prolapsarian

[prolapsarian]

Two Small Brecht Translations on Memorials and Statues

From Journeys into Modernity After the great wars, my work was discovered in the vault of a fascist national library alongside other ‘degenerate literature’. An equestrian statue of me was erected on a children’s playground. I hurried along to see it. On the whole I was satisfied with the statue. The artist had chosen to portray me with a friendly expression, which I heard had been requested in the commission. I understood that this was an honour: recognizing my friendly attitude towards coming generations. “But why a horse?” I asked my companion. “It indicates he dates back to antiquity,” was his answer. “And between us, there is yet another reason. Horses are completely extinct. The statue was intended to kill two birds with one stone, insofar as it also preserved the form of this animal in memory. Undated, probably circa 1940, Werkausgabe, Vol. 19, pp. 425-426

On the conjunction of lyric poetry and architecture A historical inquiry into the effects of art would without doubt conclude that all new effects in art appear together with transformations of consciousness, and indeed arrive together with the transformations in the economic-political base of human society.(Scenes of recognition from antiquity point to commerce and to military campaigns, just like the ‘oedipus complex’) There are long-term consequences. Weighty experiences, which are built into “inheritances”, still trigger reactions, which are fading away, slowly, centuries later. And in a weaker, changed form, the novelties in the communal life of people are present: feudal types of relations are passed to the proletariat and the bourgeois, and so on. The photography of the Russian Revolution - not only that of 1917, but also that of 1905 - displays a peculiar literarisation of street scenes. Cities, and indeed villages, are littered with sayings as though they were symbols. With broad brushes, the conquering classes write their opinions and slogans on conquered buildings. “Religion is the opium of the masses” is scrawled on churches. And on other buildings there are other instructions for their use. On demonstrations shields bearing inscriptions are carried; at night films appear on the walls of houses. In the Soviet Union, this literarisation has been naturalised. The year-round demonstrations, both regular and for special occasions, have formed a tradition. The working masses developed a particular type of sense of form in their emblems. At the great Mayday demonstration in ’35 I saw a beautiful emblems of a textile factory (made of white wool), narrow, lightly fluttering flags of a new form, fantastic representations of political enemies, and many slogans upon transparent banners, so that at any one time many of these slogans and pictures were visible. The qualified lyric poetry of the Soviet Union has not kept pace with the development of this mass art. The beautiful stations of the Moscow subway have enormous marble walls, which could so easily bear poems that would describe the heroism linked to their production by the population of Moscow. The same is also true for the cemetery for great revolutionaries in the Kremlin. And with the scientific institutions, sports stadiums, theatres. Their inscription could greatly elevate lyric poetry. It is their task to sing the deeds of the great generations, and to preserve their memory. The development of language from here contains its finest impulse. That those words that stone will bear have to be so carefully chosen, and will be read for a long time, and always by many people at the same time. Competitions would spur lyric poetry on to new achievements, and later generations would receive, together with the buildings, the instructions and the writings of their builders. 1935 (Werkausgabe, Vol. 19, pp. 387-388) 

[prolapsarian]

Towards Pure Machines: A Benjaminian Footnote

As a young man Edgar Allen Poe wrote an essay debunking the Mechanical Turk. The famous machine had been built by Baron Kempelen in 1769, and by the end of the century it was owned by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who after touring it through central Europe, sold it and moved on to other ventures. By the mid-1810s Mälzel had patented the metronome. Although his patent would be contested in court, he established, by way of a machine, the intellectual rights to the measure and regulation of musical time. Mälzel also invented the panharmonicon, a mechanical orchestra. He collaborated briefly with Beethoven, who composed a piece for the contraption, while the entrepreneur created ear-trumpets to aid the great composer’s failing hearing. Yet this relationship also ended up with a court case, as Mälzel absconded with his panharmonicon and gave unlicensed performances of Beethoven’s work.

Ever the showman, Mälzel went on to repurchase the Mechanical Turk, and took it to the United States, touring it in performances. This was the context in which Poe saw the machine. Poe took cues from the likes of William Brewster (discoverer of polarized light, and inventor of the kaleidoscope, leading to a craze in 1817 and another subsequent struggle over patents). Brewster had suggested that the Turk was operated by a dwarf in the eleventh of his Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Walter Scott. Yet unlike the enlightenment thinkers who aimed to explain away the impossibility of illusionistic effects into a mechanistic materialism, Poe was concerned otherwise. His detective-like unravelling of the Turk was aimed at the machine’s social mystery. He abhorred “the most general opinion in relation to it, an opinion too not unfrequently adopted by men who should have known better.” His deduction took aim less at the illusory quality of the machine than the apparently spurious authority of its mystery.

Poe’s essay established two possible solutions: that the Mechanical Turk was a “pure machine”, whose movements were untouched by human agency; or, that its moves were regulated by a “mind”. In propounding the latter, Poe unintentionally went on to describe a third term: the contortion of the body of the chess-player, William Schlumberger, who was concealed within the machine.

Walter Benjamin would adopt the image of the Mechanical Turk in his final work, ‘On the Concept of History’ as an allegory for history. Benjamin knew Poe’s works, as they had been translated by Charles Baudelaire. The gaslit streets of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ became the decisive image in Benjamin’s theorisation of the flâneur as noctambulist. Baudelaire also included the essay on the Mechanical Turk, under the title ‘Le joueur d’échecs de Maelzel’ in his 1857 translation Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires.

Benjamin makes an amendment to Poe’s argument – and although this amendment is crucial to his revolutionary thought, it has been widely ignored. In Benjamin’s text the Turk “is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone.” Contrarily, Poe noted that “the Automaton does not invariably win the game.” But he notes, “were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case – it would always win. The principle being discovered by which a machine can be made to play a game of chess, an extension of the same principle would enable it to win a game – a farther extension would enable it to win all games – that is, to beat any possible game of an antagonist.”

Already in Benjamin’s aphorism a dialectical reversal is staked: the hunchbacked dwarf of theology is said to be “in the service” of the apparatus called historical materialism. The machine is not some prosthesis in the service of theology’s “mind”, but rather theology has become, as Marx put it, an appendage to the machine. Yet Benjamin’s glorious and catastrophic resolution to this greatest of all ideological problems is not some vague, Romantic humanism, nor secessionism hypothesizing some other history in which the worker simply is not trapped within the machine. Instead, Benjamin proposes his own version of a “pure machine” characterised precisely by the contortion, invisibility, and anonymity within it. Theology is granted not an idea but only a stature, a posture, and an ugly physiognomy that must remain hidden.

Poe had misunderstood the machines of his time. Babbage’s Difference Engine was considered to replace the calculating of the human mind. Yet technologies of the 19th century were of a specific kind because the minds of men were concentrated on, and calculating, one thing only: the extraction of value from the labour of others. The purest of pure machines were hybrids and monsters, already worked up out of labour, and voraciously enclosing more.

This gives a clue to the peculiar visage of the Turk. Poe remarks looks like a human but does not look human. Perhaps he is a man from someplace else, persistently in the pursuit of leisure, but always set to work, forced to play out somebody else’s fantasies. So too with the world of commodities that present all-too-human desires dislocated from their bodies, already too broken in their making. So what do they make? What do we make? Sometimes entertainment, spectacles before the grand crowd. But the vision – the true vision – is otherwise. For it is broken, fragmented, half-seen from the inside and set to work at the endless game. Benjamin understood that perhaps in every moment every commodity is made and remade, but just so are made and remade the powers of destruction. That is to say, in the regulation of the time of production, so too is produced a truly historical time, whose only measure is the force of destruction, legible in the ruin of the hidden and the anonymous. This is no sublime vision. But it is with those powers, accumulated in contortion and innervation, as the human becomes the most impure of pure machines, that the game will always decisively be won.

[prolapsarian]

Away with all your monuments - Thoughts on Holocaust Memorial Day from 2020

Away with all your monuments. Yet today, again, we are compelled to monumentalise. It is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Little liberation it was: of the 1.3 million Jews sent there, over a million were murdered. The resistance failed. What does the compulsion to monumentalise feel like? Screens everywhere littered with stories of quiet bravery in the face of fascism. Faith in the promise that history could have been otherwise. Tales of fortitude picked up like golden tickets by all those officials, who happily assure us that should fascism ever threaten again they would be on the right side. And what were those who died like? Some were good people, others bad. Some were communists, some not. Some were Zionists, others not. Some resisted. Some collaborated. Most were broken before death. And resistance often meant a quicker death too. Ultimately it made little difference, because they alike were murdered. And although many brave people across Europe risked everything to save Jews, to rescue them and smuggle them across borders, many others did nothing.

I'm scared by these stories, that deal in separating good from bad, the resistor from the collaborator. The horror of Auschwitz is of indifference. Among the victims of the Holocaust the compulsion to resist was the very same as the compulsion to collaborate. And if the lesson that is learned is that every Kapo deserved his own execution, it is no lesson at all. Today I am remembering those who, as well as resisting, did not resist, could not resist, resigned, gave in, handed over their brothers and sisters, parents, children, and comrades to fascists and were nonetheless murdered. It is a grizzly thought but one we cannot do without. Today I am remembering those who survived and who nonetheless were far from angels, whose lives were blighted and who continued to blight the lives of others. Because to become victims of fascism did not make them good either. This is not to say that those who brought the message of what happened, that those who were spared and fought to stop us forgetting, were no good.

The compulsion to monumentalise means that Auschwitz has become some fatal star of morality. The industrialised murder of Jews, of Roma, of people with disabilities, of gay people, of communists, has become an opportunity for the great and the good to distance themselves from evil. It is feel good and blindness. It has become a festival of comfort and of peace. Peace we need and comfort we do not. In making sacred the victims it remakes them into sacrifices, whether or not they were spared.

I think of the words of the great philosopher Gillian Rose, who talks about “the sentimentality of the ultimate predator” in thinking about the film Schindler’s List. She wrote, “Schindlers List betrays the crisis of ambiguity in characterisation, mythologisation and identification, because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact. It leaves us at the beginning of the day, in a Fascist security of our own unreflected predation piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel. It should leave us unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience, we would have to confront our own fascism.” It is one of the bravest thoughts.

