What comes after Capitalism? I have a few ideas…

“Protest is when I say something does not suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that that which does not suit me no longer occurs”

-Ulrike Meinhof

So you’re in a restaurant and a man starts to choke. His table is immediately crowded by waiters and fellow diners who, by extraordinary coincidence, all happen to be opinion columnists, philosophers and social critics.

“Clearly we need to do something,” says Paul Mason, author of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.

“Perform the Heimlich manuever,” you say.

“This is terrible,” says Prospect Magazine columnist Geoff Mulgan. “But ultimately nothing can be done.”

“If you just-”

“We need to be better organized,” ventures Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth.

“Just stand behind the guy and use your hands to exert pressure on his  diaphragm!” you shout, though nobody seems to be listening.

“If something good happens I want everybody to know that I am entirely responsible,” says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“I can think of ten reasons that we need an alternative to choking- but what?” says New Left Project writer Simon Hardy.

“We must ask ourselves the difficult question of what we can do to clear this man’s airway,” says Slavoj Zizek, gesticulating wildly.

“Ideology has made it impossible to even conceive of what can be done to dislodge a small quantity of food from an aesophagus,” observes Capitalist Realism author Mark Fisher.

“Heimlich manuever!” you scream. “The Heimlich fucking manuever! Described in a June 1974 article by Henry Heimlich published in the journal Emergency Medicine!”

By the time the man lies dead in his soup four General Assemblies have been formed and are mere months away from agreeing that choking on food is indeed bad and that something should be done. #Occupyhypotheticalrestaurant is now a trending topic.

This is the position we find ourselves in today, summed up by the aforementioned Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism, which manifests itself amongst the Left as the sense that something must be done, but that nothing can be done- we are fresh out of ideas. For some this tendency expresses itself as a kind of political Millennialism in which we are (always) moments away from the coming of a Occupy Messiah, a new Marx who will lead His (or preferably Her) children in to the promised land. This is the impression one gets from Slavoj Zizek’s current writing, which seems to be saying that some of us now living will see the coming of the Kingdom (or Commune). Or in a secular form it appears as the Occupy movement’s abdication of responsibility for articulating an end goal.

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The title may be an emo-core band name waiting to happen, but Slavoj Zizek is nailing it once again in this expanded version of his speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest:

The Western Left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, gay rights etc., struggles, “capitalism” is now re-emerging as the name of THE problem. So the first lesson to be learned is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not found in the slogan “Main Street, not Wall Street,” but to change the system in which Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but rather about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What new institutions, including those of control, should we shape? The 20th century alternatives obviously did not work.

It is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organization” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, but as we do so we should bear in mind the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: The open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new Master-Signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old question: “What is to be done?”

The Violent Silence of a New Beginning — In These Times.

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God, Guns, Government and Genetics: (Psuedo) Conservatism And Evolution

Unison “blood blood blood” from repaze on Vimeo.

Since today’s article will concern blood, in a roundabout way, I thought that this was as good an excuse as any to post bloodbloodblood by Francophone Witch-housers (Witch-House dwellers? House witches?) Unison. It’s the closest anyone’s ever come to playing the music in my head, which is basically My Bloody Valentine and Atari Teenage Riot all at once.

So, while watching Adam Curtis’s documentary series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (which UK readers can watch on BBC’s iPlayer here) I noticed something. I was not repelled by watching three hours of a programme that is basically Conservative. All Watched… argued that modern society’s dependence on The Machines (you can hear the capitalisation in the voice-over) has led us to concieve of everything, from the eco-system (note the ‘system’ part) to human society itself as being essentially machine-like. The grand utopian visions emanating from Silicon Valley are shown to be empty headed shams that can be (somewhat tenously) traced back to Ayn Rand’s meth-induced crazytalk. This is all predicated on the Conservative notions of human imperfectability and what Samuel Huntington calls ‘the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions.’ Conservatism says, pace Edmund Burke, that radical change is a risky enterprise and that the few necessary changes to an existing setup should be careful and slow. Existing institutions develop in tandem with the non-human and historical environments that populations find themselves in, and are therefore already optimised to local conditions (some of the earliest environmentalists were politically of the far right- Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and fascist mystic Julius Evola for instance). As those conditions change institutions change with them, but it is folly, say Conservatives, to try to impose human will on the world.

