1iplQQJTo?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="300"></embed></object>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-83074984468486871502010-09-03T06:42:00.005-04:002010-09-03T14:35:23.461-04:00<iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?group_id=&user_id=53205122@N04&set_id=72157624710141425&text=" align="center" frameborder="0" height="500" scrolling="no" width="400"></iframe><br /><small></small><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcus_leis_allion/sets/72157624710141425/">By Marcus Leis Allion</a>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-24212033512779656802010-08-15T11:07:00.004-04:002010-08-15T11:13:54.520-04:00Fourth Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TGgC5uRO3CI/AAAAAAAAASU/Dad2IYZfmGI/s1600/banksy.jpeg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 395px; height: 389px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TGgC5uRO3CI/AAAAAAAAASU/Dad2IYZfmGI/s400/banksy.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5505653735156538402" /></a><br /><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we could say that one is a philosopher at the cost of regarding that which all non-philosophers call “form” as content, as “the thing itself.” To be sure, philosophers belong in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes something merely formal--our life included. At its best, philosophy (but also art, as in Nietzsche’s original fragment, and even religion, as in Hegel’s system) allows us to find patterns of forms of life in the seemingly endless and senseless fragments that crowd our everyday existence. It can also help us realize that our manner of being is not merely the arbitrary shape or inconsequential refinement of this rough and ready thing that people call life (their so-called life). Rather, our form of life is precisely what philosophers like to call “the thing itself.” (As an example of this philosophical proclivity at work, think of Judith Butler’s understanding of gender.) This is not to say that philosophers should merely act as the servants of a form of life, or that their true task is to develop some pseudo-science of forms of life. Even though people treat the way they live as fish treat water, philosophers are not fishermen. Philosophy is, above all, a way of life in its own right. Until this elemental fact (which, as Pierre Hadot has shown, was an obvious one for the Ancient Greeks) returns to inform current philosophical practice, it has no chance of getting out of the inconsequential mess in which it finds itself today. Luckily, when philosophy as a form of life devolves into philosophy as a profession, when friends degenerate into peers, the unique power that inheres in such a strange mode of being does not become yet another power that dominates life (aside from the occasional stray student). Kierkegaard probably said it the best: instead of having any power whatsoever, today’s philosophers seem to cheerfully “speculate themselves out of their own skin.”</span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-14303411345272055602010-07-29T09:49:00.001-04:002010-07-29T09:52:07.599-04:00Third Thesis on the Conept of Form of Life<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TFGHT3YOqWI/AAAAAAAAASM/iE0G7akCtbM/s1600/banksy1.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 291px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TFGHT3YOqWI/AAAAAAAAASM/iE0G7akCtbM/s400/banksy1.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499325395348924770" border="0" /></a><br />There is a direct correlation between the growing power of life and the growing power over life. The rise of forms of life does not necessarily lead to the decline of bare lives. The stakes today are simply higher: the more power a life obtains, the more ingenious are the apparatuses designed to control it; the more value a life has, the more intricate are the tactics devised to capitalize on it. While in medieval times the inquisition and the confession were enough to keep most people in line, the modern apparatuses of power employ much more complex techniques to achieve much less effective results. If it is true that today’s men and women are more servile than ever (“the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history,” Agamben claims), then why is there a need for all those sophisticated and ruthless apparatuses out there to get them? It is generally believed that in a global culture the differences between forms of life gradually give way to a monochromatic existence. But as power grows <span style="font-style: italic;">over</span> more lives in isolated or neglected places, the power <span style="font-style: italic;">of</span> these previously untouched lives with their still not dead forms can eventually grow as well. This is not achieved, however, because the West flattens the image of these cultures in order to feign the semblance of diversity and satisfy its fascination with the Other, but only because those “others” seize the means of representation and impress their own image on the planetary spectacle in which we live. Forms of life cannot be preserved by isolation--they can only be challenged by interaction, which is what a globalized public sphere may facilitate. Trying today to speak or listen while a million different voices crave to be heard at the same time is quite enervating, but this cacophony is still overcome whenever a single person attends to another and understands what he or she has to say. Every such communication or conversation, as fleeting or insubstantial as it may be, is a generator of the power, and form, of life. So despite the fact that we are witnessing a massive proliferation and expansion of apparatuses that are meant to get hold of our lives--from the close-circuit television that monitors our every move to the regular television that manipulates our every desire, from the cell phone that traces our whereabouts to the credit card that keeps a tab on our conspicuous consumption, from the shrinks who dissect our souls to the doctors who regiment our bodies, from the schools that discipline us well into our thirties to the media outlets that monopolize our public domain--it is encouraging to note that these powers only appear mighty. In reality, they are just scrambling to recapture what is constantly slipping through their clumsy fingers.