Today fascism again threatens. It threatens in the middle of our culture of sacralised victims. The fascism of our time has more than it would like to admit in common with the compulsion to monumentalise. It stands opposite and as mirror image of the saintly victim, as the accused. It says, “if the victim does not need to question whether they are good or bad, if their victimhood is sovereign, then I have no need to take their accusation seriously, and have no need to confront my own fascism.” But we do not need our victims to be good for the demand for justice to be righteous. Indeed justice can illuminate the world only in the redemption of those who were not already good, not already saints, not already sacralised by what was done to them. And justice does not recognise the goodness of those who were compelled to resist, as others failed. So today I resist as I affix my memory to those who did not resist. Away with all your monuments. Only then can we confront fascism, without prematurely celebrating (already 75 years too late) our anti-fascism. (I put this up, now a year later, because I haven’t had time to write something new this year.)

[prolapsarian]

All of capital will put on its liberal mask, and claim it is glad to be done with that man. The rich and the powerful will, for a few short weeks, pretend to rejoice with “normal folk” in their relief. But we should never stop asking, “in whose interests did he govern?” There are some who will say he governed only out of self interest, that a single ego ruled the world, and that nobody else was responsible. But the rich and the powerful, those who profiteered, those who made careers in the opinion of opposition when not opinion but force was needed, those who benefitted from the murder of black people, and those who benefitted from the scandal of the murder of black people - they will soon all go silent. Breathe your sighs of relief all you like; Trump ruled, and was allowed to rule, because autocracy and protectionism, race war and violent policing, anti-immigrant sentiment and sinophobia, the myth of profitable all-American production was of benefit to the most wealthy and powerful strata of society. He was allowed to rule because flirtations with fascism by those who call themselves liberal are a perennial aspect of the ideology of Coastal neo-liberalism, while they blame its violent excrescences, its paranoia, and its racism on those who it dupes with the economic promises of manufacture and the social promises of ethnonationalism. Things might change a little: Biden and Harris will probably be more friendly to the new monopolists, the centibillionaires, while appeasing the mere billionaires with scavenging from whatever new war in the Middle East they design. It is all very bleak.

[prolapsarian]

The Election and Stupidity

I am glad the election is over, because through the weeks of opportunism, integrating myself into the campaign, I have watched myself getting stupider. It has felt like lopping off, day by day, each organ of perception. Sometimes the cause of communism calls for this type of self-barbarisation: but it's also worth trying to take hold of the fucking blunted dullness that induces. It is difficult to tell if what I'm writing comes out of the stupidity or my resistance to it. Probably both.

I spent a lot of the last five weeks mixing campaigning with listening to the audiobook of The Golden Notebook. That great work of communist splitting, now remixed, now split again. Since the results came in lots of people are talking about "political education" and "community organising". I consider these to be empty concepts. They are cries of people who have realised that there is something missing in what they thought they were doing right - but those people are worst of all to find out how to fill that emptiness. I am not a vanguardist, but I will make claims for the communist avant-gardes. For histories that are for us and only us (in some secret compact between all generations). That there are these most extraordinary of works that are ours - and lots of us have our own communist canons and countercanons. I think everyone should read or listen to Lessing. Or pick up some Jelinek. Go grab some Aime Cesaire, or some Rene Menil. Go to the Blake exhibition at the Tate - and maybe a few hundred of us can go all at once and refuse to pay to go in, and we will explain that they can't stop us because Blake was a communist. Recite some Rimbaud or Ulrike Meinhof. Get with the Latin American communist poets like Huidobro or Vallejo. Perform some Brecht for your children. Go pirate some Pasolini or some Fassbinder or some Petri.

And it's not just things of the past. There continues to be this feverishly exciting, virtuosic communist production. Here's just some things I loved this years that changed how I saw the world, changed how I acted: Sophie Lewis' Full Surrogacy Now; all of Anne Boyer's writing; And all of Sean Bonney's too; Verity Spott's Click Away Close Door Say; Caspar Heinemann's Novelty Theory. And these are just people close to me, my friends and loved ones, because this fucking torrential underground is as full with the living as it is with the dead. There is so much more.

And these are - in the end - all quite simple things, often made in stolen hours or years. Simple at least compared to the world that we are collectively and perversely producing and reproducing together, with communism the perversion of the perversion (far better and more beautiful and more painful and more forceful than the negation of the negation.) We have to think the world as well, sometimes as simple as a crystal yet so full of tenderness. And that's what all these great communist avant-gardists were capable of, just as Marx was - even if in them and in their work the crystal is sometimes cracked.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like “community organising” or “political education” - because in how programmatic or awfully practical these proposals are they stamp out everything I’ve learned from these torrents of communist virtuosity. They are as mediocre as they sound, and resigned too. Someone’s gonna come on here and accuse me of intellectualism. Please instead fuck off.

What once excited me about Corbynism was the promise of a politics that wasn't just about some people in Parliament: the promise of a changed politics that changed the world, and within which the relations between politics and the world would also be changed. I think that's true for a lot of other people too. And that is long in the past now. By 2017 Corbynism was set on a course of mere parliamentarianism: the tasks established for its popular base nothing more than cheerleading through Twitter about how great they thought it all was, or reading opinion polls like tea leaves, as enthusiasts for their own good fortune. Or even worse the task became a type of collective introversion in which the committed ones built ever more baroque policy castles in the air, veritable King Ludwigs of social democracy. The two processes are conjoined: the first in which historical action is exchanged for mere spectatorship; the second in which politics is exchanged for policy, the means of social transformation exchanged for toying with the various fantastic imagined ends. What was rancid in the project was that their collective dreams - yes dreams - were things like "Keynesian deficit spending" and "a reorganisation of the benefits system" or "better public transport." And I don't decry it easily, because these are things really would help lots of people to survive who will be horribly murdered, who will suffer brutality, whose cries will be silenced. But also these are shit dreams compared to COLLECTIVELY BUILDING A WORLD OF FREEDOM, EXPLODING PAST INJUSTICE INTO HAPPINESS, THE SHAPES OF FIRE, THE UNBABBLING OF LANGUAGE INTO TONE THAT KNOWS NO PURITY OR IMPURITY, REVELATION OF THE BEAUTY OF THINGS INTHEMSELVES, THE RECONCILIATION OF NATURE AND HISTORY, THE ANNIHILATION OF CLASS SOCIETY, GLORIOUS ILLUMINATION, THE FORCE THAT STRIKES DOWN THE POWERFUL, THE END OF ALIENATION, PERPETUAL BLISS etc.

And I mean yes this is stupid and sloganistic, a sort of golden calfism that is no good without knowing at the same time that each and every one of these are diverted through the most fragile and difficult particularities of lived experience - as much through that with which we give each other strength as through how we oppress and destroy each other. And the tension is finding how other people do these things, try to say them, how we as a collective fail to be collective.

But you know how stupid it makes us not to even dream these things, not to be even lightly touched by them in every moment (or not to be able to perceive that we are already lightly touched by them). The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. One of the worst things that can come of us is to be fooled by our own opportunism. I am slowly going to try to make myself and those around me less stupid than I have been and would like friends and comrades to help. This isn’t about Enlightenment or Bildung. This isn’t about finding agreement or any more doxasticism in this world where opinion and its parasitic monopolies has overflowed truth. It is about struggle and negativity. It is without ends. And all force to us.

[prolapsarian]

Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)

The great ruse of our political epoch: Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and their crows in press, scorched a set of oppositions in the minds of the people. The whole of society encapsulated in an image of “workers versus shirkers”, “strivers versus skivers.” The great tragedy of our political epoch: the Labour movement, the left, and the social democrats took the bait of these laminated ghouls. They responded simply by saying that there were no skivers: instead there was a worthy working class, labouring away ever harder, and getting ever poorer. They said the whole thing was a myth, that the shirkers were a phantom, a chimera, a scapegoat, an image invented by evil overlords to turn the working class against itself, leaving it prone to the ideologies of reaction. The labour movement talked instead only about the working poor, or the unemployed who wanted always to get back to a good job, on a good wage, forever and ever.

Few resisted the ruse, but Sean Bonney was one of them. Perhaps it was because Sean himself was a skiver, a drunk, a scoundrel, a villain, an addict, a down-and-out, a fuck up. More likely it was because of his deep political intuition and understanding. For him, the politics of class warfare was never about worthiness; it was never about what the working class deserve at the end of a hard day’s work, but instead its crucible was the hatred of the social conditions that pummelled people, silenced them, boxed them in, boxed them up, oppressed them, made them suffer. This politics was uncompromising because it understood that any compromise was a failure: there is no weekend that redeems the week, no pension that makes good on the life wrecked by the conformity and unfreedom of work.

I like to think of Sean as the thing that terrified those Tories most, as one of those beautiful creatures who so absolutely threatened them that they had to transfigure him into a phantom. His poetry too was one with this politics in this. Every line is written in solidarity with the shirking class, a class whose underground history crawls and stretches backwards, a perpetual dance, an unending squall, as anonymous as it is enormous. If Sean was a skiver he was also always hard at work, undertaking an immense labour of compression, in order to make that history heard. And this furious labour was quick and angular, because it always came with some sense that history was, already, ending. As a singular voice that resisted the ruse, his writing is one of the most important political efforts of our time.

o scroungers, o gasoline there’s a home for you here there’s a room for your things me, I like pills / o hell.

*** Since hearing of Sean’s death I have been thinking a lot about what I learnt from him. Learning is maybe a strange way to look at it. Because Sean’s poetry was not really so complicated. He stated unambiguous truths that we all knew and understood. Just like Brecht’s dictum in praise of communism: “It’s reasonable, and everyone understands it, it’s easy […] it is the simplicity, that’s hard to achieve.” This was the plane on which we met. All of us, Sean’s friends, comrades, loves, beloveds, others we did not know who all were invited, all in this common place where we know how simple these truths are, even if none of us were able to express them with such concision as Sean – even if we were all somehow less rehearsed, less prepared, less audacious. And suddenly I know it was a common place he made, wretched and hilarious.

*** So communism is simple. But running beneath all of Sean’s work was an unassuming argument, from which I have learned so much. Although argument was not his mode – his poems were always doing something, accusing but never prosecuting – an argument is there, even if it was exposed as a thesis in its own right. It is something so simple, easy, and so obvious that it barely seems worth saying. Sean’s poems made an argument for the enduring power of French symbolism – for a power that surged through history in the spirit of that movement. No surprise for a poet who rewrote Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But constantly a surprise to a world that thought that mode already dead, a world no longer animated by the literary symbol, nor transfixed by the resurrection any such symbols could herald. His writing followed the traces of this hyperhistory that wrapped around the world and back, from the high culture of decolonial revolutionism back in to cosmopolitan centre where bourgeois savages feast greedily on expropriated wares; into the dark sociality of the prison, and out again into every antisocial moment that we call “society”; sometimes making the earth small within a frozen cosmos ringing out noise as signal to nobody and everyone; sometimes bringing the whole cosmos in crystalline shape (sometimes perfect, sometimes fractured) as the sharpest interruption within the world - every poem charting a history stretched taut between uprisings and revolts. He knew the rites of symbols, the continuing practices with which their political power could be leveraged.