There’s a reason that the above doesn’t sound like any Conservative you know. Glenn Beck, Bill O’reilly, Sarah Palin, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy et al. aren’t Conservatives, at least in any meaningful way. They, as Richard Hofstader pointed out over sixty years ago, are psuedo-conservatives (the article is really worth reading). They may pay lip-service to traditional values, but they are ready to sacrifice them at a moment’s notice when it fails the What Would Ayn Rand Do? test. Take, for example, the Traditional Family, which looks, contra George H.W Bush, something like The Simpsons: dad goes out to work, mom stays at home to look after the two-point-four children and they are still able to afford a four bedroom house in suburbia, two cars and college for their kids someday. They don’t just have material comfort but moral health based on a foundation of family and church. This life is inconcievable for most Americans, not because evil Liberals and their activist judges made lesbian communes a viable alternative to phallogocentric ‘houses’, but because real wages have stagnated as cost of living has gone up, meaning that Marge needs to get a job that lasts more than one episode (at the Kwik-E-Mart maybe?). Consequentially she can’t spend time with her children, cleaning the house or cooking (don’t worry, I tore up my feminist card when I wrote that), leading to a marked decrease in their quality of life. The kids have nobody to help with homework and they eat microwave meals in front of the television. The next generation grow up slightly worse (maybe not Lisa), get slightly worse jobs than their parents, live in slightly worse houses and raise slightly worse children. All that ‘moral degeneracy’ and ‘erosion of traditional values’ happens, and all because it would be Islamo-Socialism if the rich paid their share of taxes.

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Social media puts an end to shyness by generalizing its pathology

In The New Inquiry (which is excellent) Rob Horning (he of the equally excellent Marginal Utility and Hipster Runoff Exegesis) writes:

As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics — being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding — in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to.

The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out. Rather than attempt agreeable chitchat and compromise my “authentic” identity with false congeniality, I would isolate myself, hoping that withdrawal would make me come across at a glance as mysterious and different rather than rude and feckless. If I had to volunteer talk about my tastes, interests and opinions out of context, they might be exposed as somehow wrong or worse, as not especially distinctive. And even if I hit it off with someone, my ineffable singularity could have easily vanished in the consensus of compatibility. I’d rather my self-importance remain undisturbed by anyone’s curiosity about me than risk seeming ordinary to myself.

This gave me my basic framework about how to behave in social situations. The possibility of discovering genuine connection with other people receded to fantasy; I could only try to make it through without embarrassing myself. Shyness had made me so deficient in empathic experience that I could only view social life in terms of risk rather than opportunity. The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read but with a message that’s inscrutable and fleeting, one that could convey the complexity of the real me without reducing it to something superficial. I could not get past the wish to broadcast my identity without having to interact with anyone.

Facebook, of course, caters to that desire. Because its business model relies on user-generated content and the data-mining it makes possible, Facebook is engineered to facilitate “sharing.” It frees users to build an identity in isolation, unhampered by contingencies of face-to-face interaction or real-time reciprocity. Or in other words, it allows socially anxious people like me to assemble a shyness disguise that others appear willing to accept as genuine.

More at The New Inquiry

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The Great Approval: The Cuts Protests and Missing the Point Entirely

It’s been a while since my last post- no excuses, I got lazy and unimaginative, then work commitments interceded and I lost sight of my true purpose: to write wordy explanations of mostly non-existent philosophical tropes in exploitative, sexually depraved zombie anime padded out with the occasional post on boring news stuff.
That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been dilligently consuming and categorising various media entertainments though: I’ve enjoyed the HBO comedy series Bored to Death far more than I thought possible, loved the Coen Brothers’ True Grit even though I had the original confused with The Searchers, became very gay (in the video game Dragon Age 2, having chosen the far more dramtically interesting Hawke x Anders-by-way-of-Fenris romance option), invested in property (in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood- remember when these games used to be about stabbing people?) and discovered a totally alt dive-bar/restaurant chain called ‘Nandos’.
In other news, Liturgy and Burzum have both released new material. Burzum is, as I’m sure you’re aware, racist Heathen convicted murderer and church arsonist Varg Vikerness’s one-man band and his new album is Fallen, out on Byelobog (and Candlelight in North America). I prefer it to Bellus after one listen- the folk parts are better integrated and the closing instrumental Til Hel og tilbake igjen is so pretty that you almost forget that you’re listening to the work of somebody who stabbed somebody twenty-three times in the face. Liturgy are a little more acceptable amongst polite company- four guys from Brooklyn who inevitably attract the ‘hipster-metal’ moniker even though they may be making today’s most forward-thinking extreme music. ‘High Gold’ is from their new album, Aesthethica, which will be out on Thrill Jockey on May 10th. When I listen to this song I can’t help but think of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. See if you can hear that too.

