Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 19:54:38 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: Re: non servium - 


All

How to define a set of, a sequence of social and political actions? What
could constitute a shift towards a politics that might work?

A number of positions interest me at the moment - firstly there is the range
of positions which in some sense or another aims to define itself through
relating its social and personal perspectives in terms of the 'other', that
which is external to the self. A couple of varieties are worth mentioning -
there is the vaguely Kantian form which possibly proscribes the intervention
into the social-collective, in the name of a collective good by a militant
group - it is proscribed in the name of human limitations, types, attributes
and human rights. There is another form which is equally problematic - that
which refers back to the irreducible differences derived from cultural
difference.  Both forms in some way call and/or refer to an ethical ideology
that effectivly places humanity as being submissive, fragiole (as in fragile
but with an extra 'o' or two) and excessivly mortal. The other in this case
is something that needs protecting, rights granted to it by its protector,
who is of course the West... Secondly there is the anti-humanist position
that seems to me the best of the post-modern perspectives out there, not
based on a relation to the other but more of a project ---

more later - have to go watch the post-modern vampire slayer par-excellance
'Buffy'

best

sdv

Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

> Steve, Hugh and any others who may be listening
> in the stillness of the night  -
>
> Hugh, I'll start with you.  In your last post, you proposed a lottery
> method for selecting at least some of our national representatives.  Are
> you familiar with other election reform proposals that promise greater
> impact for the reform of US democracy?  Examples of what I have in mind
> are runoff elections that would allow citizens to vote for viable third
> party candidates without wasting their votes; and proportional elections
> that would allow minority parties representation and do away with the
> current winner-take-all philosophy.
>
> One problem I have with your proposal is that once the candidates are
> selected, there is no guarantee that they will prove invulnerable to
> lobbyist and PACs, the same familiar business as usual outcome.
>
> The other problem I have with your proposal is that it remains firmly
> within the scope of restricted democracy and simply does not go far
> enough to address the global, postmodern condition which Steve has
> spoken of recently in a number of posts here.
>
> Steve, my response to your comments is as follows.  I was not attempting
> to define postmodernism as being reactionary as much as I was arguing
> against a certain reception of the postmodern which constructs it this
> way.  The MTV version of postmodernism, if you will, has it that Pomo is
> strictly cultural, apolitical and playful - transgressing genres is
> simply good clean harmless fun (and good for business too.)
>
> At stake in all this is the reception of Lyotard and I have been
> relentlessly attempting to argue here that according to my understanding
> of him, Lyotard remains constantly political and that is his great
> strength.  I will concede your point about identity politics because
> something like this is intertwined with the postmodern politics of which
> Lyotard speaks.  (Perhaps it is better described though as no-identity
> politics.  The self wants to be deterritorialized.  It wants to move.)
>
> I don't know how to explain the sea change that has taken place in me
> during the brief period since Bush has been appointed as the president.
> It has affected me in numerous ways.  The first result is that it has
> made me more radical in my political thinking.  It made me realize that
> the left has simply given up far too much!
>
> Also,in some strange way it has made me feel joyful because I have begun
> at last to realize a little how much is really at stake.
>
> The form this understanding has taken for me is a new, revitalized
> understanding of Marx; one that I feel Lyotard was also groping for in
> his rejection of an objective, deterministic, emancipatory Marxism.
>
> Today I read Harry Cleaver's introduction to Antonio Negri's "Marx
> Beyond Marx - Lessons from the Grundrisse" and was very impressed with
> some of the comments he made.
>
> "Negri reading of the Grundrisse is designed to teach - and to remind -
> that there have always been not one, but two subjects of capitalism."
>
> "Negri shows that Marx saw clearly how the historical development of
> capitalist society has always involved the development of the working
> class as a separate and antagonistic subject - a subject that develops
> the power to throw the system in crisis and destroy it."
>
> "From the point of view of the developing working class subject,
> capitalist hegemony is at best a tenuous, momentary control that is
> broken again and again by workers' struggle."
>
> "It (capitalism) faces the very problem Marx forsaw in the Grundrisse: a
> growing difficulty in finding new ways of putting people to work to
> control them socially."
>
> "Negri sees that one of the two most fundamental aspects of working
> class struggle is the struggle against work"
>
> "The second, positive side to revolutionary struggle is the elaboration
> of the self-determined multiple projects of the working class in the
> time set free from work and in the transformation of work itself.  This
> self-determined project Negri calls self-valorization."
>
> The last point reminds me of Lyotard's consistent criticism of
> emancipatory projects.  I think Lyotard's basic point was similar to
> Negri.  By feeling the differend, witnessing and resisting, each one of
> us realizes something in the moment that cannot merely be projected or
> deferred into the future.  The goal of a revolutionary politics is
> nothing less that this very self-determination that opposes the terror
> of the given.
>
> Let me conclude by quoting Negri himself:
>
> "Prisoner: Class antagonism in the post-modern world.  Maybe you're
> right.  Then it mean, at this point, filling with a material content the
> struggle against power.
>
> Free Man: Precisely.  In the conviction that the struggle against the
> capitalist organization of production, of the job market, of the working
> day, of the restructuration of energy, of family life, etc., all of this
> involves the people, the community, the choice of lifestyle.  To be
> communist today means to live as a communist."
>
> I don't know yet where this leads me, but I fear it leads me beyond this
> space.  Strangely enough, for me today to be postmodern means once more
> to study Marx.  I am a now a student again with a strange hope and wings
> that beat against the cage.