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Controversial things, or the dual sense of ‘saklighet’
A quick comment on the translation of the term ‘nysaklig’ into ‘new-thingly’ …
It seems to me that ‘thingly’ loses one aspect of the dual nature in ‘saklig’. A ‘sak’ can actually refer to two things: First, a thing or an object in the most concrete way; crystals, ants, computers, gay bath houses or supernovas; the second aspect of the word ‘sak’ is more relational and refers to an affair or a controversy, the fact that something matters and have become important or crucial in some sense to certain actors; a quarrel between friends, a scholarly disagreement or the scandals of classical politics. ‘Sak’ can even refer to a cause, as in fighting for a cause etc.
I’m not sure that Rasmus Fleischer intended this, but then again that’s not the point.
What I like about the second aspect, which seems to me to have been lost in the translation, is that it places relationality by way of controversy, confrontation and affairs at the center of how to study objects. This does not mean that objects are merely reduced to their relations, that relationality “undermines” the independent being of things, as Graham Harman likes to say it. Rather, it brings forth the idea that to know, study or encounter a thing (a parrot, boulder or para-military group) is always in some way dramatic, or at least political (in the cosmopolitical sense of Isabelle Stengers, whom I haven’t read, but at least in the way Latour has made sense of it [pdf]).
In danish, this aspect becomes even more clear, as the corresponding word ‘sag’ specifically is used to refer to law suits or other legal disputes between parties. Also, the news media are especially obsessed about ‘sager’, ie. affairs, that are scandalous or revealing.
Curiously, ‘saklig’ (or in danish, ‘saglig’) also refers to a manner of discussing focused on facts – for some people this even implies so called “neutrality”, but I guess that sense comes from the party of dusty scientism. In a broader sense ‘saklig’ refers to an attitude of being to-the-point. But most interestingly, ‘saklig’ is usually used synonymously with being objective, which should be understood very literally in the OOO-sense: oriented towards the objective, ie. the involved objects and what concerns them. Similarly, ‘saklig’ is also usually used synonymously with the expression ‘matter-of-fact’ (which is similar with to-the-point, but at least makes a for me still unclear reference to Latour in the article ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matter-of-fact to matter-of-concern’)
This should be enough to give an idea of some of the richness that the term ‘saklig’ could reveal. To sum up the dual sense of the term that I have outlined above: ‘saklig’ implies both an object-orientation, but also an orientation towards confrontation, dispute and drama. If anyone was ever uncertain of the political implications of OOO and might have thought that it implied static or reactionary conservatism, where the subterranean qualities of object are always preserved and all the shallow entanglements and collisions between them are merely fleeting changes in a hard-as-diamond state-of-things, then the scandinavian expression might evoke a quite different idea of the object-orientation, of sakligheten.
To make a closing association (and I’m aware that this post has been almost entirely associating), we might consult Karen Barad and her agential realism in Meeting the Universe Halfway. Barad is certainly a philosopher of the speculative sort – in one occurence calling for a “weird materialism” – by audaciously launching her grand metaphysics by merging the micro-physics of Michel Foucault with the quantum physics of Niels Bohr. There are important differences between her and OOO though, and I feel that the concepts of apparatus, entanglements, intra-action and especially the Bohrian term phenomena bring up crucial problems (Instead of objects, at least in the non-entangled sense, Barad argues that ‘phenomena’ should be the real objective referents; a term that could also fruitfully be named situation). Nonetheless – or maybe exactly for that reason – Barad can help us grasp the dual sense of ‘saklighet’ in her discussion of “onto-epistemology”. The argument is fairly simple, because of an elegant wordplay, that she borrows from Judith Butler. Barad’s metaphysics can be summed up in a sentence: the universe comes to matter. Every thing comes to matter in two ways: comes to matter as in materialize; comes to matter as in having meaning, or making sense. It is in this way that epistemology always has ontological consequences (and vice versa). Every process of mattering (e.g. an experiment on the behavior of light) involves what Barad calls an ‘agential cut’ in the object (e.g. light), that makes certain aspects of the object come to matter (e.g. its particle-quality) and certain others not come to matter (e.g. its wave-quality). Agential cuts make certain things appear and other certain things disappear. It’s in this way that the ontoepistemological process in a profound way always implies ethics: in an almost literal sense to ‘take sides’ when making agential cuts, in a particular controversy between objects (where the ethical actor in question naturally becomes one of these objects).