Sean was one of the few untimely symbolists of our time. His poems are full of these things: bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc - never quite concepts, never quite images, never quite objects, but pieces of the world to be taken up and arranged, half exploded, into accusations; treasured as partial and made for us to take as our own, a heritage of our own destruction, at once ready at hand, and scattered to the peripheries on a map of the universe, persistently spiralling, in points, back to the centre, some no place.

But if Sean was a symbolist, if he was attentive to its fugitive history, a slick and secret tradition of the oppressed, then this was also a symbolism without any luxuriant illusion. It is a symbolism in which all knowingness has been supplanted with fury and its movements. Sean’s poems are spleen without ideal. They have nothing of the pointed, almost screaming, eternal sarcasm of Baudelaire when he ever again finds the body of his beautiful muse as white and lifeless cold marble, utterly indifferent to the desirous gaze. There is no such muse, no callous petrified grimace, half terrified half laughing, ancient enough to unseat Hellenism itself - although there is beauty still but it exists otherwise, amid a crowd, darkened and lively. When I think of Sean’s monumental work I imagine an enormous bas-relief of black polished marble jutting out from some monstrously disproportioned body, angled between buildings. This great slab flashing black in the white noise of the city. This great slab as populous as the world. Flashing black and seen with the upturned gaze. There is no oppression without this terrified vision that sees in ever new sharpness the oppressor.

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave; when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring, when the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished, will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtisan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

*** I haven’t explained what I learnt. I ask the question, What does it mean to find the late nineteenth century stillborn into the twenty-first? Why should these febrile years, from 1848 to the Commune have been so important? What was Sean leveraging when he recast our world with this moment of literary and political history? And what was he leveraging it against? I have a sense that what was important to Sean was a sense of mixedness. There were those who would read these years, after the defeat of revolution, as a dreadful winter of the world. There were those who saw only society in decline. “Jeremiads are the fashion”, Blanqui would say while counselling civil war. And then there were those for whom arcades first provided an extravagant ecstacy of distraction and glitz. These were the years of monstrocity, from Maldoror to Das Kapital. These years of the great machines that chewed up humans and spat out their remains across the city, of great humans who chewed up machines and made language anew. These years in which the fury of defeat burnt hot. These years of illumination. These years where gruesome metallic grinding and factory fire met the dandy. Few eras have been so mixed, so utterly undecided. No era so perfect to carve out the truly Dickensian physiognomy of Iain Duncan Smith. This was neither the stage of tragedy nor comedy, but of frivolous wickedness and hilarious turpitude. The world made into a barb, and no-one quite knowing who is caught on it. The great progress. The great stupidity. Street life. The symbol belonging to this undecided realm.

Marx was famously dismissive of that “social scum” the Lumpenproletariat, who he described at the beginning of this period as “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Marx saw in these figures, in their Bonapartist, reactionary form, a bourgeois consciousness ripped from its class interest and thus nourished by purest political ideology. But if he could excoriate the drunkenness of beggars, Marx failed to appreciate its complement: the intoxication of sobriety of the working classes, the stupefaction in methodism, their imagined glory in progress. Wine, as the beggars already knew, was the only salve to the social anaesthetic of worthiness and the idiotic faith in work.

If Sean were here I’d want to talk to him about this learning in relation to a fragment by Benjamin, which he wrote as he thought about the world of Baudelaire; this world of mixedness of the city constructed and exploded, and the people within it subject to the same motion:

During the Baroque, a formerly incidental component of allegory, the emblem, undergoes extravagant development. If, for the materialist historian, the medieval origin of allegory still needs elucidation, Marx himself furnishes a clue for understanding its Baroque form. He writes in Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1922), vol. 1, p. 344: "The collective machine ... becomes more and more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one — that is, the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not only by the hand of man but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of division of labor, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those processes is, on the contrary, imperative." Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may be conceived as half finished products which, from the phases of a production process, have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction. During the Thirty Years' War, which, now at one point and now at another, immobilized production, the "interruption" that, according to Marx, characterizes each particular stage of this labor process could be protracted almost indefinitely. But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of which becomes the death's head, is the integration of man himself into the operation. The death's head of Baroque allegory is a half-finished product of the history of salvation, that process interrupted — so far as this is given him to realize — by Satan.

I won’t pretend to know all of what Benjamin means here but I have some idea. And those last sentences terrify me. Modernity begins with a war that is a strike, one that repeats through history. And the shape of this strike, this war, this repetition, is the shape of detritus of production interrupted. We shift perspective and the machine is revealed as other than it was once imagined: it is not some factory churning out commodities, but a world theatre of soteriology. An exchange takes place: the half-finished product for the half-destroyed body. Although what is created (albeit as a “monument to the process of destruction”) is some monstrous combination of the two. One and the same seen with two different perspectives, and the two perspectives separated by the distance between the promise that production will be interrupted, in rhythmic repetition, and the force of the machine that completes the product, kills the body into it, sealing death perfectly within the commodity, as its catastrophe. This distance, a tropic on the edge of the end of the world, is Hell.

This is a lot. But maybe it gets close to what I learnt. That all those bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc were for Sean the emblemata of our political times. These are the monsters, half-finished, half-human, half-machine, the bird interrupting itself with a scream a silent as the cosmos once seemed. I don’t know if they are to be taken up as weapons in the battle for salvation, or as mere co-ordinates on the map of hell. But they are certainly potent, and set here in commitment to redemption, for the work of raising the dead. Sean’s writing was always ready for this task, in constant preparation, and in constant interruption. Its angles quickly pacing between the two.

This has become theologically ornate. But perhaps something of the point is clear: that in the symbolic realm of Sean’s language are staked the great theological and materialist battles of our age. He had to deep dig into our time for that, furrow and dig so deep that he found the nineteenth century still there, crawling everywhere, right up to us. And all of this was set, furiously, against a more everyday view that production has all but disappeared from sight: society fully administered slips across screens with nothing but a sense of speed and gloss. His poetry decries, digs into, a laminated world with which we are supposed to play but in which we are never supposed to participate, never mind to get drunk, see the truth, raise the dead, even now as they slip away ever further through the mediatized glare.

*** Are we not surrounded by those who cast spells? Sorcery is the fashion, if only for the blighted, the meek, the poor, the oppressed. And it would be easy to mistake what Sean was writing for just another piece of subaltern superstition; promising mighty power for as long as it remains utterly powerless and otherworldly. But this is not right. Seans symbols are not just any old sign, or signal, or sigil. They are not arcana, but materials taken to hand out of the dereliction of the present. They are certainly magic, just as Sean was certainly a seer. But this is a materialist magic, a fury, a joy. They are not drawn from some other mystical world, but from this one. And his magic was to suspend them between this world and the next, between law made in the mouths of a class who hated him, and justice. He saw more deeply than most of us dare, and invited us along. Invited everyone along, including the dead who will rise, even if we have to dig and dig and drag them out of the ground and through the streets, to show the world what streets are really for. Here in this common place, between buildings, together. This is the place of magic, for riots, for burning cars; here a wall, there a blazing comet. Let his poetry dance on, and we will dance on too.

[prolapsarian]

Oppression and Persecution

A central problem of radical politics today is the confusion of oppression with persecution. Often the malign volition of the oppressor has been elevated to the highest question of why and how oppression happens. The fact that oppression operates upon a subject that increasingly recognises itself as an individual (or that oppression operates through the processes of individualisation), leads to the fallacy of believing that the oppressor must be an individual too. Political analysis is truncated in the Nietzschean or Schmittian ideological nonsense that the oppressor and oppressed, the friend and the enemy, are in some way mirror images, similarly constituted, equal partners in the terrible dance. The subject-centric thought cannot help but see only subjects everywhere. It leads ultimately to a sort of thinking that seems doomed to paranoia, in which oppressors appear only as gremlins and tormentors, creatures of sheer unhinged force without real interest, heartless and brutal. With the diagnosis of evil and the acknowledgement of antagonism the analysis concludes. This misinterpretation of material disadvantage as persecution is also the point at which elements of the new far right has most effectively appropriated left narratives. Surely a straight line may be drawn between the madness of Judge Schreber, who feared mystical rays causing his feminisation, and the online incel who takes up arms against the innocent women he claims have slighted him. Yet his fantastical theory of persecution made universal is truly not so far from what some left politics has become.

At the same time, real material conditions of persecution have lost their moral force. Every moment of supreme indignity is supposed to be explained away with sociological judgement. The young black man who is picked on by police, stopped and searched, framed and fitted up, week after week, is invited to accept "institutional racism" as an explanatory panacea. The woman degraded by men in her workplace and refused equal employment or wages, the asylum seeker deported and separated from their family, the benefits claimant who is “sanctioned” by a bureaucrat, are asked to hope that an account of “structural oppression” will adequately describe what they experience. The society that has lost all shame about its brutality expects its victims to feel no shame either, permitting no responsibility, while robbing people of the vital force in the demand for social transformation in their lives. The disenchantment implied by the sure-footedness of these theoretical abstractions is nothing but the devaluation of the subjective moment of suffering and indignity.

None of this is to say that we should conclude the analysis of society with either a theory of oppression or one of persecution. But in such a situation, it is worth asking whose interest is served by this sort of ideological confusion, in which subjects have already become objects and objects have already become subjects. This hocus-pocus conjures a cloud over the broken middle, obscuring any thinking of the transformations from subject to object and from object to subject as social processes. It condemns us on the one hand to be endlessly frustrated lunatics pointing fingers at the ever-fading mirages of evil overlords, and on the other hand to be mere scientists offering a steely gaze at our own collective demise.