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-27543596824552561142010-07-04T11:21:00.003-04:002010-07-04T11:30:56.182-04:00Second Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TDCoRZlPpVI/AAAAAAAAARw/0VFWGF3Wd0U/s1600/stopandsearch.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 332px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TDCoRZlPpVI/AAAAAAAAARw/0VFWGF3Wd0U/s400/stopandsearch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490072962642978130" /></a><br />Whether they know it or not, all established apparatuses of power tend to agree on one basic point, formulated in the clearest terms by the best theoretical minds of the Third Reich: that since “no political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power,” politics is basically the practice of “giving form to the life of the people.” To complicate our basic dichotomy, it must be admitted that what the power over life is concerned with above all else is how, and not just that, we live. It is only when the powers that be realize that they did <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> manage to achieve the desired result, when life did not care to conform to a certain form, that the opposite practice is unleashed: the stripping of life from its form (whatever it may be), this diabolical metamorphosis from caring (for the form of life) to forsaking (bare life), as power yields to violence and biopolitics transforms into “thanatopolitics”--a politics concerned with death rather than with life. Bare life is by no means a manifestation of sovereign power, but a proof of sovereign powerlessness, that is, its failure to influence or protect the way we live. Nothing is simpler than to subject a bare life to power (indeed, the desire to do so is usually a mark of weakness); but it is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to completely subject a form of life to a power external to it. No matter how awesome the powers of the state, the law, the sovereign, the government, the police, or the army are, they can only contain the explosive power of the multitude of forms of life with limited success. A life completely devoid of a form, like a point without extension, is a fiction. In the same way that outside the theoretical realm of Euclidean geometry there is no point with zero dimensions, there is no absolutely bare life in the actual world, outside Agamben’s political theory, though horrifying limit cases, like the <span style="font-style:italic;">Muselmann</span>, do exist. (By the same token, we could add that there are no pure forms of life that are totally separated from actual physical life outside Debord’s theses on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Society of the Spectacle</span>, though beatific limit cases, like cartoon characters, do indeed exist.)David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-62845345653101244972010-06-17T12:39:00.003-04:002010-07-04T11:30:39.183-04:00First Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TBpRQLgz1BI/AAAAAAAAARg/w5a6_85ebMQ/s1600/banksy_05.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 250px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/TBpRQLgz1BI/AAAAAAAAARg/w5a6_85ebMQ/s400/banksy_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483784834687161362" /></a><br />There are two forces in this world that propel our lives in opposite directions: the first is the power <i>over</i> life, and the second is the power <i>of</i> life. On the one hand, “biopower” is understood by Agamben as the first force, as the incessant attempt to strip life from its form and reduce it to bare life, to the mere fact of being alive, and thus deplete it of its power. On the other hand, biopower may also be presented as a force that is internal or immanent to a life that is always understood as a form or a way or a manner of living, wherein lies its power. While in the first process life cedes its powers to the forces external to it, in the second process those external forces become powerless in face of life. If the first force does its best to depoliticize our lives in such a way that only the fact <i>that</i> we are alive persists as its main concern, the second force politicizes our lives, because <i>how</i> each and every one of us lives in any given moment becomes the central political question. We will use the term “biopolitics” from now on to designate this constant struggle between these two forces, rather than only one of them independently of the other: on the one hand, the monitoring, controlling, disciplining, and administrating of our lives by apparatuses of power (like the government and the police, but also the education system and economic institutions, to mention just a few obvious examples); on the other hand, our ability to fight these powers by imagining, producing, practicing, or presenting new ways to share our lives with one another. It may be assumed that the power <i>of</i> life is merely a reaction against the growing power <i>over</i> life. But it is also possible to reverse the genealogy and claim that it is actually the various apparatuses of actualized power that are the ones reacting against the potential power embedded in the multifarious ways we live our lives. While it is usually assumed that “life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object,” I would like to turn Deleuze’s formulation on its head: <i>power becomes resistance to life when life takes power as its object</i>. If the power over life is what we usually call “the powers that be,” the power of life is what we may call “the powers that become,” or “the coming power.”David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-62736944855051975672010-04-30T08:18:00.007-04:002010-06-24T03:47:35.685-04:00Forms of Power<span style="font-style: italic;">Only those who have no path will reach their end.<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span><br />The first segment from a seminar with Giorgio Agamben.