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All for your safety
Aaaaahh… The tranquility of sitting at an outdoor café in one of the civilized areas of a european metropolis immersing yourself in reading a book while being watched over by machines of loving grace.
[Naïve as I was, I was sure this was some absurd kind of cynical art installation. A friend later told me no, the cameras was to make sure that the customers paid or did not behave inappropriately. Later I saw the same kind of large grey cameras, pointing directly down on the nearest tables, at several other cafées.]
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Instead of security, instead of privacy: Secrecy, intimacy and trust
Brist made the suggestion that we should stop talking about ‘security’ and instead start building a language around ‘secrecy’.
I think it sounds like a very good suggestion, so I here give my comments in a debate I would hope to see more contributions to. My problem with ‘security thinking’ especially stems from the expert bias it brings with it: the overly focus on learning complicated technologies and tools even before finding out what you want to secure, ie. keep secret. It’s like the security paradigm just breeds security consultants, eager to give their expert advice and still you have no clue why you would want to learn to encrypt your email or install plugins that makes your browser less vulnerable to so called man-in-the-middle attacks. Over and over, the same response: “Why would I want to put down time on all that crap, It’s not because I’m some kind of wanted person or politician”. The thing is: ‘Security’ seems completely irrelevant for most people.
So maybe not ‘secrecy’ … After all, everyone has secrets. Necessary secrets, secrets between friends, secrets between colleagues, large secrets and smaller secrets, silly secrets and dangerous secrets.
Before we continue, a disclaimer: Why do we even find it necessary to discuss replacing one word for the other? Is this not just silly semantics? To that I would answer: When we would like to replace one way of talking about things with another, we are messing with things other than language. So no, not ‘just’ semantics. More appropriately, we are negotiating a paradigm: Which means we are also always building the components for how we would want technology, tools, social contexts, law etc. to come into being. In short, certain words make certain things matter in a certain way. Similar to how all the fuss about ‘cloud computing’ easily comes to matter as a corporate rule of cyberspace. We think ‘the cloud’ is just ‘up there’ floating around freely in the sky, while all our data are being placed in the same few servers managed by the same few corporations, leaving us very dependent on these few central actors. Essentially losing control of how we want to communicate, share stuff, find each other etc. Then, instead of ‘the cloud’ we might speak about ‘the mountain’ – where the internet gods keep our digital offerings, or something. You get the point.
Given that the words we use matters, let’s continue to build on Brist’s suggestion to replace ‘security’ with ‘secrecy’. To frame it, here’s a long quote.
What I find really important about moving from security to secrecy is that it allows us to think about what we actually want to keep secret, and from whom. Because of this, thinking about secrecy is just as valuable for people like me who do most of what I do more or less openly as for the aforementioned people who are hunted by intelligence agencies. While security is often an all-or-nothing affair, since a weak spot can crack the whole system open, secrecy is about managing what information someone can gather about you. [...] You have to ask yourself what secrets you want to keep. Your name? Your political affiliations? Your online habits, or your network of friends? Once you have those answers you can begin looking at tools and practices. Not the other way around — that’s for server admins and programmers.
There are several points to comment on, but let me start with the notion of ‘security as an all-or-nothing affair’. Security certainly invites people into a mode of thinking that can become dominated by paranoia. Either you’ve decided to be careful about it or you rather not care. And yes, paranoia does not mean that you are not followed and surveilled etc. A small dose of generalized paranoia can even be a good motivator to learn skills, as a way of remembering to do certain stuff.
But paranoia lacks heavily in what secrecy could be better in growing: Intimacy.