[prolapsarian]

The Language of Boris: Part 2

“Prison spaces”

Boris Johnson chose to announce his flagship “law and order” policies in the Mail on Sunday, a paper in which comment tends from “lock them up and throw away the key” to “bring back hanging”, with every brutal fantasy of corporal punishment getting a frequent airing too. Johnson made a promise of an extra “10,000 spaces in our prisons”. This curious euphemism is meant to highlight funding going towards a half-crumbling, half-privatised prison estate, within which prisoners are subject to all manner of abuse, violence, neglect, and overcrowding. “10,000 spaces in our prisons” sounds like the rare pleasure of being able to afford a house with a spare room. But the political calculation is otherwise: that Johnson can make himself popular with several million people by promising to send tens of thousands of other people to prison. Only, to promise of future incarceration of so many people, who have not yet committed any crimes, looks a little too much like promising some ritual sacrifice to ward off the evils of the present. As though the goat will appreciate a new shiny altar as it’s led to its death.

“The Public”

Alongside a programme of expanded mass incarceration, he announced the extension of stop and search powers across over 40 cities in an attempt to soothe the public’s worries about increases in knife crime. There he wrote,

“I want the criminals to be afraid – not the public.”

The division is stark. “Criminals” and “the public” are held firmly apart. Separation is the entire logic of this juridical strategy: criminals must be distanced from the public not only rhetorically but in reality too. It is a carceral logic, one that wagers on punishment over remedy, while knowing that the most severe punishment - the most gratifying punishment it can offer to those who yearn for “law and order” - is excommunication from the body politic.

Such a sentence also contains three dubious implications: firstly that on committing a crime you can expect not to be considered a member of the public, and that politicians no longer have any duty to serve you; secondly, only those who are not criminals themselves can be expected to be protected from crime, or to have their fears addressed by the state; and thirdly that those subject to the force and violence of these expanded tactics are already “criminals”. The last of these suggestions is particularly spurious given that the powers being offered to police officers allow stopping and searching a person “whether or not he has any grounds for suspecting that the person or vehicle is carrying weapons or articles of that kind.”

Policies such as this are not about making the public less afraid, but more afraid. Throughout his campaign to become Prime Minister, Boris falsely proclaimed knife crime as the core violence in our society. The effect was to make middle class rural and suburban white people afraid of young black urban boys and men. He reinvented the “folk devil” of black urban youth, in order to terrify people who live miles away from any urban centre, and who have little understanding of the everyday lives of people who inhabit them - lives as much full of joy as hardship, as full of striving as of difficulty, as full of fruitful collectivity and solidarity as they are subject to forces of division and competition. It’s the same as how, during the Brexit referendum, fear of immigrants was whipped up in those places where no immigrants live.

Yet victims of knife crime are not middle class white suburban Daily Mail readers, but instead predominantly young urban boys and men, most of them people of colour, poor, deprived, brutalised by society and the state, living in a world in which any aid and support has been cut away. Far from protecting young black urban boys, who are truly the victims of knife crime, far from making their lives safer, this policy will embolden racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to attack them. Precisely those who need protecting are cast through presupposition as “the criminals” and not “the public.” All the while those middle class white folk will feel a little safer. But they don’t feel safer because they are less afraid: they feel safer because they are more afraid, and can now proclaim that something is being done about it. Never mind if that something is arbitrary violence, surveillance, harassment and criminalisation of racialised sections of the public, who are already the true victims of the violence whose fear they adopt. Never before has vicarious feeling been so craven. Like the old image of a person looking from safety out of their window at the violence of a storm, Boris’s exercise in bourgeois sublimity aims not to alleviate fear but to politicise it.

And this is without mentioning that as a police tactic “stop and search” not only does not work, but has a monumentally chequered history. These powers have long been used by racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to target and harass young black people. The section 60 powers that are to be used more frequently were (apparently) designed as a response to violent crimes involving weapons, but 97% of stops made under the act result in no prosecution for charges involving violent crimes or weapons. By far the most arrests after a search are for minor non-violent crimes, and even more stops and searches result in no action at all. At present black people in England and Wales are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people are.

The expansion of Section 60 powers has its own dubious history. The act has slippery wording in which its powers can be enforced in “any locality” in which violence has occurred or is likely to occur: during the riots in 2011, caused by the arbitrary police killing of a young black man in Tottenham, a section 60 was put in place across the whole of London (the largest area over which such an order has been put in place.) Expand the definition of “locality” enough and you can always map an area in which some violence has taken place. Then bring out the white hordes, holding brooms aloft triumphant, and say to the police, “go forth and brutalise.”

[prolapsarian]

The Language of Boris: Week 1

"Golden Age” On 25 July 2019, Johnson set out his plans in his statement on priorities for the government. The conceit of his speech was to shuttle between the pragmatics of policy and governance, via panegyrics to optimism and a can-do attitude, to an image of Great Britain in 2050. This is the date when, according to current plans, the UK’s net carbon emissions will be reduced to zero. His speech closed,

There is every chance that in 2050, When I fully intend to be around, though not necessarily in this job we will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.

The irony is lost on Johnson: that the image of a “golden age” has always furnished societies that see themselves in decline. The golden age is an image projected back from the wreckage of a fallen, broken world. And so just as Johnson elevates his moment of election, he presages the catastrophe to come. Brecht knew this irony best: during the finale of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, as the city of cartels and rackets collapses, as crooks escape and the innocent are damned by a drunken God, there enters a crowd. The people stomp out a herald of a new authoritarian order, bearing placards: “FOR THE EXPROPRIATION OF OTHERS”; “FOR LOVE”; “FOR THE VENALITY OF LOVE”; “FOR PROPERTY”; “FOR THEFT”; FOR THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL”; “FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE RICH”; “FOR COURAGE IN THE FACE OF THE WEAK”; “FOR THE ENDURANCE OF THE GOLDEN AGE.”

Perhaps Johnson evokes something more everyday though. This is a golden age of a golden man: fair in complexion, with a signature head of blazing yellow hair. The Sun adopts the line: its front page headline reads “JOHNSUN” depicting the new prime minister as the face of the sun, like the baby from the Teletubbies, beaming across the sky on the hottest day of the year. The opportunity to reiterate the paper’s title, to prove that it is their prime minister, is not missed. It was the oldest image of a golden age, that given by Hesiod in the Works and Days, that described it as time of in which a race of golden people lived. But by the time of Plato such an anatomic image had become untenable. In the Cratylus dialogue, Socrates argued that those who lived in the golden age were not described as as a golden race because they were truly golden in visage, but because they were good and fine. Johnson, openly deceitful and ignoble, machiavellian and brutish, could never be described as good and fine, nor wise and knowing, as Socrates continues. So roll back Plato and Socrates, back to the older racial implication, where blond hair and a fair face are the guarantors of righteousness and a world of plenty. 

“Talent” “We will also ensure that we continue to attract the brightest and best talent from around the world”: To describe a person or a set of people as “talent” has a very specific set of meanings in British English. It is not the same as describing someone as talented, or saying that they have talent, or even that they have a particular talent. Calling someone “talent” is part of a grammatical formation peculiar to the dialects of the highest upper classes (perhaps the only other word that suffers this fate is “wit”, invoked only by one upper class person convivially describing another.) The grammar involves a ricochet, firstly from a human attribute to an abstract noun, and then back as a concretion, in which this “talent” describes the whole of a person. Perhaps this motion is why describing people as “talent” has a sexual aspect too, especially when uttered in the plummy accents of the ruling classes. “Talent” means people with prominent sexual features. But we know that it isn’t the protuberances that the ruling classes love; instead what excites their libidos is the abstraction. Not least when the very notion of “talent” is designed to discover such an abstraction as naturally embedded within the body of the person thus described. “Recovery”

“to recover our natural and historic role as an enterprising, outward-looking and truly global Britain, generous in temper and engaged with the world”: It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. 35 years since its end, nearly half of the British population remains proud of British colonialism, from the slave trade to Bengal Famine, while less than a quarter regret this history. No wonder then that Boris could help but fantasise its restoration, with every brutality recast as generosity. Such is the British character.

[prolapsarian]

“Fed up” and “Disappointed”: A Political Portrait of the UK

Half the population is "fed up." To express being "fed up" means to be a middle aged man, and to shout a lot (so lots of fed up people, who are neither men nor loud nor middle aged have no way to express what they want in public.) Often you are fed up because you have bad wages, or your business wasn't profitable, or because they stopped you beating up your wife and children. Sometimes you're fed up because you're not allowed to hate Johnny Foreigner any more (even though you did lose your job when new people moved to your town.) You're fed up because the NHS isn't working and no-one listens to you, but you are sure that people should be listening to you. You know that being "fed up" is all you can do to change things. And at least shouting makes you feel better. You shout because you know you're right, just like Jeremy Clarkson or Piers Morgan knows he's right, because other people are wrong. Why is no-one listening? 

The other half is "disappointed." To be disappointed also means to be middle aged, or to be a millennial who dreams of being middle aged. You are disappointed mainly because of what the "fed up" people have done to you, and often because of how the "fed up" people express themselves. But nonetheless you'll still take their rent (paid for with housing benefits), increase it every year, and let the "fed up" people take the flack for the increasing cost to the public when they are called "scroungers". You are disappointed by the service at the NHS but you might have health insurance with work. You are disappointed because you worry about how the future might stop your children excelling, but you don't give a thought to other people's children left behind (just like you were disappointed when your kids only got into their second choice school, but you did nothing to change the system in which some people had to go to bad schools. No wonder, your kids will be fine even if you have to bring in a private tutor to help them a little.) You are disappointed because, when you think really hard about what a good person you are, and how you deserve all you have, you can only imagine how unkind those who have less than you must be. You are disappointed at them being fed up. Why can't they just hold a banner or sign a petition? You think a lot about how you could never be that unkind. You are disappointed that the world is unfair, but you are certain that it isn't your fault. You would never hate foreigners, but all the ones you know are well off. Why would anyone hate them? They're good and kind people too. You are disappointed that people are less worldly than you because they don't speak French, but you wouldn't learn even a word of Turkish to speak to your neighbour.

[prolapsarian]

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation. 

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit.  I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it.  DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table.  JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them.  DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures.  JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring.  DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language.  JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities.  DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further.  JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production.  DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images.  JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality.  DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it. 