<br /><object width="400" height="300"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/K_61_EqPwNc&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/K_61_EqPwNc&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="300"></embed></object>David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-80478572566522839102010-03-31T13:32:00.017-04:002010-04-01T10:22:21.335-04:00Moods<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/S7OIT9cwJJI/AAAAAAAAARY/Fyt9rU2Q6IU/s1600/yoel+hoffmann+moods.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/S7OIT9cwJJI/AAAAAAAAARY/Fyt9rU2Q6IU/s400/yoel+hoffmann+moods.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5454853450169853074" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Excerpts from Yoel Hoffmann's new book, translated from the Hebrew. <br /></span><br />[54] This book is a book of states of mind. You can call it <span style="font-style:italic;">moods</span>.<br />Sometimes we love and sometimes we hate. And there are times when we hate the things we used to love or love the things we used to hate and there is no end to such things. <br />We used to hate spiders but now we love them. Especially those with skinny legs and round bodies. And since we don’t scare them away (as others do) they spin their webs in all sorts of places and roam the floor and walls and sometimes they stand all night long above the bed, almost touching the nose. <br />And as we sit at the table and prepare to write, a spider approaches the paper and stands on the words. <br /><br />[95] This is the solution to the Zen riddle about the sound of the one hand, as well as the solution to the agonies of man about which Sigmund Freud spoke. Namely, that someone will touch someone else and so forth. <br />We think that the readers should use this book to look for another human being. For example, they should drop it in a bar or a pub and lift it up and ask a woman, Is this yours? Or they should place on it two glasses of red wine (we will make sure that it will be big enough). Or they should stab it with a dagger and say, If the dagger will touch the word love you come with me (we will make sure to spread the word everywhere). Or they should say, If your back hurts you better put under your head something stiff (for this reason we will publish a special hard-cover edition).<br />Once (we remember) we used to put books on chairs to reach high places. <br /><br /><br />[153] The readers always need to see the paper behind the words. Not the one that was there before the words were written, but the one that arises after they have been read.<br />Don’t believe those physicists who speak about specific gravity. The things that you see, even if they seem to be heavy, are the materials of dreams. And don’t even believe that. A dream is in itself a dream.<br /><br />Nevertheless, when you see large things like a hippopotamus or a sumo wrestler you are tempted to ascribe to them exaggerated actuality. It was very difficult, for instance, to doubt my stepmother Franciska. But once we knew a very fragile woman, who appeared and disappeared like a hologram. It was very easy to doubt her existence but the longings for her were extremely painful. <br /><br /><br />[154] Because of these longings that are very hard to bear novels with three hundred and even six hundred pages are being written for all of you, full with countless human beings that come and go, like a medicine cabinet filled with Tylenol pills.<br /><br />You need to place one of those novels in front of a raven. Or, if you wish, a turtle. <br />Once a raven entered through the main door and stood on the kitchen table. It first pecked at some breadcrumbs and then froze in its place and stared at us. <br />This is why we write all these things. If we knew what the raven saw when it looked at us, we would reveal it to the readers instead of this book. But because we don’t know we write and write.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2454365152806528236.post-9301181741053997352009-11-02T18:13:00.019-05:002010-02-01T14:35:44.210-05:00Public Enemy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/Su9nuv1TFdI/AAAAAAAAARE/W5WRmkfGknA/s1600-h/cat_no_547.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 322px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ZAuI4it_sbw/Su9nuv1TFdI/AAAAAAAAARE/W5WRmkfGknA/s400/cat_no_547.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399648531052172754" /></a><br />"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."<br />-Foucault<br /> <br />With his exceptional acumen and erudition, Daniel Heller-Roazen traces in his new book, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Enemy of All</span>, a painstakingly detailed genealogy of the figure of the pirate. Predominately an analysis of the strange legal status of piracy, the book interlaces texts from the history of political theory, philosophy, and literature in order to show how “the common enemy of all,” as Cicero calls the pirate, morphed in mediaeval times into “the enemy of the human species,” and then, in Modernity, into “the enemy of humanity.” <br /><br />Traversing the liquid paths of the high seas, pirates operate in a lawless, soveringless state of exception, and they are treated by jurists accordingly: like the “illegal enemy combatants” of the recent “war on terror,” their actions occupy a zone of indistinction between the criminal and the political, and so they are protected by neither the civil law nor the law pertaining to prisoners of war. As a deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration once put it, “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system? What were pirates?” Or, as Heller-Roazen phrases it in the closing pages of his book, Why is it still difficult for many to realize that we are currently moving “toward a perpetual war,” where man is a pirate to man, where sovereign power can do anything to whomever is labeled “the enemy of all”?