This is where it gets interesting for me. Parallel to the problems and ambivalences in security thinking is all the talk about ‘privacy’ in so called information activist circles. I say, liberal information activist circles. I’m not so sure I would want to fight and struggle to defend privacy. I’m just dropping examples from the top of my head – drawing from the feminist critique of the public/private division – but we have to remember that this division between the public and the private is the same thing that gave us the idea of a single bourgeous public (thereby ignoring minor voices and naturalizing their silence); it is the same division that have forced queers of all types behind closed (private) doors under the pretension of ‘tolerance’ (like you treat a guest in his house); it was the same division that sustained patriarchy in (private) homes; and so on … (let me know more examples and maybe we can list a bunch of problems with the division in order to find fitting replacements for them)
Intimacy seems to be intimately entangled with secrecy. Intimacy, pushing the questions Brist mentioned about what to keep secret, and to whom? Security, on the other hand, is most often something you want to do by yourself – conjuring passwords, keeping your valuables in your safe, hiring a private security firm to guard your solitary house. Security easily produces the kind of paranoid affect that makes you suspicious – to other people, people you might otherwise want to build trust with, your complicities, your friends …
So yes, this makes us introduce another concept that fits into the secrecy-intimacy-pair: Trust. Trust is always a social relation, something you build between each other, something to be shared and extended. Trust might just be the single most important affect when sharing secrets.
You can certainly try to build a secure world all by yourself, but you can never build trust all by ourself. Unless, you might not be trusting yourself? But then, this is only a problem for the extremely paranoid liberal, excessively focused on security and the idea of the self.
A good practical example is already existing terminology: When encrypting mails with GPG you can verify each other’s keys, gradually building a web of trust – enabling other people that trust those of us who verified the keys to trust them as well. As a contrary way of delegating trust, you have the hierarchical ‘tree of trust’ – here, all trust is placed on one single actor, instead of being built up through the trust-glue between all your trustworthy friends.
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On a side note: I’m reminded by Tiqqun’s concept of zones of offensive opacity (ZOO, in short), a concept that specifically builds on secrecy and trust: diffuse overlapping territories (not occupying the territory, but “being the territory”), dim grey zones of friend circles on dim grey zones of others who trust each other, a communist geography beneath the state’s cartography, spaces impenetrable in their composition and meaning to authority. A secret communism:
The advantage of the ZOO is that it establishes and expands a base for autonomy. Specifically, it looks to communism as a qualitative guide. At every moment when one might be tempted to engage in the social, for whatever resources it may offer, the ZOO suggests constructing a parallel space of communism.
For de danske / svenske optegnelser: Vi behøver at forhandle en erstatning af sikkerheds-privatlivs-paradigmet med en anden klynge koncepter omkring hemmelighed, intimitet og tillid.
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It is stupid to make Facebook understand what is wrong with Facebook but it is okay if you take the understanding with you when fleeing
“We are so sorry that you decided to deactivate your account. Please take a moment to write why you have chosen to leave, so we can do our best to make our services better.”
“First, Facebook is now the largest database for information about people that have ever existed, but it does not allow me to see and copy my entire social diagram. I want to participate in a social network where the fruits of my clicking and connecting comes back to me, if at all. Second, Facebook is a proprietary business, which means that all the value we create as users end up somewhere else. I want to participate in a not-for-profit social network where profits goes back into the network to develop new stuff we ourselves decide, take out the commercials or stop selling our social diagrammes to corporations. Third, Facebook keeps surveilling me, and let states and corporations do it too for a price, even if I don’t want to be surveilled. Fourth, Facebook is an infrastructure that is not copy friendly, and leaves no room for collective building and restructruring – only at the mercy of your developers, only by way of pathetic protesting, in Facebook groups. Fifth, Facebook keeps my data even if I don’t want it to, even if I delete my account. Sixth, Facebook is a closed system on the internet, where every user cannot decide which other nodes – including on the outside of the Facebook wall – we want to connect to. For all these and other reasons, Facebook is a danger to the internet as I see it now. That’s why I want to quit, at least for now, to learn how more people could also quit. See you again, or never (depends if we succeed).”
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The ambivalence of affirmative action
It is true that affirmative action leaves a lot to be desired. Ideally we would be able to live with different kind of personalities, sexualities, skin colors, cultures and bodies. Ideally we would also ourselves change at every encounter with someone different than ourselves. (This post will definately not propose some kind of multiculturalist perspective in the sense that people should be the way “they are”, as if people just “are” in one way and somehow never changes, and as if then we should at all costs live separately to never encounter each other. I will definately not preach “tolerance”, which is something hosts do to a guest in their own house).