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

[prolapsarian]

“Left-Wing Antisemitism” Reconsidered

About two years ago I posted about how to spot “left-wing antisemitism.” I have now, after quite a lot of consideration, decided that my previous analysis was theoretically weak. So here is a reconsideration - in which I make an argument for adopting an account of populist and elitist antisemitism instead.  I dislike the phrase "left-wing antisemitism". Or at least the conjunction of "left-wing" and "antisemitism" comes too easily. Certainly one can identify the difference between a populist antisemitism and an elitist one: on the one side social theory that asserts the inherent unfreedom of society, due in most part a sort of conspiracy theory antisemitism that imagines the world, capital, and the media run by Jews keeping the rest of the population in check; on the other a social theory that asserts the inherent freedom of society, a commitment to the laissez-faire, which nonetheless is perpetually worried about the alien influence of Jews and the capacity of Jews to abuse their privileged status as Jews to undermine that freedom, whether by fomenting revolution or through undermining the principles of free and fair exchange. But the differentiation that we normally make between left-wing and right-wing does not so easily map on to populist and elitist antisemitism. Rather, the difference in bourgeois society between "right-wing" and "left-wing" centres essentially on the "Jewish question": that is, the question of how a Jew can live in a bourgeois society; what protections and privileges a supposedly universal society should afford Jews; whether the preservation and protection of the particularity of Jewry necessarily undermines the state's universal character. This is to say that the "Jewish question" (and this is where Marx's analysis is quite correct) occurs only in a society that is fundamentally unreconciled in regard to the relationship between universal and particular. To be either "left-wing" or "right-wing" as positions in bourgeois politics is to presuppose what is unreconciled: it is to push either for the universal or the particular while recognising the other.

That might sound a bit abstract but it can be fleshed out a little. Normally we talk about "right-wing" or "left-wing" as being an argument about whether we have a small or a big state. The right wing thinks that the state should make minimal incursions into people's lives, and thinks that freedom is best preserved where that freedom is asocial in character, where it asserts "freedom to stand against the state" as an element of precisely what the state is; while the left wing thinks that they state should be big in order to guarantee, for everyone, a certain type of social freedom: a "freedom in the state" in which the citizen must nonetheless participate fully. So the traditional right-wing position on the "Jewish Question" is to assert the Jew's right to practice Judaism in private, to be Jewish in private, so long as this private Jewishness does not threaten to overturn the state as such; while the left-wing position on the "Jewish Question" tends to assert that the Jew, just like everyone else, is free to do as everyone else is, but at the same time must at certain times give up his or her Jewish character in order to participate in that freedom: for the Jew to separate himself off from society is for him to condemn himself to a state of unfreedom, or to sanction state punishment for his a- or anti-sociality.

There are some quite extraordinary moves that are made in considering this problem in Marx, but perhaps most significant is a type of analysis that rests on having understood bourgeois society to be unreconciled, and which recognises the strange asocial sociality of bourgeois society which guarantees the right of the citizen to act freely as an individual only insofar as he produces himself socially (or in early Marx submits to free exchange), and which guarantees the rights of the collective to produce itself socially only insofar as that production is alienated and prepares an inescapable ideology - and in a sense reality - of individuality. Out of this dialectical schema, in which each element is fully mediated in the other, Marx is able to make some quite extraordinary claims: perhaps most importantly the self-emancipation of the particular is able to transform the universal - that is, for the Jew to emancipate himself from his own Jewishness has the capacity to illuminate and concretise the emancipation of the universal; while the emancipation of the universal must mean accounting for the Jew in his particularity.

What is significant is that neither of these positions are much like either of the anti-semitic positions that on the one hand describe an already emancipated society or on the other describe a society paralysed by fear in which no emancipation is possible. The question of the production of antisemitic views has to do with how the Jew can become the scapegoat for the lack of reconciliation in society - each antisemitic view is a fixation on a society different from the bourgeois one that blames the Jew for that fact that he remains a constant reminder of the lack of reconciliation between universal and particular. And in truth, both the left and the right can adopt aspects of either elitist or populist antisemitism in order to achieve this.

These are sorts of classical dialectical arguments one can make and rehearse about bourgeois society in the abstract. They remain interesting as problems of dialectical logic, and can also offer some useful reflections on what should be accentuated in truly emancipatory politics (the self-emancipation of the particular, and the elevation of the universal from its mere formal character into its concrete particularity). But they remain abstractions, which are not particularly useful for describing the inner shape of the history of the bourgeois state. Today society is both much more inclusive in one sense and much more exclusive in another - it is certainly more strained, in part because these are not merely constitutional arguments about the form of the law as applied to bourgeois citizens. When people “on the right” talk about wanting a “small state” they generally mean that they want to pay less tax, and that they want less of their profits to be redistributed to those who are forced to labour for them. Meanwhile, those “on the left” who talk about wanting a “big state” normally mean that they want better healthcare, education, housing, and perhaps even the state ownership of infrastructure and some other capital. Very rarely do these arguments occur in their constitutional form: neither the compulsive social character of the big state nor the asocial freedoms afforded by a small state are taken particularly seriously - and yet the failure of both is blamed on Jews. It is this secondary characteristic of antisemitism that has come to predominate.

As is now well known, in 1941 Hermann Göring ordered the orchestration of the "final solution to the Jewish question" through the total annihilation of the Jews of Europe: a plan for the state to violently emancipate itself from its Jewish citizens. Such a final solution was never achieved in full, although millions were murdered in the attempt. But while in one sense the Nazis were not victorious, perhaps they were in another: the final solution to the Jewish question was supplanted by the final and eternal deferral of the Jewish question. After the Nazis the so-called “Jewish Question” can simply never be asked. The question of the size of the state is therefore left as a matter of mere contingency, allowed to crash around on the stormy sea of history. Big states occur in times of growth and smaller ones in times of decline. And forever this contingency, the cycles of boom and bust, are blamed on the spectre of a Jew, who remains the proof that society has not freely brought itself under its own control. At the same time, in moments when there is a big state those elitist antisemitisms are more often operative, while in times of economic decline the populist versions come to the fore - in each case regardless of whether those who espouse these views are “left-wing” or “right-wing”. Meanwhile, such a notion is strengthened by the fact that, increasingly, there is little to differentiate the left and the right in politics proper. In the post-Göring world the accusation against one’s enemy transforms too: it is no longer enough to blame the Jew, but one has to blame the antisemite for conjuring the Jew into existence, as though without the antisemite society would already be free of dwelling on the Jew. And so another page is written in the book of history. Having lost the Jewish question amidst the total unconscious of eternal deferral; having ceded politics to a world in which history is nothing but the terrible and terrifying play of natural forces of boom and bust, the Jew and the anti-semite are forced to perform an endless dance with one another. Neither is capable of emancipation. The cool annihilation of any possibility of a truly political state means that the Jew can only be recognised by the antisemite, and the antisemite can only ever recognise social force as in some way Jewish. And those who are committed to ending antisemitism so quickly morph into those who are committed to ending the Jews. Meanwhile the only means by which the left and the right can behave as truly left or right would be to inaugurate a politics of an utterly provisional, unfinished, and unreconciled state, which today is refused on all sides.

[prolapsarian]

Walter Benjamin with Crosses and Without: Marginalia on the Symbol

Drafted for a seminar on ‘Intensity’ in Benjamin’s work, Hannover, April 2018

I.

I want to ask three short but complicated questions. But more than this I want to address them not merely with regard to the history of of philosophy, but also with regard to their theologico-theatrico-political implications (as an ongoing concern). They are to be addressed not only in terms of a closed logic completed by the pastness of the past, as mere dead fact to be unpacked, but also as centres of necessary contemplation and arenas of action.

What is the weight - or intensity - implicit in the predicative copula?

In what relation does the epistemo-critical prologue stand to the rest of the Trauerspiel book?

What do the answers to these questions tell us about our historical condition?

These problems mights seem, at least at first, unrelated, but they might also touch on some tensions in these texts.

II.

What do I mean by the weight implicit in the predicative copula? Here I simply want to indicate that the being that is spoken of in the “is” of a judgment is historically unstable, variable, and excessive. Excessive in particular in the sense that predicative judgements do not simply function to bring phenomena into understanding by subsuming their particularity under the universality of the concept. While they may indeed do this, at the same time, the language of judgement constitutes the relation between knower and known, consitutes the objectivity of the object and the subjectivity of the subject. And those constitutions are themselves historical, and charged or weighted into the “being” that is spoken of by the “is”.

The purpose of making this relatively schematic point about the nature of judgements is that - if we are going to try to understand not only what Benjamin has to say about the relations of truth, to intention, to knowledge; but also why these might  be important things to speak about - we need to get to grips with some of what he thought about that historical instability, that variation, and that excess. In short, this schematic point leads to a conclusion that can be anything but schematic.

In particular it seems that for Benjamin this excess in the “being” of the “is” migrates into the object itself, and can be considered with regard to a weak power within that objectivity - that of symbolisation. And to recognise this symbol is the task of philosophy. He writes in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book:

It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication.

And while here this question is not couched in “objectivity”, the very lack of such terminology will lead us to conclusions about what happens to the Symbol in that book.

III

A set of a schemata drafted in 1920 or 1921 is marked at its head by two crosses. This image is perhaps incidental, if not accidental, to the ‘konfusionsschema’ that is presented. Yet in the attempt to invoke clarity, in the drawing of a diagram that hopes to display relations between language and truth, between knowledge and vision, between truth and simplicity, between perception and multiplicity, so too do we witness a double crucifixion of two phrases: firstly of the ‘imaginary object’ and secondly of ‘objective intention.’ (This ‘objective intention’ has to do with an intention not of the judgement that subjectively cast the object as its object, but instead the intention that the object has towards God, a ‘symbolic intention’. Hence Benjamin writes also,“Certain material objects can be fulfilled only in an ascribed objective intention, and they then point to God.”)

           What are the movement of the cross? Should we read it as a sign of splitting and decision, as in a crossroads, in which one must judge and choose a path, knowing full well that the other lies perpendicular? Or is it, contrarywise, a site and sign of mixing, of fusing together, the necessary reconjunction of something already divided? Benjamin’s schemata suggests both. And what is split, and crucified here? It is the word, which divides into concept and essence - the one associated with knowledge and the other with truth. But in the dialectical motion, just as the word is split, so too must these lines transect through the ‘objective intension’ that is produced in this splitting. We might ask how they were split apart to begin with, and the answer in turn would be in the decisive judgement that chose a path. To borrow the phrase from the history of scientific modernity, the splitting is itself the consequence of an experimentum crucis, in which the path of knowledge is chosen while the path of truth is not. And yet knowledge remains con-fused with truth at the point of this meeting, if not in the knowing subject.