<br /><br />This book will surely be read by some as an indispensable addendum to Agamben’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Homo Sacer</span>, but it also seems to contain the seed of a yet-to-be-developed radical thought. Enemies, Heller-Roazen explains, are traditionally divided into two categories: private and public. A private enemy (<span style="font-style:italic;">inimicus</span>, a negation of <span style="font-style:italic;">amicus</span>, the friend) is an individual who seeks to hurt another individual, and takes pleasure in doing so. A public enemy (<span style="font-style:italic;">hostis</span>) stands for a nation that does not act with hatred but with a sense of right, making claims against another nation, or refuses its claims, and wages an open war in their name. The public enemy, 18th century philosophers of law claim, is a political figure who fights for a political cause. There is, however, a more ancient distinction that contrasts the public enemy with the bandit. While the former receives a mandate from a sovereign and thus has certain rights, is treated as an equal, and fought against according to prescribed conventions, the latter is literally an “out-law,” or an “unlawful enemy”: he is a pirate to whom no pledge can be made, and with whom no oath is binding. Like a shadow of the public enemy, there is no need to declare war before the bandit or the pirate is attacked, and there are no rules that must be followed in the process of his elimination. <br /> <br />To the modern ear, the expression “public enemy” means something completely different. With a semantic somersault that has to do as much with the mass media as it does with law enforcement, the most wanted criminals in the modern state (most notably American gangsters) were given a name that was reserved until then for the legitimate enemy in a traditional war between nations. In the society of the spectacle, the “public enemy number one” is not just infamous but also, quite plainly, famous. As Benjamin observes, when the army, police, and secret services obtain a complete monopoly on violence, the “great criminals” arouse the secret admiration of the public, no matter how abominable their means or ends may be, simply because they exist outside the law. A great criminal is not just a regular criminal on a larger scale. As a public enemy, he becomes a mythological figure (to use Barthes’s term) that functions as a menace to the social, political, juridical, and economic orders, and evokes, precisely for this reason, a not-so-secret fascination in the minds of so many people. But what is a better paradigm of the “great criminal” in Western culture than the pirate? Could it be that the “enemy of all” and the “public enemy”--two figures that used to be opposite--are closer to one another than they appear? <br /><br />Though the criminals recorded in the archives of the French police that Foucault gathered in “Lives of Infamous Men” were not always the sort of notorious figures that captivated the attention of an entire nation, Agamben believes that they are perfect examples of how “the encounter with power pulls from darkness and silence human existences that would otherwise not have left any traces.” From private, unknown enemies, they become (usually against their will) public enemies--and here we use the term “public” in the strict Arendtian sense of the word: they are political figures the moment they set sail for the liquid paths of the modern public sphere. By using what society deems inglorious means, public enemies can achieve glory, even immortality, within the shimmering light of appearances (Chuck D was clearly aware of this argument when he named his hip hop group "Public Enemy").<br /><br /> Granted, the juridical no man’s land in which the pirate and his modern descendants dwell is indeed a serious problem with ruinous consequences. Good-old liberals will continue to fight for the inclusion of those “enemies of all” within an agreed-upon legal code, as well as for the restoration of their human rights. Bad-new anarchists, however, know better. What is certain about the Tiqqun affair is that the French government made a textbook mistake that we are well-familiar with since the days of the Greeks and Romans: try to get rid of a “public enemy” like Socrates or Jesus, and the result is a wild proliferation in the popularity of the ideas that these “common enemies” stood for (of course, not all public enemies are born equal; some just idly fascinate us for a while until another one comes along). Not many people cared about the “Invisible Committee” and its philosophy before last year’s events. Now put the word “tiqqun” in Google Trends and see what happens: it is no longer a local curiosity, but a global phenomenon. Assuming that the ideas of Julien Coupat and his friends are indeed “dangerous,” could it be that today they are no longer the enemies of France, but literally the “enemies of all”? And is it fair to say that their incarceration only worked in their favor? <br /><br />In 1964, Andy Warhol was commissioned to create a mural for the exterior of the New York Pavilion in the World Fair. His submission comprised of enormous black and white silk-screened plates, prepared from mug shots of the thirteen most wanted men on the FBI list. Just before the opening, a word came from above, probably from the office of Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York and the director of the Fair, ordering the swift and complete alteration of the work. Warhol’s decision to paint on top identical portraits of Moses enraged Philip Johnson, the architect of the pavilion, and so eventually the artist decided to cover them over in a single reflective silvery color. Though <span style="font-style:italic;">Thirteen Most Wanted Man</span>--made by the man who understood the notion of fame better than anyone else--was only seen by a handful of people before it was destroyed, it remains not only one of his most powerful works, but also a perfect meditation on the idea of infamy, and its perpetual persistence in face of the attempts to cover it up. <br /><br />What makes the public enemy such a potent figure is that any attempt of the powers that be to reduce his being to a bare life, to expose his body to random acts of violence, and eventually to kill him with impunity, is usually not only futile, but also counter-productive. The reason for this is simple: the public enemy’s form of life is a life that cannot be separated from its form.David Kishikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09287802372745246084noreply@blogger.com0