Ideally we would not need affirmative action. But, we do not live in an ideal world. In this very real world, white heterosexual males already get affirmative action on the informal level. It is institutionalized not in the governmental sense but in the sociological sense. It is informal privilege and if you’ve had it all your live, it is often very difficult to see. (For a reference, read this short text: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack (PDF). It is about white privileges, but could be translated to any of those relations of domination mentioned. Remember, things do not need to be identical to compare them. In fact, it would be pointless to compare them, if they were identical, it is precisely because they are different (but similar) that you can compare them. Now use your empathy and read a very good text, it might just learn you something of your white privileges too).
The thing is, when you do not live in an ideal world, you need to get your hands dirty. You will have to give privilege to the underprivileged. You will have to take privilege away from the privileged, when those privileges dominate or lessen the powers of the underprivileged. There are real zero-sum games in this world. Some of them end up having disastrous consequences. You can be a good ally (whether white, heterosexual or male) and start getting a sense of your subtle domination or help dismantle your own privileges.
But, as have been pointed out, this leaves much to be desired. I believe it is a kind of revolutionary desire that most of us have. This desire need to go hand-in-hand with our dirty hands and it is the desire of liberation of not all differences between people, but “all difference that makes a difference”.
I believe this is what Malcolm X learnt, when he was first a racist, speaking for the liberation of all blacks and the constitution of a black nation (black nationalism, black separatism). I believe he later toned down the nationalist aspect and acknowledged white allies that wanted to help, to desire the liberation from being black. The point is, that these things should go hand in hand: the liberation as what we are, and at the same time liberation from what we are. While we stand up against opression, we flee into new worlds at the same time.
I think in the context of homosexuality, the one part is traditionally done by gay rights movements and the other part is more recently seen in queer/trans politics. Queers does not want to just be “gay” and happy for their new won liberal rights. They want to abolish the need for an either-or heterosexual-homosexual “choice” altogether and become multiple other things desiring many other things. If you would want to give liberal rights to every single queer label that is out there, you would need a gazillion new rights. It would become pointless.
These two angles are never separate and should always go together at the same time, in the same political actions and the same discussions: Liberation of + liberation from.
Privileged persons often just stress the latter part (e.g. white people stressing liberation from race, “we should all just be equal” or “we should not focus on the colour of people’s skin” or “this is just inverted racism” etc.). This is because the latter part does not threaten their privileges. The latter part, liberation from, does not entail that they would lose their white privileges. But they have many of their privileges precisely because other people do not have them (e.g. get in front of the line). The same goes for heterosexuality.
Privileged people therefore often become either colour-blind, gender-blind or forced ignorant of people’s sexual desires (because, “we should all just be the same”)
Again, this is a very privileged stand point.
We do not live in an ideal world, therefore we should not become blind of “the differences that makes a difference”: colour, gender, sexual desire, different kinds of bodies etc.
Also, most people are already and always becoming something else than they are (becoming “black” by living in a black neighbourhood, becoming “trans” by learning gender crossing behavior, becoming “bisexual” by flirting with someone of your own gender or whatever you may become). It matters too how people are becoming something and influences how you should meet and treat that specific person.
Again, it is not the differences that are the problem, but how we treat differences. In fact, differences, or the fact that we can become multiple other things, are very desirable because it gives people the freedom of determination over their bodies. If you do not agree that difference is something good, just witness the multiplicities of queer. In queer, the abolition of heteronormativity does not mean that everything just becomes a grey blur “where everyone is the same”. Rather, it means a rainbow-coloured explosion of subjectivity, because “everyone is equal”. Sameness does not follow equality, it is the other way around: inequality between differences learns people that you should try to become the same as the privileged ones. Hierarchies makes you want to race to the top, where the ideal type resides. It makes everyone desire the same things. The revolutionary desires of queer makes you want to desire many things and become many things, because there is not a top to race to, like running everyone’s running to the great sexual pyramid of heteronormativity, but rather a horizontal plane of a multitude of desires with many rainbows and many treasures at the ground level.