           To focus on these diagramatic lines might seem capricious, were this not a text about crosses. I want to ask the question of these crucifixions in relation to the famous passage in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book  

The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is the intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it [in sie eingehen und verschwinden]. Truth is the death of intention. (36)

My sense is that one can’t be just as schematic as the prologue suggests, and that some historical consequences of such a thought can be read elsewhere in the book. Meanwhile, within the schemata I want to know if objective intension dies there on the cross, under the excruciating tension between truth and knowledge; or whether it has merely been marked by the cross as a sign or seal of salvation, by some crusador, some backward-looking baroque crucisignatus.

These two aspects of crucifixion  - the torment and pain of the passion of the body, and the symbolic mark of salvation - are proximate to many of the themes of this book. And yet despite this, in quite a profound sense, the Trauerspiel book is a book without crosses. Benjamin describes a historical process, whereby the cross of the martyred Jesus of the passion play had been supplanted by the crown of a prince. The passion of Christ, in a religious sense, has been supplanted by the secular play of political intrigue (albeit in a century of relative piety). “if the tyrant falls, not simply in his own names, as an individual, but as a ruler and in the name of mankind and history, then his fall has the quality of a judgment, in which the subject too is implicated”. This is the history of bloody politics placed upon a stage, shown and technized, if not exalted.

It is perhaps worth remarking too, that this question of the body, and of the word, is the central questions of early modern theology. When, in ‘The Task of the Translator’ Benjamin talks about the relationship of of the German Brot to the French pain, there is a distinctively doctrinal connotation. For the translation of the Latin hostia into the vernacular for the bread of the Eucharist, is accompanied by the greatest of theological struggles. Can I not hear behind each of these words the shadowy echoes of Calvin, and the great translator Luther? Does Benjamin perhaps want to resolve the problem of transsubstantition politically, as translation, through an account of its coterminous consequences of national sovereignty? And are we not dealing now with the word made flesh (pace John) rather than the body made bread? Is not the dreadful history of the reformation to which every counter-reformation baroque allegorist responds the actuality of the word made flesh, now crucified, once the every word has become nothing but concept.

To draw these all too brief digressions together, I want to briefly mention the results of this thinking in the Trauerspiel book, a book in which there is no account of “objective intention” in the way that we find in the schemata and fragments from the very early 1920s; and of how Benjamin might at once think through these word-crucifixions with regard to a theory of symbols. To state the theory briefly, the earlier theory of “objective intention” founded in the object has been replaced with a theory of death and its display. As is well known, Benjamin gives, in the Trauerspiel book, an epochal history of the symbol, - regarding firstly it’s classical aspect (as a type of internally oriented humanism), its romantic aspect (where it dwells in a miraculous nature and instantaneously reveals itself) before turning to its baroque moment, and to the allegorical view of things. This “allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world.”

It is in the world of allegory that the Trauerspiel book is truly without crosses. Instead, its concern is with how these aspects of crucifixion - as excruciations and marks of salvation, indwell in the body of the word itself as script. One might note here that in the finale of the book the concern is with the image of Golgotha - the site of the crucifixion. But it is not the crucifixion of Jesus that is important, but instead now the writhing physionomics of a profusion of baroque engravings, of a scriptal landscape or inscribed languagescape. It is the scene of not only worldly but wordly suffering - of words made gods, and suffering gods too, which may harbour, in their objectivity, some symbolic form that marks them for salvation. The symbol’s migration into allegory transforms each and every word into a site of bodily suffering, with truth straining internal to it, in the rhythm of catastrophe.

The allegorical then, has a particular mode of providing a setting into which we might enter and into which we - with our own bodily suffering - might disappear. This is the natural-historical setting of a bloody world-theatre devoid as much of eschatology as of doxology beyond a certain type of fragile crisis nationalism. But here as a means of attaining if not truth then redemption, this setting seems historically limited to the world of pious secularism. And we are left asking what of the symbols of today? And how do they strain towards or away from the cross, through the word made matter?

[prolapsarian]

Strikes, Pensions, and the Long Crisis of the University Sector

Next week the UCU (University and Colleges Union), which represents most people working as lecturers and researchers in universities, is beginning a wave of strikes. The strike is about cuts to pensions. Since there is a large financial hole in the main pension fund, the bodies that administrate that fund are hoping to lessen it by reducing pay outs in retirement. If this happens lecturers could lose up to £200,000 (or £10,000 per year over 20 years).

This is certainly a bad state of affairs, and one worth striking about, but it barely reflects any of the problems for workers in a sector that has now been in a permanent state of crisis for decades. In fact a large proportion of the workforce are not enrolled on pension schemes. Over half of those working in the sector are on precarious contracts, in many case hourly paid, zero hour contracts, or short-term contracts, often with little security or benefits. Often they are research students who, knowing they need teaching experience if they want to progress to the relative security of a permanent post, accept super-exploitative wages and conditions. Often they are workers who, having attained a doctorate, are expected within the sector to work many precarious, poorly paid positions (while they fund their own research out of, erm, magically being rich) to “earn the right” to be offered a full time permanent position, for which there is now enormous competition.

The state has found those with full-time permanent academic positions to be extremely compliant. Faced with ever-worsening conditions in the sector as a whole, those with professional salaries have been paid just enough to look the other way. They have been paid just enough to accept ever greater class sizes; just enough to accept utterly meaningless “excellence frameworks” in teaching and research that pit colleagues against each other in competition while providing zero evidence of improved teaching or research; just enough to not mind teaching assistants working on their courses below the minimum wage; just enough not to complain when students are impoverished and university education is made more exclusive by exponentially increasing tuition fees; just enough to ignore enormous cuts to grants for postgraduate and research students; just enough to accept the outsourcing of service staff such as cleaners and security staff in the university, who then face bullying, abuse, loss of pensions, zero hour contracts, and bad working conditions; just enough to submit to helping the home office threaten students with deportation and to comply with racist “prevent” policies; just enough to accept increases in teaching-only positions with no pay for research; just enough to accept the decimation of paid research time across the sector; just enough to repeat in fear the mantra “publish or perish”; just enough to ignore the monopolisation of academic outputs, and the hiding of publicly funded research behind paywalls; just enough to accept the worsening quality of education and research.

To the glee of government after government that “just enough” has not been very much at all. Professional pay for academics has declined not just relatively but absolutely during a half a century boom in the industry. Despite the massification of education, those with permanent positions have preferred to be paid off in order to pretend that the university is still a cottage industry. Many don’t complain because they consider themselves “lucky” to have their jobs, and wouldn’t want to tempt fate. The consequence is a mass industry in which most workers have little security and low wages, which they accept with the promise that if they slave away hard enough they might finally be rewarded with precisely that security that is now being eroded as pensions are cut (while wages have been cut for years, and many departments have faced closure). Most of the poorest, most who are from BME backgrounds, most who are disabled or who have caring responsibilities simply can’t take this, and drop out of the race.

The fact that staff have rolled over again and again for decades, that they have been bought off and shown so little solidarity has allowed an enormous transformation of Higher Education. By now most people who work in the university understand the situation: not only is teaching and research poor to the point of dereliction, but even those who are in the most secure positions are constantly worried about their jobs, about having to re-enter a jobs market in which the number of decently paid positions is constantly being squeezed. Everywhere there is just competition. But the pervasive ideology that competition breeds success has proved hollow: now the competition is between departments to provide an “education” economically, to make sure you don’t lose your job, to show you are worthy of some tiny pot of funding that is required to get your job done. Finally it is revealed (as though it wasn’t obvious) that there never really was a competition provide high quality teaching or research. So real is this fear and the spirit of competition - between academics, between departments, between institutions - the endless race to the bottom and the attitude of box-ticking has almost entirely eclipsed any learning (not to mention wisdom) in the academy.

There are a number of very straightforward demands that can and ought to be made across the sector to either solve the crisis or to bring it to a head. But they require some bravery and solidarity, rather than the cowardice and competition that we have seen for decades. And the people who are in the best position to show bravery, who could really lead this fight, are those with full-time permanent positions. They should know too that if their jobs are threatened for leading the fight, everyone will have their backs. 

Below are a series of demands that could easily be adopted, and should be widely supported:

• No to the proposed cuts to pensions

• An end to below-inflation annual pay rises

• Refuse to take part in REF and TEF, which show no evidence of improving teaching or research

• Refuse to teach on any courses that do not offer all teaching staff proper contracts (fractional or otherwise), with adequate pay for prep and marking. End zero hours contracts in the sector, and pay people for the time they work.

• Refuse to publish anything held behind paywalls (the knowledge monopolies of Elsevier, Springer, and Co. must be ended!)

• Refuse to publish books with academic presses where books are so expensive only institutions can purchase them

• Support for the immediate abolition of tuition fees

• Support for all postgraduate loans to be replaced with grants

• Support for increased numbers of grants for doctoral students

• Fixed quotas of students per faculty member (so that increases in student numbers are matched by increases in numbers of academic staff)

• Immediate abolition of the position of “vice-chancellor” in all universities (once universities stop seeing themselves as in competition, there will be no need for these people in any case)

• Refusal to take part in league-tables, which undermine workers in the worst funded parts of the sector

• Refuse to take on management positions

• When involved in hiring, to do this on the basis of which candidate will provide the best education to students and will do the most interesting research, not on the basis of who will professionalise most adequately

• Refuse to help in “teacher training” for research students in which those research students are not remunerated for attending training courses.

• Support bringing in-house all staff who work in the university, regardless of their jobs (service staff too!), and giving them equal pensions, holiday pay, sick pay, and job security.

• Demand service staff within the university, including those on the lowest pay such as cleaners, are included on university management committees all the way to the very top.

Let’s hope the strike over pensions is just the beginning of a battle to save the sector, to improve education and research, and to end the poverty, competition, and fear that has come to characterise working in higher education. None of this is really revolutionary stuff - it’s just about protecting the conditions of workers. It shouldn’t be hard to support. To all those people with full time permanent contracts who are striking, a great many people who are working with worse conditions - indeed without pensions - will be supporting you unconditionally in a spirit of solidarity.  In the mean time, I threw this together on my own in an hour. I’m sure lots of people can do a better job of making these arguments than me, so do that. And if you don’t have time, do share this, and get those conversations happening in your departments. 