Liturgy – High Gold

Burzum – Valen

Now, enough politically-questionable folk-metal, on to the matter at hand.

It is near impossible to persuade people that protests don’t matter, harder still to try and impress upon people that (in the Western world at least) taking to the streets en masse and demanding that a democratically elected government change its policies might actually harm the causes they support and strengthen the governments they are protesting against- and furthermore that the protests are not even aimed at political transformation, but fufilling the emotional needs of the participants to engage, however briefly and inauthentically, with forces bigger than themselves.
We romanticise protests- May ’68 is still the axis of world history for European intellectuals, we stare admiringly across the mediterrenean at the revolts that began in Tunisia earlier this year and tell ourselves that we did that- we gave the otherwise ignorant oriental rabble Facebook, Wikileaks and a No-Fly Zone (and now they’re trying to elect leaders whose policies accurately reflect the religious beliefs of their people! The cheek of it!) Never mind the 100% failiure rate of protests (as opposed to insurrection and revolts seen in the Middle East and earlier in Eastern Europe) or that no matter how brave and iconic, the Tiannamen Square tank-guy is either sipping Victory Gin and mumbling about how much he loves Big Brother or was taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot a long time ago. As Simon Jenkins points out in the Guardian, protests in the UK have always failed. Always. The only real progressive force seems to be blind, impersonal and bloodthirsty history making certain limited reforms economically necessary. Protests can coincide with these moments, as the Women’s Suffrage movement did with WW1, but they cannot and do not cause them.

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Angry Nerds: How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types

The Jared-Loughner-is-a-douche train keeps a’ rolling! In this episode, Slate columnist Matt Fenney drops a pile of YOU KNOW NOTHING OF MY WORK.

More at Slate

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John Gray on humanity’s quest for immortality

From the always brillaint John Gray:

The séance that Charles Darwin attended in January 1874 at the house of his brother Erasmus brought the pioneering biologist together with Francis Galton, eugenicist and one of the founders of modern psychology, and the novelist George Eliot. All three were anxious that the rise of spiritualism would block the advance of scientific materialism. They were unimpressed with what they witnessed – Darwin found the experience “hot and tiring” and left before sparks were seen and rapping heard – but they would have been seriously concerned had they known the future career of a fourth participant in the séance, the classical scholar and psychologist FWH Myers.

The inventor of the word “telepathy” and the writer who first introduced the work of Freud into Britain, Frederic Myers went on to become one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Supported by some of the leading figures of the day, including the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and Arthur Balfour, president of the society and later prime minister, the psychical researchers believed human immortality might prove to be a scientifically demonstrable fact.

Their quest for an afterlife was partly driven by revulsion against materialism. Science had revealed a world in which humans were no different from other animals in facing oblivion when they died and eventual extinction as a species. For nearly everyone the vision was intolerable. Not fully accepted by Darwin himself, it led the biologist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace – acknowledged by Darwin as the co-discoverer of natural selection – to become a convert to spiritualism. Wallace insisted he did not reject scientific method. Like Sidgwick and Myers, he was convinced science could show the materialist view of the world to be mistaken.

More at The Guardian.

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives

Deleuze and Guattari had an instant intellectual rapport. Both men were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of the family romance, psychoanalysis had become (in Guattari’s words) a ‘capitalist drug’, individualising collective problems and neutralising the disruptive effects of desire. Freud’s big mistake, they agreed, was to see desire as something rooted in lack, as an attempt to fantasise a missing object (the mother’s breast, for example). As a result, Freud had imagined the unconscious as a theatre of representations, in which the same grimly repetitive Oedipal drama was performed night after night. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the unconscious was better understood in political terms as a productive and potentially transformative force – a force that could change the world. The unconscious, as they saw it, was a deliriously innovative ‘factory’, ceaselessly producing new and transgressive combinations of desires. In the book that eventually came out of this meeting, Anti-Oedipus, they would portray desire as a relentless and impersonal flow, an electric current moving through the social body and interrupted only by ‘desiring machines’ that sought to direct and channel it. A desiring machine could be anything from a breast (‘a machine that produces milk’) to a revolutionary political movement, and its aim was always the same: to connect with other machines (the infant’s mouth, the masses), and produce a shift in reality. Desire had virtually no limits: like power in Foucault, it was everywhere, and it passed through everyone without belonging to anyone.