Now we’re at it! Here’s some inspiration for tonight, well beyond affirmative action. These guys workin’ it ;)
(This text appeared in a different context in a less open discussion, but I thought I would repost it here as a standalone post)
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Internet terminology
Ever wondered what an “IP number” actually is? Lately I have.
Trying to educate myself in internet common knowledge, for the purposes of cryptoanarchist / cryptocommunist training, I got increasingly frustrated with the catch-22‘s of Wikipedia and similar sources, that tried to explain concepts like “Router”, “IP number” and “DNS”: Seemingly, you needed to know at least 10-15 important terms to learn even the first and most basic ones.
The site Webopedia proved a much better encyclopaedia, but I still feel like I needed something more pedagogic, even visual learning which suits abstract systems like the internet well, and so I searched and found some great videos that explains basic concepts of how the internet works. See below and enjoy! Leave a comment if you know of any other good videos, graphics or resources, and I’ll update this blog with it!
DNS Explained
An explanation of where web sites on the internet come from, how a name address gets translated into the unique IP number through DNS (Domain Name System).
CONCEPTS: DNS, IP addresses, Root domain, Name servers, Cache, Root
Warriors of the Net
Apparently, this is cult classic. Gotta’ love the late 90′s graphics and the awe-inspired voice-over reaching a poetic climax in the end: “Pleased with their efforts / and trusting in a better world / our trusted data packets ride of blissfully into the sunset / of another day / knowing fully they have served their master’s well.”
CONCEPTS: IP, LAN (Local Area Network), Router, Router Switch, Firewall, Proxy, TCP Packet, ICMP Ping Packet, UDP Packet, “Ping of Death”
History of the Internet
“History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file sharing, from Arpanet to Internet, during the cold war. E.g. how the cuba crisis turned the centralized networks of the US military Arpanet into decentralized networks and the radio waves into distributed direct waves, The story of french Cyclades explains how the term ‘inter-net’ was born,
CONCEPTS: Batch-processing, time-sharing, ARPANET, mainframe, IMP (internet message processor), NCP (network control protocol), TCP (transmission control protocol), Packet Switching, X25 protocol, OSI (Open System Interconnection) protocol, TCP/IP protocol
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Exploiting rule-based interaction
Hacking involves knowing how humans sometimes work as procedural machines, acting by pre-defined rules that can easily be exploited. All it takes, is to know the entire set of pre-defined rules, and then picking the most suitable course of “interaction”. This of course works when dealing with all kinds of companies, from fast food restaurants to public transportation. It is especially true in hierarchical companies that micro-manage their employees, so the rule-based procedures completely the interaction. Another example are the procedures for when and in which cases an employee must bring their supervisor. Or leave you alone (so you don’t have to be bothered by their selling tricks on the phone). Or wait for you, and with you never coming back to them, waste their time (which make the company lose money).
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Commoniser moved / flyttede / flyttade
UPDATE: FörlÃ¥t! Fortfarande lite rörigt här nu och dÃ¥. Sidan är under development. I’m developing..
Welcome, velkommen, välkommen in. Commoniser got a new domain, and with a new form! Mere öppett domæne & med det kommer vår, introducing/presenting, Die form: flashy-orange-sans-serif-modernistisk schweitzer æstetik. Lär mig att koda wordpress i php/css, cutting edge. Känner mig som en hacker. Deform
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Love for the biopolitical economy: Wasps & Orchids
This blog will talk about love. Yes, love! But first…
A DISCLAIMER FOR THE THICK-SKINNED AND THE HARD-BOILED
Love is not just a matter for the sentimental fool. Love produces subjectivities, affective networks, and schemes of cooperation. In this sense, love is an economic and political power. Love is not just a matter for the romantic either. Love is not merely, as it is often characterized, spontaneous or passive. It does not simply happen to us, as if it were an event that mystically arrives from nowhere. Instead it is an action, a biopolitical event, which, in order to be created in its benign form, also requires training. A boot camp of love for everyday life.
Love can fascinate us, but it should also interest us, since love provides a path for investigating the power and productivity of the common.
Corrupt forms of love
We often think of love as a means to escape the solitude and isolation of individualism. But in our contemporary ideology we end up getting isolated again in the private life of the couple or the family. To arrive at a political concept of love that recognizes it as centered on the production of common life, we have to break free from the contemporary corruptions of the term. After that, we’ll explore their antidotes.