[prolapsarian]

Walter Benjamin on Blushing

I have a new big piece of writing out - a set of translations of fragments on colour by Benjamin and some inflationary reading notes. The translations are of material that have never appeared in English before, and the long essay that follows them includes all sorts of thoughts about rainbows and clouds and borders and soup and bodies and ruins and vertigo and christmas and communism.

https://www.academia.edu/35350866/Walter_Benjamin_on_Blushing_New_translations_of_fragments_on_colour_and_some_inflationary_reading_notes_draft_

[prolapsarian]

‘Cat Person’ and Character-Analysis

My ill-advised tuppenceworth on 'Cat Person':

There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and ego weakness) at key moments. It happened in 1921 in 'Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', the sister book of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' now not amid war but instead subsequent social and economic ruin. It happened again in the writings of Reich, Fenichel, and Freud in the 1930s. Indeed, you can see a longer history of this sort of quantitative ego-analysis as significant to attempts understand the Nazi phenomenon reaching through to the late 1940s. And it appears once again in the 1970s. Needless to say, these are turns that have been made necessary - albeit through the darkest and most labyrinthine paths - by social and economic crisis. And more significantly they have come about as those economic crises have instantiated dominant social modes of the hatred of women, not so much by some abstract patriarchy but by new developments of homosociality, bound up in warriorship, male cliques and confraternities. And needless to say too that these developments have prospered in particular in circumstances of male mass-unemployment or the mass fear amongst men of unemployment. In short, this whole analytic nexus is bound up with women at work ("taking the jobs of men"), and how in periods of economic crisis masculinity can triumph through new extra-liberal communal modes of (anti-)social organisation founded on the hatred of women and violence against them, and from which women and their work is excluded. But from a psychoanalytic view, they are also stories about how these "new communal modes" are founded, in truth, on regression.

The great victory of stories like "Cat Person" - and perhaps the reason for its popularity - is that they inaugurate this question in the time of our own economic crisis - and in particular amongst a generation of men who, over the last decade, have graduated university into a collapsing economy. And although this story might speak in more lulling tones than, say, Jelinek did in the 1970s, the violent backdrop is even more extreme: one of Elliott Rodger-style massacres and the mushrooming of nasty 4chan-based chatter about a "beta uprising”, of “pick-up artistry” and the belief that being a “good guy” is the world’s best justification for being a pig in bed. That is, this story asks the crucial questions: “what are the burgeoning modes of the hatred of women amongst the male precariat? And how do they find their violent expressions?” In one particular way, the story’s diagnosis is extremely precise: in the moments in which it dwells on Robert’s fantasy of Margot’s return to a high school romance. Indeed, the present regressions in male mass culture (especially of the American variety) are founded on an almost constant return to schoolyard identifications, and the paired homoerotic sado-masochistic figures of jock and nerd. Just to add, as I will come to it in more detail, this doesn’t mean this should be responded to by a hatred of homoeroticism - which this regression will turn into; nor does it mean kids straightforwardly enjoy being bullied - and raped, symbolically or otherwise - at school; and nor is it to condemn as barbaric either childhood eroticism in general or sadomasochism. But these schoolyard identifications have been hardened by the discovery that they are already so strong that they present the perfect marketing opportunity to mass-cultural producers. This isn’t to deny that there is a long history in American film and television about the fantasy of the nerdy guy who - by dint of cunning - gets with some conventionally hot woman, who is invariably the butt of all the jokes because she is stupid, and therefore apparently deserves everything that this cunning metes out to her. That history runs from Woody Allen through to The Big Bang Theory. But this type of cultural production - by men, for men - is enormously more prevalent now than it has been at any time before, and it both produces and fulfils these regressive tendencies. They remain the most enormous source of profiteering.

I wrote this back in March on these phenomena, and my views haven’t changed so much, but it gives a more *political* view of how new forms of illiberal male violence play out in this scenario, and how the two figures find themselves bound together: “For people of my generation a lot of what is on offer in the way of websites, TV shows, music separates itself along the lines of "nerds vs jocks." Mass culture finds its market in taking sides in an enormous process of regression: marginal pre-pubescence is the scene of eternal fixation. What follows is some crude sociology: it is intriguing to see how this plays out as a collaboration between the two sides in the strains of contemporary misogyny - on the one side the Jockish Trump type, non-consensual hands everywhere, and on the other the Nerdish misogyny that has developed I guess through trends like "pick-up artistry", the hatred of women because they don't love you unconditionally. Maybe this collaboration between these two types, founded on a single type of psychic formation, marks out also the uneasy collaboration of Government and the Internet alt-right, an army of hateful hidden nerds, who think they are probably just using the likes of Trump and Bannon as avatars. But perhaps what is most striking here is the strength of self-righteousness founded on the feeling of oppression long ago, each side by the other. However much the internet warrior might have a nicely paid job and plenty of resources, he feels hard done by in a culture that seeks to perpetuate forever the violence of the school yard. He sees himself as a figure of vengeance, however little he might be oppressed. Mass culture becomes an arena in which the tensions and contradictions of something like a regressive anality are played out, in a world frozen into unambivalent sado-masochism. Be a man, be ego-weak, the TV bellows!”

Part of what has been most reported, and most interesting about Cat Person story has been the establishment of a sort of culture-war in the responses to it. What has been less spoken about, though, is how those responses have been conditioned by the complex of genitality within a mass-culture that thrives on pre-genital identification. What might in fact be the most provocative moments in this story for a lot of the men who have responded are the depictions of the failing penis: “At the end, when he was on top of her in missionary, he kept losing his erection, and every time he did he would say, aggressively, “You make my dick so hard,” as though lying about it could make it true.” What makes this so provocative is that the regressive forms of mass cultural play on the hyper-ambivalence developed in age towards one’s own pre-genital fixation within the culture. What is constantly produced and sold to and by a generation of men are sorts of cultural objects that both catch them in a homoerotic moment and then fantastically - and aggressively, violently - disavow it. This is to say, that today’s regressive male mass culture, despite being homosocial and indeed homoerotic, is at the same time very deeply homophobic. Yeah, that’s an old story from the 1930s too, but it also explains something of why a lot of people get very jumpy about it, especially when the women’s true fantasy is depicted as being with another guy who shares in laughing at the first’s failed genitality. It turns out, with that laughter, that she hates his anal fixation just as much as he does. Not that this is her fault either.

So who, in the end, is to blame? Maybe all of this sounds like a dodge too (or some verbose resistance) - no doubt it to an extent is, and the message of this little story is more straightforward: it tells men to reflect a bit, be more sensitive to how women are feeling; it adds to the perennial refrain that men need to “work on their shit.” And it does this well - I too found myself reflecting. But I worry that this also misses the mark in certain respects - and most extravagantly in its willingness to submit to the prevailing psychological doctrine that all matters of character can be exchanged for questions of behaviour. All of this, I think, raises the question of what we do about prevailing ego-weakness and its violences today. Traditionally in character-analysis the answers have been pretty poor: there is a hope - and one can read is quite clearly in late Freud - that this sort of illiberal male mass violence in crisis can be solved by the “return to work”. But here I can’t help but to think he is wrong. Yes, the experiment in the west of full-employment liberalism did, in effect, reduce the immediate power of male confraternities and armies over society, but it did this by allowing this violence to quietly return to the home, and by pushing women straight back into the unremitting violence of the home too. This is the history of the 1950s and 1960s, and it was not until the next crisis of employment that the pent up rage against it, by those women who had survived it, was able to be given some expression. Indeed, for all of its hopes of some kind of peacefulness, prevailing liberalism in periods of boom most usually simply institutes processes of social repression - privatising violence within the family - where psychological repression leaves off; while the forces of that violence remain intact. Meanwhile other solutions proffered have been “a new olympic games” (Ernst Simmel), new freer forms of communalist and more sexually free lifestyle (Reich), or simply “education” (for an Adorno immured in the post-war boom).

It seems to me that all of these answers are useless in one way or another - and that the culture does truly require a feminist response. One would hope that it would be as psychoanalytically sensitive as it is violent. I guess to invoke all of this history of character-analysis is rather unfashionable too. Not least because these sorts of arguments fell out of fashion because all sorts of terms - for very good reason - fell out of use. Things like “penis-envy” (and as I quietly have suggested here, in many ways I think this was often a misnomer for work-envy), or “repressed homosexuality”. Nonetheless, these sorts of discussions do - even deprived of vocabulary - offer some scope for addressing the problems of how the crisis of our age is rebounding into hatred and violence against women on a mass scale. In any case, basically I'm well up for a fierce critical discussion of ego-weakness and mass culture. F-Scales at the ready.

[prolapsarian]

After Hyde Park

The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again - this time at the Anarchist Bookfair - and there seems to be more polemic than ever around the proprosed Gender Recognition Act, I am posting it again here.

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This week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I'm also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being used by cynically by certain feminists in these milieux, whose main politics over the last decades has been to whip up hatred against trans* people, to try to gather a crowd behind them. I know that quite a few people who are currently lining up behind the likes of Julia Long (or who at the very least refuse to recognise the deeply divisive positions and gestures that people like her are taking and making) read my wall. My hope is that some of the stuff below will make you see this differently.

1. There has been a small but vocal scene of feminists around London - people like Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Chester, Julia Long - whose politics over the last couple of decades has centred on making the argument that trans* women aren't women. A good proportion of these people's opinions go further though: they claim that gender reassignment surgery is nothing other than self-mutilation; that trans people demanding protection from oppression are "male rights activists" (that is, aligned with certain far-right movements); and that the main aim of trans* people's lives is to undermine the gains of the women's movement. But what has been peculiar to this politics - and I only know about London here, but I hear the same from other places - is that its mode of expression has been to attack trans* people themselves. Far from making theoretical interventions or arguments, far from entering into conversations, this group of feminists have gone about instituting their politics by publicly outing, doxxing, and monstering trans people. They do this in a context (and take full advantage of this context) in which transphobia predominates in the mainstream press and many other institutions of civil society. In more immediate social interactions their politics consistently and deliberately misgender all trans people they come into contact with. Ultimately their politics amounts to the idea that trans*-women, in their very being, undermine feminist movements, and they wish to undermine them in every way possible, playing opportunistically on wider social transphobias.