A second meeting was promptly arranged at Guattari’s château in Dhuizon. As they discussed their project, friends and family dropped in, ‘buzzing around the daily primal scene, in which Félix and Deleuze create intensely’, one witness wrote. ‘In a word, it’s working.’ Deleuze was beguiled by Guattari’s energy: ‘He always seems to be in motion, sparkling with light.’ Yet he also recognised something about Guattari that few others did: ‘When you examine Félix more closely, you realise how alone he really is. Between two activities, or in the midst of people, he can plunge into the deepest solitude.’

The challenge was getting Guattari to endure the solitude of working at his desk: otherwise the book would never be written. That was Deleuze’s first rule. His second rule was that the collaboration would be monogamous: no other parties could be involved, nor would he take part in any of Guattari’s many other militant activities. Anti-Oedipus emerged from their correspondence over the next two years: ‘long, disorderly letters’ that Deleuze would fashion into Deleuzo-Guattarian prose. In recent years, Dosse notes, there has been a tendency to ‘de-Guattarise’ the collaboration and to canonise Deleuze at Guattari’s expense, but Deleuze always insisted on the centrality of his friend’s contribution. In his words, ‘Félix was the diamond miner and I was the polisher.’ As they worked on Anti-Oedipus, he recalled, ‘we no longer knew who had written what … We were more like two streams coming together to make a third.’ The diamond miner took a less sentimental view of the collaboration. ‘We’re really not of the same dimension,’ he complained in his diaries. ‘I’m sort of an inveterate autodidact, a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules Verne.’ Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto Gilles’, and felt ‘overcoded’ by the ‘perfection that he brought to the most unlikely book’. What he really wanted to do was ‘say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow.’

More at the London Review of Books.

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Making Sense of Modernism

Despite his gain in knowledge and power, Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus strikes an increasingly saturnine pose. His freedom from Christian authority, bought at such great cost from Mephistopheles, comes to be experienced as loss: not just loss of grace, but loss of meaning and of purpose, too. At the last, as we hear him here, he strives once more for the re-enchantment of the world. He can even see that symbol of the sacramental universe, ‘Christ’s blood’, ‘stream[ing] in the firmament’. But it’s too late; God has departed. In his wake, modern Faustian man is free, but rootless, liberated but cut adrift from the resources that had once furnished his life with meaning.

Such is the similarly plaintive refrain that runs through Professor Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?. Not that you would know this, given the silly-season furore that greeted the author’s much-publicised criticism of the greats of contemporary Anglo-American literature. Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, even Philip Roth – all are, admittedly, the recipients of Josopivici’s critical sting. ‘Reading Barnes’, Jospovici writes – and the Guardian gleefully quoted – ‘like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner’. If these ‘precise’, ‘cynical’, and unrelentingly ‘ironical’ writers, having snuck out from under ‘Philip Larkin’s overcoat’, clearly annoy Josopivici, then at least he finds Philip Roth, a man frequently and perhaps unthinkingly hailed as ‘our greatest living writer’, funny and thought-provoking. ‘[B]ut only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking’, Jospivici adds, just in case his personal enjoyment be mistaken for objective literary praise.

More at Sp!ked

Also, Carles at Hipsterrunoff is now podcasting, and you can listen to episode 1 here. The content is virtually identical to HRO in its written form (there are no MP3s of relevant buzzbands, for example) but does allow the listener to realize that Carles has a very, very sexy voice.

UPDATE

You can now call Carles from Hipster Runoff at any time, day or night (mostly night) to discuss your problems, chillwave and Zooey Daschenel or just to hear Carles’s sexy voice (mostly the latter).

Also again: it’s 2011. Here’s a picture of Michael Jackson dressed as Hitler.

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Black Metal Theory Symposium: The Album

“Black Metal is smarter than it thinks”, and here’s audio proof:

Anthony Sciscione -‘Goatsteps behind my steps’: Black Metal and Ritual Renewal

Brandon Stosuy-Meaningful Leaning Mess

Erik Butler – The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix – Transcendental Black Metal (mp3)

Joseph Russo -Perpetue Putesco – Perpetually I Putrefy

Niall Scott – Black Confessions and Absu-lution

Nicola Masciandaro – Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya

Scott Wilson – BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum

Steven Shakespeare – The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground

Black Metal Theory: Black Metal Theory Symposium I (2009) – audio.

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix also plays in Liturgy, one of the best (that is, most progressive) BM acts to have emerged during the Great North American Wave of the early 21st century.

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