- Identitarian love, or “love of the same”. Identitarian love can be based, for example, on a narrow interpretation of the mandate to love thy neighbor, understanding it as a call to love those most proximate, those most like you. Family love, race love, nation love or patriotism, all exemplify the pressure to love most those most like you and hence less those who are different. From this perspective we might way that populisms, nationalisms, fascisms, and various religious fundamentalisms are based not so much on hatred as on love – but a horribly corrupted form of identitarian love. Love of the stranger, love of the farthest, and love of alterity can function as an antidote against the poison of identitarian love, which hinders and distorts love’s productivity by forcing it constantly to repeat the same.
- Unifying love, or “love of becoming the same”. The contemporary dominant notion of romantic love in our culture, which Hollywood sells every day, its stock in trade, requires that the couple merge in unity. Individuals thus find each other with the promise of becoming the same. The mandatory sequence of this corrupted romantic love – couple–marriage–family – imagines people finding their match, like lost puzzle pieces, that now together make (or restore) a whole. Of course, no single other makes anyone whole. Contrary to this, some say that “you are already whole”. While this notion rings more true, it is also too simple. Rather, wholeness emerges from the inside as an internalized secure base, only through love’s inclusion of others. Discovering the uniqueness and singularity of our encounters and relations, can function as an antidote against the poison of unifying love, which handicaps and encloses love’s expansion by forcing it to merge into the one.
To summarize, these corrupt forms of love aim at the same goal: making the many into one, making the different into the same. Sameness and unity involve no creation but mere repetition without difference. Similarly, various forms of patriotism, nationalism or loyalty to the party, share this notion of setting (or pushing) aside differences and alterity in order to form a united people, a united identity.
Wasps & orchids
To discover a way out of the corruptions of live, let’s turn to the classic metaphor of insects and flowers. Certain orchids give off the odour of the sex pheromone of female wasps, and their flowers are shaped like the female wasp sex organs. Pollination is thus achieved by pseudocopulation as male wasps move from one orchid to the next, sinking their genital members into each flower and rubbing off pollen on their bodies in the process.
So wasps fuck flowers! Wasps do their work just like that, for nothing, but for the fun of it. Our delight at this example is due in part to the fact that it undercuts the industriousness and “productivism” usually attributed to nature. These wasps aren’t your dutiful worker bees; on the surface they aren’t driven to produce anything, at least not in the traditional sense. Seemingly, they just want to have fun.
A second point of interest is undoubtedly the way this pollination story reinforces the diatribe against the corruptions of love in the monogamous couple and the family, as told above. Wasps and orchids do not suggest any morality tale of marriage and stable union, as bees and flowers do, but rather evoke scenarios of cruising and serial sex common to some gay male practices and communities of non-monogamy.
This is not to say that cruising and anonymous sex serve as a model of love to emulate, but rather that they provide an antidote to the corruptions of love in the couple and the family, opening love up to the encounter of singularities.
Training in love of becoming-other
We should be careful to not just see the orchid as imitating the wasp or trying to deceive it, as botanists often do. Rather, the orchid is a becoming-wasp (becoming the wasp’s sexual organ) and the wasp is a becoming-orchid (becoming part of the orchid’s system of reproduction). What is central is the encounter and interaction between these two becomings, which together form a new assemblage, a wasp-orchid machine. The fable is devoid of intentions and interests: the wasps and orchids are not paragons of virtue in their mutual aid, nor are they models of egoistic self-love. We should avoid reducing the activities through questions like “What does it really mean?” or “What do they really want?”. Instead, this machinic language allows one to ask questions like “How does it work?”, “What happens in the process?” or “What comes to matter?”