2. It is significant that this pattern has been known to feminism in the context of debates over sex work. On that question certain feminists have attacked women sex workers (most prominently on Reclaim the Night marches.) They do this instead of negotiating the dialectical tensions of labour, commodity, libido, possession, and exchange under patriarchal capitalism. Instead the sex worker herself becomes the scapegoat and centre of gravity of the entire system. If only she can be done away with (and with no particular care for how she came to be selling sex), the whole system will apparently simplify itself. The whole thing is slightly bizarre - akin to blaming proletarians in a munitions factory for a society founded on perpetual war, rather than blaming the society based on perpetual war for the fact that certain proletarians find themselves having to produce munitions. This isn't to say there aren't important and nuanced debates to be had about sex work, safety of workers, the consequence of sex being sold on the most anarchic open market for all women, and so on. Although there is an irony that feminists whose political movement arose from hatred of the "it can wait until after the revolution" now take precisely the same attitude to sex workers merely defending their physical safety. This is all slightly by the by. But the same brutality of attitude, which leads to certain feminists putting the blame of sexual exploitation at the feet of sex workers, which leads them to attack their very existence as scapegoat, has been transferred wholesale to how some feminists are treating trans* people. This has now been going on for very many years.

3. In the discussions that have surrounded the Gender Recognition Act, those women who have for many years been aggressively transphobic have been trying to reposition themselves to win support from other women and feminists who might not really agree with the extremity and violence of their positions. They have started to talk about defending civil society institutions, and about having debates. To many trans* people in London it is clear that these aims are not true. Indeed last week's shitshow of a "debate" mainly involved slinging insults and platforming people whose only point ever is to say that trans* women are men (indeed people who have somehow made careers out of this!) There are questions about civil society, and about womanhood, raised by the act. The trouble is that these particular feminists are not interested in them beyond a very specific, outmoded and divisive line.

4. There are genuinely some people who (mainly on the internet) take an "against nature" position in the trans* community, and who respond to anyone questioning trans* discourse - or even the primacy of discourse in trans* scenes - as an existential threat that can only be met with violence. There are certain individuals who send death threats, punch people, shout "kill all TERFs" etc. Apart from these people are the enormous majority of trans* people who are consistently in conversations, discussions, social movements, reflections with all sorts of people (and alone) about questions of sex, gender, sexuality, nature, history. The transmisogynist and transphobic feminists consistently attempt to play up the extent of this violent, silencing culture, because they know that ultimately plays out in their favour. This behaviour is analogous to Zionists who play up the anti-Semitism of small elements of the Arab population to justify the violence meted out by Israel against all Palestinians. They know that it is ultimately beneficial to their position to claim that they are being silenced and attacked, that all discussion is made impossible. Often their aim has been to provoke this situation (for example by holding meetings where the only speakers are those who routinely claim that all trans* women are men.) The events this week in London, when divisions were cynically sown in this way - people like Julia Long know that their position is ultimately stronger, that their hatred of trans* people and violence against them appears more legitimate and more reasonable when people are most divided. It is for this reason that these people have for so long practiced such a highly antagonistic politics. But none of this really helps women, trans* or otherwise. At the same time it is really a terrible shame for most trans* people that the time they need to defend themselves has collided with what can only be described as a crisis in the politics of oppression, where (turbo-charged by the internet) significant numbers of people advocate nihilist violence against their oppressors to shore up the community of the oppressed. But this trend seems thankfully to be waning. It is a strange irony too that an all-out-war has broken out only where these internet cultures have come into contact with those feminists who first tried to drag the movement into communitarianism.

5. One frequent line of argument that is common is the "gender" is all post-modern nonsense. But to think that the transformations in social relations that have taken place in the last 30 years can be done away with through the power of a demystifying gaze, which does away with the ideology of discourses only to rediscover nature, is to miss the point. We are without a doubt living through a sexual revolution - one as great as those that preceded it, that of the 20 years following the French Revolution, that of Weimar Germany (and Austria) in the wake of psychoanalysis, and that of the 1970s. And indeed it is the revolution of gender itself. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy. When I try to think about the early decades of psychoanalysis it is impossible to think about the great advances it offered people in thinking about their sexuality, about understanding the sexual lives of children, without at the same time thinking of its victims: of Dora, of the children subject to the prevalent paedophilia of Western Culture over whom psychoanalysis had thrown the darkest cloak (until Ferenczi's late interventions). But to take up the position that just refuted it as pseudoscience - the position of someone like Karl Kraus - is to sort of miss the point. The great historical movement of psychoanalysis (which remains unfinished) was already transforming people's lives, people's self-understandings and self-misunderstandings, people's relations and relationships. So too is the case with something like Butler's view of gender, which has now entered the everyday. And whether you agree with it or not is no longer the issue, because questions of humanity are not staked either for or against it but within it and through it. When I was teaching classes of 18 year old humanities students a lot of them had read Butler while at school. Most of those who hadn't were at least aware of the discourse, and were familiar with replicated or bowdlerised forms of it online. It was just part of their sexual growing up. And sometimes I think of the old arguments against the psychoanalytic revolution: that it left the continent of Europe deep in anxiety, packed full of people narcissistically introspecting, discovering uneasily, and obsessing over, their own neuroses. And perhaps if psychoanalysis left in its wake a generation of neurotics, then theories of gender leave a generation of gender disphorics. But it is unclear to me that they are any less well as a result. All of this isn't to say that something like a fiendish Krausian rejection isn't interesting, but it is nonetheless brutal, polarising, as Benjamin would say: destructive. But the Karl Krauses of today's sexual revolution have none of his style; they are experts in the brutishness of brutality alone. They refuse even to accept the divisive effects of their own polemical skepticism, and refuse to notice the bodies trodden underfoot.

6. Perhaps one of the arguments used by transphobic feminists that I find myself most sympathetic to is the idea that we need to return to a conversation of nature. The claim stands against the idea that questions of gender and sexual identity are entirely matters of society and consciousness, in a world that has apparently (at least in these spheres) overcome the forces of natural necessity, the expressions of nature, and natural divisions. But where I absolutely disagree is with the sort of nature that is invoked by these people: it is nature viewed with the taxonomic gaze of Linnaeus. The point of this thinking is to show, just as Linnaeus tried to do with animal species, that sexual divisions are eternal and unchangeable, and thus can be given names. It is to invoke precisely those figures like Goethe's "eternal feminine" that feminism initially set out to undermine. Absolutely no regard is given to questions of sexual development, transformations in sexuality in childhood, puberty, maturity or old age. No discussion of how socialisation and historical catastrophe might affect this. Instead all of this is ignored in favour of the sovereignty of the persistence of the genital, in its purely fleshly form. After the arguments I had this week I went back and read Firestone's Dialectic of Sex and Mitchell's Feminism and Psychoanalysis - two of the brightest stars in the constellations of the second wave. What I love about these books is their views of nature (and in Firestone's case, where she is most indebted to late Engels, quite polemically) as something utterly dynamic, as a world of constant change, modification, and dialectical force, utterly unrecognisable to Linnaean fixation. This thinking shows up the will to fixate nature - the brutal domination of nature - as that which bourgeois thinking has mistaken for the mastery of nature by an enlightened nature that would lead it to reconciliation. This fixated and fixating view of sexual difference ultimately disregards all questions of sexual development (and decline), and in questions of consciousness it willingly swaps out the sensitivity and nuances of developmental psychology for the stark fruitlessness of evolutionary biology.

7. Amongst responses to the Gender Recognition Act are a set of arguments that have been virally circulating on the internet about how it is set to roll back the victories of the second wave. Most of these arguments are patent nonsense, relying on convincing readers (with no evidence) that legal gender reassignment isn't already possible (the Act would just streamline these processes, and would not require the sign-off of doctors.) But more than this, these arguments often rely on a total revisionism about the gains of the feminist movement. Reading them one might quickly believe that women in the 1970s spent their time arguing for single sex toilets and women's prisons. Meanwhile these arguments have a habit of eliding the work done by many trans* people continuing the best of the struggles of the second wave, in organisations like Sisters Uncut, fighting for better domestic violence services. Similarly on questions of sexual violence these viral internet ventures seem to take a step back. Far from the perspective of the second wave that so often saw press sensationalism around street rapists and unknown attackers as often used as a mask for not dealing with the prevalence of sexual violence in the home and amongst known men, the sensationalist figures have been reinvented as the spectre of a sexually violent man who becomes trans* only to gain access to women. This is not to say that street rapists and the like are not real consequences of patriarchal society that need a feminist response. But it is to say that the rolling back of the perspective that finally after decades won out against the marital exemption for rape into a sort of tabloid sensationalism is a step backwards. And more than this, it is terrifying that this sort of sensationalism is used to justify punishing all trans* people, not least when there is absolutely no evidence that this behaviour is any more prominent in the trans* community.

8. Perhaps what has been most grotesque in the last week is the willingness of people to talk explicitly and aggressively about trans* people's bodies - about bodies they don't know in any sense other than seeing a clothed photograph, and about which they have no real right to speak. This is matched with the cruelty that wants to point to every moment when those bodies might be most uncomfortable, when they might not "pass", when they betray a difficult history or an unfulfilled wish, when they express a neurosis that they try to compensate against or disguise. I have been so upset by how friends' bodies have been spoken about - and all just to try to elicit an angry reaction from them at best and to destroy them at worst.

All of this isn't to say that no conversation should be had. Nor is it to say that that gender is some easy solution (and I challenge you to find a single trans* person who thinks it is.) The point, however, is that at their best theories of gender - in their natural-historical, dialectical elaboration - are capable of saying "well sex isn't that easy or simple either." But the point is really to give some background and hopefully some understanding about what is going on. I know lots of people feel uneasy too and want to have conversations, and that they feel silenced. The best suggestion I have - other than joining in existing discussions, forming reading groups, or getting involved in struggles together - is not to line up behind people like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Miranda Yardley, Jen Izaakson, and the rest. Strangely their politics of hate wants you to be silenced too - they want to leave the field divided so that their hatred can win out (as it did in London this week.) Similarly, quite a few people in the last week have responded to me by simply denying the violence and effects of transphobic feminisms. I would encourage everyone who says this to go and talk to some trans* people about their effects it has on their lives. Why not just ask them about it? And find out how a discussion with them can happen humanely without all of this shit. This is quite the opposite of organising meetings where the one thing the platform speakers have in common are repeated press claims that trans* women are men - never mind acting all naive afterwards when it causes shit to kick off. It will require some savviness to work out who is involved in what position and why - but what is needed now is to be savvy, and to not think that Julia Long presents the only option for "opening debate" while she in fact closes it down. It is also true that the Gender Rights Act has the potential to affect more people than just trans* people. This really ought not be responded to by publishing outright lies, provocations, and viral content, only to conclude "let's have a comradely debate," by which point the "debate" is already utterly uncomradely.