The fable thus tells the story of wasp-orchid love, a love based on the encounter of alterity but also on a process of becoming different. The conspicuous variety of orchids, with their fascinating shapes and colours, tells us something of the power of wasp-orchid-love. A truly polymorphous love! Furthermore, beyond the serial and anonymous quality of cruising love, these becomings seem to continue their encounters, and thereby instituting lasting relations of becoming-other. By turning wasps and orchids into machines of becomings, we discover the parallel and open relationships of polyamorus love, where both serial encounters and relations of continuity can take place. Love does not just happen spontaneously, so a process of training in love becomes necessary in maintaining these forms of polyamorus love. Training in love does not reduce the multiplicity of singularities, making everyone the same or merging the many into one. In avoiding the corrupt forms of love and enhancing the benign ones, training in love creates contexts for the singularities to manage their encounters and relations: to avoid the negative encounters and relations, which diminish their strength, and prolong and repeat the joyful ones, which increase it.
The biopolitical production of love
Wasps who loves orchids point toward the conditions of the biopolitical economy. But how could these wasps be a model for economic production, you might ask, when they don’t produce anything? The bees and the flowers produce honey and fruit, but the wasps and orchids are just hedonists and aesthetes, merely creating pleasure and beauty! It is true that the interaction of wasps and orchids does not result primarily in goods, but one should not discount their biopolitical production, ie. the making of forms of life. In the encounter of singularities of their love, a new assemblage is created, marked by the continual metamorphosis of each singularity in the common. Wasp-orchid love, in other words, is a model of the production of subjectivity that animates the biopolitical economy. Let’s have done with worker bees, then, and focus on the singularities and becomings of wasp-orchid love!
Stereo Total – L’amour á trois
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c’est sexy, extatique
crazy, excentrique
animal, romantique
c’est communiste
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I copy-remixed this text from a number of passages in Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri‘s Common Wealth (pdf on a.aaarg.org), in particular p. 186-188 from the chapter “De Singularitate 1: Of Love Possessed”. Consequently, the “we” speaking in the text is a combination of these writers, their own copied writers, me, and anyone feeling the urge to inhabit this open text.
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Oh Dearism
Adam Curtis explores the phenomenon of distant suffering and its impact on contemporary politics and media. The points is: suffering in media leaves us apathetic and unable to act on the problems we are exposed of. It does not fulfil its promise of awakening indignation and mobilizing political change. Instead, it dulls our political affects, and naturalizes suffering. Distant suffering is precisely this, that we experience suffering from a distance, mediated through TVs, newspapers and other channels. Suffering usually provokes a feeling of pity in the other and, on a good day, even indignation, but since our reactions to the exposure of distant suffering never gets reinforced through political action – what is one to do? – the affects are gradually dulled and lose their intensity. In the end, we merely mobilize a lax state of worry, only able to produce the reaction: “Oh, dear”.
In a similar way, activist consciousness raising has for many years channelled their indignation through a production of shame and self-contempt in other people. People are horrible, with their bourgeois racist tendencies, holding animals in cage to experiment with and eat them, they only think about money, their car, or flat-screen TV. The solution is therefore to raise consciousness through protests and mockery, ie. raise shame. Where does this leave the TV-watching and shame-ridden citizen? Like apathy, shame and self-contempt are inhibiting affects: they shut down behaviour, and leaves the person in a depressed state, unable to act differently. The person only stops doing the horrible bourgeois activities for a moment, while in a state of shame, but have no new behavioural repertoire to replace the shameful behaviour with. Having no idea what to do puts the person in a state of cognitive dissonance. To reduce dissonance, a person usually finds changing their belief easier (“My behaviour is not so bad after all”) than changing their behaviour beyond inhibition, ie. creating a new kind of behaviour to replace it (“I have learned I can do this instead”). What the dissonance reduction produces instead is a construction of justification for the former shameful behaviour. In the process of justifying and constructing valid reasons for continuing to do the activity, the person strengthens the reasons and affective base of it. Thus, the dynamic of shame-producing activism and a shame-ridden person without a new behavioural repertoire, is unable to create a political event. Paradoxically, it often does the opposite, strengthening the existing behaviour.
Watching this video and reading these notes, you might find yourself in a meta-level state of Oh Dearism, since it has given you no other clues for what to do instead than keep watching troubling documentaries, reading about catastrophes in the newspaper, and seeing a worrying unveiling of a political scandal in the news, while feeling you have done a political act by attending with your mind to the trouble, but also feeling apathetic. The answer is, keep reading this blog, because it will give you all the answers and help you out of your apathy. Have a good day.
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